AP photographer Rodrigo Abd wins POY Latam photojournalist of the year

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Founded in 2011, Pictures of the Year Latin America, or POY Latam, is a biennial documentary and artistic photography contest in Ibero-America. It was created with the support of the Missouri School of Journalism Pictures of the Year International (POY), a program of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute.

This year, Associated Press photographer Rodrigo Abd was named the POY Latam 2025 Photojournalist of the Year. Abd has spent years documenting social struggles and upheavals across Latin America.

Abd’s winning portfolio brings together striking individual images, capturing the complexities of life in Latin America and in-depth essays that delve deeper into Paraguay’s overcrowded prisons, the destruction of sacred caves in Mexico’s Yucatán by the Maya Train project, and a widening of the lens on Afghanistan, where he used a kamra-e-faoree, or instant box camera once common on Afghan streets, to create portraits that reveal a new way of seeing daily life under Taliban rule.

The 2023 death of 11-year-old Máximo Jerez in the Argentine city Rosario after a gunman opened fire at a birthday party drew ire from city residents fed up with drug violence. Neighbors responded by looting and destroying the home of a suspected gunman. In turn, the government sent federal security forces. Abd documented the frustration for a city where drug-related killings have become alarmingly routine.

Paraguay, a key drug trafficking hub in South America, is grappling with severe prison overcrowding. Its 18 prisons were built for about 10,000 inmates but now hold more than 17,600. Despite recent government efforts to tackle internal gang control and other issues, overcrowding remains pervasive. Abd documented conditions in five prisons—four for men and one for women—finding cramped facilities in nearly all but the women’s center.

Mexico’s $30 billion Maya Train, the signature project of former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is designed to link tourist hubs in the Yucatán with rural areas and archaeological sites. But the railway also cuts through one of the country’s most fragile natural treasures: an immense network of caves, rivers, and sinkholes known as cenotes. Abd documented both the damage unfolding underground and the natural beauty that continues to draw tourists to the region.

A wooden box cameras known as kamra-e-faoree, was a common sight on Afghan city streets in the last century — a fast and easy way to make portraits, especially for identity documents. Simple, cheap and portable, they endured amid half a century of dramatic changes in this country — from a monarchy to a communist takeover, from foreign invasions to insurgencies — until 21st-century digital technology rendered them obsolete. Abd went back to this tradition of Afghan photography to capture moments of life under the Taliban: officers directing traffic, children swimming in the river, Taliban fighters gathering for lunch and other daily occurrences.

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This is a photo gallery curated by AP photo editors.

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