COVID hug wins World Press Photo of the Year

Along with the top award, Mads Nissen also won in the General News category with his photo of an 85-year-old woman being embraced for the first time in months through a "hug curtain" by a nurse at the Viva Bem care home in Sao Paulo. It is a "rare positive photo about the COVID-19 era," said the jury. Under President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil is one of the countries most affected by the virus.

Antonio Faccilongo also won two awards, Story of the Year and the first prize in the Long-Term Projects category, honoring a series shot over a period of at least three years. His project "Habibi" focuses on the stories of Palestinian security detainees held in Israeli prisons. Shown here are relatives of the prisoners; the women head to an Israeli checkpoint to visit them.

An estimated 129 billion disposable face masks and 65 billion throwaway gloves are being used each month during the pandemic, the BBC reported. With this photo titled "California Sea Lion Plays with Mask," Ralph Pace, a California-based freelance underwater and environmental photographer, illustrates how the waste that lands in nature poses a threat to animals.

Nearly a third of Brazil's Pantanal region, a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve and home to the world's largest tropical wetland and flooded grasslands, was destroyed by fire in 2020. Photojournalist Lalo de Almeida shows the destruction in his award-winning series "Pantanal Ablaze." The fires are due in part to the current Brazilian government's weakening of conservation regulations.

For his series titled "Sakhawood," Russian documentary photographer Alexey Vasilyev accompanied various film shoots in the Russian republic of Sakha, in the far east of the country. Even though it is small, the local movie industry there has been dubbed "Sakhawood." Art is a way of showcasing and preserving Sakha culture, traditions and stories.

Valeriy Melnikov's series "Paradise Lost" deals with the impact of the conflict between ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Some residents, like this man, decided to burn their houses before leaving areas that were to return to Azerbaijani control following the November 2020 peace agreement.

Photographer, writer and filmmaker Ami Vitale's winning shot is titled "Rescue of Giraffes from Flooding Island," a photograph of a giraffe being transported to safety in a barge from a flooded Longicharo Island on Lake Baringo in western Kenya. "As with all of nature, the giraffe is full of majesty, but also vulnerability, as illustrated beautifully in this photograph," said juror Kevin WY Lee.

Canadian documentary photographer Chris Donovan won first prize in the sports category with his series "Those Who Stay Will Be Champions," which the jury praised for being "beautifully shot in black and white frames" that give "another nuanced look into Black lives in America, beyond the protests and the Black Lives Matter movement."

Italian photographer Lorenzo Tugnoli's coverage of the port explosion in Beirut won him the award in the Spot News, stories category. The images of the devastating explosion that shook the Lebanese capital on August 4, 2020, encapsulate "the pain of the situation," said jury member Gurung Kakshapati.

"The Transition: Ignat," by freelance photographer Oleg Ponomarev, is this year's winning single portrait, showing a transgender man and his girlfriend in Saint Petersburg, Russia, a country where LGBT+ people are extremely marginalized. "The first impressions I had when I saw this photograph were of dignity and love," said jury member Andrei Polikanov.

Torrell Jasper, aka Black Rambo, has become an Instagram star by showing off his guns. Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti won the first prize in the Portraits, stories, category with his series titled "Ameriguns," showing different owners of firearms in the US. Half of all the firearms owned by private citizens in the world (for non-military purposes) are found in the United States.