World Press Photo Print Sale - 70 Prints for 70 Years was a temporary anniversary sale marking 70 years of World Press Photo. The selection featured seventy images from the organization’s archive: award-winning photojournalism, historic images, and work from the Joop Swart Masterclass.
Update: the print sale ran from November 17 through 26, 2025. This article remains online as a retrospective on the sale and on how World Press Photo brought renewed attention to its archive through limited-edition photographic prints.
In 2025, World Press Photo celebrated its 70th anniversary with several anniversary activities. These also included the exhibition What Have We Done? 70 Years of World Press Photo, which took a critical look at the archive. The print sale followed in its wake: not only as a sales event, but also as a way to make seventy years of visual journalism tangible.
70 prints from the World Press Photo archive
The collection brought together historic and more recent images. The photographs show, in different ways, how World Press Photo has viewed news, conflict, identity, freedom, and change. Offering the images as physical prints turned the archive into something other than an online overview: a photograph could be viewed anew, kept, and hung on a wall.
The sale also included work by participants in the Joop Swart Masterclass. In this way, World Press Photo connected its well-known competition photographs with education and talent development: older icons appeared alongside images by new generations of visual storytellers.
What made this print sale special?
Each image was offered as a limited-edition, museum-quality print measuring 20 x 30 cm. The original prices were €150 unframed and €250 framed. For collectors and enthusiasts, these were therefore more than decoration: they were small, affordable editions of photojournalism with archival value.
This reflects a broader interest in making high-quality photographic prints. A print calls for a different kind of attention than an image on a screen: paper, size, contrast, and presentation all help shape how a photograph is read.
Images with a story
One of the selected images was Belinda Qaqamba Ka-Fassie by Lee-Ann Olwage. Belinda Qaqamba Ka-Fassie, a drag artist and activist, poses at a shisanyama in Khayelitsha, near Cape Town. Belinda, the photographer, and other Black, queer, gender-nonconforming, and transgender people collaborated on a project about African drag culture, identity, and reclaiming public space.
Wubbo de Jong’s 1990 photograph was also included in the selection. It shows a Romanian soldier being welcomed by his girlfriend on his return to Brașov after weeks of service in Bucharest during mass demonstrations and political confrontations following the revolution.
Ed van der Elsken’s contribution came from Havana, Cuba, in 1967. The photomontage was originally published as a spread in Avenue Magazine as part of a feature on Cuba. A selection like this shows how World Press Photo preserves not only individual news images, but also a broader visual history.
Supporting photojournalism
According to World Press Photo, the sale helped support photographers and independent visual journalism. That remains the lasting value of this retrospective: the print sale shows how photojournalism can continue to circulate beyond the news cycle—as an archive, a memory, and a physical object.
Those who want to follow current developments at World Press Photo can also explore the World Press Photo 2026 yearbook. It shows how the organization continues its annual selection of documentary photography and photojournalism.
