Old Montreal is hosting the World Press Photo exhibition, with the show remaining on view in the historic district of the city until 12 October.

The exhibition forms part of World Press Photo's touring programme, which brings the annual contest's winning and honoured photographs to venues across the world after their initial presentation in Amsterdam. Visitors to the Montreal stop can expect the images that defined this year's edition: press photographs drawn from a competition that each year receives tens of thousands of entries from photographers working across the globe.

The decision to stage the exhibition in Old Montreal places the work in one of the city's most visited quarters, a district of stone buildings and 18th- and 19th-century streetscapes that draws heavy foot traffic through the autumn tourist season. The 12 October closing date gives the show a run of several weeks in the city, long enough for both residents and the autumn visitor crowd to see it.

World Press Photo, founded in 1955, remains the most closely watched institution in photojournalism. Its annual awards carry unusual weight in the field: a World Press Photo of the Year title can define a career, and the touring exhibition that follows the Amsterdam announcement is seen annually by audiences in dozens of countries. The contest's categories — from singles and stories to long-term projects — have in recent years tracked the field's own shift toward sustained, documentary-length engagement with subjects rather than single decisive images alone.

For Montreal, the exhibition continues a pattern of international photography programming in the city, where institutions and festival programming have long given the medium a prominent place in cultural life. Hosting the World Press Photo show in a heavily touristed historic district rather than a conventional gallery signals the organising logic of the tour itself: these are photographs intended for a broad public, not a specialised art audience.

What that public will encounter is work chosen for its journalistic consequence. The winning images in recent editions have documented war, climate disruption, political upheaval and social change, and the exhibition format — large-format prints presented with caption context — keeps the emphasis on the story each photograph carries rather than on the craft of the photographers in isolation. That emphasis is the point: the contest rewards pictures that did work in the world, images that moved news audiences and, at their strongest, moved policy conversations.

The exhibition runs in Old Montreal until 12 October, after which the tour continues its international circuit.