An Australian snapper has won one of the world’s most prestigious photography prizes for a shot of an asylum seeker passing a baby through a barbed wire fence on the Hungary-Serbia border.

Warren Richardson, a freelance photojournalist based in eastern Europe, beat more than 5,000 other photographers — who together submitted more than 80,000 images for consideration — to claim the 10,000-euro World Press Photo of the Year prize.

“This is an incredible image from the refugee crisis of 2015,” Vaughn Wallace, one of the judges, said in a statement.

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“It’s incredibly powerful visually, but it’s also very nuanced.”

Another judge, Huang Wen, called the image “haunting”.

“It’s subtle, and shows the emotion and the real feeling from the deep heart of a father just trying to hand over his baby to the world he was longing to be in,” Wen said.

Richardson said he spent five days camping on the border in August last year.

He said a group of about 200 people were playing “cat and mouse” with the police guarding the newly constructed fence.

“I was exhausted by the time I took the picture,” Richardson said in statement.

“It was around 3:00 in the morning and you can’t use a flash while the police are trying to find these people, because I would just give them away. So I had to use the moonlight alone.”

See the full size photo below:

In Warren Richardson’s photo, a man passes a baby through a fence at the Hungarian-Serbian border.
Supplied: Warren Richardson/World Press Photo