San Diego, CA—The 2014 Sony World Photography Awards, organized by the World Photography Organization (WPO), is now open for entries. Professional, amateur, youth and student photographers worldwide can enter their work free of charge at worldphoto.org. Photographers will compete for a range of cash prizes and the latest digital imaging equipment from Sony.
Coinciding with the opening of the awards submissions, the WPO launched an online magazine at worldphoto.org/the-magazine. Each month the magazine will center on one key topic affecting the photography industry. It will include interviews, discussions and interactive webinars on that topic and will feature experts drawn from the World Photographic Academy and the wider photography industry.
The theme of the inaugural June edition is photographic awards. Features include the importance of editing your work, a roundup of the top awards to enter and how to make a living from awards. The magazine will also present interviews with the winning and short-listed photographers of the Sony World Photography Awards. The June edition opens with 2013 L’Iris d’Or/Photographer of the Year, Andrea Gjestvang. Future magazine themes include collecting photography, how technology is changing photography and photojournalism. The magazine will also include video interviews, edited versions of which can be seen on WPO’s new dedicated YouTube channel: worldphoto.org/WorldPhotoOrg.
2014 Sony World Photography Awards
Since the launch of the Sony World Photography Awards in 2007, over 555,000 images from 230 countries have been entered and the awards have established themselves as one of the world’s leading photography competitions. The most recent winner of the L’Iris d’Or/Photographer of the Year title is Norwegian photographer Andrea Gjestvang, who won for a powerful series of portraits of children and youths who survived the July 2011 massacre on the island of Utøya, outside of Oslo.
The winner of the 2014 L’Iris d’Or/Photographer of the Year title will be presented with $25,000, and the Open Photographer of the Year will receive $5,000. All category winners will receive the latest digital imaging equipment from Sony, and the Student Focus winner will receive a range of Sony equipment for their university. In addition, winning and short-listed photographs will be published in the 2014 edition of the Sony World Photography Awards book and exhibited at Somerset House in London.
The 2014 Sony World Photography Awards include the following competitions: Professional – 15 categories judged on a series of work; Open – 10 categories judged on a single image; Youth – 3 categories for photographers under age 20; and Student Focus – for higher education photography students aged 18–30. The Open and Youth competition will close for entries on January 6, 2014; the Professional competition will close on January 9, 2014.
The brief for the Student Focus competition is to shoot a single image for the front page of a newspaper. The image can be sensationalist or low key, but it must make the viewer want to learn more and draw attention to an issue that has meaning for the photographer. Entries to the Student Focus competition close on December 6, 2013.
On April 30, 2014, the L’Iris d’Or/Photographer of the Year plus Professional category winners and Open, Youth and Student Focus Photographers of the Year will be revealed at a gala awards ceremony held in London. worldphoto.org
