Pictures of the Year Latam (POY Latam), Ibero-America’s most prestigious documentary photography competition, officially opens its 2025 call for entries. Before August 16, photographers and visual artists from across the region can submit their work free of charge through the Picter platform: site.picter.com/poylatam-2025
Created in 2011, POY Latam celebrates and values the image as a tool for narrating Ibero-America: its challenges, its beauty, and its contradictions. The competition invites photojournalists, visual artists, collectives, and emerging and independent photographers to apply in one or more of the 17 categories, ranging from classic documentary photography to new visual narratives from the region.
Judging rounds will take place online from August 28th to 31st and will be broadcast live on POY Latam’s social media channels. The outstanding entries in each category will be announced during these sessions.
POY Latam Categories
CLASSIC FORMAT: Daily Life (single photo), 2. Daily Life (essay), 3. News (single photo), 4. News (essay), 5. Democracy and Human Rights (essay), 6. Portrait (essay), 7. Sports (essay), 8. Photojournalists in the World (essay), and 9. Photojournalist of the Year (portfolio).
OPEN FORMAT: Nuestra Mirada Award (essay), 11. Long-Term Projects (essay), 12. Redefining Archives (essay), 13. New Talents (essay), 14. Environment, Carolina Hidalgo Vivar Award (essay), 15. Identity and Gender (essay), 16. Multimedia, and 17. Photobooks.
Pablo Corral Vega, director of POY Latam, stated:
The strength of this competition, which has been held for 14 years, lies in the community of visual creators in the region. We are a space for dialogue, education, and creation. From the South and for the South. A platform for telling stories that help us understand who we are.
For the 2025 edition, the competition’s Advisory Council determined that images created with generative artificial intelligence will not be accepted.POY Latam is made possible thanks to the support of Global Exchange and Social Focus Media, and has the communications support of SolipsisArt Colectivo Fotográfico Ecuador.
In its previous edition (2023), POY Latam received more than 70,000 images from 1,500 authors from across Latin America and awarded 87 outstanding works. The live broadcast of the final judging was followed by more than 30,000 people, consolidating the contest as a space to make the voices, territories, and realities of our region visible through images.
