In 2025, World Press Photo marks its 70 year anniversary; a milestone which provides the opportunity not only to look back at the remarkable history of the organization, but also to examine how the images World Press Photo awarded and helped to give a global platform over the past seven decades have shaped the public’s understanding of the world.
To mark the occasion of this anniversary, and as part of a series of special events across 2025, a major exhibition, What Have We Done? Unpacking Seven Decades of World Press Photo, curated by artist and photographer Cristina de Middel, will take place in several locations. The world premiere of the exhibition will take place on 19 September 2025 at the Niemeyerfabriek in Groningen, and is hosted by Noorderlicht—one of the Netherlands’ leading platforms for photography and lens-based media. The show will run until 19 October, with a press preview scheduled for 18 September. It will also be shown in Johannesburg, South Africa, at The Market Photo Workshop from 20 September and in Dhaka, Bangladesh, at Drik Picture Library from 21 November 2025.
Reflecting on the 70th anniversary has brought World Press Photo back to its extensive archive spanning seven decades of stories that have been powerful vehicles of change. They’ve helped raise awareness of critical global issues and to shed light on little-known but important stories. Still, delving deeper into the archive, World Press Photo has also had to confront the unintended consequences of their choices, whether from assumptions made, to stereotypes that may have been perpetuated, or voices that were underrepresented. This exhibition is an invitation to reflect on the various recurring visual patterns that are to be found in different eras and to start a dialogue.
The exhibition features over 100 photographs from those working across the 70 year period – from Horst Faas, Don McCullin, David Chancellor, Eddie Adams, and Steve McCurry, to Johanna Maria Fritz and Sara Naomi Lewkowicz. This exhibition is an invitation to rethink not just how visual language has evolved but how we, as viewers and citizens, should learn to read images with a sharper and more critical eye. This tension between new tools and old habits raises a crucial question: If the ways we capture and share images have changed, why do we continue to tell the same stories in the same way? What do these recurring images say about what we choose to see—and what we ignore?