About the project

In late 2016 we started a collaboration with World Press Photo to answer a deceptively simple question: how do you tell the story behind a great photograph without competing with the photograph itself?

A press photo — a Syrian refugee handing a child across barbed wire on a border, a migrant crossing under floodlights — pulls you in instantly, but it raises questions that the image alone can’t answer. Who is this. Where. When. What happened next. Traditionally those answers live in a caption that nobody reads, or in an article a click away from the picture.

How it works

We built an interactive layer that lives on top of the photograph itself. Hover over a face, a hand, a piece of the background, and the story for that part of the frame surfaces — small, restrained, never blocking the image. The photograph stays the centre of attention; the context becomes something you discover instead of something you have to be told.

The technical challenge was keeping the photo crisp while making the layer feel as much a part of the image as a frame around a painting. No washed-out overlays, no modal pop-ups, no losing focus on what the photographer captured.

Why it matters

Press photography exists to make distant events feel close. We wanted the storytelling around it to do the same — quiet, considered, and on the photograph’s terms.