A new photo exhibition at the Bronx Documentary Center (BDC) showcases history-making moments of 2025 from around the world, captured by renowned photojournalists.
Winning works from the 2025 World Press Photo Contest are on display now through March 15 at the BDC Annex at 364 East 151st Street, marking the show’s first appearance in New York City in more than a decade.
The 42 winners represent six world regions — Africa, Asia-Pacific and Oceania, Europe, North and Central America, and West, Central and South Asia. Most of the photojournalists are local to the areas they cover, showcasing a diverse range of subjects, styles and moments, whether intimate or huge in scope, tragic or ordinary and everything in between.
BDC Creative Director Michael Kamber worked with World Press Photo to create the exhibition and was a winner himself in 2008.
Kamber worked as a photojournalist for 25 years, mostly in the Middle East, the Caribbean and Africa, and founded the Bronx Documentary Center in 2011 as an educational space to introduce young people to the power of photography.
It was also established in memory of a close friend and fellow photojournalist who was killed covering the war in Libya in 2011, Kamber told the Bronx Times.
The center serves mostly students from the South Bronx and East Harlem and engages them in discussions about community issues, where they are getting information, and the journalistic principles of fact-checking, interviewing, researching and sourcing.
Kamber said the BDC teaches young people how to ethically document the community while telling important stories based on their own experiences. For instance, students have worked on projects highlighting Bronxites’ immigration stories, new housing development and the prevalence of neighborhood marijuana shops.
Some young people from BDC programs have gone into careers in journalism and photojournalism, Kamber said.
The next generation of documentarians and photographers need not look far for inspiration as they build their portfolios. The World Press Photo exhibition at BDC has seen an “enormous turnout” so far, including several high school and college groups, Kamber said.
Many Bronxites come from, or have connections to, the various countries represented in the winning collection, he said.
“World Press Photo kind of represents our community in a way,” Kamber said. “Really, it’s about, this is what happened in our world in the last 12 months, and it’s a chance to really spend time with it and consider it.”
At the Bronx Documentary Center, young people are taught how to ethically photograph their communities and can also learn technical skills, including washing and developing rolls of film. Photo by Emily Swanson
A window into Taliban-led Afghanistan
The exhibition includes five works by Kiana Hayeri, an Iranian-Canadian photographer who traveled throughout Taliban-led Afghanistan to capture images of everyday life for women and girls.
In addition to winning World Press Photo honors, Hayeri also turned her 2024 photos into a book, “No Woman’s Land,” in collaboration with French human rights attorney and researcher Mélissa Cornet.
Hayeri lived in Kabul 2014 to 2023 and saw firsthand how women were restricted from the full scope of society under the Taliban, she told the Bronx Times.
Because women were “really pushed out of public spaces” like schools, libraries and parks, each photo required a “very strategic” plan and the ability to overcome a lot of hesitancy to participate, she said.
“We would knock on 20 doors and get 19 no to get one yes,” Hayeri said. “It’s completely understandable, to be honest. These women were extremely brave to even meet with us to start with but also put themselves in front of my camera.”
Even though the women’s faces were covered, they were taking some degree of risk in allowing themselves to be photographed. For instance, Hayeri said she photographed a Taliban prosecutor who likely risked imprisonment.
Hayeri’s images currently on the wall at BDC depict girls attending an underground school, friends at a sixteenth birthday party, a woman who abandoned her educational plans under Taliban law, and a first-time mother in the maternity ward who became saddened to learn she just had a baby girl, according to Hayeri.
Another stunning photo shows a window display of several mannequins wearing glittery, full-skirted gowns and plastic bags over their heads — illustrating that even faces of fake women are not allowed.
While Hayeri’s career has been prolific, she said among the many perks of being a World Press Photo winner is receiving questions and engagement from young people inspired by her images.
“For me, that has been really the biggest value, where we have been penetrating into education systems where otherwise we would not have had the chance to,” she said.
See Hayeri’s work and the rest of the free exhibition at the BDC during gallery hours: Thursday/Friday 3-7 p.m. and Saturday/Sunday 1-5 p.m.
Reach Emily Swanson at eswanson@schnepsmedia.com or (646) 717-0015. For more coverage, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram!