One of the world's largest and most prestigious photography competitions has announced its winners for the year 2020. The Sony World Photography Awards received more than 345,000 images from 203 countries and territories, submitted for its four competition categories: Professional, Open, Youth and Student. Organised by the World Photography Organisation, the awards have now declared overall winners in each category.
Photographer Pablo Albarenga from Uruguay has been declared the grand prize winner of the Photographer of the Year title for his series Seeds of Resistance. According to Sony World Photography Awards, Seeds of Resistance is a "body of work which pairs photographs of landscapes and territories in danger from mining and agribusinesses with portraits of the activists fighting to conserve them."
For his work to document the plight of indigenous communities in Latin America, Mr Albarenga has won a cash prize of $25,000.
"This year's winner comes from the Creative category and is a brilliant set of images which offers a powerful visual record of how deforestation goes hand in hand with the destruction of communities and peoples. The judging process this year was challenging - there were a number of extraordinary stories and sets of images that could have won the overall title, but Seeds of Resistance really stood out. Pablo is from Uruguay and this project is deeply personal to him as a photographer. The effort required to envisage, produce and shoot this series is laudable in every way," said Mike Trow, Chair of the 2020 Professional competition.
In the Open competition, UK's Tom Oldham won the first place for Black Francis - a black and white portrait of Pixies frontman Charles Thompson. "I never dreamt I could get anywhere in the Open competition as the standard is so high and this award will really take some time to realise," said Mr Oldham.
Greek Student Ioanna Sakellaraki was chosen as Student Photographer of the Year 2020 for her series Aeiforia, which captures solar panels, wind turbines and battery farms on the Greek island of Tilos - the first in the Mediterranean to run almost entirely on renewable energy.
19-year-old Hsien-Pang Hsieh emerged as the overall winner in the Youth competition for his image Hurry - which appears to show a street performer walking in a hurry while he is, in fact, standing still.
A virtual exhibition featuring the winners' work is now available on the World Photography Organisation website.
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