Ferley Ospina wins World Press Photo
- World Press Photo named Colombian photographer Ferley A. Ospina a 2026 regional winner for “Name the Absence,” a story about fatherlessness in Norte de Santander. - The project turns Ospina’s own history into the spine of the work: armed groups killed his father in 1999, and one image shows five-year-old Valeria. - It matters because this year’s winners pushed beyond frontline imagery, rewarding intimate reporting on violence’s afterlife inside families and communities.
Photojournalism prizes usually reward the moment of impact — war, disaster, protest, the frame where history looks loud. Ferley A. Ospina’s World Press Photo win lands somewhere quieter. His project, “Name the Absence,” was selected in the 2026 contest as a South America regional winner in the Stories category, and the force of it is that it photographs what violence leaves behind rather than the violence itself. ### What did Ospina actually win? He did not win the single overall World Press Photo of the Year. He was one of the 2026 regional contest winners announced by World Press Photo on April 10, 2026, after a competition that drew 57,376 photographs from 3,747 photographers in 141 countries. His winning entry was “Name the Absence,” recognized in South America, Stories. What's “Name the Absence” about? Basically, it is a documentary series about children and families living with the absence of fathers in northeastern Colombia. The setting matters — Ospina works out of Cúcuta, near the Colombia-Venezuela border, and much of his photography has focused on Catatumbo and Norte de Santander, places shaped by migration, armed conflict, and displacement, nationally legible. ### Why is it so personal? Because Ospina is not circling the subject from a distance. Armed groups killed his father in 1999 in a border zone of Norte de Santander, and he fled with his mother afterward. That autobiographical fact is the engine of the series. Turns out the project is not just about “father absence” as a statistic — it is about how one photographer used his own family rupture to see similar absences in other homes. ### What do the pictures show? One of the central images shows Valeria, a five-year-old girl, playing behind a curtain at her aunt’s home while her single mother raises her alone. That kind of frame tells you what Ospina is after. Not spectacle. Not a battlefield. More like the domestic shadow cast by conflict — the empty place at the table. Many households are headed exclusively by women. ### Why would World Press Photo pick this? Because the contest has been broadening what counts as urgent visual journalism. The 2026 winners still include conflict and politics, but the South America selections especially show an interest in resilience, memory, and long-tail social damage. Ospina’s project fits that shift perfectly — it is still about conflict, but viewed through family structure, grief, and everyday survival. ### Why does the Colombia angle matter? Colombia has a huge archive of images about war, armed actors, and displacement. Ospina adds something different. He stays with the afterlife of violence in one specific region and one specific social wound. That makes the work feel less like abstract national trauma and more like lived inheritance — children growing up inside consequences they did not choose. ### Was he the only Colombian recognized? No — another Colombian, Ever Andrés Mercado Puentes, also appeared among the 2026 regional winners. But Ospina’s project stands out because it folds personal history directly into documentary reporting without collapsing into memoir. That balance is hard. It is one thing to photograph your world. It is another to make private grief readable as public truth. ### Bottom line Ospina’s win matters because it shows what documentary photography can do when it stops chasing the explosion and studies the silence after it. “Name the Absence” is about fathers missing from the frame — but also about a country still learning how to picture what violence takes away.
