The Sony World Photography Awards are a highlight of the photography scene every year, inviting photographers of all types to submit their best images in a variety of categories and genres to be judged against each other.
Countless photos are submitted, and the final shortlists and winners are almost always jaw-dropping, whether for their beauty or harshness, or any number of other reasons. This year’s main awards have just been announced, and we’ve gathered together some of our favourite images from the lists for you to browse right here. Prepare to be amazed.
Seeds of resistance
The overall winner of Sony’s competition this year is Pablo Albarenga, a photographer whose series documents the threat posed against environmentalists in Brazil who are trying to protect habitats and areas from deforestation and damage.
They’re pictured literally laying down their lives, contrasted with the area they protect in a stitched-together amalgam.
This is another from Albarenga’s series, and showcases another of his chosen details - the landscape on the right has the first signs of deforestation at play in it, shining a spotlight on exactly how the environments these citizens care about could be threatened so gravely.
The winner of the Architecture section, Sandra Herber, has created an amazing series of images by simply and sparsely photographing fishing huts on Lake Winnipeg, in the cold of winter. The freezing conditions positively chill you as you look but the individual character of each hut is also manifest.
We love the painted fish on this hut from Sandra Herber’s series - it’s a splash of vibrant colour in a landscape that’s largely monochromatic, and sets off the isolation of the hut really nicely.
Jonathan Walland’s photos of buildings look like something created in a laboratory - he cleverly dials back all colour and focuses only on the building in focus to create a sort of silhouette of their shape and lines, which strips them down to their architectural essentials.
This, another from Jonathan Walland’s series, shows that even when a building is constructed with a more modern aesthetic, and curved lines, Walland can still distil it into an essential form, something that looks like the very first sketch its designer might have come up with.
Big brother
José De Rocco’s series came third in the Architecture bracket, and features stark images of buildings framed in such a way that their surface details become the story of the image itself.
Take the side of this supermarket - its red tiling dominating the frame but that security camera also drawing the eye inescapably.
Dione Roach took second place in the Creative category for this series, boldy titled Kill Me With an Overdose of Tenderness, which collages together snapshots from the online world in a punk-rock aesthetic that applies a grungey layer to our sometimes clinical social media channels.
Objets d’art
The items photographed by Luke Watson in this series are all recovered from conflicts, some as old as the First World War, and repurposed into rudimentary pinhole cameras.
It’s a repurposing that prompts you to think about the object’s original intended use, and the creative potential that countless everyday items therefore implicitly carry with them.
Patched up
This helmet from Luke Watson’s series is another starkly clean image demonstrating how something can be given a new lease of life. The tech world is particularly shabby when it comes to re-use, so this is a challenging photographic idea.
