The We showcase the winning entries across many of the different categories of the Sony World Photography Awards, announced last week. is the world’s largest photography competition, recognising and showcasing the best photographic talent across all levels, genres and areas of expertise. An exhibition of the winning entries is currently underway at Somerset House, London. However, for those who can’t make it, below we showcase the winning entries across many of the different categories.
See the Sony World Photography awards site for more detals about the awards.
Open Photographer of the Year winner
The Open Photographer of the Year competition of the year asks photographers to enter a single image, capturing a unique and individual moment in time. The winner also recieves $5,000 (USD).
Image Name: Enchanted Bamboo Forest
Photographer Name: Kei Nomiyama
Image Description: The season of a firefly comes around in Japan at the beginning of a rainy season. This firefly is a species called Luciola parvula, and repeats blink. [Hime-HOTARU] Call a firefly in Japan. This species flies in the beautiful forest. In particular, the firefly in bamboo forest is valuable. The population of these firefly decreases every year in Japan. These may be influence by environmental destruction. This picture was taken under a little moonlight.
Youth Photographer of the Year winner
The Youth Photographer of the Year competition recognises this next generation of talented young photographers. The competition provides a global platform on which photographers can grow and flourish into the next stages of their careers.
Image Name: Sarah
Photographer Name: Sam Delaware
Image Description: Sarah, my sister, December 28th, 2015.
After moving to a university across the country, I understood that Iíd miss my family; my mother and father, and especially my sister. Like so many millions of other young adults around me, I left my family and my home this year for the first time, and in an instant, they were no longer a daily part of my life. I wanted to somehow speak to the mixed feelings I was experiencing; excitement, for the life I was about to begin, and nostalgia, for the one I was leaving behind. Traveling back to Maine for a short time allowed me to create this somewhat spontaneous image of my sister, giving me the opportunity to express this change in the best way I knew how.
Student Focus Photographer of the Year award winner
Photographer Name: Sofia Jern
Series Name: The Glue Boys
Series Description: “Some of us came into this world trough the back door. Our lives are in stark contrast, yet we see the same stars. We are not so different after all”. These are the words from one of the glue boys in the streets of Kitale in Kenya. Happiness, sorrow and hope are all proportional to our own environment. At the garbage tip in Kitale many children spend their days looking for food. Some of them may have a mother or father that is incapable of taking care of them and some may be orphans. During the cold nights a lot of them sleep under a piece of plastic. In order to forget about the hunger and chilly winds at night they turn to glue, which they inhale in order to forget. Their world is very different from mine and they have to grow up too fast and learn how to survive in a harsh world.
Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award 2016 winners
The Outstanding Contribution to Photography award went to the artistic duo RongRong & inri, the influential photographic husband and wife team who have shaped contemporary photography in China and around the world.
Professional competition winners
The Professional competition is devided into 14 categories: Architecture, Landscape, Campaign, Contemporary Issues, Current Affairs, Daily Life, Environment, Candid, Conceptual, Portraiture, Staged, Still life, People, and Sport.
This year’s edition attracted 127,098 images from around the world.
Architecture winner
Photographer Name: Amélie Labourdette, Winner
Series Name: Empire of dust
Series Description: Amélie Labourdette interrogates the invisible landscape, the blurred zone of concern located below the visible landscape. The ‘Empire of Dust’ series of photographs was taken in the south of Italy, where financial crises and embezzlement have created an architectural aesthetic of incompleteness. Using an ‘archaeology of the present’ she both reflects contemporary history by the yardstick of these unfinished architectures, and involves the viewer’s imagination so that a new view of the world unfolds. In front of these images, we become archaeologists of our time, able to look back at our present and see our future too.
Landscape winner
Photographer Name: Maroesjka Lavigne, Winner
Series Name: Land of Nothingness
Series Description: Named for its desert, Namibia is one of the least densely populated places on earth, visually defined by rich colours in a barren, yet constantly changing landscape; the vast brown plain of scorched earth, the white surface of the saltpans, the gold tones of the sand dunes. Patience is required to discover Namibiaís subtle scenery. Hours of driving reveal more emptiness; the sight of other people is rare and only the strategically located gas stations are a reminder of the world beyond.
Campaign winner
Photographer Name: Jetmir Idrizi, Winner
Series Name: TransBrasil
Series Description: TransBrasil is an ongoing project, which aims to deepen gender identities issues from documentary photography perspective. It proposes to approach different social and cultural expressions that question the binary schemes masculine/feminine to understand the gender and identity process. Also, this project pursuit thinks about the possibility of multiples identities. For that reason, the proposal adopt the transgender concept, understanding the trans as a dynamic space without fix tags; as a border with an identity traffic which enable plurality and freedom to choose who each person wants to be, creating a gender hybridity. Transgender people express their gender identities in many different ways.
Contemporary Issues winner
Photographer Name: Asghar Khamseh, Winner
Series Name: Fire of Hatred
Series Description: The violent act of acid throwing is primarily against women and children. These attacks are committed with the intent to disfigure, maim and destroy the social life and future of the victim. The motivation to commit this type of violence is cultural destitution, intolerance and happens in situations such as family conflicts, rejected marriage proposal, revenge and divorce requests. Victims In addition physical and psychological damages, victims are faced with the experience of social stigma ,blame and social unpleasant tags.
