How many photojournalists have been killed during the last year.

In the last year, somewhere between 100 and 130 journalists and media workers were killed across the world, depending on whose ledger you trust—whether it is the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists, or Reporters Without Borders. Each count slightly differently. Some insist on proof that a killing was directly linked to journalism; others count the dead who were simply doing the work when the blast came, or the bullet found them.

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But none of them isolate the photographers neatly, as if the act of seeing could be separated from the act of reporting.

Photojournalists are folded into the total—subsumed into the wider category of “media workers”—their deaths recorded without always naming the tool in their hands. A camera does not grant a separate column in a database. It barely grants protection in the field.

And yet, anyone who has watched the past year unfold knows that a disproportionate number of those killed were the ones closest to the moment. The ones who had to be. The ones working not from a desk or a distant bureau, but from the street, the rubble, the corridor of a hospital still echoing from impact. In places like Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan, the visual journalist has become both witness and target—sometimes deliberately, often incidentally, always vulnerably.

The modern war zone does not distinguish between observer and participant. A camera raised is no longer a neutral act; it is a presence, a signal, occasionally a threat. The old, fragile understanding—that journalists were to be seen and spared—has thinned to near-transparency.

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What the figures do tell us, bluntly, is that we are living through one of the deadliest periods for journalism in recent memory. The past two years have climbed toward record highs. The majority of those killed are local journalists—men and women working in their own countries, documenting their own communities, without the insulation of international recognition or institutional backing. Among them are photographers who will never have their byline widely known, whose images may circulate without their names, whose deaths may be counted without their stories being told.

And so the question—how many photojournalists have been killed in the last year—does not have a clean answer. Not because it is unknowable, but because it is unprioritised. The counting stops at “journalist,” as if the distinction does not matter.

But it does matter. Because the photographer stands a fraction closer. Because they must see clearly enough to show others. Because the act of witnessing, in its purest form, requires proximity.

If the numbers hover around a hundred dead, then somewhere within that figure is a quieter tally: those who died with a camera in their hands, doing the oldest and most dangerous part of the job—looking directly at the thing others would rather turn away from.

And continuing to look, until they couldn’t.