‘The power of a still image’: World Press Photo Expo comes back to Montreal

Montreal is welcoming back the annual World Press Photo Exhibition – a flagship event of the fall cultural calendar – for the 18th year in a row.

This year’s edition showcases the winning works from the 2025 World Press Photo Contest, bringing the best of photojournalism and documentary photography from around the world that are on display until Oct. 13, 2025 at Marché Bonsecours.

The winning photographs in this year’s exposition were chosen by an independent jury of 31 people specializing in photography, who reviewed nearly 60,000 photographs entered by nearly 4,000 photographers from 141 countries across the globe, that address today’s most pressing issues, such as devastating conflicts, political upheaval, the climate crisis and the safe passage of migrants.

“I think there are pictures that are really hard to see,” said a man who was visiting the exposition with his wife and two-month-old baby, as he pointed to photographs taken by Agence-France Presse photographer Clarens Siffroy. The photo depicts the violence inflicted upon a man who was left buried beneath tires in the streets of Haiti as gang violence took over the country after assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.

“Every year, the photos are fantastic, but they illustrate so many problems on the planet, and I think it’s important to come and remain sensitive to these realities, which remain absolutely crucial for too many people,” said a woman who has made it a tradition of attending the exhibition every year with her husband.

“We are proposing to our visitors something that is very human, and I think that people really need to connect — like if you see the people all around here, sometimes they are really close to each other, looking at the same thing at the same time, and there’s a kind of a communion spirit,” said Yann Fortier, exhibition director of the Montreal World Press Photo Exposition.

According to Fortier, the exhibition has been such a success, attracting large crowds over the years, they decided three years ago to extend the exhibit from four to six weeks, giving viewers the chance to properly admire the photographs with smaller crowds.

The exhibition is organized into six regions: Africa, Asia-Pacific and Oceania, Europe, North and Central America, South America and West, Central and South Asia. Each with at least one winning photojournalist from the region, a practice that Fortier says, the World Press Photo Foundation changed three to four years ago to allow local photojournalists the chance to share their own stories.

“There’s close to 140 photos that have been taken by 40 photojournalists in three different categories: single photo, stories and also long-term projects,” Fortier explained.

The stories category allows photojournalists the opportunity to tell a more nuanced story by using four to 10 images, while the long-term category allows them to showcase 24 to 30 images for a more detailed and immersive experience.

“We all believe in the power of a fixed image of analog exhibition, and especially nowadays with immersive exhibition, with AI and with the fact that everything is moving all around on a huge screen, or really small screen. I think that somewhere in the middle, we are offering something that is really unique, because it’s also talking about real people living real things,” added Fortier.