The Highs and Lows of Last Year Captured: World Press Photo Exhibition 2019

The Hungarian National Museum welcomes the annual collection of winning images from the 62nd World Press Photo Contest from last week until the end of October. The exhibition shows the best 143 photos, selected from 78,801 images taken by 4,738 photographers from 129 different countries.

The World Press Photo Contest is the most prestigious competition of photojournalism in the world, celebrating the photographers and pictures that best contributed to the past year of visual journalism. Photojournalists from around the world compete in eight categories: Spot News, General News, People, Sports, Contemporary Issues, Daily Life, Portraits, and Nature. The carefully selected international jury–which changes every year–also selects one picture to be the World Press Photo of The Year.

This year there is a Hungarian bond to the exhibition and the contest: Hungarian photographer Bence Máté’s photo “Survival instinct” won first prize in the Nature category and is displayed among the 143 winners on the world tour.

World Press Photo with Hungarian Category Winner Opens in Budapest

The main focus of this year’s competition was migration and women’s issues, but despite the themes, the images are less “dramatic” than what visitors would expect, according to the Hungarian event’s organizer, Tamás Révész.

This year, the World Press Photo of the Year was taken by John Moore, a senior staff photographer and special correspondent for Getty Images, and shows the moment when Honduran toddler Yanela Sanchez cries as she and her mother, Sandra Sanchez, were taken into custody by US border officials in McAllen, Texas, USA, on June 12th.

The World Press Photo Contest rewards pictures that are visual documents which provide an accurate and fair representation of the scene the photographer witnessed. As the jury doesn’t want a prize-winning picture that misleads the international audience, all of the pictures entered must follow a series of guidelines that guard against manipulation. You can check out all of the winning photos and series of this year’s contest here.

The prize-winning photographs embarked on a year-long traveling exhibition back in April. Seen by over 4 million people in 45 different countries, the exhibit allows the important global issues documented by these photojournalists to be seen by a wider audience.

Sophie Boshouwers, curator of the World Press Photo Foundation, told the press conference last week that the exhibition generally attracts the second largest number of visitors in Budapest after its home city, Amsterdam.

The exhibition in the Hungarian National Museum was opened by Dutch Ambassador Rene van Hell and will run until October 23rd.