Sony World Photography Awards announces 2021 contest winners

Last month, the World Photography Organisation treated us with impressive category winners of this year’s Sony World Photography Awards. The overall winners have now been announced, too, and it’s a beautiful selection of images from all over the world. Let’s take a look and enjoy them together.

Craig Easton from the UK was awarded Professional Photographer of the Year for the best series of work. Bank Top is a collaboration with writer and academic Abdul Aziz Hafiz, examining the representation and misrepresentation of communities in northern England, focusing on the neighborhood of Bank Top in Blackburn.

Open Photographer of the Year for 2021 is Tamary Kudita from Zimbabwe. Her photo African Victorian was the winner in the Creative category, and it shows a young black woman dressed in a Victorian dress and holding traditional Shona cooking utensils. “The image probes at stereotypical contextualising of the black female body and offers an alternative visual language through which a multifaceted African identity is presented,” the WPO explains.

Pubarun Basu from India is this year’s Youth Photographer of the Year. This category awards photographers aged between 12 and 19 for the best single image. The photo titled No Escape from Reality brought Basu first place in this year’s Youth category.

Last but not least, Student Photographer of the Year is Coenraad Torlage from South Africa. This category awards the best series of work taken by any student aged 30 and under. Torlage was chosen for his series Young Farmers, created in response to the brief Our Time which asked students to depict the way they and their contemporaries see the world and how they plan to change it for the better.

But wait, there’s more. Category winners of the Professional competition have been announced as well, along with the award for Outstanding Contribution to Photography, which means plenty more photos to enjoy. Keep scrolling to take a look at them, and make sure to visit Sony World Photography Awards’ website for more information.

I’ll also leave you with the winner announcement video, and you can watch it here too.