The World\'s Best News Photos for 2012

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Paul Hansen’s dramatic image of a funeral procession in Gaza has been named 2012’s World Press Photo of the Year. The photo shows a grop of men carrying the corpses of two children who were killed in Gaza City in November when their house was destroyed in an Israeli missile strike. Their father’s body is carried behind on a stretcher.

Mr. Hansen, who has covered Gaza about a half dozen times over his career, took the photo for the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter. In a phone conversation Friday morning he described the image as capturing “an emotionally charged moment.”

“It was a horrible day,” he said. “It was so sad and heart-wrenching and hit me on personal level, because I have a child myself.”

Santiago Lyon, vice president and director of photography for The Associated Press, was chairman of the jury, and said the winning photo worked powerfully on many levels.

“I’ve always maintained that a successful photograph should reach you on at least one of three planes,” he said during a telephone interv! iew Friday morning. “Those planes would be your head, your heart and your stomach, and I think this picture works on all three. So when we were looking at it in those final stages, we found it to be very powerful on all three levels, and very layered and very complex, but at the same time very simple and very direct.”

The image draws some of that power from its striking â€" almost stylized â€" lighting and tones. Mr. Hansen, 48, said the unusual look resulted when light bounced off the walls of the alley for just a few moments.

Mr. Lyon said the jury carefully examines the winning images for post processing. He said they decided Mr. Hansen’s photo was “within the acceptable industry parameters.” He added: “Everybody has different standards about these sorts of things, but as a group we felt that it was O.K.”

World Press Photo is a 56-year-old nonprofit foundation with headquarters in Amsterdam, where the announcement of this year’s winners was made on Friday morning.

Mr. Lyon said that he personally looked at over 75,000 images that included “a lot of powerful material” from Syria and Gaza as well as “a fair amount of material around women’s issues and gay and lesbian issues.”

Rodrigo Abd of The Associated Press won first place in the general news singles category for a close-up of a severely injured woman crying after her husband and two children were killed when the Syrian Army shelled her house in northern Syria.

Alessio Romenzi received first place in the general news stories category for a series of images from Syria for Time magazine.

Nadav Kander won first place for staged portraits with a series on London stage actors for The New York Times Magazine.

In the contemporary issues stories category, Maika Elan of the Most photo agency won for a powerfully intimate series of portraits  of gay couples in Vietnam that was published in Lens earlier this year.

Majid Saeedi of Getty Images came in second place in that category for a story on life in Afghanistan during wartime, and Aaron Huey came in third for a story about the Oglala Sioux on the Pine Ridge.

Fausto Podavini won first place, daily life stories, for an essay on Alzheimer’s disease. Tomás Munta, took third in that category for a story on gangs in El Salvador for The New York Times.

Daniel Rodrigues won first place, daily life single for an image of football in Guinea-Bissau.

Sports action singles was won by Wei Seng Chen for an image of a bull race in Malaysia. Sports feature stories went to Jan Grarup for women’s basketball in Mogadishu, Somalia.

Besides Mr. Lyon, the jury included Elisabeth Biondi, Germany/United States, independent curator; Bill Frakes, United States, photographer, Sports Illustrated; Staffan Widstrand, Sweden, photographer and managing director, Wild Wonders of Europe; Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Iraq, special correspondent, The Guardian; Mayu Mohanna, Peru, photographer and curator; Véronique de Viguerie, France, photographer, Reportage by Getty Images; Anne Wilkes Tucker, United States, curator photography Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Gu Z! heng, Chi! na, professor at School of Journalism, Fudan University, Shanghai.

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