World in the picture
Daniel Nelson
US photographer John Moor wins the overall Sony World Photography Awards prize and $25,000 for his Liberian ebola pictures and a 19--year-old Malaysian student, Yong Lin Tan, is named Youth Photographer of the Year.
What! Why those photos - are they really the best? That’s one of the pleasures of the annual awards exhibition at London’s Somerset House – to compare your favourites with the judges’ choices.
They had a lot to choose from: 173,444 entries from 171 countries. Imagine sifting through that lot.
It’s a maze for the viewer, too, with categories on Professional, Open, Youth, Photography Student, Low Light, Split Second, Architecture, Arts and Culture, Campaign, Conceptual, Contemporary, Current Affairs, Landscape, Lifestyle, People, Portraiture, Sport, Still Life, Travel. Mobile Phone and National. There’s also a “guest show” on #FutureofCities, which aims to “document the problems, solutions and trends shaping cities globally” and another for Outstanding Contribution to Photography.
For most people – including myself – the categories will be largely irrelevant. They simply want to look at photos.
From that perspective, the exhibition is rewarding, with subjects including Rana Plaza building collapse survivors in Bangladesh (a country that has made its mark in international photography circles), Palestinian circus children, receding glaciers on Mt Kenya (with a novel bid to show climate in action), Indian eye surgery, Bolivian women wrestlers, Burmese punks and solar portraits, China’s Yi ethnic minority. Image by John Moore, 2015 L’Iris d’Or / Sony World Photography Awards’ Photographer of the Year
The Future of Cities section on the other side of the Somerset House courtyard has 12 photo stories, which include the Beijing subway (“a city of the dead”), Robocops in Kinshasa (“They don’t take bribes”), a suburb of Indian laundries doing the washing for Mumbai’s hotels and restaurants, the conversion of Medellin from violent hot spot to smart city, a Johannesburg boxer wounded in a burglary who now works in a gym, Malaysia’s attempt to make itself a world city, and tiny neighbouring Singapore’s vertical garden, 200-metre high park, and “super trees (“It’s likely that this is more the ‘look’ of being green that anything genuinely sustainable, as creepers make their way up airconditioned towers of steel and concrete”.
It’s a photographic travelogue with an array of topics, countries, techniques and styles.
• In a collective statement, the judges said of overall winner John Moore’s Liberia photographs: “John Moore’s photographs of this crisis show in full the brutality of people’s daily lives torn apart by this invisible enemy. However, it is his spirit in the face of such horror that garners praise. His images are intimate and respectful, moving us with their bravery and journalistic integrity. It is a fine and difficult line between images that exploit such a situation, and those that convey the same with heart, compassion and understanding, which this photographer has achieved with unerring skill. Combine this with an eye for powerful composition and cogent visual narrative, and good documentary photography becomes great.”
• John Moore interview
• Sony World Photography Awards
ebola, Liberia