Current Affairs winner
Photographer Name: Angelos Tzortzinis, Winner
Series Name: In search of the European Dream
Series Description: Migration to Europe has increased over the past years, mainly because of political and social turmoil in the Middle East. During the recent years, Greece has been the path for thousands refugees and migrants for their crossing from Turkey to Greece and other European countries. The main places of entrance are the islands of Kos and Lesbos by sea. Greek government, in an effort to minimize the wave of refugees entering the country has built an 8-mile long and 8-feet high barbed-wire wall at the main entrance point at its north eastern borderline with Turkey. This caused a huge wave of refugees and migrants trying to enter the country by the Aegean Sea. For many, it is their first encounter with the sea. Hundreds have lost their lives in their attempt to reach the European Union, man hoping to reunite with long-lost friends and family. At the time I write this text, millions of refugees and migrants wait in Turkey to cross the sea border for a better life.
Daily Life winner
Photographer Name: Espen Rasmussen, Winner
Series Name: The Curse of Coal
Series Description: Coal used to be the gold of West Virginia, US. But then Obama came and so did new environmental regulations. Together with lower price on coal, it led to huge redundancies and the coal became a curse for many of the coal-cities in West Virginia. In 1940, 140,000 people worked in the mountains, today only about 15,000 are left in the coal business. Towns like Beckley and Mullens do not have many other sources of income. Drugs, pills, alcohol and violence is dominant in many places, and young people are struggling to find work, forcing many to move.
Environment winner
Photographer Name: Kevin Frayer, Winner
Series Name: Eagle Hunters of Western China
Series Description: The Eagle Hunting festival, organised by the local hunting community, is part of an effort to promote and grow traditional hunting practices for new generations in the mountainous region of western China that borders Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia. The training and handling of the large birds of prey follows a strict set of ancient rules that Kazakh eagle hunters are preserving for future generations.
Candid winner
Photographer Name: Kirstin Schmitt, WinnerSeries Name: Waiting For the Candymen
Series Name: Migrant Tomatoes
Series Description: The series Waiting For the Candymen is study of Cuban idiosyncrasy; an allegory of waiting: Waiting the right moment, waiting for tomorrow, waiting for something or someone who brings redemption maybe!
Conceptual winner
Photographer Name: Julien Mauve, Winner
Series Name: Greetings From Mars
Series Description: This project is about space exploration and discovery, but it’s also about our behaviour in front of landscapes and how we create pictures that will share our personal story with the world. In every spots, carefully chosen for their similarities with the red planet, the photographer imitated stereotypical tourist poses. It’s interesting to observe the way we act in front of the camera, how we include ourselves in the landscapes, how those landscapes trigger the desire to affirm our presence. And how the way we take pictures exposes the vanity involved in our endless pursuit of self-definition.
Portraiture winner
Photographer Name: Marcello Bonfanti, Winner
Series Name: Ebola Survivors
Series Description: The most widespread epidemic of Ebola virus disease in Sierra Leone ended the 7th October 2015 with 14,122 cases and 3,955 deaths. That required the complex and brave intervention of international NGOs in the attempt to fight the virus. The Italian NGO Emergency ran an Ebola treatment center built by DFEED. Thanks to the medical care of Emergency, the survivors were able to start a new life. They returned to life finding their families partly or totally killed by the virus.
Staged winner
Photographer Name: Alberto Alicata, Winner
Series Name: Iconic B
Series Description: In this project, Alberto Alicata re-examines some of photography’s most iconic images using that icon of contemporary Western culture, Barbie. Restaging shots by such luminaries as Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Guy Bourdin, David Lachapelle and Mario Testino on sets designed in proportion with Barbie, the obsessively detailed productions invite playfulness into images that are some of the most imitated, idolised, collected and studied in history. A new dimension is created, enriching our visual memory with new images and surfacing unexpected suggestions.
Still life winner
Photographer Name: Francesco Amorosino, Winner
Series Name: Migrant Tomatoes
Series Description: Once a year Italian families make tomato sauce at home, cooking and canning a huge amount of vegetables. Tons of tomatoes are grown in the fields of the South of the country and harvested by about 19,000 labourers, paid 1 or 2 euros for each filled box. Only in 2015 there were 13 deaths at work in the fields because of high temperatures. Many of those involved in the harvest are immigrants. On the tomatoes, still dirty with soil, bought by my family to make the sauce, I saw the fingerprints of those who had harvested them, I imagined their stories, the hours spent in the sun, the hope, the desire to work. Since then, I haven’t watched the sauce with the same eyes.
People winner
Photographer Name: Kevin Frayer, Winner
Series Name: Nomadic Life Threatened on the Tibetan Plateau
Series Description: Tibetan nomads face many challenges to their traditional way of life including political pressures, forced resettlement by China’s government, climate change and rapid modernization. The Tibetan Plateau, often called “the Roof of the World,” is the world’s highest and largest plateau.
Sport winner
Photographer Name: Nikolai Linares, Winner
Series Name: Second Best
Series Description: Portraits of the silver medal winners just after loosing their final at the Zealand boxing Championships held in Copenhagen in March.
L’iris d’Or / Photographer of the Year
The L’Iris d’Or Photographer of the Year prize winner is chosen each year from among the first place winners of all the Professional categories.
The L’iris d’Or / Photographer of the Year and $25,000 prize goes to Iranian photographer Asghar Khamseh, whose Fire of Hatred series shows victims of acid attacks.
Her images are both shocking and striking, portraying in full details of the terrible injuries suffered by her subjects, in such a sensitive way to allow the humanity of the subjects to shine through.
National Awards winners
Now in its 4th year, the National Award programme works across 61 countries, from Australia to Argentina, Russia to Vietnam, and is unique in its scope and reach. See the first place winners for each country below.