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28 Stunning Images Showcasing Human Diversity As Shared By The Sony World Photography Awards 2026

Mexico Kenya

The Sony World Photography Awards 2026 have once again highlighted just how powerful photography can be, bringing together an incredible selection of images from around the world. With more than 430,000 submissions from over 200 countries and territories, this year’s competition offers a wide-ranging look at the people, places, and stories shaping life today.

Taking the top honor of Photographer of the Year is Citlali Fabián for “Bilha, Stories of My Sisters,” a moving and deeply personal series centered on the lives, resilience, and shared experiences of Indigenous women in southern Mexico. Alongside her work, this year’s winning and shortlisted images explore everything from wildlife and environmental issues to culture, identity, and social change, showing just how much a single frame can communicate. Now on display at Somerset House in London, the selected works bring together more than 300 photographs that capture both the beauty and complexity of the world through contemporary photography.

#1 “Saving History From The Flames” By Philip Kangas

Photographer of the Year, Youth Competition Description: “When a fire broke out in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in central Stockholm, firefighters worked hard to contain the fire and began transporting art pieces to safety.”

#2 “The Barefoot Volcanologist” By Elle Leontiev

Photographer of the Year, Open Competition, Portraiture Category Description: “On the ash plains of Mount Yasur, on the island of Tanna, Vanuatu, Phillip, an internationally recognized, self-taught volcanologist, stands barefoot atop a volcanic rock bomb. Wearing a lava-protection suit gifted to him by visiting researchers, the volcano smolders behind him, sending a plume of gas and Sulphur into the sky. Phillip grew up beneath the active volcano, and this portrait captures him in his element.”

#3 “Bilha, Stories Of My Sisters” By Citlali Fabián

Photographer of the Year, Creative Category Description: “Mitzy is part of Indigenous Futures, a network that discusses the climate crisis from the perspective of Indigenous peoples. She has participated in forums including COP26 and COP30, and is represented with her ancestors and future generations as a united front in the defense of their territory. Growing up without role models can make it difficult to recognize one’s ability to shape the future. This series seeks to create a precedent through collaboration with activists and artists from Indigenous communities in southern Mexico.”

#4 “Crossing Point” By Will Burrard-Lucas

Winner, Professional Competition, Wildlife & Nature Category Description: “An eastern black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis michaeli) moves through a forested river crossing in Kenya’s Maasai Mara national reserve at night. A remote camera trap was installed here in collaboration with rhino rangers to monitor how individuals use secluded corridors linking feeding areas and water sources. Its primary purpose was conservation monitoring, the system allowed nocturnal scenes to be lit creatively, revealing the wildlife and habitat in dramatic ways that are rarely seen in an area largely closed to tourism.”

#5 “The Place Where I Used To Play” By Jubair Ahmed Arnob

Photographer of the Year, Student Competition Description: “What is the city but the people?’ – William Shakespeare. Arnob returns in memory to Green Model Town, Dhaka, Bangladesh, where the rivers, canals, ponds, and fields that once held laughter are now buried under concrete. He photographed disappearing landscapes in a dreamy, surreal style, layering images with memory and emotion over the period of years.”

#6 “Capybaras At The Forefront Of Dispute And Resistance In Buenos Aires By Anita Pouchard Serra

2nd Place, Professional Competition, Wildlife & Nature Category Description: “Capybaras eat grass in the public areas of the private town of Nordelta, close to a construction zone, 22 March 2025 in Tigre, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Nordelta was built on a wetland, an ecosystem where water is the main factor controlling plant and animal life. The development’s 45,000 upper-class residents have seen the capybara population triple to 1,000, dividing the community and leading the Buenos Aires government to approve population control plans.”

#7 “It’s A Dog’s Life” By Rob Van Thienen

3rd Place, Professional Competition, Sport Category Description: “An Afghan hound strikes a fake rabbit. For many years Van Thienen has attended sighthound training sessions. Many are former racing dogs that have been adopted in order to give them a happy post-racing life. Even after retirement they are still athletes that need to run and chase on a daily basis. At this private track, an artificial rabbit is pulled by wire along the track, allowing the dogs to run alone or in small groups. At the end of the track there is a soft sandbox where they grab the rabbit, Van Thienen’s favorite moment.”

#8 “Buzkashi” By Todd Antony

Winner, Professional Competition, Sport Category Description: “A chapanda (rider), Marengo as depicted in the 19th century painting Napoleon Crossing the Alps. Buzkashi (‘goat pulling’ in Persian) is the fierce, ancient sport of Tajikistan. Similar to polo, but there are no teams and no boundaries. The ball is a goat carcass and the aim is brutally simple, seize it, hold it, break free. The game was born among the nomadic horse cultures of central Asia, where strength and horsemanship were measures of identity.”

#9 “Sixteen And A Half - Eight Months In A Juvenile Prison” By Bagdassarian Alexandre

3rd Place, Professional Competition, Documentary Projects Category Description: “Over a period of eight months, Alexandre Bagdassarian documented the daily lives of young detainees in one of France’s six juvenile prisons, one of the country’s least visible institutions. ‘The cells were delicate spaces for me to photograph, as they are at once impersonal and intimate. What mattered most was the young person’s consent, that he or she genuinely accepted my presence and that of the camera.”

