Iranian photographer wins high honor at Golden Shot Photography Awards 2026

TEHRAN- Morteza Akhondi, a distinguished photographer from Iran’s Hormozgan province, has secured the first-place prize within the Editorial/Press class on the prestigious Golden Shot Photography Awards 2026.

The internationally acclaimed competitors awarded Akhondi the Gold Award for his aerial {photograph} capturing the funeral and burial procession of 168 martyred college students and academics in Minab, Fars reported on Friday. 

The picture, lauded for its highly effective visible narrative and inventive composition, has resonated deeply with international audiences and captivated the worldwide jury, the report added. 

The award-winning {photograph} supplies a hen’s-eye view of a historic and tragic second, documenting the ultimate farewell to the younger victims of a extensively condemned crime dedicated by the US and the Zionist regime. 

In the small metropolis of Minab, the lack of so many younger lives was a heavy burden for the group. To honor the victims, a big space of land was became a cemetery, with graves dug in neat, infinite rows. 

This putting imagery is what makes Akhondi’s {photograph} exceptional. The aerial view reveals the haunting association of those small graves, every symbolizing a life misplaced too quickly. Surrounding this solemn website, your complete metropolis gathered in grief, their shared sorrow creating a robust distinction to the orderly rows of scholars being laid to relaxation.

In this class Akhondi was adopted by Bartosz Matenko from Poland and Mohammed Muhtasib from Saudi Arabia, who secured second and third locations, respectively.

The caption accompanying the {photograph} on the official awards web site underscores the gravity of the topic: “Minab – 168 Students. The resting place of children whose only ‘fault’ was being children… Innocent, they were silenced, and history will never forget the crime.”

The jury additionally granted an honorable point out to a different Iranian photographer, Ali Nejatbakhsh on this class. His acknowledged sequence titled “Solidarity” supplies a harrowing visible report of the aftermath of an Israeli missile strike on June 13, 2025. 

The photos doc the determined hours following the destruction of a residential constructing on Patrice Lumumba Street in Tehran—the house of Ahmadreza Zolfaghari, a college member of nuclear engineering. Through these frames, the resilience of firefighters, rescue groups, and municipal crews is immortalized as they labored beneath unstable situations and momentary lighting to clear particles and seek for survivors amidst the ruins.

The tragedy in Minab, depicted in Akhondi’s profitable work, stays some of the harrowing episodes of latest historical past, marked by the cold-blooded bloodbath of 168 harmless college students and academics.

On February 28, the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary faculty in Minab, Hormozgan province, grew to become the positioning of a catastrophic bloodbath throughout the preliminary waves of aggression launched by the United States and the Zionist regime towards Iran. 

The strike occurred as college students—youngsters aged between 7 and 12—have been starting their morning classes. A precision missile strike brought on the instant collapse of the college constructing, trapping college students and academics beneath mountains of rubble. Official stories confirmed a ultimate loss of life toll of 168 victims, with at the least 95 others sustaining extreme accidents, marking some of the harrowing atrocities of the battle’s opening day.

While US and Zionist authorities initially tried to distance themselves from the carnage as photos of the ruins flooded social media, rigorous forensic and digital investigations have since uncovered the reality. An intensive evaluation by Al Jazeera’s digital investigations unit, using over a decade of satellite tv for pc imagery and ground-level video, confirmed that the college was a definite civilian facility, remoted from any army installations for at the least ten years. Furthermore, satellite tv for pc information revealed that the college was “triple-tapped”—hit by three separate, deliberate strikes—proving the assault was not a mistake, however a calculated concentrating on of kids.

This conclusion has been echoed by the worldwide group’s most respected information shops. Investigations by The New York Times, BBC Verify, CBC, and NPR have all independently concluded that the United States was answerable for the strike. These findings have sparked international outrage and raised elementary questions relating to the “intelligence” used to justify the bombing, because the sample of the assault suggests the direct concentrating on of an academic establishment. The Minab faculty tragedy now stands as a somber testomony to the immense human value of this aggression and a major focus for worldwide calls for for accountability.

SAB/