As photojournalism contests elevate certain images to global prominence, they also influence how violence, dignity, and memory are constructed in the public imagination.
Several years ago, a prominent European photojournalist gave a lecture about their work at the Frontline Club in London. After a slideshow and explanation of the process of her incredible work depicting refugees in Sudan and mothers in the West Bank, someone asked, “Does the striking aesthetic ‘beauty’ of these photos detract from the context and meaning behind them?” A fair question. After all, as a photojournalist, I know that to have work commissioned, it needs to be truthful yet appealing to the eye to sell or reach a wider audience.
Photojournalist and documentary photography contests are a clear example of this. A business model where winning photographers and their work receive money, camera gear, and other incentives. Yet it is also the subject of the photo that ‘wins’ and has their image in an ‘afterlife’ of the contest that can be used in promotion, exhibitions, social media, etc., often in contexts far from what they, or the photographer, imagined. It is in the process by which contests choose winning photos and their following dissemination in other environments that one can see the lines blurred between a ‘truthful depiction’ and a ‘beautiful photo’ for mass consumption.
There’s creating the photograph and then sharing the photograph. And I think that those things are sometimes quite conflated. . .. a really great place to start is to separate them and consider them as two separate processes. Consent to take a photograph is not the same thing as consent for it to appear on a newsfeed or on a billboard.
Dr. Savannah Dodd, founder and director of the Photography Ethics Centre
The ‘Afterlife’ of a Contest-Winning Photo
The World Press Photo is the most prestigious and famous photojournalistic contest and organisation in the world, responsible for touring photos in exhibition spaces globally and giving outreach, acclaim and notoriety to the winners and finalists.
The winner of the 2025 World Press Photo of the Year is a striking, stark and confrontational image, a portrait of nine-year-old Mahmoud Ajjour, who lost both arms in an airstrike in Gaza, photographed by Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times. The jury described it as “strong composition and attention to light, to be contemplative, sparking questions about the experiences yet to come for the young, wounded boy”.
A Gazan native herself, Samar’s winning photo was used in the advertisement of the travelling exhibition of the World Press Photo, the armless Mahmoud lining the walls of an ascending escalator in the Barcelona metro. This is the ‘second life’ of the photo, used to inform the public of the exhibition.
Dr. Savannah Dodd, founder and director of the Photography Ethics Centre, ponders this separation of the photo from its original creation:
“There’s creating the photograph and then sharing the photograph. And I think that those things are sometimes quite conflated. ... A really great place to start is to separate them and consider them as two separate processes. Consent to take a photograph is not the same thing as consent for it to appear on a newsfeed or on a billboard.”
Images now move fluidly across platforms and contexts that the photographer may never have anticipated, from exhibitions to social media to commercial spaces. This includes how images are captioned, how they are spatially presented in exhibitions or public advertising, and how much agency we retain – or should retain – over secondary uses. Ethical responsibility does not end at publication; it evolves as images continue to circulate.
Joumana El Zein Khoury, Executive Director of the World Press Photo Contest 2026
In her book, Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media, Anne Rothe describes how trauma functions in contemporary culture and how media surrounding suffering is used to make a ‘story or narrative’ to sell to the public. She uses examples of the Holocaust in film depictions, as well as photos and videos utilised by newsrooms.
Mahmoud’s image seemed eerie plastered on the metro, and later, when witnessing the leaflets for the exhibition with his image used as coasters in a nearby bar, it seemed even more so. This can be seen as an example of a society desensitised to a conflict that has been so much in the public eye via traditional news media and social media since October 2023 or, simply, the method to advertise the real purpose of the World Press Photo: to showcase compelling and urgent stories, deepening our understanding of the world’s complexities to inspire action.
Yet, much like the famous photo of Che Guevara now plastered on t-shirts and university bedroom walls globally, can the image’s ‘afterlife’ completely strip the original context and intent behind the photo?
