The World Photography Organisation has announced the winners of the prestigious Sony World Photography Awards 2020. The names of the top three in the ten Professional categories – Architecture, Creative Photography, Discovery, Documentary, Environment, Landscape, Nature and Wildlife, Portrait, Sport, Still Life – and the winners of the Open, Student and Youth competitions have been revealed. Past winners include Martin Parr, William Eggleston and Nadav Kander.
This year’s winner in the Architecture category is Sandra Herber, who with the Ice Fishing Huts series describes the huts that detail the Canadian landscape of Manitoba, which must be transportable and must allow access to the underlying fishing ground. The shots tend to describe the freedom with which the owners personalize these tiny structures, once these requirements are met.
For Environment wins Robin Hinsch, with a series of photos dedicated to the swamps of the Nigerian territory, a geographical area that before being exploited by the oil industry, boasted one of the highest concentrations of biodiversity on the planet. Ronny Behnert, on the other hand, is the first of the Landscape category, dedicating his shots to the torii, traditional Japanese doors commonly found at the entrance to Shinto shrines and marking the transition from worldly to sacred spaces.
This year the organization will dedicate to the winners for the first time a virtual exhibition, accessible directly from their site, due to the impossibility of having a physical one because of the social distancing measures to be taken for the coronavirus.