A Chinese photographer has won the title of Food Photographer of the Year 2019 for his photo of people enjoying a feast of noodles.
Jianhui Liao took the award-winning photo, titled Cauldron Noodles, during a celebration of the goddess Nuwa’s birthday in Shexian County in the Hebei Province, China.
The photograph, which features an overhead view of the community dressed in Qing Dynasty costumes gathering around a large pot of noodles, beat out 9,000 images from 77 countries.
As the winner of the annual Pink Lady Food Photographer competition, Liao, who shot the picture with a Sony 7RM2, was awarded a prize of £5,000. His photograph also won for the Food for Celebration category.
Of the stunning photo, competition judge Andy MacDonald said: “It stood out from the rest in its category for the way in which [Liao] made the subject matter, a community feast, so beautiful and atmospheric.
“The competition was fierce, there were 9,000 images entered from 77 countries – more entries and more countries than ever before – and the standard was phenomenal.
1/30 H o m e – Architecture
“In the traditional Romanian mindset, the house is considered the nucleus of family life, a primordial space which generates and preserves vital energies. As a photographer traveling across Romania, I watched villages and towns being architecturally transformed during recent years, as a consequence of cultural appropriation and as part of the globalization process. Is the house still a primordial site, or have its functions diminished to the merely utilitarian? Has the house been relocated from the center of the world to its periphery?” – Felicia Simon
Felicia Simion/Sony World Photography Awards
2/30 Sea Lion and Sky of Sardines – Natural World & Wildlife
México, Baja California Sur, Los Islotes. A sea lion swimming among a school of sardines.
Christian Vizl/Sony World Photography Awards
3/30 The Big Score – Sport
“Outside The Griffin, one of the four pubs encircling the stadium, the Reading fans are cheering. With the final score of 2-2, they are the ones who have something to celebrate. Even though it has gone a bit downhill since the football club between 2006 and 2008 spent two seasons in Premier League.” – Thomas Nielsen
Thomas Nielsen/Sony World Photography Awards
4/30 Teddy Bear Cholla – Landscape
“Joshua Tree National Park in California is one of the four Gold Tier International Dark Sky Parks in the US, It is known by its beautiful trees and also by the Cholla Cactus Garden situated approximately 12 miles (20 km) south of the park’s north entrance. I wanted to capture such beautiful cacti under the starry sky. To capture the star trails, the camera stays fixed, while, as the hours pass, the stars move. The resulting photos show the nightly movement of stars on the sky’s dome. The only star that does not move is the North Star and is found at the center of all concentric circles.” – Imma Barrera
Imma Barrera/Sony World Photography Awards
5/30 Lee Dickerson – Sport
Lee Dickerson, a team member of the “Hot Rod Hoodlums” is enjoying a cigarette after a successful run on “The Flats”
Sigurd Fandango/Sony World Photography Awards
6/30 Outlawing the Face Veil in Denmark – Documentary
Ayah, 37 and Aisha, 18 drink from Burger King cups in a mall ahead of the face veil ban in Hundige, Denmark, July 19, 2018
Andrew Kelly/Sony World Photography Awards
7/30 Rainbow Cabana – Architecture
“There is an intrinsic charm in the cabana rental structures of Miami Beach. Each is unique and often paired with the umbrellas it rents out to form a small community of matching hues. The hotel staff will even have matching uniforms to top it off. This series came about in late 2017 and early 2018 after getting tired of shooting Miami’s lifeguard towers. Everyone does it and everyone has seen them, but the cabanas are often overlooked. There are dozens of them but most people have no idea unless they’re willing to walk for hours. Now this series exists you don’t have to, but you still should.” – David Behar
David Behar/Sony World Photography Awards
8/30 To the South of the Colourful Clouds – Landscape
A group of transplanted trees wrapped in green and white plastic, standing quietly above a new pond as part of the Haidong North Mountain Forest Park
Yan Wang Preston/Sony World Photography Awards
9/30 Dennis and Cindy – Sport
Dennis and Cindy Adere are not racing themselves, but brought their car collection along to watch the action at Speed Week.
