This year's World Press Photo exhibit is up at Brookfield Place for one more week. There's a good chance you've some of these photos already online — World Press Photo is "the world's largest and most prestigious annual press photography contest" — but to see them come alive in large scale in this traveling exhibition is to experience them in a new way.

As the selected photos are all winners and runners up in their field of photojournalism (sports action, contemporary issues, portraiture, etc), all photos in the free exhibit are striking: taken to tell stories and translate experiences, each photo in the exhibit will raise as many questions as it can answer. The strange, surreal world of bullfighting fascinates in full colour, while the most brutal shots are behind a section not visible to casual by-passers. When viewing the blood soaked floor beneath a pool table in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, onlookers didn't know if the photo was staged (it wasn't.) If you've been feeling the fall sads, you might need a stiff drink before heading past the "disturbing images" warnings.

Nature photos such as a bold close up of a huge southern cassowary bird and a Caribbean trumpet fish offer larger than life respite from human dramas. Yet there's a little bit of terror lurking everywhere: in one shot, trained monkey in Central Java wearing a doll's head looms up from the street: a little menacing, a little cute, a little troubling. In the portrait grouping Chinese artist Ai Weiwei holds a cell phone in the darkness for photographer Stefen Chow, as if to take a selfie on the camera's lens — or remind us to do a double take, and keep looking at what makes an image tell a story.

PHOTOS

The World Press Photo exhibit runs until 6PM on October 21st at Allen Lambert Galleria, Brookfield Place (181 Bay Street).

Installation photos by Derek Flack