Meet the agency that brought World Press Photo's images to Iraq
World Press Photo Foundation has launched an exhibition in Iraq for the first time thanks to the efforts of one pioneering photo agency which wanted to realize the dream of its founder.
Every year since 1955, the famous Amsterdam-based World Press Photo Foundation has curated an exhibition of images picked from that year’s World Press Photo contest and showcased the exhibition in different locations around the world — from Singapore to Kenya to Brazil. Yet in its 64-year history, the exhibition has never been to Iraq — until now.
Iraq and Iraqis have often been the subjects of the photos submitted to the contest, which in 2019 received 78,801 submissions from 4,738 photographers from over 120 countries. In 2004, French photographer Jean-Marc Bouju won the contest with his picture of an Iraqi prisoner of war with a hood over his head, comforting his young son at a US holding center near Najaf.