Sigurd Fandango/Sony World Photography Awards
10/30 Meet Bob – Natural World & Wildlife
“Bob walks through the hallway, past the bathroom, back to his room. During rehabilitation, DVM Odette Doest found out that Bob had been habituated by humans and therefore could not be reintroduced back into the wild. So now he spends his time at her house, where he shares a room with his other avian rescue friends.” – Jasper Doest
Jasper Doest/Sony World Photography Awards
11/30 Meet Bob – Natural World & Wildlife
“At the end of a long day at her veterinary practice, Odette makes supper, accompanied by Bob and, on her shoulder, Willy, a two-year-old free-flying chestnut-fronted macaw she rescued as a chick. Odette and her son also share their home with nine cats and ten dogs. Bob is unfazed by his housemates.” – Jasper Doest
Jasper Doest/Sony World Photography Awards
12/30 Bubble Up! – Creative
“By definition most people are “normal”. Some want to be different and follow the norms of a specific social or cultural tribe, they are normal too. And there are those who would laugh at nonsensical categorizations, who don’t believe in or live by conventions, who create their own reality and live it naturally. They are the subject of Pol Kurucz’s last photo series: genuine eccentrics, weirdos and lunatics who in the eyes of the photographer are the new normals. Shooting for this last series took entirely place in the Kolor Studio, in the heart of Rio de Janeiro, where all the sets and accessories were built by the Kolor Art Collective. Most models, performers, and actors featured in the photos come from the city’s humanist microcosm and themselves belong to redefined group of the eccentrics.” – Pol Kurucz
Pol Kurucz/Sony World Photography Awards
13/30 Chill – Brief
Waiting full of impatience for the couple to arrive
Rebecca Fertinel/Sony World Photography Awards
14/30 Entos Eyesus – Landscape
Entos Eyesus church forest on an island in Lake Tana near Bahir Dar
Kieran Dodds/Sony World Photography Awards
15/30 An Elegy for the Death of Hamun – Documentary
“Hossein, a 13-year-old boy, is from Beris, Chaabahar, Balouchestan, which although it is a free-zone area and is located next to the harbor, has very oppressed residents. Despite the fact that they live near the sea, they lack healthy drinking water. The largest proportion of suburban residents who live in poverty are located here in this city. Beris harbor is an oppressed region in Chaabahar. The natives in Beris are the oldest residents of Chaabahar. The people of Beris live in hardship, poverty, and famine. However, after seeing their farms dried up and their livestock lost, which has led to their unemployment, most of the residents of Zabol, especially farmers and livestock breeders, have decided to move to the tourist city of Chaabahar, which suffers from a lack of water.” – Hashem Shakeri
Hashem Shakeri/Sony World Photography Awards
16/30 Outlawing the Face Veil in Denmark – Documentary
Ayah, 37, and wearer of the niqab weeps as she is embraced by a police officer during a demonstration against the Danish face veil ban in Copenhagen, Denmark, August 1, 2018
Andrew Kelly/Sony World Photography Awards
17/30 Back to the Future – Architecture
“The individual works are alluring collages that demand and seduce our visual and art historical memory, create time jumps and explore new combinations of different genres. Everything is composition and photography is a means to arouse associations in the mind of the beholder and to establish connections with our cultural-historical socialization and its emergence. In this setting of the media, the pictures move along the border and the narrow ridge between photography and painting. The shown pictures tell stories. They show cityscapes and nature, seen through the spectacle of our cultural history. There are time leaps and the still-valid view of the architecture and landscape. In these pictures fragility and the task of protecting it are shown. Men are long gone but their stories are still alive.” – Peter Franck
Peter Franck/Sony World Photography Awards
18/30 Furtwangen-Neukirch – Brief
Interior at the restaurant Hexenlochmühle in the Black Forest, Germany
Christina Stohn/Sony World Photography Awards
19/30 Popular Resistance Icon – Documentary
“A shirtless young protester in Gaza gripping a Palestinian flag with one hand and swinging a slingshot over his head with the other, on the northern border between the Gaza Strip and Israel in the weekly protests organised by Palestinian protesters to protest against the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which has been imposed by Israel for the past 12 years.” – Mustafa Hassona
Mustafa Hassona/Sony World Photography Awards
20/30 Tartine à mâcher
“2 opposites things in the same image. At first sight, this is disgusting, but at the same time the photo’s got something hypnotic. Isn’t it?” – Nicolas Gaspardel & Pauline Baert
Nicolas Gaspardel & Pauline Baert/Sony World Photography Awards
21/30 The Avondale Primary Majorettes – Brief
“Tamzleigh De Kock, Wakiesha Titus, Riley Van Harte, Claresha Nano, Chrishey Sassman, Charity Adams, Kesia Plaatjies, Erin Carolus, Aneeqah Meyer and Linomtha Makaleni. Despite the girls in the Avondale Majorettes team being 6 to 13 years old, they work very well together, and are expected to perform at a pace which accommodates everyone.” – Alice Mann
Alice Mann/Sony World Photography Awards
22/30 Youth of Belfast – Brief
“In Northern Ireland, Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists live in homogeneous neighborhoods that are still divided by walls. While they stick to their own symbols of identity and tradition, they wear the same clothes, listen to the same music, have the same haircuts and often the same worries such as violence, unemployment, social discrimination and lack of prospects.” – Toby Binder
Toby Binder/Sony World Photography Awards
23/30 Wayne. New Romney, Kent – Brief
