The following images are drawn from the World Report Award 2026 finalist projects, the international documentary photography competition promoted by the Festival della Fotografia Etica. Selected by an international jury for depth and vision, they portray crises, resilience and everyday life from every corner of the world. A glimpse of the voices that this year have interpreted our times with the greatest intensity.

Kolbars (porters, in Kurdish) are Kurdish border couriers who transport goods across dangerous mountain routes between Iraq and Iran. Their ages range from 12 to 70 years old. They endure extreme conditions, carrying heavy loads for minimal pay while risking death from weather, landmines, and border forces. More than 300 kolbars die every year, 72% of whom are killed by gunfire from Iranian border patrol agents. Despite the risks, kolbari makes essential products more accessible and affordable to many Iranians.

Ebrahim Alipoor is a Kurdish-Iranian documentary photographer and visual artist. For over a decade, his practice has explored themes of borders, identity, heritage, and spirituality. Through long-term documentary projects in Kurdistan and the Middle East, he explores the human, social, and political realities of communities facing conflict, displacement, and contemporary change.
His work has received numerous international awards and recognitions, including the 2025 World Press Photo for his project Bullets Have No Borders. His photographs have been exhibited internationally and published by leading media including Le Monde, The Guardian, Stern, Newsweek, and De Volkskrant.

Daily life in Gaza continues amid displacement, hunger, and destroyed infrastructure. In 2025, ceasefires have been broken or failed to end the humanitarian collapse. Civilians endure ongoing losses, uncertainty, and exhaustion that seem endless.

Saher Alghorra is a Palestinian photojournalist based in Gaza, specializing in documenting humanitarian crises and conflict.
He has received numerous prestigious international awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, World Press Photo Award, Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, Pictures of the Year International, Visa pour l’Image Award, and Prix Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award, among others. He was also selected to participate in the Joop Swart Masterclass in 2025, one of the world’s most prestigious programs for photojournalists.

Between 1980 and 2000, Peru experienced a violent internal conflict that left over 70,000 dead and more than 22,000 people disappeared, many at the hands of state forces. The region of Ayacucho was the most affected, with thousands still missing and numerous mass graves documented. This project maps emblematic sites of violence, revealing the scale of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.Today, families continue searching for their loved ones, seeking truth, dignity, and closure.

Omar Lucas is a Peruvian documentary photographer based in Lima. For nearly 15 years, he has developed long-term projects exploring human rights, the environment, memory, and identity. His work focuses on marginalized communites and individuals across Peru, including tuberculosis patents, women miners in La Rinconada, and families searching for the remains of people who disappeared during Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980–2000). His work has been recognized by POY Latam and the Photo Humanity Grant. He is currently documenting the aftermath of the 2022–2023 protests in Peru and the families’ struggle for truth and justice.

This project documents how the Arctic is rapidly transforming into a zone of military buildup and industrial exploitation. Drawing on the legacy of Cold War radar systems, it shows how climate change—warming the region much faster than the global average—has opened access to resources and shipping routes. This has intensified competition among global powers, leading to rising tensions, environmental damage, and a new wave of neo-colonial expansion.

Louie (Luigino) Palu is a photographer and filmmaker whose work has examined social political issues, such as human rights and conflict for 30-years. He has been selected for a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and World Press Photo Award. His work has covered the wars in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and an ongoing long-term project on the Arctic. His work has been published, exhibited, and screened widely. His work is in the collections of numerous museums, libraries, and archives. He holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Since 2023, Ethiopia’s northwestern Amhara region has been engulfed in an insurgency led by the Fano militia, a movement of former soldiers and civilians claiming to defend their community. The conflict stems from post–Tigray War tensions, escalating into widespread violence between Fano and federal troops. Both sides have been accused of serious abuses, while Fano has gained control over large rural areas. The war has deepened a severe humanitarian crisis, leaving millions in need of aid and hundreds of thousands displaced.

Robin Tutenges is a French photographer, member of Collectif Hors Format. Trained in geopolitical conflict analysis and photojournalism, he works on human rights violations, with a particular focus on cross-border and ethnic issues. His reports have been published in Le Monde, GEO, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, among others. His work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Camille Lepage Award, at Visa Pour l’Image Festival (2026); Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Lucas Dolega-SAIF Photo Award (2025), a Pulitzer Center Grant (2025) and the European Press Prize Award (2024). His work has been exhibited at venues such as the Visa Pour l’Image festival (2026), the National Museum of Photography of Colombia and the Marseille Photography Center.

