New York, NY—The World Photography Organization (WPO) opened the 12th edition of the Sony World Photography Awards. Moreover, to celebrate the awards’ continued presence as a leading global photography competition, WPO revealed the latest recipients of the Sony Grant from previous award winners. It also announced three new award categories for 2019.
Working across 180 countries, the aim of the WPO is to raise the level of conversation around photography by celebrating the best imagery and photographers on the planet. Created by the World Photography Organization, the Sony World Photography Awards showcase the best contemporary photography from the past year.
The awards give exposure and opportunity to photographers worldwide on an annual basis. In addition, Sony supports the awards to help the continued development of photographic culture throughout the world. Submissions to the awards are free at worldphoto.org.
Furthermore, all category winners of the Professional, Open, Youth and Student competitions will receive digital imaging equipment from Sony. In addition, cash prizes of $25,000 will be presented to the Photographer of the Year and $5,000 to the overall Open competition winner.
Moreover, all winning and short-listed photographers’ works will be exhibited at the annual Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition in London. They will also be toured internationally. In addition, the winning images will be published in the annual awards’ book.
“Being named Photographer of the Year means a huge amount to me,” commented Alys Tomlinson, the overall winner of the 2018 awards. “It’s wonderful to be recognized for what I do, for what I am so committed and passionate about. Having worked on the Ex-Voto series for five years, winning this award has opened up and emphasized the centrality of pilgrimage to us all.”
Sony World Photography Awards New Categories
Photographers worldwide are invited to submit to the awards’ four competitions: Professional, focusing on outstanding bodies of work between 5–10 images across 10 categories; Open, which rewards the world’s best single images across 10 categories; Youth, a single brief for emerging talent aged 12–19; and Student, for photography students across the globe. The National Awards program will also reward local photographic talent.
The 2019 awards mark the introduction of two challenging new categories in the Professional competition: Brief and Documentary. Brief will test photographers’ abilities to compose a body of work on a specific theme. The inaugural theme of this category is “Identity.” Documentary is a new category for bodies of work portraying facts about a chosen subject that give insight into contemporary issues and news.
In the Open competition, the new Creative category was introduced. In addition, the awards welcome Culture Trip and Eurostar as category partners.
Sony Grant
Introduced in 2016, Sony Grant provides previous award winners with further opportunities to develop and display their works as well as establish an ongoing relationship with Sony. The recipients are chosen by Sony from the winning and short-listed photographers of the awards’ Professional and Student competitions.
The 2018 Sony Grant recipients are Alys Tomlinson (UK), Luca Locatelli (Italy), Tom Oldham (UK) and Balazs Gardi (Hungary). Each will receive $7,000 to develop a project of their own over the next year. In addition, the resulting images will be exhibited at the 2019 Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition at Somerset House in London.
The 2018 Student Sony Grant recipients are Morgan Mulholland (South Africa), Anshul Mehrotra (India) and Cao Hongmei (China). Each student will receive $3,500 to develop a collaborative project set by Sony and the WPO. They will also be exhibited in London.
2019 Prizes and Deadlines
Photographers have until November 30, 2018 to enter the Student competition, until January 4, 2019 for the Open and Youth competitions, and up until January 11, 2019 for the Professional awards. Full competition and categories descriptions can be found at worldphoto.org/swpa.
