Australian wins World Press Photo for migrants image

“Had I used a flash, I would have given their position away to the Hungarian police”, said Richardson, who camped out for days on the border to document the passage of the migrants.

Taken at night on August 28 a year ago, the man and child were among the people seeking to cross into Hungary before a secure fence on the border was finished.

On his blog, Richardson wrote about a night he will “never forget” when he saw a group of Syrians hiding among apple trees on the Serbian side of the border (it is not clear if this is the same night his winning photo was taken). Vaughn Wallace, deputy photo editor for Al Jazeera America, on Thursday said the image was ‘incredibly powerful visually, but it’s also very nuanced’. Richardson says the photo “causes you to stop and consider the man’s face, consider the child. You see the sharpness of the barbed wire and the hands reaching out from the darkness”, judges said.

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Nature Singles, first prize – Rohan Kelly caught a sunbather oblivious to the ominous shelf cloud approaching on Bondi beach in Sydney, Australia. ‘But I didn’t think like this’.

Other members of the jury agreed.

The 2016 contest drew entries from around the world: 5,775 photographers from 128 countries submitted 82,951 images. It’s the first black and white photo to win the top prize since 2009.

Founded in 1955 by a group of Dutch photojournalists who wanted to expose their work to an global audience, World Press Photo’s annual contest has since grown in size and prestige.

Japanese photographer Kazuma Obara won the People Stories category for a series of pictures shot on old Ukrainian film depicting the life of a woman affected by radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Ochoa also took third place for photos showing raindrops covering portraits of victims of the November 13 Paris attacks that were left at a street memorial.

Sergey Ponomarev won the General News stories category for migrants arriving by boat at the village of Skala on Greece’s Lesbos island, while Daniel Berehulak won the Daily Life stories category with his account of Chilean, Chinese and Russian research looking for commercial opportunities in Antarctica.