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North and Central America – Singles | Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump | Jabin Botsford
Members of the US Secret Service help Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump off stage moments after a bullet hit his ear during a campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show Grounds, Pennsylvania, 13 July 2024.The assassination attempt, and the media coverage that followed, marked a turning point in the presidential campaign that would shape not only the election to come, but the political future of the United States.
Photograph: Jabin Botsford, for The Washington Post/World Press Photo 2025
West, Central, and South Asia – Stories | No Woman’s Land | Kiana Hayeri
Teenage girls line up at a private high school in the west of Kabul where pupils follow the American curriculum in English but cannot obtain an official education certificate. Nor can they go to university in Afghanistan as these are closed to women. This is a rare instance where the school has managed to secure the local Taliban’s agreement to turn a blind eye to its operation. Seven hundred girls study here every day under strict security measures.Read more on this story here
Photograph: Kiana Hayeri, Fondation Carmignac/World Press Photo 2025
Singles | Mahmoud Ajjour, Aged Nine | Samar Abu Elouf
Mahmoud lost both arms above the elbow after he was hit by a missile fired by Israeli planes during the war on Gaza. Mahmoud’s family fled their home after shells began falling. The going was slow, and the boy went back to urge everyone on. When an explosion ripped off one hand and mangled the other, he asked to be left behind, saying: “I am going to die.” Now in Qatar, Mahmoud uses his feet for everything. “My biggest wish now is to get prosthetics,” he says. He was photographed in Doha on 28 June 2024.
Photograph: Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times/World Press Photo 2025
Africa – Long-term project | Women’s Bodies as Battlefields | Cinzia Canneri
A young Eritrean woman shows the scar from a bullet fired by Amhara soldiers. She was living in the Mai Aini camp in Tigray with her husband, two children and a sister when the war broke out. The family escaped to the Dabat refugee camp in the Amhara region. On reaching the camp, she was separated from her husband and raped in front of her children. The UN Human Rights Council have said 24,000 Eritrean refugees in the Mai Aini and Adi Harush camps live in constant terror without access to humanitarian aid.
Photograph: Cinzia Canneri - Association Camille Lepage/World Press Photo 2025
Stories | Gaza Under Israeli Attack | Ali Jadallah
Residents return to their homes in Khan Younis, two days after an Israeli troops withdrawal on 7 April 2024. Israel continued its war on Gaza throughout 2024, leaving much of it in ruins. With international journalists effectively barred from Gaza, local photographers risked their lives to document the war. The photographer, who has also lost family members, says: “Every time I photograph a destroyed house, I remember mine. Every time the wounded and martyred are pulled from the rubble, I remember my father and siblings.”
Photograph: Ali Jadallah, Anadolu Agency/World Press Photo 2025
Singles | Constance Wynn II | Philip Montgomery
Constance in the front parlour of her home in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, which was built by her great-great-grandfather, on the day of the US presidential election in 2024. Her ancestors escaped slavery by fleeing to Pennsylvania, the first state to become a haven for enslaved people.Montgomery spent weeks around the election in Luzerne County, where voting patterns shifted from favouring Democrats to Republicans over the past 12 years, to reveal the complexities of the politically significant swing county.
Photograph: Philip Montgomery for The New York Times Magazine/World Press Photo 2025
Europe – Stories | Democracy Dies in Darkness | Rafael Heygster
A view from behind the scenes as the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) holds a federal party conference in Essen, Germany, on 30 June 2024. Many Germans see the party’s far-right views as a threat to democracy.
Photograph: Rafael Heygster for Der Spiegel/World Press Photo 2025
Stories | Protests in Georgia | Mikhail Tereshchenko
A woman rinses her eyes using a syringe filled with clear liquid after police deployed tear gas at a protest. She wears a protective ski mask, respirator and gardening gloves (to pick up hot gas containers) in Tbilisi, Georgia, on 7 December 2024.
