World Press Photo Celebrates 70th Anniversary at Photoville

Sat, Jun 7 - Sun, Jun 22  2025

1 Water St, Brooklyn, NY 11201

World Press Photo celebrates its 70th anniversary. The organization, an Amsterdam based foundation, hosts the world’s largest and most prestigious annual photography competition. You can visit the anniversary exhibition at Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza.

For 70 years, the World Press Photo Contest has been the ultimate time capsule of photojournalism.

But the three words that make up its name—World, Press, and Photo—don’t mean what they did in 1955. The “world” is no longer filtered through a single Western perspective. The “press” is a fragmented battlefield of digital noise. And the “photo?” Well, it no longer needs a camera to exist.

Yet, despite all this change, our visual language keeps repeating itself. We’ve built a library of tropes: heroic men in action, emotional women in distress, Africa as a place of suffering, and melodramatic white soldiers. These patterns have become shortcuts, shaping how stories are told, and, more importantly, how they are remembered.

This tension between new tools and old habits raises a crucial question: If the ways we capture and share images has changed, why do we keep telling the same stories in the same way? What do these recurring images say about what we choose to see—and what we ignore?

This exhibition is an invitation to rethink not just how photojournalism has evolved but how we, as viewers and citizens, should be learning to read images with a sharper and more critical eye.

Featuring

Alberto Garcia, Saba Press Photos
Ashley Peña, for New York magazine
Balasz Gardi, 2008
Bo Bor, Reuters
Christopher Morris, Black Star for TIME
Ekkehart Sachse
Francesco Zizola, Contrasto for Max
Georges Mérillon, Gamma
Hans E Wendt, United Press International
Hocine, Agence France-Presse
Kirk McKoy, Los Angeles Times
Mario Cruz
Michael Kamber, The New York Times
Paul Lowe, Magnum Photos for Newsweek
Peter Elinskas
Ronald G Bell
Seamus Murphy, The Sunday Times Magazine
Valery Shustov, RIA Novosti

About World Press Photo

The World Press Photo Foundation is a global platform connecting professionals and audiences through trustworthy visual journalism and storytelling, founded in 1955. As a creative, independent, nonprofit organization, based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, we encourage diverse accounts of the world that present stories with different perspectives. We exhibit those stories to a worldwide audience, educate the profession and the public on their making, and encourage debate on their meaning. We are a global platform connecting professionals and audiences through trustworthy visual journalism and storytelling.

About Photoville

Founded in 2011 in Brooklyn, NY, Photoville was built on the principles of addressing cultural equity and inclusion, which we are always striving for, by ensuring that the artists we exhibit are diverse in gender, class, and race. In pursuit of its mission, Photoville produces an annual, city-wide open air photography festival in New York City, a wide range of free educational community initiatives, and a nationwide program of public art exhibitions. By activating public spaces, amplifying visual storytellers, and creating unique and highly innovative exhibition and programming environments, we join the cause of nurturing a new lens of representation. Through creative partnerships with festivals, city agencies, and other nonprofit organizations, Photoville offers visual storytellers, educators, and students financial support, mentorship, and promotional & production resources, on a range of exhibition opportunities.

The exhibition is supported by DutchCultureUSA’s FUTURE 400 program.