To Master -
Sony World Photography Awards
Sony World Photography Awards has four competitions:
- Professional - Recognising outstanding bodies of work
- Open - Rewarding exceptional standalone images
- Youth - Celebrating the best single images by emerging photographers aged between 12-19 years old
- Student - Providing a platform for photography students worldwide
- The competitions are free to enter for anyone undertaking a full time photography program at an established institution
- Students Photographer of the Year will win €30,000 of Sony digital imaging equipement for their institution
- Sony World Photography Awards will be held at Somerset House
2021 Student competition briefing
For the first brief in the Sony World Photography Awards 2021 Student competition, we’re challenging you to show us a story connected to building a better future. While 2020 has been a challenging year, there are those who are working towards a better future for all. We want you to tell us their stories.
Show us in five (5) to ten (10) images those communities or individuals wanting to create a more desirable, satisfactory and effective tomorrow. Your images can be taken on any device, shot in any style – be black & white or colour – and approached from any angle you feel is best. While creative responses are encouraged, it’s key to stick to the brief.
Previous Sony Winners and Shortlisters
The Truth is in the Soil - Ioanna Sakellaraki, Royal College of Art, UK ( Student Photographer of the Year 2020)
Series Description
Inspired by the origins of ancient Greek laments, I dwelled within traditional communities of the last female professional mourners inhabiting the Mani peninsula of Greece looking for traces of bereavement and grief. My personal intention for realizing this project has been the impossible mourning of my father that is yet to come while making this body of work contemplating fabrications of grief in my culture and family. The series aims at expressing the strangeness of the present absence as a conceptual approach and commentary to cultural loss today. In a way, these images work as vehicles to mourn perished ideals of vitality, prosperity and belonging. By connecting my poignant grief with the dramatisations performed by the professional mourners, I look into the subjective spirituality of Greek death rituals. I am interested in how the image affirms things in their disappearance and gives us the power to use things in their absence through fiction. During my making process, the distinction between the real and the imaginary and the disturbance between represented space and personality lead to a tangible experience of separation. Through my images, this separation becomes an encounter. The human figure becomes a space opening into the outside where the image finds its condition and disappears into it. The images lay between real and unreal allowing the viewer to believe in the real that is yet to come functioning as passages between sheltering something from death and establishing with death a relation of freedom.
Visible Theatre, Invisible Drama - Fangbin Chen, Qilu University of Technology, China ( shortlisted for 2020 Student awards)
Series description
The Chinese folk drama stage is an arena that people build spontaneously to watch theatrical performances. It not only reflects the evolution of opera art, but also presents a profile of the changes in economy, culture, art and life. Life is like a drama. With his camera lens switching from the outside to the inside and from the inside to the outside, the photographer displays the stage with historical imprints and the changing life scenes with a unique calm, discarding the fixed perspective of the actors and the audience. The lines celebrated unintentionally by the stage form a new picture, in which the unique visual image shot from the back of the stage demonstrates the drama-like evolution in real life.
"Wire Formation" by Sounak Das ( shortlisted for 2019 Student awards)
Series description
In the dark, the chaotic wires from poles to poles, across the road, over the head, from trees to houses, down the allies create a sort of coherence. These chaotic wires around the city have always represented an entangled reality of Dhaka city. The State has initiated and published newspaper articles quoting that these wire poles will no longer exist beyond the year 2022, which compelled me to archive my reality. I intend to create shapes and forms using several light sources to produce a sculptural typology of objects like poles and wires and the environment around it. I had an urge to sneak out in the streets at midnight and capture images of steel structures, transformer poles and power cables, much vivid as an existence in the background of our adaptive sight. The references of these subtle and abstract artefact metals and wires are for people living a century ahead of my time and philosophy. These photographs would be a representation of my time.
