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There was something disconcerting about the Christmas carols blaring in the background during my visit to this year’s World Press Photo exhibition in Jakarta.

Viewing a series of harrowing shots depicting violence and sexual assault victims in Colombia to the peppy sound track of “Jingle Bell Rock” added a layer of irony that I don’t think the photographer originally intended his work to convey.

The hanging of this show on the ground floor of Pacific Place, a mall currently decked with boughs of holly and teeming with children wearing reindeer antlers while frolicking in fake snow, seemed somewhat flippant considering the serious subjects depicted in many of the images.

But on the plus side, there were moms, dads and even a few pembantu (maids) looking at the works with their antlered charges­ — an audience that may not usually have the time or inclination to go to a traditional gallery.

The exhibition is the result of an annual competition run by the World Press Photo organization, which invites entries by photojournalists working for publications around the globe.

Following judging by a panel of 13 international photo editors, journalists and curators in Amsterdam each April, the winning photographs go on tour for 12 months, showing in more than 100 cities worldwide. Jakarta will be hosting the exhibition until Dec. 28.

World Press Photo 2008 showcases striking individual images and photo stories across a number of categories, including portraits, spot news, nature, entertainment and sports. It forms an eyewitness record of international events that occurred in 2007.

In the past, I have viewed the exhibition in Sydney at the State Library of New South Wales, where images are reverently displayed against a backdrop of white walls, and the only distraction is the clip-clop of stiletto heels worn by the city’s chardonnay set.

But considering the exhibition carries weighty messages about contemporary social and environmental concerns, the mall — a favorite monument to vapid consumerism for many Jakartans — might not be a bad place to try and get people thinking about more than designer labels and their credit card limit.

The overall winner was a British photographer, Tim Hetherington, with his image of an American soldier collapsing in exhaustion at a bunker in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, proving that a blurred photo is not necessarily a bad one. Hetherington, whose winning work appeared in Vanity Fair magazine, captures the disorientation and anguish of life on the battlefield in a single candid moment.

Gary Knight, the chairman of the panel of judges, commended Hetherington’s image for representing “the exhaustion of a man – and the exhaustion of a nation.”

John Moore’s work documenting the final moments of Benazir Bhutto’s life and the chaos following her assassination, is a compelling study of how quickly a violent attack can spin normality in to chaos. The former Pakistani opposition leader is shown addressing crowds of supporters at a political rally in December 2007, when an attacker fires at her car and a bomb explodes. Moore’s sequence of photographs, which won first prize in the spot news stories category, show the attack, the chaos and the casualties. His final image of a grieving man standing among dead bodies, arms opened towards the heavens, seemingly reveals a moment when a man’s faith in humanity and the divine is lost.

While disasters, conflict and social injustice are explored in many of the images on display, some lighter moments are also skillfully captured.

Ariana Lindquist’s sensitive portrait of a Shanghai girl waiting backstage during a Cosplay competition, a Japanese subculture in which people dress up as popular cartoon characters, took first place in the Arts and Entertainment singles section.

In the story category, Polish photographer Rafal Milach compiled a winning series of photographs of former clowns who had studied at the Julinek circus school, which had to close due to financial problems. His quirky and somewhat surreal portraits walk the line between being humorous and invoking pathos, and are tinged with a warm nostalgia for these traditional circus arts that have fallen victim to the passing of time.

Even in photographs that depict troubling subjects, there are moments of humor and joy: a little girl proudly showing off her smart new dress before Passover in Christopher Anderson’s series on daily life in Bethlehem, and elderly friends walking side by side through a park in Carolyn Drake’s study of Torez, a Ukrainian coal mining town where there is high unemployment. These images provide relief and a glimpse of hope in desperate situations.

In the sports categories, exhilaration seems to be the main theme. Australian photographer Tim Clayton’s black-and-white series documenting land diving on the island of Pentecost in Vanuatu is a vertigo-inducing standout. The men and boys on the island build tall timber towers and leap off them headfirst with only a vine tied around their ankles to rescue them from death.

Every photo in this collection is moving and eye-catching. And if you can handle the Christmas carols, the exhibition is certainly worth a look.