Founded in 1986, Panos Pictures has evolved from a photo archive of the Panos Institute, an NGO that specialised in communication on development issues, to become one of the world’s leading independent and award-winning photographic agencies in the world. Representing more than 80 creatives known for their integrity and willingness to go beyond the mainstream media agenda, Panos celebrates this year its 40° anniversary.

Photographer Lalo de Almeida has been documenting the Amazon region for over a decade, recording the devastating effects of Bolsonaro’s policies on the rainforest’s fragile ecosystems and the populations that inhabit it. Despite the fact that the Amazon rainforest produces 20% of the oxygen we breathe and is home to more than three million animal and plant species, its survival has been seriously threatened for years. The project is called “dystopia” because these exploitative policies have created polluted rivers and degraded regions that look more like lunar soil than a territory once covered by the Amazon rainforest.

Lalo de Almeida is a Brazilian photographer based in Sao Paulo. Lalo studied photography at the Instituto Europeo di Design in Milan. He began working as a photojournalist for small agencies in Milan covering police work in the city. From there he moved onto covering domestic and international event such as the wars in former Yugoslavia. He returned to Brazil and since the late 1990s has been working for the daily newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo.
He combines working for the newspaper with producing his own documentary projects. He has won, amongst others, three World Press Photo awards including the 2022 Long-Term Project category for Amazon Dystopia alongside the Eugene Smith Grant.

Ian Willms’s work shows the largest and most environmentally destructive oil extraction project in the world: the oil sands in the province of Alberta, Canada. The industry is consuming vast areas of boreal forest, affecting a region roughly the size of England. In addition, more than 70 megatons of greenhouse gases are emitted every year. The United Nations has recently found that Indigenous communities in Canada are disproportionately exposed to toxic substances as a result of industrial development across the country. In Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, residents describe this process as a “slow-motion cultural genocide.” As Long as the Sun Shines focuses on the daily, intimate destruction taking place in the shadow of an industry so vast that it can be seen from space. Intense wildfires, fueled by climate change, are bringing unprecedented challenges. In Fort Chipewyan and Fort McKay, rare cancers, birth defects, lupus, and other diseases are occurring at an alarming rate. For many years, healthcare professionals have been sounding the alarm about pollution levels caused by the surrounding oil sands mines and calling for a comprehensive public health study.

Ian Willms is a Canadian photographer based in Toronto. His longform documentary practice resides within the space between photojournalism and contemporary photography. Ian’s pacifist Mennonite ancestors fled violent persecution in Russia in 1923 before settling in Canada. As a child he was raised by his independent, agnostic, feminist mother in a subsidised apartment building for at-risk women. These experiences shape the empathetic and socially concerned disposition which informs his work today. His photo essays have won awards and support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Greenpeace Photo Award, World Press, Pictures of the year International and the National Magazine Awards.

Jonas Kako’s project documents the impact of climate change on the Colorado River, which once snaked its way across the western United States and Mexico for over 2,000 km, from the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of California. Since the 1980s, however, the river has progressively dried up and today barely reaches the delta in the south. The main causes are large-scale agriculture and the diversion of water to supply cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas. What was once a vast delta, where flocks of migratory birds found a rich ecosystem, is now a salty desert. According to a recent study published by the journal Science, climate change is the main cause of Colorado’s decline, and the river’s water levels have fallen by approximately 1.5 billion cubic meters, an amount equivalent to the annual water consumption of 10 million Americans.

Jonas Kakó is a German photographer based in Hannover. He studied photojournalism at the University of Hannover and has focused his work around the effects of the climate crisis. Through a number of projects, including “The Dying River” which was awarded a World Press Photo award in 2023, Jonas tries to show how this most pressing issue of our time is impacting on the lives of people who are suffering the consequences of global warming and whose very existence is threatened by it. Jonas has worked for the Weser-Kurier in Bremen since 2016 as well as on assignments for national and international magazines. His freelance work has appeared in National Geographic, Stern, Vice, De Volkskrant and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung among many others.

