Australian wins World Press Photo with refugee baby pic

Australian freelance photographer Warren Richardson won the World Press Photo of the Year 2015 award with his photograph of a refugee father handing his baby through barbed wire across the Serbia-Hungary border. The refugee in the photograph was one of about 200 people trying to cross the border from Serbia into Hungary before the fence around the border was completed. The photo was taken at night on August 28th last year, at the border near Horgos in Serbia and Roszke in Hungary. Richardson explained how he took the photo: "I camped with the refugees for five days on the border. A group of about 200 people arrived, and they moved under the trees along the fence line. They sent women and children, then fathers and elderly men first. I must have been with this crew for about five hours and we played cat and mouse with the police the whole night. I was exhausted by the time I took the picture. It was around three o'clock in the morning and you can't use a flash while the police are trying to find these people, because I would give them away. So I had to use the moonlight alone." Francis Kohn, chair of the general jury who selected the photo of they year and director of Agence France-Presse, described Richardson's photo as "classical" and "timeless". "We thought it had almost everything in there to give a strong visual of what's happening with the refugees", he said. Other members of the jury agreed. "It's a haunting image. You see the anxiousness and the tension in such a mood which is pretty different from those in-your-face images", said Huang Wen, directer of new media development at Xinhau News Agency. "It's subtle and shows the emotion and the real feeling from the deep heart of a father just trying to hand over his baby to the world he was longing to be in. This is really something."