The World Press Photo Contest has announced its global winners for 2023. From the war in Ukraine, through the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to the conflicts over the use of water in Central Asia and the deportations due to the climate crisis in Egypt, the prize wants to emphasize the importance of documentary photography.

The four global winners are the Ukrainian photographer Evgeniy Maloletka with “Mariupol Maternity Hospital Airstrike” for the Photo of the Year section; the Danish photographer Mads Nissen, with “The Price of Peace in Afghanistan” for Story of the Year section; the Armenian photographer Anush Babajanyan, with “Battered Waters for the Long-Term Project Award; and the Egyptian photographer Mohamed Mahdy, with “Here, The Doors Don’t Know Me” for the Open Format Award.

Maloletka was one of the few photographers present at Mariupol in early March 2022. “We came to Mariupol just one before the invasion. For 20 days, we lived with paramedics in the basement of the [Mariupol Maternity] hospital, and in shelters with ordinary citizens, trying to show the fear Ukrainians were living in. […] This is the image that I wanted to forget, but I couldn’t,” he said. Nissen instead shows the daily lives of people in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime, after the United States and its allies withdrew from the nation in 2021.

Babajanyan then spent years documenting the interdependence of water resources between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. After years of peaceful cooperation, however, the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers have recently become a source of conflict due to drought and water mismanagement. Last but not least, Mahdy’s project shows how rising sea levels affect sentimentally, and not only, Al Max, a fishing village along the Mahmoudiyah Canal in Alexandria, Egypt. In 2020, in fact, the Egyptian government began to forcibly move the residents of the village and demolish their homes. “My project talks about loss of memory, our culture, and identity fading away,” Mahdy said.