Photograph: Mikhail Tereshchenko – TASS Agency/World Press Photo 2025
Long-term Project | It Smells of Smoke at Home | Aliona Kardash
A nightclub in the Siberian city of Tomsk, Russia, in January 2023. By this point the Russian state has managed to suppress public protests against the war in Ukraine almost completely. Even playing Ukrainian music is seen as civil disobedience. However, the club played tracks in Ukrainian.
Photograph: Aliona Kardash, DOCKS Collective, for Stern Magazine/World Press Photo 2025
Stories | The Lake Has Fallen Silent | Aubin Mukoni
Silver sambaza, a sardine local to Lake Kivu, are captured in a net in this image captured on 20 March 2024. Climate change, overfishing and the presence of gas extraction plants are among factors threatening the sambaza population in the city of Goma, which lies on the lake’s northern shore. Many stories are woven together at the majestic lake at the border between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Beneath its waters and the fishing communities that surround it lies turbulence and uncertainty.
Photograph: Aubin Mukoni/World Press Photo 2025
Singles | Life Won’t Stop | Mosab Abushama
The groom at his wedding in Omdurman, January 2024. In Sudan, announcing a wedding with celebratory gunfire is a tradition. Asked by a friend to document his wedding in a city constantly targeted by airstrikes, Mosab says: “Despite the clashes and random shelling, the wedding was a simple but joyous occasion with family and friends. The war in Sudan, which began in April 2023, brought horrors and displacement, forcing me to leave my childhood home and move to another part of the city. It was a time none of us ever expected to live through.”
Photograph: Mosab Abushama/World Press Photo 2025
Singles | Tamale Safalu | Marijn Fidder
Bodybuilder Tamale Safalu trains at home, Kampala, Uganda, 25 January 2024. Despite losing his leg after a motorcycle accident in 2020, Tamale remained committed to competitive bodybuilding, becoming the first disabled athlete in Uganda to compete against able-bodied athletes. His strength and determination in the face of adversity challenges stereotypes and serves as an inspiration. He says: “By competing as a bodybuilder on stage, I want to encourage other people with disabilities to recognise their own talents and never put their heads down.”
Photograph: Marijn Fidder/World Press Photo 2025
Stories | The Elephant Whisperers of Livingstone | Tommy Trenchard
Newly built houses abut the fenceline of the Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park in Livingstone, Zambia, September 2024.In Livingstone a succession of failed rainy seasons and human encroachment on to land traditionally used by elephants have led to a rapid increase in human-wildlife conflict over the past few years. During the dry season, elephants enter in search of food, raiding gardens, vegetable patches and fruit trees. When harassed and startled by residents, these interactions can become dangerous.
Photograph: Tommy Trenchard, Panos Pictures, for NPR/World Press Photo 2025
Long-term Projects | Bullets Have No Borders | Ebrahim Alipoor
“Death for us is a divine destiny, its timing determined by God,” says Rahman, pictured in Kurdistan, Iran, in February 2019.Kolbars (border couriers) carry goods, such as household appliances, mobile phones and clothes, on their backs through treacherous terrain from Iraq and Turkey into Iranian Kurdistan. The Iranian government bans the import of many such goods to protect local production and save foreign currency in the face of western sanctions. The decades-long marginalisation of Kurds has led to widespread unemployment in the region.
Photograph: Ebrahim Alipoor/World Press Photo 2025
Asia-Pacific and Oceania – Long-term Projects | Te Urewera – The Living Ancestor of Tūhoe People | Tatsiana Chypsanava
Apprentices from a local school learn essential farming skills at Tataiwhetu Trust, an organic dairy farm in Ruatoki, New Zealand, 14 January 2022.The Ngāi Tūhoe people of the Te Urewera region have maintained a staunch independence, never losing their connection to their language and cultural identity. In a groundbreaking 2014 agreement, the New Zealand government opened the way to Tūhoe managing their ancestral lands according to their cultural values.
