There are few people holding a camera who can move people like Mass Nissan. The two-time World Press Photographer of the Year is a master of producing shots that deliver a full-body experience. He joins me from his home in Copenhagen to talk about his shot The First Embrace, taken in a care home in São Paulo during the height of Brazil’s first Covid wave. It shows a nurse hugging one of the home’s residents through a simple invention called The Hug Curtain, which looks a lot like something you’d have draped around you at a barbershop but allowed people to embrace one another for the first time since the start of the pandemic.

The photo won Mass this year’s World Press Photo of the Year, and he tells me why having empathy should be at the heart of every photo journalist’s mission.