2022 World Press Photo Exhibition

The World Press Photo Exhibition 2022 showcases the best and most important photojournalism and documentary photography from around the world. Presenting the results of the foundation’s annual photo contest, it features accurate, diverse, high-quality visual stories benefit the world by creating mutual understanding. We invite viewers to step outside the news cycle, and think critically about important topics in our world.

To offer a more global and better geographic balance of perspectives, the World Press Photo Foundation launched a new regional strategy this year, changing the set-up of the annual contest and judging by working with six worldwide regions – Africa, Asia, Europe, North and Central America, South America, and Southeast Asia and Oceania. Entries are judged and awarded in the region in which the photographs and stories are shot, rather than the nationality of the photographer.

Each region has four format-based categories: Singles, Stories, Long-Term Projects, and Open Format. These categories welcome entries that document news moments, events and aftermaths, as well as social, political and environmental issues or solutions.

For its 65th edition, the contest saw 4,066 photographers from 130 countries enter 64,823 photographs. Judging of the 2022 World Press Photo Contest involved regional juries and a global jury. 31 highly qualified jury members from around the world helped to make a selection over a six-week period. Entries were judged anonymously except for some Open Format candidates, which had identifying information embedded in the work.

In each region, a selection of entries per category was first made by a regional jury, composed of professionals from and/or working in that region, with a range of expertise. With the knowledge of the region that each jury member possesses, they were well equipped to judge the stories and be able to put them into cultural, political and social context. Once the regional juries made their selection, the global jury–composed of the six regional jury chairs and the global jury chair–decided on the 24 regional winners, and from those, the four global winners.

24 winners and six honorable mentions were chosen out of 4,066 entrants with 64,823 photographs from 130 different countries.

The 2022 World Press Photo Contest regional winners are 24 photographers from 23 countries: Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Japan, Madagascar, Mexico, Nigeria, The Netherlands, Norway, Palestine, Russia, Sudan, and Thailand.

Providing a variety of perspectives from all corners of the globe, the 2022 World Press Photo Contest regional winners present courageous stories, invaluable insights, and a diversity of interpretations – from the undeniable effects of the climate crisis to civil rights movements, and from access to education to preserving indigenous practices and identity.

In yet another transformative year for the world, the majority of the 2022 World Press Photo Contest winning stories are told by photographers who are closer to them, with 19 out of 24 of the awarded projects told by photographers from the country and/or community in which their story is from.