Photograph: Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic/World Press Photo 2025
South America – Stories | Droughts in the Amazon | Musuk Nolte
Elidia Carolina lives with her partner and their two-year-old daughter in a “floating house” built on stilts. Due to the droughts, the area around their home now resembles a desert, and they must walk almost 2km to reach the shore of the Solimões River. Manacapuru, Amazonas, Brazil, 3 October 2024. The Amazon River is experiencing record low water levels due to severe drought intensified by climate change. This ecological crisis threatens biodiversity, disrupts ecosystems, and affects local communities reliant on rivers for survival.
Photograph: Musuk Nolte, Panos Pictures, Bertha Foundation/World Press Photo 2025
Stories | Brazil’s worst-ever floods | Amanda Perobelli
Waterlogged streets amid floods in Canoas, in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, 6 May 2024. Floods in the state caused environmental devastation, the displacement of more than 600,000 residents and the deaths of 183 people. The government declared it the state’s largest ever climate disaster, with 2.39 million residents affected and major human, non-human and economic losses. According to international scientists, climate change, intensified by El Niño, made the flooding twice as likely.
Photograph: Amanda Perobelli/World Press Photo 2025
Singles | The Last Hope | Gabriela Oráa
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado greets supporters from atop a vehicle during a campaign rally for the presidential candidate Edmundo González Urrutia. Mérida, Venezuela, 25 June 2024. In 2023, Machado won the opposition primaries to challenge Nicolás Maduro in the presidential elections, but Venezuelan authorities barred her from running. As a result, she endorsed the former ambassador as the opposition’s candidate and led his political campaign across the country.
Photograph: Gaby Oráa/Reuters/World Press Photo 2025
Stories | No more monkey mania in Thai town | Chalinee Thirasupa
A man sprays alcohol toward long-tailed macaques to keep them from stealing goods near Phra Prang Sam Yot temple. Lopburi, Thailand, 25 May 2024. Macaques, believed to bring good fortune, are part of the identity of “Monkey City”. Tourists flock to see them, feeding them fruit. By 2020, the monkey population had reached 3,121, but during the Covid-19 pandemic tourists disappeared and the monkeys became more aggressive, stealing food and fighting. Authorities intervened with a sterilisation programme.
Photograph: Chalinee Thirasupa/Reuters/World Press Photo 2025
Long-term Projects | Paths of Desperate Hope | Federico Ríos
A group of Afghan, Chinese, Venezuelan and Ecuadorian migrants wade toward a boat headed for the Darién Gap in Capurgana, Colombia, 2 March 2023. Many of the Afghans had never seen the ocean before. This project documents the perilous journeys of migrants traversing the gap, a 100km-long stretch of dense jungle connecting Colombia and Panama. More than a million people from diverse nations have braved this route since 2021.
Photograph: Federico Ríos/World Press Photo 2025
Singles | Botafogo Fans: Pride and Glory | André Coelho
Botafogo fans celebrate their team’s victory after watching the game on screens at the Nilton Santos Stadium, the team’s home stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 30 November 2024. Two of Brazil’s oldest and most venerable football clubs met at the Mâs Monumental Stadium in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for the final match of the South American Football Confederation’s (CONMEBOL) Libertadores cup. Botafogo, which had never won the cup, defeated rivals Atlético Mineiro 3-1
Photograph: André Coelho, EFE RJ - Río de Janeiro/World Press Photo 2025
Singles | Gabriel Medina at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games | Jerome Brouillet
Brazil’s Gabriel Medina bursts out triumphantly from a large wave in the fifth heat of round three of men’s surfing, during the Olympic surfing at Teahupo’o, Tahiti, French Polynesia on 29 July 2024. Medina scored a near-perfect 9.9 in the heat, and went on to pick up bronze, ceding the gold medal to France’s Kauli Vaast. This photograph circulated widely, attracting more than 9.5m likes on Medina’s Instagram alone
Photograph: Jérôme Brouillet/Agence France-Presse/World Press Photo 2025
