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 of a Syrian refugee handing a child across barbed wire on a border, or 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.