Marco Garro’s Quiulacocha is a visual essay that uses the alchemy of photography as both a medium and a metaphor to explore the impact of mining on the health of people in Cerro de Pasco, the epicenter of this industry in Peru and one of the most polluted places in the world.
The name of Lake Quiulacocha, in Quechua, comes from the Andean gulls that once arrived in flocks on its shores from the Pacific coast. Today, however, no form of life survives in the lake; it is rather an accumulation of toxic substances: lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, aluminum, boron, copper, cobalt, iron, manganese, and selenium.
The photographer began collecting water samples from Lake Quiulacocha to use in developing the photographs I take in Cerro de Pasco. The acidic liquid produces stains and hues that appear unpredictably across faces and landscapes, mimicking the indelible imprint of pollution on life.
Quiulacocha was a natural lake before it was turned into a waste dump in the 1950s. Today, the region is a landscape reminiscent of one of the circles of Dante’s Inferno.

Marco Garro is a documentary photographer, journalist, and visual artist based in Peru. His work focuses on social, human rights and environmental issues, mainly in the Andes and the Amazon of his home country. Marco is a Pulitzer Centre Grantee and National Geographic Explorer. He received the Photography Residency ‘Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac’ in France and won first place of the Instituo Cultural Peruano Norteamerican in Peru. He published his first photo book Quiulacocha which explores the consequences of mining pollution in a remote Andean city in 2025. Marco’s work has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and Bloomberg. He is a member of the Peruvian photographic collective Supayfotos.

Photographer Heidi Bradner went to Chechnya a number of times during the First Chechen War (1994-1996) when both Russian and foreign journalists were allowed to work inside Chechnya. Her images, and those of many other photojournalists who covered the conflict, were instrumental in fuelling the outrage against the war and its human costs both in Russia and across the world.
Though a peace accord was concluded in late 1996, the Chechen imbroglio was far from finished by 1999 when the second war took off (1999-2005).
This reportage takes us back to the years of the first conflict in this region, offering images and testimonies from a chapter of history that is often forgotten. But it also gives us the opportunity to remember Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist known throughout the world for her courageous reporting during the Second Chechen War. Politkovskaya was assassinated in the entrance hall of her home on October 7, 2006, and this year marks the twentieth anniversary of her death: an occasion to pay tribute to her legacy and her commitment to the truth.

Heidi Bradner was born and raised in Alaska, USA. She started doing freelance writing and photography as a student for the Juneau Empire, the Anchorage Daily News, and various other Alaska publications while completing her history and journalism degrees at the University of Alaska-Anchorage. After graduating Heidi began to photograph in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Based in Moscow from 1991 – 1997 Heidi documented the changes and paradoxes of the turbulent post-Soviet years. She is a recipient of the Leica Medal of Excellence, the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography Grant and the Alexia Foundation Photography Grant as well as many other prizes and awards. Now based in London UK, Heidi continues to work on projects in Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Square Mile is an initiative by VII Community, a program of The VII Foundation in partnership with PhotoWings. The initiative presents diverse photographic explorations by members of VII Community, a worldwide network of The VII Foundation alumni and Foundry Photojournalism Workshop participants.
Square Mile is a geographic framework, signifying a local focus on spaces where personal, local, and global influences intersect. The projects presented explore how themes such as climate change, identity, history, legacy, migration, gender, and environment appear within a local perspective. The initiative aims to inspire conversations on the significance of local stories in a global context and to engage the general public in discussions about social issues and the transformative power of photography.

Several organized trafficking and exploitation networks operate in Ecuador, with young women being the most vulnerable population for sexual exploitation. Through its shelter, the NGO Alas de Colibrí (Hummingbird Wings) addresses the issue of trafficking in young adolescent women who are survivors of sexual exploitation. Bird’s Nest is a photographic series that tells the story of adolescent women in the shelter. There, they seek to heal and build new life projects through therapeutic activities.

David Diaz Arcos is a visual storyteller based in Ecuador. He produces photographic and audiovisual content on educommunication, human rights, and territory for NGOs and the press. His work has been published in National Geographic, BBC News, The Washington Post, El País, and Bloomberg, among others.

