At first glance, this looks like sci-fi: a bulbous, gravity-defying tree stretching its twisted limbs towards a sky streaked with pinks, purples and cosmic dust. But nothing here is imagined. The tree is real. The sky is real. And the place is Socotra; an isolated Yemeni island in the Arabian Sea where Earth masquerades as somewhere else entirely.
Swiss photographer Benjamin Barakat’s image, Queen Bottle Tree, won the Lone Tree Award at this year's International Landscape Photographer of the Year contest, and for good reason.
