The World Photography Organisation has opened the 12th edition of the Sony World Photography Awards, the world’s most diverse photography competition.

Celebrating the best contemporary photography from the past year, the Awards give vast exposure, visibility and opportunity to photographers worldwide on an annual basis.  Sony supports the Awards to help the continued development of photographic culture throughout the world, celebrating the best of past and present practitioners, as well as giving a global platform to today’s talent. Photographers worldwide are invited to submit to the Awards’ four competitions: Professional, outstanding bodies of work between 5-10 images across ten categories: Open, rewarding the world’s best single images across ten categories, Youth, a single brief for emerging talent aged 12-19, and Student, for photography students across the globe. The National Awards program will also reward local photographic talent.

The 2019 Awards is marked by the introduction of two challenging new categories in the Professional competition: Brief and Documentary. Brief will test photographers abilities to compose a body of work on a specific theme. The inaugural theme of this category is ‘Identity’. Documentary is a new category for bodies of work portraying facts about a chosen subject, giving insight into contemporary issues and news. In choosing these new categories, the Awards hopes to continue appealing to a diverse range of contemporary photographers.   In the Open competition a new Creative category has been introduced.
Submissions to the Awards are free at www.worldphoto.org. For the full list of categories and prizes click here.