Every year the Dutch-based non-profit organization World Press Photo sifts through thousands of news photographs from around the world in search of images that "represent an event, situation or issue of great journalistic importance and demonstrate an outstanding level of visual perception and creativity."
The resulting awards and accompanying exhibition have been running since 1955. This year's World Press Photo finalists were chosen from a record 69,190 submissions by 4,266 professional photographers from 123 countries. The 200 prizewinners will be seen by people in 80 cities.
Somewhat surprising and disappointing is the fact that not one of the pictures on display is from Japan, even though there is keen interest in the exhibition here. (World Press Photo is co-sponsored by Japanese camera-maker Canon and was installed last week at the Tokyo Museum of Photography in Ebisu.) The selection is somewhat Euro-centric, which is unsurprising as half of the jury are Europeans this year. There was but one representative from East Asia (Associated Press photographer Alberto Marquez of the Philippines). Hopefully this will change next year.