Overall Winners 2020
Professional, Open, Student And Youth Winners Announced

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The World Photography Organisation is delighted to announce the overall winners in the prestigious Sony World Photography Awards 2020. The Photographer of the Year title and accompanying $25,000 prize is awarded to Pablo Albarenga (Uruguay) for his series Seeds of Resistance. Also announced are the ten category winners of the Professional competition alongside 2nd and 3rd place as well as overall winners of the Open, Student and Youth competitions.

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. In 2017, at least 207 leaders and environmentalists were killed while protecting their communities from projects threatening their territories. According to a 2018 report by Global Witness, most of these cases occurred in Brazil with 57 assassinations being recorded, of which 80% were against people defending the Amazon.

Albarenga’s series explores the bond between the defenders and their lands – a sacred area in which hundreds of generations of their ancestors rest. In the photographs, the main characters in the stories are seen from above, as though they are laying down their lives for their territory.

PROFESSIONAL CATEGORY WINNERS

Winning photographers in the Professional competition have been selected by a panel of expert judges for submitting an outstanding body of work of five to ten images, ranging from personal subjects and observations to headline news and little known but critical issues . This year’s winners are:

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ARCHITECTURE

WINNER: Sandra Herber (Canada), Ice Fishing Huts, Lake Winnipeg

2nd place Jonathan Walland (UK)

3rd place José De Rocco (Argentina)

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CREATIVE

WINNER: Pablo Albarenga (Uruguay), Seeds of Resistance

2nd place Dione Roach (Italy)

3rd place Luke Watson (UK)

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DISCOVERY
WINNER: Maria Kokunova (Russian Federation), The Cave

2nd place Hashem Shakeri (Islamic Republic of Iran)

3rd place Hugh Kinsella Cunningham (UK)

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DOCUMENTARY
WINNER: Chung Ming Ko (Hong Kong SAR), Wounds of Hong Kong

2nd place Didier Bizet (France)

3rd place Youqiong Zhang (Mainland China)

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ENVIRONMENT
WINNER: Robin Hinsch (Germany), Wahala

2nd place Álvaro Laiz (Spain)

3rd place Luca Locatelli (Italy)

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LANDSCAPE
WINNER: Ronny Behnert (Germany), Torii

2nd place Florian Ruiz (France)

3rd place Chang Kyun Kim (South Korea)

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NATURAL WORLD & WILDLIFE
WINNER: Brent Stirton (South Africa), Pangolins in Crisis

2nd place Masahiro Hiroike (Japan)

3rd place Adalbert Mojrzisch (Germany)

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PORTRAITURE
WINNER: Cesar Dezfuli (Spain), Passengers

2nd place Denis Rouvre (France)

3rd place Sasha Maslov (Ukraine)

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SPORT
WINNER: Ángel López Soto (Spain), Senegalese Wrestlers

2nd place Lucas Barioulet (France)

3rd place Andrea Staccioli (Italy)

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STILL LIFE
WINNER: Alessandro Gandolfi (Italy), Immortality, Inc.

2nd place Elena Helfrecht (Germany)

3rd place Chen Fangbin (Mainland China)

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To find out more about this year’s winning and finalist projects please visit our

online winners galleries

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OPEN PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR :

The Open competition celebrates the power of single images. Winning photographs are selected for their ability to communicate a remarkable visual narrative combined with technical excellence. Selected from ten Open category winners Tom Oldham (UK) is named Open Photographer of the Year 2020 and receives the $5,000 prize for Black Francis.

The photograph is a black & white portrait of Pixies frontman Charles Thompson (aka Black Francis), originally taken for MOJO Magazine. Asked by Oldham to acknowledge his frustration with photoshoots, Francis offered a perfect gesture of exasperation by digging his hands into his face. The result was an expressive photograph which ran as the lead image for the article.

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STUDENT PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR :

Greek Student Ioanna Sakellaraki was chosen as Student Photographer of the Year 2020 for her series Aeiforia, created in response to the brief Sustainability Now which asked students to produce a body of work connected to environmental sustainability. In her series, Sakellaraki presents night-time photographs of solar panels, wind turbines and battery farms used across the small island of Tilos in Greece which is the first in the Mediterranean to run almost entirely on renewable energy.

Sakellaraki represents the Royal College of Art in the UK and has won €30,000 worth of Sony photography equipment for her institution.

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YOUTH PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR :

Selected from seven category winners, Hsien-Pang Hsieh (Taiwan Region, 19 years old) has won Youth Photographer of the Year 2020 for his image Hurry, featuring a street performer who is seemingly walking in a hurry but is in fact standing still. Inspired by his experience as a newly arrived student in Germany, Hsien-Pang sees the image as his comment on the intensive pace of life and a reminder others to slow down.

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