The 2025 Visa d’Or Award Winners

Since its creation in 1989, Visa pour l’Image – Perpignan has stood as the world’s foremost festival dedicated to photojournalism, honoring the photographers who risk their lives and devote their craft to bearing witness to history. Among its most anticipated highlights are the Visa d’Or awards, which celebrate excellence in visual reporting across multiple categories.

Each year, these prestigious prizes recognize photographers whose work embodies courage, commitment, and an unwavering dedication to truth—whether documenting conflict, humanitarian crises, environmental challenges, or the defining social issues of our time. More than accolades, the Visa d’Or awards underline the essential role of photojournalism in shaping collective memory and challenging indifference.

In 2025, the festival once again brings global attention to outstanding stories that push us to see, to feel, and to reflect—reminding us that photography remains a vital force for awareness and change.

The Visa d’or News Roger Thérond Award by Paris Match
Winner: Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

Major Ashraf Elbashir, a Sudanese army officer, walked along the destroyed Shambat bridge in north Khartoum. © Ivor Prickett for The New York Times, 2025 Winner of the Visa d’or News Roger Thérond Award by Paris Match

This year, Paris Match will fund the prize of €8,000 for the Visa d’or News Award winner. The 2025 winner is Ivor Prickett for The New York Times for his work on the Battle for Khartoum.
www.ivorprickett.com

The Visa d’or Feature Award
Supported by the Region of Occitanie / Pyrénées-Méditerranée
Winner: Brent Stirton, Getty Images

Recruits of the Rwandan-backed Congrès national pour la défense du peuple (CNDP) rebel movement training inside the gorilla sector in Virunga National Park. The CNDP movement re-emerged as M23 in 2012, and was active in 2017 and again in 2022. M23 currently holds most of Virunga National Park. February 15, 2008

For the eighteenth time, the Region of Occitanie / Pyrénées-Méditerranée will fund the prize money of €8,000 for the Visa d’or Feature award winner. The 2025 winner is Brent Stirton / Getty Images for his work “Virunga National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo: 100 years of Resilience”.
www.brentstirton.com

Göksin Sipahioglu by Sipa Press Daily Press Visa d’or Award
Winner: Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

Family members looking for signs of missing relatives searching through papers strewn on the floor inside Sednaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria. December 16, 2024.

The jury for the Göksin Sipahioglu by Sipa Press Daily Press Visa d’or Award were, all exhibiting photographers: Jean-Louis Courtinat, Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Gaëlle Girbes, Deanne Fitzmaurice, Brent Stirton
Entries were received from 24 newspapers. The Visa d’or has been awarded to The New York Times for the report by Daniel Berehulak on Syria. This year, the award is being sponsored by Sipa Press for the second time, with 8,000 euros in prize money for the winner of the Daily Press Visa d’or award.
www.danielberehulak.com

Ville de Perpignan Rémi Ochlik Visa d’or Award
Winner: Alfredo Bosco / Ronin

Drugs seized in the Kurdish territory in northern Iraq. In addition to captagon, the drug trade in this area is quite varied: cocaine, heroin and crystal meth. In recent years, Kurdistan has become a major crossroads for drug trafficking in the Middle East. Erbil, Iraq, December 1, 2024

For the nineteenth consecutive year, picture editors from international magazines have chosen the winner of the Ville de Perpignan Rémi Ochlik Visa d’or Award. The award is given to the young photographer who has produced the best report, either published or unpublished, in the previous year. The Ville de Perpignan sponsors the prize of €8,000. The 2025 winner is Alfredo Bosco for his work on the Iraqi synthetic drug crisis.
www.alfredobosco.com

Visa d’or des Solidarités by the Département des Pyrénées-Orientales
Winner: Jean-Louis Courtinat

A homeless man in the waiting room of the Hôtel-Dieu emergency department. Paris, 2003. © Jean-Louis Courtinat

For the second time, the Département des Pyrénées-Orientales will fund the prize of €8,000 for the winner of the new award, the Visa d’or des Solidarités. The winner is Jean-Louis Courtinat for his work on 40 years of social photography.