Executive Director of the World Press Photo Contest 2026, Joumana El Zein Khoury, speaks about the nature of the ‘afterlife’ of an image past these contests:
“The ‘afterlife’ of images is no longer peripheral; it is central to ethical practice today. Images now move fluidly across platforms and contexts that the photographer may never have anticipated, from exhibitions to social media to commercial spaces. This includes how images are captioned, how they are spatially presented in exhibitions or public advertising, and how much agency we retain – or should retain – over secondary uses. Ethical responsibility does not end at publication; it evolves as images continue to circulate.”
Another aspect of a photo’s ‘afterlife’ is the way it can move a mass audience of people into action. The photo of Mahmoud inspired a fundraising campaign for him to access prosthetic care, signifying how concern can catalyse solidarity and change beyond the publication.
The ‘afterlife’ of images is no longer peripheral; it is central to ethical practice today. Images now move fluidly across platforms and contexts that the photographer may never have anticipated, from exhibitions to social media to commercial spaces.
Joumana El Zein Khoury, Executive Director of the World Press Photo Contest 2026
How A Photo Is Chosen
The documentary, Sea of Pictures, by Misja Pekel, details the journey from photographer to newsroom and judges’ table of the infamous photograph of Aylan Kurdi, the drowned boy on the beach during the peak of the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe in the mid-2010s.
In an interview, Aiden White, director of the Ethical Journalism Network, discussed the editorial motivation in choosing the photo to publish, and by extension, what people will see/what photographers will be eligible for:
“We need aesthetics in pictures as much as we need good language in the use of words. Of course, we need elements in a picture or a video that will reach out to people and communicate quickly and simply the story behind them.”
When judging photography contests, considerations must be made over the use of editing, consent, context and whether the photo reinforces dominant visual tropes of suffering, the starving African, for example.
Professor Ingrid Berman, American documentary photographer and professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, explained how visual clichés are a reflection of the violent reality of our world:
“The truth is that our world has become way more violent, and much of that violence is visible and perpetuating; hence the repetitive images. When children are murdered, parents and family members cry out. Should journalists not photograph that visual trope of the grieving loved ones? When a state bombs people into smithereens, should we not see the results of that violence even though the picture has been seen in some way many times before?”
As a judge in this year’s World Press Photo contest, Professor Berman sits alongside many other professionals in the photographic and journalistic world, measuring the photos not by their virality or reach in changing policy. Judges examine captions, photographer engagement, and context, not the unforeseeable consequences of global circulation.
When I first saw Mahmoud’s portrait lining the Barcelona metro, it felt jarring, even unsettling. But perhaps that discomfort is not a failure of photojournalism. Perhaps it is evidence of its power.
Stretching back decades, the World Press Photo and other photographic contests and archives have determined what images of the global south have become iconic. Reform was made when regional juries were introduced based on the geographical section the submitted photo is from. As Joumana El Zein Khoury states herself:
“World Press Photo does not merely reflect the field; we actively shape it.”
Time changes our perceptions, both of what is acceptable as a society and as individuals. Practices within the photojournalistic sphere in the past directly impacted what the World Press Photo contest published and reinforced in the minds of exhibition goers worldwide and within wider media circles, journalistic communities, and those affected directly by the subject of the photos.
The World Press Photo archives site states the following:
“What voices dominated the contest, and whose voices were excluded? Why did it take over 20 years for a woman photographer to be awarded the Photo of the Year?”
When I first saw Mahmoud’s portrait lining the Barcelona metro, it felt jarring, even unsettling. But perhaps that discomfort is not a failure of photojournalism. Perhaps it is evidence of its power.
The issue is not whether such photographs should exist. They must. Violence should not be hidden.
The question is how institutions that elevate them, that tour them, brand them, monetise them, and historicise them can remain accountable not only to audiences and photographers, but to the people in the frame.
If contests shape what the world sees, they also shape how suffering is remembered. And memory, once institutionalised, rarely belongs to those who first lived it.