“This body of work is part of a culmination of eighteen years of predominantly photographing the South East of England. There are a number of themes at work in this photo-series covering nostalgia, class and the beautiful uncanny of everyday English life. As a photographer, the work represents the continued pursuit of my visual style and approach to photography. It has taken a long time to get here and now, going through the wider edits of this work, I can appreciate that I always saw the world in this way.” – Edward Thompson
Edward Thompson/Sony World Photography Awards
24/30 Miss Faversham. Margate, Kent – Brief
“This body of work is part of a culmination of eighteen years of predominantly photographing the South East of England. There are a number of themes at work in this photo-series covering nostalgia, class and the beautiful uncanny of everyday English life. As a photographer, the work represents the continued pursuit of my visual style and approach to photography. It has taken a long time to get here and now, going through the wider edits of this work, I can appreciate that I always saw the world in this way.” – Edward Thompson
Edward Thompson/Sony World Photography Awards
25/30 The Once Mighty Ko’olau – Creative
“This series takes place in my home of Hawaii. I use traditional film and silver gelatin to shoot and print images of controversial building and infrastructure projects in Hawaii. I then attempt to remove the buildings from the image by laser etching them. The laser leaves a scar on the image, much like the permanent damage from infrastructure which cannot be removed.” – Leah Schretenthaler
Leah Schretenthaler/Sony World Photography Awards
26/30 The Twin Slide – Architecture
“In Germany, pools are public. They are part of social and cultural life, open for all kind of social classes, a place where people spend a lot of time, especially in childhood and which leaves pleasant memories. Everybody can afford the inexpensive entrance fee. The series was shot by drone, in summer 2018 at a height of only a few meters.” – Stephan Zirwes
Stephan Zirwes/Sony World Photography Awards
27/30 Border Wall Prototypes – Architecture
Border wall prototypes stand in San Diego, near the Mexico US border, as seen from Tijuana, Saturday, December 22, 2018
Daniel Ochoa de Olza/Sony World Photography Awards
28/30 Güle Güle – Discovery
“Güle Güle (goodbye in Turkish) is a personal project focused on the city of Istanbul. To document the profound changes happening in the city and within Turkish society, we got in close contact with the realities that are the driving forces and the results of this change. Photographs derive from multiple relationships, penetrating the complexity of the city and its contrasting microcosms. Gentrification, the marginalization of the poorer classes, increasing discrimination against homosexuality, the massive migration of Syrian refugees and the Kurdish community issue are just some of the hidden realities behind the subjects portrayed. While still following a documentary approach, we decided to leave the informative and didactic content of the images in the background to foster their visual immediacy and an open-ended narrative.” – Jean-Marc Caimi & Valentina Piccinni
Jean-Marc Caimi & Valentina Piccinni/Sony World Photography Awards
29/30 Güle Güle – Discovery
“Güle Güle (goodbye in Turkish) is a personal project focused on the city of Istanbul. To document the profound changes happening in the city and within Turkish society, we got in close contact with the realities that are the driving forces and the results of this change. Photographs derive from multiple relationships, penetrating the complexity of the city and its contrasting microcosms. Gentrification, the marginalization of the poorer classes, increasing discrimination against homosexuality, the massive migration of Syrian refugees and the Kurdish community issue are just some of the hidden realities behind the subjects portrayed. While still following a documentary approach, we decided to leave the informative and didactic content of the images in the background to foster their visual immediacy and an open-ended narrative.” – Jean-Marc Caimi & Valentina Piccinni
Jean-Marc Caimi & Valentina Piccinni/Sony World Photography Awards
30/30 Henkō – Portraiture
“Henkō – a Japanese word composed of kanjis meaning “change” and “variable/unusual light” – conveys the idea of a shifting light which transforms our perception of the objects it illuminates. Apart from retouches to soften or accentuate the Adam’s apple, the images were not Photoshopped in post-production. Only lighting, make up and the subject’s facial expressions convey the symbolic gender reassignment. The choice of format – traditional photographic portraits in diptychs – and the seemingly simple image conceal the complexity of the subject matter, forcing the viewer to question the medium and their ability to see through it. If lighting and a skin-deep makeover can make viewers question their understanding of gender, perhaps the border between masculine and feminine is hazier than we are led to believe?” – Massimo Govanni
Massimo Govanni/Sony World Photography Awards
1/30 H o m e – Architecture
“In the traditional Romanian mindset, the house is considered the nucleus of family life, a primordial space which generates and preserves vital energies. As a photographer traveling across Romania, I watched villages and towns being architecturally transformed during recent years, as a consequence of cultural appropriation and as part of the globalization process. Is the house still a primordial site, or have its functions diminished to the merely utilitarian? Has the house been relocated from the center of the world to its periphery?” – Felicia Simon
Felicia Simion/Sony World Photography Awards
2/30 Sea Lion and Sky of Sardines – Natural World & Wildlife
México, Baja California Sur, Los Islotes. A sea lion swimming among a school of sardines.
