Sony World Photography Awards Student and Youth competitions 2020: Shortlists and grant recipients announced
The World Photography Organisation announces today the shortlisted photographers in the Student competition and new information about photographic projects by Sony Student Grant 2019 recipients. Also included are details of photographers shortlisted in the Youth competition. Works by Student and Youth shortlists and Student Grant recipients will go on display as part of the Sony World Photography Awards 2020 exhibition at Somerset House this April.
STUDENT COMPETITION SHORTLIST
The Student shortlistfeatures bodies of work by ten students at leading higher education institutions from across the world. Students were challenged to submit a series of five to ten images responding to two different briefs. All ten shortlisted photographers have won Sony digital imaging equipment to help complete their project with the Student Photographer of the Year winner due to receive €30,000 worth of Sony photography equipment for their institution.
The first brief Invisible Lines asked students to engage with the stories of people trying to break invisible barriers and structures whether natural, social or intellectual. Reyad Abedin’s (Bangladesh, Counter Foto – A Center for Visual Arts), The Name of My City is Dust and Smoke and Life features images of his native city Dhaka in which rapid infrastructure development and the eroded boundaries between nature and manmade constructions has had a devastating effect on the ecological balance of the environment in and around the city. For her project The Truth is in The Soil, Ioanna Sakellaraki (Greece, Royal College of Art) dwelled with the traditional communities of female professional mourners, or moirologists, inhabiting the Mani peninsula in Greece. Responding to personal grief and loss, Sakellaraki’s images depict the silhouettes of the mourning women projected against abstract backdrops which convey our relationship to and acceptance of death.
The second brief, Sustainability Now,tasked students with producing a body of work connected to environmental sustainability. Highlights include Guardians by Fangbin Chen (China Mainland, Qilu University of Technology), which records efforts by the photographer’s local community to contain the spread of coronavirus. Referencing the predation of wild animals as the likely source of the epidemic, Chen’s photographs urge people to reconsider their relationship to the natural world. In Roots of Cause, Arantza Sánchez Reyes (Mexico, LCI Monterrey) reflects on the efforts of individuals living in Monterrey, Mexico, known as one of the most polluted cities in Latin America, to strike a renewed balance with nature by practicing a more sustainable lifestyle.
Other featured students include: Micaela del Sol Angulo (Peru, Centro de la Imagen), Robin Ansart (France, Ecole Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière), Amy Davis (South Africa, CityVarsity Cape Town), Ashley Tofa (New Zealand, The University of Auckland), Tobia Faverio (Italy, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) and Chip Skingley (UK, University of the West of England – Bristol).
This year’s Student shortlist was judged by Tim Clark, curator, writer and Editor in Chief 1000 Words. Read More »