#10 “Country Music In Kenya” By Fredrik Lerneryd

3rd Place, Professional Competition, Perspectives: Category Description: “A woman poses for a portrait during International Cowboy Day. This series was photographed over an 11-month period, with the highlight being the International Cowboy Day festival, in Nairobi, Kenya. The festival drew around 3,000 country music fans to Ngong Racecourse in the final week of July. Country music has been played on the radio in Kenya since colonial times, and the popularity for the genre is growing, with shows being held by various artists in local bars a few times a week.”

#11 “Country Music In Kenya” By Fredrik Lerneryd

3rd Place, Professional Competition, Perspectives Category Description: “Sheriff Knight (centre), the ‘Dancing Cowboy,’ leads the line dance during International Cowboy Day at Ngong Racecourse in Nairobi, Kenya.”

#12 “Constructed Landscapes” By Dafna Talmor

Winner, Professional Competition, Landscape Category Description: “Untitled. This series employs hand-printed and collaged color negatives that are reconfigured into abstracted landscape representations from a personal archive. Purposefully undisclosed locations, sites that may otherwise be loaded with personal and political connotations, are collaged and repurposed. These staged landscapes reference the histories of photography, from Pictorialist combination printing processes to contemporary discourse, conflating the ‘real’ and the imaginary.”

#13 “Homes Of Haor” By Joy Saha

Winner, Professional Competition, Architecture & Design Category Description: “Documenting the vernacular architecture of Ashtagram, Kishoreganj, in Bangladesh’s Haor region, where homes are built on naturally raised mounds that become islands during the monsoon, surrounded by seasonal floodwater, and boats become the primary means of travel. From above, the settlements form distinct patterns shaped by elevation, water and function. Roads, clustered dwellings, and carefully arranged livestock spaces reveal how rural communities design and adapt their built environment to a landscape defined by water.”

#14 “Beneath The Bridge” By Morgan Otagburuagu

2nd Place, Professional Competition, Sport Category Description: “Bisi posing after training, Lagos, Nigeria. Beneath the Bridge documents a makeshift gym where amateur boxers, boys and girls alike, forge their discipline and dreams with nothing but tires, rope, water and willpower. The project creates an intimate, visceral portrait of grassroots aspiration, exploring universal themes of resilience, gender equality in traditionally male spaces, and the profound human need to carve a place of purpose from the margins.”

#15 “Everyday Structures” By André Tezza

2nd Place, Professional Competition, Architecture & Design Category Description: “Loja e Mercado Marielen. Named after one of the owner’s daughters, this store in Campo Largo is a family-run business integrated into the same building where the family lives. This project documents small neighborhood grocery stores on the outskirts of Curitiba, in southern Brazil. These modest structures form an architecture of resistance that persists even as large retail chains reshape the city. Often family-run and linked to domestic spaces, the stores merge work, memory and dwelling into a single building.”

#16 “Koryo-Saram By Federico Borella”

3rd Place, Professional Competition, Portraiture Category Description: “K-pop group Blue Flame inside the university gym during rehearsal in Tashkent, September 2025. Bucheon University, a Korean branch campus in Tashkent, has become one of the main meeting points for this scene, bringing together young people from different backgrounds. Koryo-saram are the descendants of ethnic Koreans from the former USSR who were forcibly deported to Uzbekistan through Stalin’s ethnic cleansing policies. Most identify as Uzbek citizens, with only faint traces of Korean cultural heritage remaining.”

#17 “A Portrait Of The Most Average K-Parenting Today” By Seungho Kim

Winner, Professional Competition, Perspectives Category Description: “South Korea stands at a crossroads. In 2023, the country’s birth rate hit a record-low of 0.72 children per woman, while more than 6m households now find the meaning of family in their dogs. Choosing between a child and a pet has become an ironic reality. However, the photographer of this series chose to put both ends of this spectrum ‘onto life’s hot frying pan’. This series is a fragile, vibrant and beautifully messy record of the K-parenting world that lies ahead.”

#18 “Under The Shadow Of Coca” By Santiago Mesa

Winner, Professional Competition, Documentary Projects Category Description: “Daniel, a young coca leaf picker (raspachín), carries one of the sacks of coca leaves he gathered earlier in the day in the rural community of Jordán Guisia, in Putumayo, southern Colombia. Coca cultivation remains one of the few economic options for rural families in this neglected border region. The project follows farmers and families whose livelihoods depend on an illicit economy shaped by poverty, weak state presence, and armed control, as well as members of Comandos de la Frontera armed group.”