Christian Vizl/Sony World Photography Awards
3/30 The Big Score – Sport
“Outside The Griffin, one of the four pubs encircling the stadium, the Reading fans are cheering. With the final score of 2-2, they are the ones who have something to celebrate. Even though it has gone a bit downhill since the football club between 2006 and 2008 spent two seasons in Premier League.” – Thomas Nielsen
Thomas Nielsen/Sony World Photography Awards
4/30 Teddy Bear Cholla – Landscape
“Joshua Tree National Park in California is one of the four Gold Tier International Dark Sky Parks in the US, It is known by its beautiful trees and also by the Cholla Cactus Garden situated approximately 12 miles (20 km) south of the park’s north entrance. I wanted to capture such beautiful cacti under the starry sky. To capture the star trails, the camera stays fixed, while, as the hours pass, the stars move. The resulting photos show the nightly movement of stars on the sky’s dome. The only star that does not move is the North Star and is found at the center of all concentric circles.” – Imma Barrera
Imma Barrera/Sony World Photography Awards
5/30 Lee Dickerson – Sport
Lee Dickerson, a team member of the “Hot Rod Hoodlums” is enjoying a cigarette after a successful run on “The Flats”
Sigurd Fandango/Sony World Photography Awards
6/30 Outlawing the Face Veil in Denmark – Documentary
Ayah, 37 and Aisha, 18 drink from Burger King cups in a mall ahead of the face veil ban in Hundige, Denmark, July 19, 2018
Andrew Kelly/Sony World Photography Awards
7/30 Rainbow Cabana – Architecture
“There is an intrinsic charm in the cabana rental structures of Miami Beach. Each is unique and often paired with the umbrellas it rents out to form a small community of matching hues. The hotel staff will even have matching uniforms to top it off. This series came about in late 2017 and early 2018 after getting tired of shooting Miami’s lifeguard towers. Everyone does it and everyone has seen them, but the cabanas are often overlooked. There are dozens of them but most people have no idea unless they’re willing to walk for hours. Now this series exists you don’t have to, but you still should.” – David Behar
David Behar/Sony World Photography Awards
8/30 To the South of the Colourful Clouds – Landscape
A group of transplanted trees wrapped in green and white plastic, standing quietly above a new pond as part of the Haidong North Mountain Forest Park
Yan Wang Preston/Sony World Photography Awards
9/30 Dennis and Cindy – Sport
Dennis and Cindy Adere are not racing themselves, but brought their car collection along to watch the action at Speed Week.