ICRC Humanitarian Visa d’or Award – International Committee
Winner: Saher Alghorra / Zuma Press

A mother mourns her son, Ziad Mahmoud Ziad Saydam who was killed during an Israeli raid on a house in Nuseirat Camp. The family had fled to Rafah where they had spent two months moving from one place to another for safety, and then had fled Rafah to find refuge in Deir al-Balah, only for Ziad to lose his life in the attack. The morgue at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, June 24, 2024.

The ICRC Humanitarian Visa d’or Award, founded in 2011, is an annual award for a professional photojournalist who has covered a humanitarian issue related to a situation of armed conflict. The winner of this year’s award, with prize money of €8,000 funded by the ICRC, is Saher Alghorra / Zuma Press for his work in the Gaza Strip.
@saher_alghorra

Visa d’or franceinfo Award for the Best Digital News Story
Winner: Gaël Turine, Johnson Sabin & Milo Milfort
“Haiti, in the depths of hell”

The 2025 winners are Gaël Turine, Johnson Sabin (photographers) and Milo Milfort (journalist) for their report “Haiti, in the depths of hell” presented as a digital broadcast on La Llibre Belgique.

For the tenth year, Visa pour l’Image- Perpignan will have the Visa d’or franceinfo Award for the Best Digital News Story, organized with support of €8,000 from France Médias Monde, France Télévisions, Radio France and the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA), all public broadcasting media. The scope of the award covers virtual reality, interactivity and editorial video work released via social media. In the context of non-stop news around the world, the Visa d’or franceinfo Award for the Best Digital News Story recognizes an idea, content and original work offering an interesting angle and perspective on the news. The 2025 winners are Gaël Turine, Johnson Sabin (photographers) and Milo Milfort (journalist) for their report “Haiti, in the depths of hell” presented as a digital broadcast on La Llibre Belgique.
@johnson.sabin

Figaro Magazine Lifetime Achievement Visa d’or Award
Winner: George Steinmetz

At the end of August, some six hundred sheep descend from pastures above the Aletsch Glacier in the Valais region of the Swiss Alps. The communal flock has summered on steep alpine slopes, watched over by a lone shepherd. After a retreating glacier cut off the annual migration route, this narrow path was blasted out of a canyon wall in the 1970s to maintain access to the remote alpine pasture.

The Figaro Magazine Lifetime Achievement Visa d’or Award stands as recognition of the lifetime achievement of an established photographer who is still working. For the thirteenth year, the Lifetime Achievement Visa d’or award is being sponsored by Le Figaro Magazine with prize money of €8,000. The winner is George Steinmetz.
www.georgesteinmetz.com

Todd Hido: Intimate Distance, Over Thirty Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album

By Todd Hido

Publisher : Aperture

2025 | 320 pages

An expanded chronology charting Todd Hido's career, with ten years of new work.

Well known for his photography of landscapes and suburban housing, and for his use of detail and luminous color, acclaimed American photographer Todd Hido casts a distinctly cinematic eye across all that he photographs, digging deep into his memory and imagination for inspiration. Newly revised and expanded, Intimate Distance: Over Thirty Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album includes ten years of new work since the book's first publication, including breathtaking new images from his travels to Iceland, Norway, and Japan, where he brings both a familiar eye and an expansive new vision.

Though Hido has published many smaller monographs of individual bodies of work, this gathers his most iconic images, along with many unpublished works to provide the most complete and comprehensive monograph charting his career. The book is organized chronologically, showing how his series overlap in exciting ways. David Campany introduces the work and looks at the kind of cinematic spectatorship the work demands. And Katya Tylevich muses on the making of each of Hido's major monographs, "The photographs lead as far as human-made roads go. They reach the periphery of utility wires, footprints, and paths already taken." From exterior to interior, surface observations to subconscious investigations, from landscapes to nudes, from America and beyond, this midcareer collection reveals how his unique focus has developed and shifted over time, yet the tension between distance and intimacy remains.

