2018 SONY WORLD PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS
A TOTAL OF 320,000 IMAGES IN THIS YEAR’S SONY WORLD PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS PRESENTED THE JUDGES WITH A MAMMOTH TASK, BUT THEY STILL MANAGED TO DISTILL IT ALL DOWN TO TEN OPEN CATEGORY WINNERS AND 63 NATIONAL AWARD WINNERS.
It’s grown into the world’s biggest photography competition and, this year, attracted a massive 320,000 entries. Somehow the judges were still able to find the winners in ten Open categories and, new for 2018, 63 country-based National Awards.
Organised by the World Photography Organisation, the Sony World Photography Awards have evolved into the world’s most diverse photography competition. The 11th edition received a record breaking 320,000 submissions by photographers from more than 200 countries and territories, presenting some of the finest contemporary photography captured over the past year.
Photographers were invited to enter any of the Open competition’s ten categories, with the judges looking for the best single image fitting each category’s brief. Many of this year’s Open winners are nonprofessional photographers, making their achievements even more remarkable. The overall winner of the Open Photographer Of The Year award is Veselin Atanasov from Bulgaria, who also won the Landscape & Nature category (pictured here).
In addition to the Open category winners, a total of 63 National Awards winners have also been selected – judged to be the strongest single image taken by a local photographer – with submissions coming from nearly 70 countries. These included Australia, Argentina, Cambodia, Chile, China, France, Indonesia, Kenya, Nepal, Poland, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey and Vietnam. The 2018 Australia National Award was won by Chris Round – a fine-art photographer based in Sydney – with an image titled Intake Tower, Blowering Reservoir, NSW, Australia (see next page). This image also earned a Commended award in the Architecture Category.
Chris explains, “This image is part of an ongoing project concerning the Snowy Hydro Scheme and the Snowy Mountains region in New South Wales. It’s an exploration of the balance between nature and man’s intervention upon it – vast structures amongst epic landscapes, re-shaped waterways and newly created ones. This is the Blowering Reservoir intake tower taken in the early morning light. The brutalist structure creates an interesting juxtaposition with the surrounding environment and the soft- looking water – a result of the need for a long exposure”.
The Chair of the judging panel, Zelda Cheatle, comments, “Judging the Open competition and National Awards allowed me to discover high calibre international work of great interest. In choosing the winners, the images all had to have something special – whether it be composition, impact, skill, a portrayal of a unique event or informing in a new way. Above all else, each winner had to be an exceptional photograph”.