2018 Sony World Photography Awards

Today I went to the Sony World Photography Awards exhibition at Somerset House, London. I hope to cover it in more detail in a later blogpost, but for now I shall list my initial impressions:

• It took me much longer to see the whole exhibition than I had anticipated, due to the wide range of photography genres covered.
• The judges' decisions seemed to me in many cases to be a bit arbitrary — several of the 1st-prize-winning photographs I found to be inferior to runners-up or shortlisted entries.
• Some of the selected images could only be seen as "good photographs" once they had been given some context by the accompanying descriptions.
• Some of the descriptions — provided by the entrants — were laughably pretentious (in my opinion, of course).
  
• There was a much higher percentage of black-and-white images than I expected.
• I'm glad I went. Despite my criticisms above, I found the exhibition inspiring in its breadth, quality, and relevance.
  

Check out the galleries here (open until 6th May):
https://www.worldphoto.org/sony-world-photography-awards/winners-galleries/2018-1

2018 Professional Winners

See galleries

2018 Open Winners

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2018 National Awards' Winners

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2018 Youth Winner & Shortlist

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2018 Student Focus Winner & Shortlist

See galleries