Though it isn't always evident, behind every prize-winning photograph several images coexist. The one captured by the photographer, perfectly visible, and the ones the system of recognition produces over time, deciding what that image will end up meaning.

On December 10, I published a text on a photograph that, to my eyes, could stand without difficulty among the best of the year. Not long after, I encountered another article presenting the final selection for the World Press Photo Exhibition 2026. The photograph in question was among them. What remains now is a single doubt. Whether it will ultimately be chosen as Photo of the Year.

On April 26, 1986, I was almost certainly bored out of my mind, sprawled in some corner of my apartment in Havana’s Vedado district. What I remember from those days is fear. A dense, persistent fear. The certainty that I could be swallowed by three years of mandatory military service. I clung to a girl whose face recalled Mariko-san —Yoko Shimada’s, not Anna Sawai’s— and I could not imagine allowing the distance between us...

April 10, 2026 marks the long-awaited return to Earth of the astronauts from Artemis II. The mission set out to perform a lunar flyby that reached the Moon’s far side. Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Jeremy Hansen traveled farther than any human beings in history, a detail irresistible to sensational headlines.

We have previously discussed how a photograph — or an image — can rearticulate the public perception of reality. How it can encapsulate experience, much like a verb does, rendering it transferable, exposable, and legible in a specific way.
Any story is a continuum, difficult to apprehend in its full extension and multidimensionality...

Netflix aired the final episode of Stranger Things on December 31, 2025. It coincided with the closing of an unusual and demoralizing year. A masterstroke. We will remember forever the day the Upside Down arc was sealed, Vecna definitively defeated, and Eleven’s story brought to a close—at every level: her power, and her life in the physical realm...

The British Museum has launched a campaign to secure the Tudor Heart, an ostentatious gold pendant linked to Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Its aim is to prevent the object from falling into private hands and vanishing from public view.
Discovered in Warwickshire in 2019 by a metal-detecting enthusiast, the piece was automatically placed under the provisions of the Treasure Act of 1996...

It is cold in Harbin, a city located in China’s northeastern reaches. It is the capital of Heilongjiang Province, on the banks of the Songhua River. Winters here are long and severe. Nearly three quarters of its territory borders the far—and frozen—Russian Far East.
One of the qualities I most admire in the Chinese people is their practical intelligence. They perform small miracles with whatever lies at hand...

In the field of iconicity—where universal icons gravitate—there are two figures who seduce me in a particular way. Because of their similarities and, above all, because of their irreconcilable differences: Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner. Both carry a weight so powerful, so comparable, that they keep the scale in perfect balance.