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This chapter examines World Press Photo, an international platform for photography that runs the world's most international and prestigious annual competition in photojournalism. In addition to fieldwork conducted at World Press Photo's Awards Days 2004 and the fiftieth anniversary in 2005, this chapter is based on the author's experience at the Masterclass offered in Amsterdam for a highly selective group of a dozen international photographers, and at a seminar for young photojournalists in a developing country held over the course of three years. World Press Photo contributes to a discourse of photography as a universal storytelling medium while also offering seminars in “developing” countries aimed at training promising photographers in how to see in very particular ways. Thus, the world in World Press Photo is not one that is given but one that can be developed through photography.

This chapter focuses on the World Press Photo, a non-profit organization which organizes the largest and arguably most prestigious press photo competition in the world, yearly awarding dozens of prizes, which work as crucial institutional mechanisms of production and circulation of cultural value. Awards are relevant within such scarcely institutionalized fields as photojournalism, since they can raise value problems for jurors, winners, and observers. It is the whole vision of the cultural field—its meanings, values, and indeed objects—that is at stake in prizing. In the digital age, competitions and awards do not just reveal how news photographs are evaluated, but also what a digital news photograph actually is, or at least what nowadays it is legitimately supposed to be. This chapter mainly draws on an archival analysis of the last twenty years of the WPP awards and in-depth interviews with jurors, experts, and winning photojournalists.

This chapter addresses the relationship between imagemaking and worldmaking, or how assumed conflict shapes the production and circulation of news images which then in turn contribute to what political possibilities seem plausible. Specifically the chapter looks at worldmaking at two sites: the newsroom of a major US news publication and a World Press Photo seminar intended to develop democracy by way of photojournalism. At both sites presumed binaries shape processes of worldmaking frame by frame. Balancing such aesthetic conflict comes to stand in for journalistic objectivity. The professional brokering of news images involves simultaneous processes of producing representations and reproducing worldviews. Understanding these processes is key to understanding global infrastructures of worldmaking with its production of certain categories of people and possibilities for certain kinds of visibility and not others. In the end, better scholarship on how images both represent and produce political conflict may require that we look beyond images of conflict itself.