All About Todd Hido

Nick Brandt: The Echo of Our Voices: The Day May Break, Chapter Four

By Nick Brandt

Publisher : Skira

2025 | 128 pages

The fourth chapter of the celebrated series The Day May Break by the renowned photographer Nick Brandt, featuring Syrian refugee families, displaced by climate change in water-scarce Jordan

This is the fourth chapter of The Day May Break, photographer Nick Brandt's global series portraying people and animals impacted by climate change and environmental degradation. The series was photographed in Jordan, one of the most water-scarce countries in the world. It features rural Syrian refugee families currently living there, whose lives have been seriously impacted by droughts intensified by climate change. Living lives of continuous displacement, they are forced to move their homes up to several times a year, moving to where there is available agricultural work, to wherever there has been sufficient rainfall to enable crops to grow. The photographs show the families' connection and strength in the face of adversity, that when all else is lost you still have each other. The boxes on which the families gather aim skyward, pedestals for those in our society that are typically unseen and unheard.

All About Nick Brandt

Ed Kashi: A Period in Time: Looking Back while Moving Forward, 1977-2022

By Ed Kashi

Publisher : Briscoe Center for American History

2025 | 344 pages

Photographer Ed Kashi’s passion is long-term documentary projects that immerse him in issues that need attention or people’s lives whose struggles warrant concern. He has had a lengthy and varied career with National Geographic and other major magazines, traveling around the world to tell visual stories.

Kashi’s archive, now housed at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, houses many of his personal memories and the experiences attached to the creation of those images. More than a simple repository of images, the archive is a growing, thriving, and continually evolving organism, a living library with immense value.

Through his photography, Kashi has had an intimate, front-row seat to witness and record major events in history. His work has been a passport to worlds unseen, unveiling issues that need illumination, documenting history in the making, and capturing the human experience and the many awe-inspiring places in our fragile world. A Period in Time is a testimony to some of Kashi’s most memorable stories—people he has been privileged to observe and learn from and the places and narratives that have shaped his life, all captured one moment at a time.

All About Ed Kashi

Bruce Davidson: The Way Back

By Bruce Davidson

Publisher : Steidl

2025 | 144 pages

Nearly four decades of unpublished works from a master of documentary photography

Consisting solely of previously unpublished photographs, The Way Back is a deep dive through Bruce Davidson’s more than 60-year career. The book chronologically presents photos made between 1957 and 1992, showcasing Davidson’s exceptional versatility―from his earliest assignments to later seminal bodies of work including his yearlong study of teenage members of a Brooklyn Gang (1959), his extensive coverage of the American Civil Rights Movement in Time of Change (1961–65) and his breakthrough portraits of the residents of a single block in Harlem in East 100th Street (1966–68). Series such as Subway (1980) and Central Park (1992) confirm Davidson as a quintessential chronicler of New York City.

What emerges through this retrospective is Davidson’s overt sensibility and empathy for his subjects and his commitment to documenting them in depth over time. Unlike his peers who photographed historical events, Davidson focused on the people within these histories. Now, drawing near the end of his long career, Davidson offers this book as a parting look at his artistic passage, an elegiac goodbye as well as a requiem.

Bruce Davidson (born 1933, Oak Park, IL) became a member of the Magnum Photos agency in 1958; since then his photographs and photo series have been widely published to great acclaim. At Yale University, he studied under photographer Alexey Brodovitch and artist Josef Albers, the latter of whom encouraged him to pursue his work among marginalized people and communities. His artistic influences include Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

The 2025 Visa d’Or Award Winners

More information about the Awards Winners

Selected Books