The annual Pride Photo Award features winners in four categories – documentary; gender, picturing people with a gender identity different from male/female stereotypes; open, images without restrictions that didn’t fit into the other categories; and extremely normal, which portrayed everyday people and not stereotypes.

Sara Lewkowicz didn't set out to expose the horrors of domestic violence. She was working on a project about the challenges an ex-convict faced after being released from prison. Then one night an argument escalated and everything changed. The resulting photo essay won the 2013 Luceo Student Project Award.

Takayuki Maekawa has stalked and shot wild animals, but he’s not a hunter. The photographer has traveled to Asia, India, Africa and North America to capture the human side of his subjects in his images. He waits, sometimes 10 hours a day for as long as a month, for the animal and the picture.

On Friday, February 15, World Press Photo announced the winners of the 56th annual contest. The jury gave prizes in nine themed categories for what is considered one of the most prestigious photojournalism honors. CNN caught up with a few of the first place winners via e-mail to talk about their reactions and photographs.

Bhopal residents fell victim to the world’s worst industrial disasters in December 1984, and for many, the nightmare isn’t over. Photographer Alex Masi visited Bhopal, India, and found children with neurological and physical defects after being exposed to drinking water contaminated with chemicals.

So many women have come to work in Ivanovo, Russia, that it has been dubbed the “city of brides.” For a year, student photographer Alena Zhandarova used social media to find women living in her hometown, the country’s once-textile capital.

In 2010, photographer Maxim Dondyuk met a man with tuberculosis of the bowels in Ukraine. "A week later, I was with him in the last hours of his life. He could not move and talk; his body was like a skeleton covered with skin," he said. A Ukrainian native, Dondyuk has documented the issue in two regions.

Pictures of the Year International announced Noor’s Yuri Kozyrev as the 2011 photographer of the year in the freelance/agency category last week. His winning image shows rebels running for cover on the road between Benghazi and Tripoli as Libyan forces dropped bombs.