World Press Photo 2020: the most striking images

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The World Press Photo Foundation has announced the winners of its annual photo and photo story contest.

The Amsterdam-based organisation, which has been celebrating international professional photographers sine 1955, has released a book showing the most striking images of 2019.

The photo contest winners were chosen by an independent jury that looked at nearly 74,000 photographs entered by more than 4,000 photographs from 125 countries.

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Yasuyoshi Chiba, from Japan, won the World Press Photo of the Year 2020 with his photograph Straight Voice, showing a young man reciting protest poetry while demonstrators chant slogans during a blackout in Khartoum, Sudan.

“The place was a total blackout. Then, unexpectedly, people started clapping hands in the dark. People held up mobile phones to illuminate a young man in the centre. He recited a famous protest poem, an improvised one,” said Yasuyoshi.

“Between his breath, everybody shouted ‘thawra’, the word revolution in Arabic. His facial expression and voice impressed me, I couldn’t stop focusing on him and captured the moment.”

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For the World Press Photo Story of the Year, the judges selected Kho, the Genesis of Revolt by Romain Laurendeau, a long-term visual account of youth struggle in Algeria.

Other entries included Nikita Teryoshin’s photograph Nothing Personal, showing an 18-year-old Syrian fighter, severely burnt by conflict with Turkish forces, seeing his girlfriend for the first time since being injured.

Mulugeta Ayene’s photograph shows grieving relatives at the crash site of Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET302, near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The Boeing aircraft crashed near the town of Bishoftu, six minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 people aboard. The cause of the accident is under investigation.

World Press Photo 2020, published by Lannoo Publishers, is out on 30 April