Kotar’baaz is a metaphorical narrative of Kashmir’s psychological and political quandary, voiced through the imagery of pigeon keeping. In indigenous culture, pigeons symbolize peace, purity and spiritual freedom. But in the present landscape, charged with systemic surveillance, these birds also embody the condition of Kashmiri lives — suspended between fleeting moments of freedom on a horizon marked by countless checkpoints, always monitored, always tightly regulated.

Aakash Gulzar is a documentary photographer from Bandipora, in Indian-administered Kashmir. His work explores themes of isolation, memory, presence and the evolving relationship between people and the places they inhabit. Through intimate, long-term projects, he examines how personal histories, collective experiences and quiet tensions surface within everyday life.
He holds a master’s degree in mass communication and journalism from the University of Kashmir. His photographs have been published by Der Greif, Perimetro, Eyeshot, Eastside Asia, Outlook Traveller and Article 14, among others. His work has also been shortlisted for the Ian Parry Photojournalism Grant (2025) and the Sony World Photography Awards (2026).

Dreaming in Bulgarian explores the identity of the Bulgarian diaspora living in the historical region of Bessarabia within Moldova and Ukraine. It focuses on community traditions, daily life and the multi-layered cultural, historical, and political context of the area.
Tens of thousands of Bulgarians migrated to Bessarabia more than 200 years ago when Bulgaria was still under Ottoman rule. They have since put down roots and absorbed the cultures of other people, but preserved their native language and traditions to this day. While Bessarabia was part of the Russian Empire when the Bulgarians settled, the states and borders in this region have often changed in the past 200 years. Through this work, the photographer observes how historical events impact the diaspora and how they affect the sense of identity and belonging. The series presented is a micro-narrative about the Bulgarian-Gagauz village of Kubey in Ukraine, which is located in Bessarabia.

Mihaela Aroyo is a documentary photographer based in Varna, Bulgaria. Her work explores themes such as cultural identity, history, folklore, environment, and personal stories. She is a former Mentee of The VII Foundation’s Mentor Program and a finalist for the Inge Morath Award. Her photographs have been featured in The New Yorker, National Geographic, and Die Zeit.

The Ngāi Tūhoe have maintained their strong Māori identity and language despite colonial pressures in nineteenth-century New Zealand. Their ancestral homeland, Te Urewera, nestled in the North Island’s remote ranges, made history in 2014 as the world’s first national park returned to indigenous guardians, and was recognized as a legal entity with personhood rights, affirming Tūhoe’s role as kaitiaki (guardians).

Tatsiana Chypsanava is a documentary photographer focusing on Indigenous rights, migration, and environmental issues based in Aotearoa New Zealand. A descendant of the Komi peoples from Siberia’s North West Ural region, she collaborates with international publications and organizations to amplify diverse voices. She is a grantee of the Pulitzer Center and Wellcome Trust, and the recipient of World Press Photo for Long-term Projects. Her work appears in leading publications including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and New Zealand Geographic.

In Morocco, the Gnawa stands as a living archive of forced migration and exile, reminding us that movement is as old as humanity. Through this community, the project reconnects contemporary migration to a much longer history — one carried not in official archives, but in bodies, rituals, chants and inherited breath — and reflects on how histories of movement continue to shape identity, belonging, spirituality and cultural memory today.

Born to a Senegalese father and a French mother of Indian and Russian descent, Maroussia Mbaye crafts narratives that examine the intricate interplay of memory, tradition and community. Growing up in a multicultural, politically active family, her work focuses on Africa’s development challenges and opportunities, shedding light on social inequalities, and complex identities.

The first time the photographer saw a burlesque show was in August 2019, and it was love at first sight. She fell in love with this art form, its message of empowerment, and its celebration of diversity. Within this community, the majority are LGBTQ and non-binary folks, with straight individuals being the minority, diverging from the usual norm. Burlesque welcomes and accepts everyone, supports and loves all, and acts as the counterculture and voice of protest of current and past times. Whether onstage or the street, burlesque has always been political and a safe haven for the LGBTQ community and its allies. “This community, my community, is unstoppable

Natalia Neuhaus is a queer photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Hergaze is deeply influenced by the violence that surrounded her childhood and shaped her photographs to this day. In 2017,she was one of the recipients of the Director’s scholarship at ICP.She received an honorable mention atThe Julia Margaret Cameron Award in 2021. In 2022, Neuhaus was one of three women accepted into the Leica x VII Mentor Program.