Every year since 1955, the famous Amsterdam-based World Press Photo Foundation has curated an exhibition of images picked from that year’s World Press Photo contest and showcased the exhibition in different locations around the world — from Singapore to Kenya to Brazil. Yet in its 64-year history, the exhibition has never been to Iraq — until now.

Iraq and Iraqis have often been the subjects of the photos submitted to the contest, which in 2019 received 78,801 submissions from 4,738 photographers from over 120 countries. In 2004, French photographer Jean-Marc Bouju won the contest with his picture of an Iraqi prisoner of war with a hood over his head, comforting his young son at a US holding center near Najaf.

For the first time in 2019, a special exhibition was on a three-city tour of Iraq - Baghdad, Erbil and Sulaimaniyah-  showcasing award-winning photography chosen from the 2017, 2018 and 2019 World Press Photo contests. This is due to the lobbying of Metrography, Iraq’s first photo agency.

Established in 2009 in Sulaimaniyah by Kamaran Najm, a Kurdish photojournalist, and Sebastian Meyer, an American photojournalist, the agency aimed to train talented photojournalists and link them with international media.