A haunting image of migrants passing a baby underneath a razor-wire fence on the Serbian-Hungarian border has won the prestigious World Press Photo award for 2015 - even though it had never been published.
Australian freelance photographer Warren Richardson made the moonlit image on August 28 and said he offered it to two news organisations, neither of which responded.
Jury members, however, saw something special in the black-and-white image. Vaughn Wallace, deputy photo editor for Al Jazeera America, on Thursday said the image was "incredibly powerful visually, but it's also very nuanced."
The photo, he said, "causes you to stop and consider the man's face, consider the child. You see the sharpness of the barbed wire and the hands reaching out from the darkness."
Richardson said he did not carry any equipment to transmit his images while he spent days camping near the Hungarian border crossing at Roszke to document the passage of the migrants fleeing conflict, poverty and persecution in the Middle East and Africa.
He said the delay in sending out his images from his home in Budapest may have been to blame for the lack of interest.
"Sometimes, it's first in, first served, and I understand that theory," he said. "I can't blame anyone else but myself. But at the end of the day the picture talks for itself."
"I would have thought straight away, 'Yeah, this will definitely be published,"' he said. "But I didn't think like this."
It was so dark when he took the picture that Richardson did not even realise the migrants were passing a baby under the fence until he looked at the image on his computer. He checked the photos only once he got home to preserve his camera's battery.
"Had I used a flash, I would have given their position away to the Hungarian police," Richardson said.
The image won top prize in the contest, which drew 82,951 images from 5775 photographers. It also won the Spot News Singles category.
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