Sony World Photography Awards 2021, the photographers awarded by the competition

The pandemic does not stop the creativity of photographers around the world, whether they are long-time professionals or young novices. The confirmation comes from the numbers of the Sony World Photography Awards (SWPA) 2021, which this year has selected its newly announced winners from over 330,000 entries from 200 countries. A tsunami of photos among which the jury selected the best, not only for the technical level of realization or for the specific beauty of the images, but also above all for the stories they know how to tell.

Let’s start with the most prestigious award: the Photographer of the Year 2021 is the British documentary maker Craig Easton with the series entitled Bank Top. Born from the collaboration with the writer and scholar Abdul Aziz Hafiz, the work analyzes the way in which the community of northern England is represented by the media, focusing mainly on the Bank Top neighborhood in Blackburn.

Bank Top was born from the Kick Down the Barriers initiative, promoted by the Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery in response to the image provided by the media of the town of Blackburn, presented as “the city with the highest rate of segregation in Great Britain”. To counter this vision, the museum has invited artists and writers to visit and learn about the communities of the various neighborhoods and collaborate with the residents. The one-year project brought Easton and Hafiz to work closely with the locals, to bring back local stories and experiences through a series of black and white portraits accompanied by captions. The reportage highlighted issues of social deprivation, housing, unemployment, immigration and representation, as well as the impact of past and present foreign policies. A work that is rightly rewarded because it overcomes simplifications and generalizations, showing the context in which different communities were formed that now manage to thrive together.

“I am proud that my work has been appreciated by the Sony World Photography Awards,” said Craig Easton on receiving the award. «I photograph to learn, to try to understand, to document and share stories – he explains – It is a privilege to be able to do so by questioning perceptions and stereotypes, a theme that I believe to be particularly important. It is fantastic that the stories of the ignored or misrepresented communities of Northern England, where I live, can be recognized and shared globally. Thank you”.

It should also be noted that Easton’s latest work is itself part of a larger project, a path that the photographer has been following for some time in the region and which has produced other works, collecting further awards: there is, for example, Thatcher’s Children, a survey on the chronic nature of poverty through the experience of three generations of the same family, which ranked second in the Documentary category in the professional competition, again within SWPA 2021. And then, again, there was Sixteen, a reportage among the finalists of the Portraits category for the 2017 Sony World Photography Awards, where the photographer investigated the dreams, aspirations and fears of 16-year-olds from various walks of life. As Photographer of the Year, Craig Easton wins a $ 25,000 cash prize and a set of Sony digital photographic equipment.

The other main prizes were won by Tamary Kudita (Zimbabwe) who took home the title of Open Photographer of the Year 2021 with the African Victorian portrait, practically a gauntlet launched against the stereotypes that affect the image of women of color . The Student Photographer of the Year 2021 is Coenraad Heinz Torlage (South Africa), who in the Young Farmers series tells the challenges and aspirations of young South African farmers, while Graciela Iturbide (Mexico), wins the Outstanding Contribution to Photography 2021 award. Youth Photographer of the Year 2021 goes to Indian photographer Pubarun Basu.

It is nice to note that, even in this edition of the SWPA, there was no shortage of awards for Italian photographers in the Professionals competition, where the jury rewards technical excellence and the ability to narrate reality.

Vito Fusco won the first prize in the Documentary category with The Killing Daisy project dedicated to pyrethrum, a plant grown in Kenya: poisonous to insects, today it has become a fundamental element of the local industry producing natural insecticides. Another Italian, Lorenzo Tugnol, won the third prize in the category for having told with his images the terrible explosion of the Port of Beirut, when in the summer of 2020 almost 3 thousand tons of ammonium nitrate exploded, devastating the city and killing hundreds of people.

Simone Tramonte’s reportage is also beautiful, winning first place in the Environment category with the series of shots Net-zero Transition, documenting how Iceland has managed to meet its energy needs by using one hundred percent renewable sources.

Among the excellent “placings” are also Alessandro Pollio and Andrea Ferro: the first won the second place in the Still Life category, with a series that tells the life at home during the first lockdown in Milan, while Ferro took second place in the Landscape category with a report on outdoor billboards. Second place, finally, also for Luigi Bissolati, who was awarded in the Creative Photography category.