Photography News Issue 66

Photography News | Issue 66 | photographynews.co.uk

19

SWPA

2019 SonyWorld PhotographyAwards Awards

Now into its 12th year, over 327,000 images were entered into this year’s Sony World Photography Awards (SWPA) and its four categories: professional, open, student and youth. Within the professional and open

categories there are ten subject categories that include architecture, landscape, portraiture and street photography. The overall winner is selected from across those ten categories and in the case of the professional category,

between five and ten pictures must have been entered. In the professional landscape category, British photographers dominated, claiming all of the top three positions, and we’re

delighted to showcase their images here. YanWang Preston was the landscape winner with Marco Kesseler second and Kieran Dodds in third place. Our congratulations to all of them.

First place

To the South of the Colourful Clouds by YanWang Preston Series description: ‘To the South of the Colourful Clouds’ (2017) depicts the otherworldly ‘ecology recovery’ landscape in Haidong

so, the topsoil of the entire area is replaced by a type of red, semi-artificial soil, which forms the base for introduced, mostly non-indigenous plants, including thousands of mature trees. Meanwhile, green plastic netting is used to cover everything unappealing to the eye, fromconstructionwaste to disused

quarries. The town’s objective here has shifted froman ‘ecological’ concern to a cosmetic one of trying to be visually green. The images are part of an eight-year project ,‘Forest’ (2010-2017), for which the photographer investigates the politics of recreating forests and ‘natural’ environments in newChinese cities.

Development Zone in Dali, Yunnan Province, China. Here, a small rural area is being urbanised systematically to create “an international leisure town and an ecologymodel town”. In doing

Right An image showing a detailed ecology recovery landscape. The background is a quarry face covered by green/ cyan plastic netting. A young sapling stands in the centre, supported by a bag of nutrition liquid and a pile of semi-artificial red soil Above A group of transplanted trees wrapped in green and white plastic, standing above a new pond as part of the Haidong North Mountain Forest Park © YanWang Preston, UK, first place, Professional: Landscape, 2019 SonyWorld Photography Awards

Powered by