Australian photographer Warren Richardson wins prestigious photography prize with his haunting picture of a father passing a child under barbed wire.

To see the picture in full siza CLICK here.

The image, which shows a father handing his young child under a barbed-wire border fence toward an outstretched pair of hands, beat more than 80,000 submissions in the annual competition.

The image, which shows a father handing his young child under a barbed-wire border fence toward an outstretched pair of hands, beat more than 80,000 submissions in the annual competition, Guardian reports.

Richardson spent six months covering the migration / refugees crisis last year and told Guardian Australia the image was created on a tense night in August as refugees sought to pass from the village of Horgoš in Serbia to Röszke in Hungary.

“There were about 200 Syrians refugees hiding in an apple tree farm, looking for a way to get across the border,” he said. “I stuck with them for about four hours and they were playing cat and mouse with the police, being gassed by the police with pepper spray. The police were yelling out: ‘Don’t come to Hungary illegally – if you get here we’re going to arrest you’.

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