There is also an Italian photographer among the winners of the Open competition of the Sony World Photography Awards 2022, which reward the best shots of 2021. Simone Corallini in the Portraits category with a black and white shot of a 16-year-old surfer who has just emerged from the waves. The image is entitled “The Endless Summer-Surf Trip”. The gaze, protected by the drops of water, is suspended between the emotion of the before and the uncertainty of the after.
Sony World Photography Awards, pictures
They arrived at the Open competition this year over 170 thousand images and in the end they were selected more than 100 photographers in the various “shortlists” from which, for each category, the overall winner was chosen. On the plate, for the winners of each section, a digital imaging equipment from Sony and the opportunity to compete for the prestigious title Open Photographer of the Year – to be announced on April 12 – and the associated $ 5,000 prize. In the meantime, the works chosen by the winners and the proposals selected in the various shortlists will be on display at Somerset House in London from 13 April to 2 May.
The Sony World Photography Award is a journey around the world that, especially after two years of reduced mobility, fears, anxieties related to new international tensions, takes us out of the house and sometimes seems to embody our anxieties and frustrations with respect to a a reality that seems overturned in such a short time. For example in that restless wild mustang stallion sheltering from a sandstorm in northwestern Colorado (this is the photo, also in black and white, of the British Scott Wilsonwinner for Nature and wild animals) or in a field of sunflowers scorched by the sun of Castile and León, curiously also in this case in black and white, by the Spanish Vicente Ansola. In fact, flashes of color among the winners are rare, as in the case of the bicycle chased by the flowers of a wall stopped by Nguyen Phuc Thanh. Here a traditional flower peddler rides in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam (Travel category): the photo was taken at the precise moment when the bike passed next to a wall of a road tunnel full of floral decorations, thus giving the impression that even the street art flowers came out of the cyclist’s baskets.
More black and white in the wonderful run of a child through the streets of Havana, Cuba, taken by the French Etienne Souchon and winner of the Street Photography category, for the Lifestyle section for which it was awarded Utsab Ahamed Akash (Bangladesh) (portrays from below a beekeeper inspecting a hive, almost besieged by bees that also end up on the camera) and for Architecture. In this case Anthony Chan celebrates (or stigmatizes) the encounter between Hong Kong’s past and present: it has in fact convinced the jurors of the competition with a shot in which the chaotic facade of a weathered industrial complex overlaps the elegant entrance of a skyscraper. Still on the subject of skyscrapers, it is impossible not to mention the South Korean shot Wonyoung Choimade of buildings that pierce the curtain of clouds.
For the creativity category it was instead the theme of chronic vertigo and dizziness of the photographer’s mother, the British Isabel Salmonto strike the jury, in a portrait in which the author explores the senses of the woman, photographing her with her eyes closed immersed and a bit lost in a raw red light, with her head tilted as if she were trying to find that balance which it has always failed to achieve.
This is as far as the winners are concerned, from which the Estonian surfers of Raido Nurk for the Movement category and, for the Objects, a not too convincing still life of discarded objects by the Mexican Leonardo Reyes-González. But the shortlists are not far behind and there are also many Italians in the final selections. For example Francesca Sciambarruto with a geometric interior of the Antinori winery in San Casciano in Val di Pesa, for Architecture, e Giulio Casti with the demolition of some silos in the port of Cagliari.
Yet, Fernando Famiani for the Landscapes, with an impressive nocturnal eruption of Etna, Davide Agostini for Lifestyle with the backstage of a video clip, Paolo Paccagnella in the Objects with a plowed field guarded by a scarecrow, Davide Limonta in the category won by Corallini with the portrait of a Romanian shepherd in the Po Valley as well as Francesco Fantini with a surreal shot of a resident of the boats that shore up London’s canals. Davide Bonaldo entered the Street photography shortlist with a gymnastics session on the Barcelona seafront shortly after the lockdown and finally, for Viaggi, Alessandro Accordini with a path of the mountain massif of Pasubio e Claudia Magnani, the latter with a speleological exploration of one of the most fascinating canyons of Madeira.