If it’s true that a picture tells a thousand words, I’m not about to repeat 1,000 words here telling you about this year’s winners of the World Press Photo Awards. “Show, don’t tell,” as they say in the media business.

What’s more pertinent is why these images won, and what it tells us about the world we live in today.

Getty Images senior staff photographer and special correspondent John Moore won World Press Photo of the Year for his affecting image of a young girl crying at the U.S. border with Mexico.

Swedish photojournalist Pieter Ten Hoopen, of Paris-based agency Agence VU — he also founded the Stockholm-based non-governmental organization Civilian Act — won the World Press Award for Photo Story of the Year, for his series of images depicting the Migrant Caravan of refugees on their passage through Central America, from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to that same U.S.-Mexico border and the possibility of asylum in America — on a wing and a prayer, as it were.

World Press Photo, in other words, an independent nonprofit that supports photojournalism worldwide, has judged that the displacement of people — ordinary, everyday human beings, including many vulnerable children — is the single most important issue facing our time.

Human migration, and climate change.

People who think — or are willing to think, at any rate — know that, deep down, below the surface, climate change is one of the main factors driving mass migration. Climate change results in food insecurity, both caused and exacerbated by weather-related disasters such as droughts, floods and hurricanes, leads to poverty and, inevitably, crime and political instability. Everything is connected — and these pictures tell us that.

Veteran conservation photographer Brent Stirton — a former war correspondent and conflict-zone photographer originally based in South Africa — was recognized with the World Press Photo Environment Award for his striking image of a female special forces park ranger in Zimbabwe, part of an all-female anti-poaching unit, the Akashinga, tasked with stopping the illegal slaughter of rhinos for their horn.

And veteran Hungarian photojournalist Bence Máté, like Stirton a former winner of the London (UK) Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award, won the World Press Photo Nature Award for his sobering image of frogs with severed legs being tossed back into the water after being shorn of their limbs for food, in the Carpathian mountain region of Romania.

Overconsumption. Mass migration, brought on by human desperation. The despoiling of the planet.

These are the issues that jump out. (Interestingly, Moore was a double winner for his image of the crying girl at the U.S.-Mexico border: The picture also won the World Press Photo Award for Spot News.)

There is a point to these images, beyond preaching to the converted. Hope for humanity, even — the better angels of our nature. The state of the planet has never appeared more grim and desperate — not in the history and evolution of Home sapiens, at any rate — and yet these images serve a dual purpose. Uplifting, as well as alarming and cautionary. Understanding them is crucial to knowing and understanding the situation we are now all in. I saw the friendliest of spirits, one witness has said of public marches of public conscience, these streams of humanity marching along the open road and crowding into town squares. There’s an openness, a willingness there, among those on the march, to comfort children, share food, find spaces for older people to sit and rest — small acts of tenderness and mercy, and of humanity.

Perhaps that’s the real strength of these images — not as yet another reason to feel depressed, but rather a clarion call to action, to do something.

There are those in the mainstream media who will dismiss these World Press Photo Awards as yet another example of belabouring the obvious, more grandstanding by the left — but those who took these photos, who witnessed the worst, and best, of what humanity has to offer, know better.

These images appear to tell a simple story on the surface. Look deeper down, though, and they tell a very different story. It is time to challenge those who would do evil.

https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photocontest/winners/2019

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The end of one year and the beginning of the next is a time when we’re inundated with best-of lists and conversation starters about things to come. There’s almost too much to choose from, which is why we need curators — for everything from social media to the day’s news. Judgment, and taste, is everything. Not all opinions are equal, no matter how loudly and how often we’re told they are.

I disagreed strongly with the judges’ final choices in some high-profile photography awards this past year, but who am I to judge? I just know what I know. The Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards got it right, in my opinion; other competitions, which I won’t name here, got it quite wrong.

That’s why I was more interested in some of the year-end collections of curated material by individual publications — not, “This is the best,” but rather, “These are our favourite pictures of everything we published this year.”

That’s why National Geographic editors’ 57 favourite images of the year — all published in the magazine at some point during 2017, and hardly an award winner among them — struck a nerve with me, chosen as they were from 88 photographers who worked on some 112 stories, accumulating a total of more than 2 million photographs.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/best-of-2017/best-pictures/

I learned more, too, that I didn’t know before from Nature’s “2017 in Pictures: The best science images of the year,” than I did from many other, more prominent periodicals.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08492-y)

On one level, that’s to be expected, of course, because Nature, “the International Journal of Science,” is a peer-reviewed periodical. So a hitchhiking octopus, nanoscale fireworks and the “worm from hell” (the pork tapeworm, but you know it better as Taenia solium) become every bit as fascinating as anything on Animal Planet or NatGeo Wild.

Anyone who reads this space regularly knows I’m more of a Guardian man than a Daily Mail man, and I don’t care who knows it.

That’s why I was gratified to see The Guardian, in its Boxing Day edition, do a summary of the year’s wildlife-photography competitions from around the planet, rather than one of those subjective, often parochial lists of, “These are our favourite images of those we happened to see.”

It’s worth noting that veteran photojournalist Brent Stirton’s controversial image of a rhino butchered for its horn — “Memorial to a Species” — won both the Wildlife Photographer of the Year award and the World Press Photos award in the nature category. It’s not often that nature photography and photojournalism coincide.

I wouldn’t be doing my due diligence if I didn’t note that, judging from comments on the WPOTY’s Facebook page, many animal lovers were annoyed — livid, in fact — that Stirton’s image won best-in-show.

“How am I supposed to keep my child interested in nature,” went one refrain from an outraged mom, “if you promote such a disgusting image as yourbest-of? I couldn’t show my young daughter that picture. How is that helping anything?”

Another mom took a differening view, however, commenting on the Daily Mail’s message board, “The beauty and heartbreak in these pictures makes me proud that my daughter wants to pursue ecology and conservation as a career.”

Others pointed out — and I happen to agree — that nature photography isn’t just about big eyes and happy faces. There were better images in the final mix, both from a technical and a creative point-of-view, but few were as important.

Enough about me and my own personal opinions, though. Here’s an edited — curated, if you will — look at The Guardian’s year-end summary of award-winning images from around the world.

The complete version can be found at

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2017/dec/26/the-best-of-the-wildlife-photography-awards-2017-in-pictures

Interestingly — for me, anyway — if there’s one subject that unites many of these images, it’s our growing interest in the sea and the future of our oceans.

That isn’t just because of Blue Planet II. The legacy of the sea is a cause that runs deep.

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“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen

Reflections of humanity at its best and worst: 2019 World Press Photo Award winners.

The year in pictures — not all opinions are equal.

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