Having announced the judging panel on 15 September, the 2017 Sony World Photography Awards are now accepting entries.
The winning image in the Open category of the 2016 Sony World Photography Awards: Fireflies in the bamboo forest; © Kei Nomiyama, Japan, Open Photographer of the Year, 2016 Sony World Photography Awards.
The annual competition is free to enter and entries can be submitted online through the Competitions section of the World Photography Organisation website. All photographs entered must have been taken in 2016 (January 1 to December 31, 2016), although entries in the Professional competition may have been taken prior to this, provided they were first published in 2016.
The competition is divided into four separate categories: Professional, Open, Youth and Student Focus. The Professional category is further split into 10 genres: Architecture, Conceptual, Landscape, Natural World, Portraiture, Still Life, Current Affairs & News, Contemporary Issues, Daily Life and Sport. This competition will be judged on a body of work. The Open competition has similar categories and judges will award the best single images from across the 10 diverse categories, from Architecture and Landscape to Still Life and Street Photography. In each category there will be one winner plus up to 10 shortlisted photographers and up to 40 commended photographers.
The Youth competition is for photographers aged 12-19. This year the theme is ‘Beauty’. There will be one Youth competition winner plus up to 10 shortlisted photographers and up to 40 commended photographers. The Student Focus competition is exclusively for those undertaking a full-time photography course. Each year all registered universities are given a unique 1st challenge, with a time frame given for their students to respond and submit a single image per university. A shortlist of 10 students are then selected and given a second and final challenge. This year’s first challenge is ‘Memories’.
The deadline for the National Award, Open and Youth Competitions is January 5, 2017 11.59:59pm (GMT). The Professional competition deadline is January 10, 2017 11.59:59pm (GMT), while the Student Focus competition deadline is December 5, 2016 11.59:59pm (GMT). For more information and to view previous award-winning images, visit https://www.worldphoto.org/sony-world-photography-awards.