#19 “Jinê Land: Where Women Keep The Earth Alive” By Matteo Trevisan

2nd Place, Professional Competition, Environment Category Description: “Şirîn Ehmed is a teacher at Jinwar and has lived there since its foundation in 2017. Jinwar is a women-only village built for women and their children in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. Its name comes from Kurdish, jin meaning woman and war meaning space or home, forming ‘women’s space’. September 2025. The series tells the story of women shaping the ecological and social future of Rojava in north-east Syria, where Kurdish, Assyrian, Arab, and Armenian communities have self-organised.”

#20 “Wild” By Wolfgang Duerr

3rd Place, Professional Competition, Wildlife & Nature Category Description: “Images in this series were taken by a wildlife camera. Exposures were made when animals activated the camera via motion sensors, with the photographer responsible for the preparation and follow-up work, installing the wildlife cameras in carefully selected locations and evaluating and processing the images generated over a period of months. The finished work is thus a co-production with the wild animals, whose decisive part, the moment the image is created, was not chosen by the photographer.”

#21 “The Faithful” By Jean-Marc Caimi & Valentina Piccinni

Winner, Professional Competition, Portraiture Category Description: “Between the death of one pope and the election of the next, crowds gathered in St Peter’s Square, Vatican City, for an event that functions simultaneously as sacred ritual and global spectacle. The pilgrimage took on the traits of fandom, as rosaries, flags and prayer gestures were performed with full awareness of the attendant cameras and media. The portraits capture ‘doubled consciousness’: believers performing acts of faith within a mediated public space, where personal conviction merges with stadium-scale performance.”

#22 “The Oyster” By Andreas Secci

2nd Place, Professional Competition, Landscape Category Description: “Untitled. This series of abstract landscapes depicts oyster farming on the French coast of Normandy and Brittany, where the farms stretch along the entire coastline, shaping the character of the landscape. With a tidal range of up to 12 meters, the oyster beds disappear from view at high tide but are fully exposed at low tide. Yet it is only from a bird’s-eye view that the vastness of these abstract landscapes, reminiscent of Roman legions, can be appreciated.”

#23 “Experiments In Stillness” By Gargi Sharma

2nd Place, Professional Competition, Still Life Category Description: “This image maps out the messy, beautiful journey of the human heart.’ By placing different stages of love together in one frame, the photographer has created a cycle where every emotion has a home. The series explores the quiet dialogue between the object and the viewer, allowing space for multiple interpretations and moments of stillness. Framed with intention, everyday objects gradually create a visual language, gain the ability to hold meaning, and give form to abstract ideas.”

#24 “Chinese Watchtowers” By Chen Liang

3rd Place, Professional Competition, Architecture & Design Category Description:“Yuqing watchtower, established in Jiangmen in 1922 by a person named He, who returned to China from overseas. Many of the watchtowers in Jiangmen, in Guangdong Province, were built during the time of the Republic of China from 1912 to 1949, as public refuges and defensive fortresses. Most were constructed by Chinese people living overseas who had returned to their home towns or raised funds to build them in the countryside, making them a unique architectural form that combines both Chinese and western influences.”

#25 “Beneath Beofhód” By Shane Hynan

3rd Place, Professional Competition, Environment Category Description: “A family footing turf for domestic use. Ticknevin, County Kildare, Ireland. Beofhód, ‘life beneath the sod’ in Irish, evokes the primal significance of bogs in Celtic tradition. The series examines the cultural and environmental aspects of bogs in Ireland and contemplates themes of social and environmental justice, topographical mapping and evolving perceptions of peatlands in a de-industrialized era. Ecological imperatives have ended large-scale peat extraction, but have created tension with harvesting for domestic use.”

#26 “Be:longing” By Marisa Reichert

2nd Place, Professional Competition, Portraiture Category Description: “Rully Mallay, 64, at her boarding house, Yogyakarta, June 2025. A trans rights activist and the founder of the Waria Crisis Center shelter for sick and elderly trans women, a much needed place as many trans women live alone after coming out and have no relatives to care for them in old age or during difficult phases of life. The series documents the lives of older Muslim trans people in Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia. People of the queer community face the challenge of reconciling their faith and identity with society’s expectations.”

#27 “The Palm, On Piru” By Ben Brooks

3rd Place, Professional Competition, Creative Category Description: “Carson, California, 2025. Documenting G-Funk and Gangster Rap artists across Piru and Blood-affiliated neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles, Compton, Carson and Inglewood, the work offers a visual study of the communities foundational to west coast hip hop and southern California’s parallel gang culture, tracing a lineage from the rise of the Crips and the Piru Street Boys to the formation of the Bloods, and the emergence of gangster rap, using the red and pink spectrum of infra red film as aesthetic language.”

#28 “Cap Formentor” By Michael Blann

3rd Place, Professional Competition, Landscape Category Description: “Cap Formentor lighthouse cycling climb leading to Sa Calobra, December 2025. Tramuntana mountains, Majorca, Spain. Mountain Roads is a series of photopolymer etchings of iconic European mountain roads. This ongoing project aims to document the greatest cycling roads spanning the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Dolomites, the Picos and the Spanish Islands. It celebrates the permanence of mountains and the feats of engineering and construction required to navigate and build a route through and over these formidable climbs.”

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