Sigurd Fandango/Sony World Photography Awards
10/30 Meet Bob – Natural World & Wildlife
“Bob walks through the hallway, past the bathroom, back to his room. During rehabilitation, DVM Odette Doest found out that Bob had been habituated by humans and therefore could not be reintroduced back into the wild. So now he spends his time at her house, where he shares a room with his other avian rescue friends.” – Jasper Doest
Jasper Doest/Sony World Photography Awards
11/30 Meet Bob – Natural World & Wildlife
“At the end of a long day at her veterinary practice, Odette makes supper, accompanied by Bob and, on her shoulder, Willy, a two-year-old free-flying chestnut-fronted macaw she rescued as a chick. Odette and her son also share their home with nine cats and ten dogs. Bob is unfazed by his housemates.” – Jasper Doest
Jasper Doest/Sony World Photography Awards
12/30 Bubble Up! – Creative
“By definition most people are “normal”. Some want to be different and follow the norms of a specific social or cultural tribe, they are normal too. And there are those who would laugh at nonsensical categorizations, who don’t believe in or live by conventions, who create their own reality and live it naturally. They are the subject of Pol Kurucz’s last photo series: genuine eccentrics, weirdos and lunatics who in the eyes of the photographer are the new normals. Shooting for this last series took entirely place in the Kolor Studio, in the heart of Rio de Janeiro, where all the sets and accessories were built by the Kolor Art Collective. Most models, performers, and actors featured in the photos come from the city’s humanist microcosm and themselves belong to redefined group of the eccentrics.” – Pol Kurucz
Pol Kurucz/Sony World Photography Awards
13/30 Chill – Brief
Waiting full of impatience for the couple to arrive
Rebecca Fertinel/Sony World Photography Awards
14/30 Entos Eyesus – Landscape
Entos Eyesus church forest on an island in Lake Tana near Bahir Dar
Kieran Dodds/Sony World Photography Awards
15/30 An Elegy for the Death of Hamun – Documentary
“Hossein, a 13-year-old boy, is from Beris, Chaabahar, Balouchestan, which although it is a free-zone area and is located next to the harbor, has very oppressed residents. Despite the fact that they live near the sea, they lack healthy drinking water. The largest proportion of suburban residents who live in poverty are located here in this city. Beris harbor is an oppressed region in Chaabahar. The natives in Beris are the oldest residents of Chaabahar. The people of Beris live in hardship, poverty, and famine. However, after seeing their farms dried up and their livestock lost, which has led to their unemployment, most of the residents of Zabol, especially farmers and livestock breeders, have decided to move to the tourist city of Chaabahar, which suffers from a lack of water.” – Hashem Shakeri
Hashem Shakeri/Sony World Photography Awards
16/30 Outlawing the Face Veil in Denmark – Documentary
Ayah, 37, and wearer of the niqab weeps as she is embraced by a police officer during a demonstration against the Danish face veil ban in Copenhagen, Denmark, August 1, 2018
Andrew Kelly/Sony World Photography Awards
17/30 Back to the Future – Architecture
“The individual works are alluring collages that demand and seduce our visual and art historical memory, create time jumps and explore new combinations of different genres. Everything is composition and photography is a means to arouse associations in the mind of the beholder and to establish connections with our cultural-historical socialization and its emergence. In this setting of the media, the pictures move along the border and the narrow ridge between photography and painting. The shown pictures tell stories. They show cityscapes and nature, seen through the spectacle of our cultural history. There are time leaps and the still-valid view of the architecture and landscape. In these pictures fragility and the task of protecting it are shown. Men are long gone but their stories are still alive.” – Peter Franck
Peter Franck/Sony World Photography Awards
18/30 Furtwangen-Neukirch – Brief
Interior at the restaurant Hexenlochmühle in the Black Forest, Germany
Christina Stohn/Sony World Photography Awards
19/30 Popular Resistance Icon – Documentary
“A shirtless young protester in Gaza gripping a Palestinian flag with one hand and swinging a slingshot over his head with the other, on the northern border between the Gaza Strip and Israel in the weekly protests organised by Palestinian protesters to protest against the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which has been imposed by Israel for the past 12 years.” – Mustafa Hassona
Mustafa Hassona/Sony World Photography Awards
20/30 Tartine à mâcher
“2 opposites things in the same image. At first sight, this is disgusting, but at the same time the photo’s got something hypnotic. Isn’t it?” – Nicolas Gaspardel & Pauline Baert
Nicolas Gaspardel & Pauline Baert/Sony World Photography Awards
21/30 The Avondale Primary Majorettes – Brief
“Tamzleigh De Kock, Wakiesha Titus, Riley Van Harte, Claresha Nano, Chrishey Sassman, Charity Adams, Kesia Plaatjies, Erin Carolus, Aneeqah Meyer and Linomtha Makaleni. Despite the girls in the Avondale Majorettes team being 6 to 13 years old, they work very well together, and are expected to perform at a pace which accommodates everyone.” – Alice Mann
Alice Mann/Sony World Photography Awards
22/30 Youth of Belfast – Brief
