THE first 21 pages of the World Press Photo Book (Thames & Hudson $170) feature 15 people who have died or who are in the process of being killed. It is not a pretty sight: genocide in Rwanda, right-wing extremists in South Africa, a bomb on a bus in central Tel Aviv. But 1995 was not a pretty year. The World Press Photo of the Year, taken by James Nachtwey of Magnum Press and shown above, was chosen because it encapsulates the ugliness of 12 months which saw wars and terrorist campaigns grind on, governments apparently unable, and sometimes unwilling, to do much about them.

The photograph is a profile portrait of a young Hutu at a Red Cross hospital in Rwanda and serves as proof of the atrocities perpetrated in the African country. The man has been mutilated with a machete by the Hutu militia. Remarkably he lived, but his face is criss-crossed with deep scars and the uppermost segment of his ear is missing. Nachtwey said of his subject: 'He had a look in his eyes that told me he had been to hell and back.' Most of the photographs in the spot news section record scenes of terror, or its aftermath. Most are in black and white, evidence that not all newspapers have given in to the fashion for colour. Some, like the pictures of skeletal corpses being shovelled into a mass grave at a refugee camp in Zaire, are not far removed from scenes of the Nazi holocaust. The photographs are chosen by a jury that meets every year in Holland under the auspices of the World Press Photo Foundation.

This is one of the most respected international competitions, with judges examining over 30,000 photographs (some from Basil Pao in Hong Kong, but none of his make the book). Not every page contains horrors. The arts award was won by Stern magazine's Gregor Schlager, for a documentary series of photographs of Leipzig's Thomaner Boys' Choir. The sports award was won by Australian Stephen Dupont, for photographs of a wrestling school in Old Delhi run by a 95-year-old celibate, vegetarian guru.