On Thursday, during a ceremony in London, the World Photography Organization, Creo, and Sony announced the winners of the 17th Sony World Photography Award. This long-standing prize celebrates photography and shines as one of the most important global photography competition.
Juliette Pavy is the Sony World Photographer of the Year. She conquered the jury of the 17th Sony World Photography Awards with a visual story about the forced contraceptive campaign imposed on Greenlandic women by Denmark in the sixties and seventies.
The other works highlighted by the final selection of category prizes all deal with strong contemporary themes, such as the relationship between humanity and the environment and the different declination of diversity.
In Sala Mayor (Living Room), the winner of the Architecture and Design category, Siobhán Doran (Ireland) documented the homes of families who acquired wealth in the sugar trade in the Philippines through a series of eerie and striking pictures of their sumptuous and post-colonial living rooms.
The winner of the Creative category, Sujata Setia (United Kingdom), used her project A Thousand Cuts to examine the stories of survivors of domestic abuse from the UK’s South Asian community. The photographer employed a series of intricate incisions on the surface of the photographs, revealing a layer of red paper underneath to symbolize the pain and resilience of her subjects.
With the series the Sacrifice Zone, one of the most visually striking series, Dutch photographer Eddo Hartmann explored a remote area of Kazakhstan which was the site of USSR’s major nuclear testing facilities. Hartmann used an infrared camera to turn into pink and red the green of the scenery, thus evoking the radiation contamination invisible to the human eye (opening picture).
In our gallery above, we’ve collected all the pictures of the professional category winners, along with the winner of the Open selection. Every year, the SWPA competition also invites amateur photographers to send their shots to participate in the Open category. The absolute winner this year was Liam Man, with the impressive drone shot “Moonrise Sprites over Storr.”
Last but not least, this year’s Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award went to Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, celebrating an extraordinary career that spans more than five decades. “I am humbled by this award and extremely grateful for it,” said Salgado. “To the young photographers whose work we admired tonight, I say, keep on going! In fifty years from now, you will be the one on this stage, accepting the prize I was awarded tonight.”
The picture of all the professional category winners, along with selected shots from the shortlisted finalist, the winner of the Sustainability Prize, and 40 selected photographs by Sebastião Salgado, will be on display at the Somerset House in London from April 19th to May 9th.