“In Northern Ireland, Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists live in homogeneous neighborhoods that are still divided by walls. While they stick to their own symbols of identity and tradition, they wear the same clothes, listen to the same music, have the same haircuts and often the same worries such as violence, unemployment, social discrimination and lack of prospects.” – Toby Binder
Toby Binder/Sony World Photography Awards
23/30 Wayne. New Romney, Kent – Brief
“This body of work is part of a culmination of eighteen years of predominantly photographing the South East of England. There are a number of themes at work in this photo-series covering nostalgia, class and the beautiful uncanny of everyday English life. As a photographer, the work represents the continued pursuit of my visual style and approach to photography. It has taken a long time to get here and now, going through the wider edits of this work, I can appreciate that I always saw the world in this way.” – Edward Thompson
Edward Thompson/Sony World Photography Awards
24/30 Miss Faversham. Margate, Kent – Brief
“This body of work is part of a culmination of eighteen years of predominantly photographing the South East of England. There are a number of themes at work in this photo-series covering nostalgia, class and the beautiful uncanny of everyday English life. As a photographer, the work represents the continued pursuit of my visual style and approach to photography. It has taken a long time to get here and now, going through the wider edits of this work, I can appreciate that I always saw the world in this way.” – Edward Thompson
Edward Thompson/Sony World Photography Awards
25/30 The Once Mighty Ko’olau – Creative
“This series takes place in my home of Hawaii. I use traditional film and silver gelatin to shoot and print images of controversial building and infrastructure projects in Hawaii. I then attempt to remove the buildings from the image by laser etching them. The laser leaves a scar on the image, much like the permanent damage from infrastructure which cannot be removed.” – Leah Schretenthaler
Leah Schretenthaler/Sony World Photography Awards
26/30 The Twin Slide – Architecture
“In Germany, pools are public. They are part of social and cultural life, open for all kind of social classes, a place where people spend a lot of time, especially in childhood and which leaves pleasant memories. Everybody can afford the inexpensive entrance fee. The series was shot by drone, in summer 2018 at a height of only a few meters.” – Stephan Zirwes
Stephan Zirwes/Sony World Photography Awards
27/30 Border Wall Prototypes – Architecture
Border wall prototypes stand in San Diego, near the Mexico US border, as seen from Tijuana, Saturday, December 22, 2018
Daniel Ochoa de Olza/Sony World Photography Awards
28/30 Güle Güle – Discovery
“Güle Güle (goodbye in Turkish) is a personal project focused on the city of Istanbul. To document the profound changes happening in the city and within Turkish society, we got in close contact with the realities that are the driving forces and the results of this change. Photographs derive from multiple relationships, penetrating the complexity of the city and its contrasting microcosms. Gentrification, the marginalization of the poorer classes, increasing discrimination against homosexuality, the massive migration of Syrian refugees and the Kurdish community issue are just some of the hidden realities behind the subjects portrayed. While still following a documentary approach, we decided to leave the informative and didactic content of the images in the background to foster their visual immediacy and an open-ended narrative.” – Jean-Marc Caimi & Valentina Piccinni
Jean-Marc Caimi & Valentina Piccinni/Sony World Photography Awards
29/30 Güle Güle – Discovery
“Güle Güle (goodbye in Turkish) is a personal project focused on the city of Istanbul. To document the profound changes happening in the city and within Turkish society, we got in close contact with the realities that are the driving forces and the results of this change. Photographs derive from multiple relationships, penetrating the complexity of the city and its contrasting microcosms. Gentrification, the marginalization of the poorer classes, increasing discrimination against homosexuality, the massive migration of Syrian refugees and the Kurdish community issue are just some of the hidden realities behind the subjects portrayed. While still following a documentary approach, we decided to leave the informative and didactic content of the images in the background to foster their visual immediacy and an open-ended narrative.” – Jean-Marc Caimi & Valentina Piccinni
Jean-Marc Caimi & Valentina Piccinni/Sony World Photography Awards
30/30 Henkō – Portraiture
“Henkō – a Japanese word composed of kanjis meaning “change” and “variable/unusual light” – conveys the idea of a shifting light which transforms our perception of the objects it illuminates. Apart from retouches to soften or accentuate the Adam’s apple, the images were not Photoshopped in post-production. Only lighting, make up and the subject’s facial expressions convey the symbolic gender reassignment. The choice of format – traditional photographic portraits in diptychs – and the seemingly simple image conceal the complexity of the subject matter, forcing the viewer to question the medium and their ability to see through it. If lighting and a skin-deep makeover can make viewers question their understanding of gender, perhaps the border between masculine and feminine is hazier than we are led to believe?” – Massimo Govanni
Massimo Govanni/Sony World Photography Awards
You can see all the other winners from the competition in categories including Bring Home the Harvest, Food Bloggers, and Food for the Family here.
