A picture of Sandra Mara Siqueira relaxing with her four grandchildren in a settlement outside of Curitiba, Brazil, has been circulating this spring. The picture doesn’t demand attention in any way. No building collapsing, no protest line, no fire. Just a grandmother, a few children, and the silent burden of ten years of waiting for land rights that no one seems eager to grant. A few years ago, this type of image might never have reached the desk of a Western editor. It contributed to the 11% increase in South American submissions to the World Press Photo Contest this year.
By itself, that figure seems modest. It could be a footnote buried in a press release with a 14 percent increase from Asia-Pacific and Oceania. However, spend any time conversing with Bogotá photographers. A different image appears in São Paulo or Lima, where the increase seems more like a long-overdue correction than a statistic.
| Metric | 2026 Contest Figure | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Total entries judged | 57,376 photographs | Submitted across all categories |
| Total photographers | 3,747 | From 141 countries |
| South America entry growth | +11% | Compared to 2025 Contest |
| Asia-Pacific & Oceania entry growth | +14% | Compared to 2025 Contest |
| Total regional winners | 42 | Across Singles, Stories, and Long-Term Project categories |
| Winners local to their region | 31 of 42 (≈74%) | Photographers covering their own region |
| Women and non-binary entrants | 22% of total entries | Described as a steady increase since 2021 |
| Regional model launch year | 2021 | Replaced single global jury structure |
| Number of regional juries | 6 independent juries | Plus one global jury for final selection |
| Countries represented by winners | 30 | Spanning all six regions |
| Exhibition reach | 60+ locations worldwide | Includes Brazil-specific stops: Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Curitiba, Salvador |
The change began in 2021 when World Press Photo replaced its previous global judging system with six separate regional juries. For photographers who had grown weary of having their work filtered through editors in Amsterdam or New York who, despite their good intentions, didn’t always understand the texture of a story unfolding in the Amazon or the Andes, this structural shift has an emotional impact. Judges in the area are able to distinguish between a staged protest photo and one that was taken by someone who truly understood the issues at hand. It turns out that the individuals making the submissions care a great deal about that distinction.
Think about the numbers: 31 of the 42 winners this year are from the areas they photographed. That encompasses the majority of the field and is not a minor trend.
Priscila Ribeiro, who won recognition in the Singles category for her documentation of land occupations in Brazil, is not a foreign correspondent coming in for a week. She is taking pictures of a narrative that she has experienced. The final images have a distinct quality, a familiarity that is difficult to imitate and even more difficult to teach.
This might simply be the result of removing a gatekeeping layer that, whether on purpose or not, favored particular conflict framings and aesthetics. The slow-burning disaster of deforestation, the protracted aftermath of Brazil’s 2023 uprising, and indigenous resistance movements are not new topics. For years, photographers have been recording them. The idea that submitting this work could actually result in something, that a jury chair in Bogotá might notice what a jury chair in Paris would have missed, is what’s novel.
Additionally, there’s a sense that this reflects a broader trend in international journalism. For the better part of ten years, media outlets have struggled with parachute journalism and its problems, such as the awkwardness of sending a photographer who doesn’t speak any of the necessary languages to cover an election or a famine. Although World Press Photo’s regional model doesn’t address the issue on an industry-wide scale, it does offer a practical solution: entrust the gatekeeping to individuals who are already familiar with the space.
When you ask what the baseline was, skeptics might argue that an 11 percent increase sounds impressive. Perhaps this is a correction rather than a revolution because South American entries were previously underrepresented. That’s a valid point, and once the backlog of underappreciated photographers is cleared, it’s still unclear if the growth will continue at this rate or plateau. Once the novelty wears off, numbers like these can quickly flatten.
Even so, it’s difficult to ignore how much the winning piece itself has changed in tone when observing this from the outside. Grandmothers on porches, land disputes measured in years rather than headlines, and the feeling that the camera belongs to someone who intends to be there next year are all more subdued than the disaster-tourism quality that used to characterize international photojournalism awards.
It’s really unclear if this will become a permanent aspect of the contest’s operations or if it will only be a brief spike connected to a few particularly noteworthy stories. The organization’s executive director, Joumana El Zein Khoury, has presented the regional model as an issue of trust, with judges who are familiar with a location evaluating those who take pictures of it. That’s a lovely sentiment. Whether decentralized judging is a real change in international photojournalism or just this year’s big story will depend greatly on how well it performs over the next five competitions as the system develops and the initial excitement fades into routine.
