Sony World Photography Awards 2023

This was quite a confusing exhibition at Somerset House. The venue is in any case a convoluted space of small rooms, some of which interconnect – almost like a Mike Nelson exhibition waiting to happen! Added to this the exhibition was held on two sides separated by a large courtyard, and quite a number of different categories and sub-categories as well as Professional and Open competitions which seemed very jumbled up.

I think they wanted to show as many of the entries as possible, so a number of rooms had one or even several large screens looping through the entries – some of which re-occurred in other parts of the exhibition. Other entries were conspicuous by their absence – the friend I went with bought tickets after seeing an article about the award featuring a drone shot of chillies drying in the sun, but to his disappointment the image was not in the actual exhibition.

I was left feeling that we were in an interesting situation where, since the award has an excellent website (link below), it was actually better to look at the images virtually rather than visit the exhibition!

Fig. 1 *The Electrician*
from the ongoing series *Pseudomnesia* (2022-)

Much more controversial was a picture created with the aid of AI, which won the creative category only to have the award turned down by the photographer Boris Eldagsen despite apparently confirming the “co-creation” of the image using AI to the organisers before he was announced as the winner. As far as I can work out the category he won allows significant manipulation, but the artist withdrew his picture to make a point and promote further debate about AI and photography which he states should be separate categories. This led to an argument with the organisers who then took down his image, stating that he had not been honest with them in the application process. Personally I think this might have missed a trick, as this was one of the interesting aspects of the exhibition and would have attracted interest and visitors. Maybe the organisers did not want the exhibition to turn into a debate on a single issue, and so to some extent denied the artist that platform. The artist suggested they donate the prize money to fund an exhibition in Ukraine – perhaps he should have done that himself and let the image win, or maybe he himself withdrew permission somehow to exhibit it as a winner. Or maybe by refusing the award they could not exhibit him as a winner, although I felt they could have found an alcove for the print at Somerset House somewhere – the whole building is basically a series of interconnected alcoves!

The publicity has probably worked in Eldagsen’s favour – I believe the category prizes are $5000 but his prints normally sell for €4,500 and the image in question is now advertised as price on application…

For once the overall winner was one of my favourites, a strange and creative approach to tracing a Libyan friend abducted and killed by government forces. Edgar Martins had himself smuggled in to Libya and photographed people he met in set scenarios that reminded him of his friend. Some images were in colour and some in b&w, with the colour ones somehow seeming more unreal and the b&w ones more documentary. I was lucky to be back at Somerset House not long after for Photo London where I saw Edgar Martins interviewed: https://photo515050level3.wordpress.com/2023/05/30/photo-london-2023/.

I noticed a lot of photography that made the real seem unreal (as opposed to what might be considered the more usual way round). For example Andres Gallardo Albajar took 3rd place in the Architecture & Design section, with an impossibly vibrant and structured series of images about the Muralla Roja apartment complex.

In the Landscape section the prize was taken by Kacper Kowalski by flying over frozen bodies of water in a gyrocopter and recording in b&w the patterns he found there. The results were particularly beautiful when printed large on the walls, showing how photography can so completely transform something.

In the Creative section the landscape of Mozambique was transformed, by Edoardo Delille & Giulia Piermartiri in their project Africa Blues, by projecting onto its surface an impression of how it might look in the future after climate change.

However the Documentary section showed that such strategies are not necessarily needed to present unfamiliar places – the images of the Womens’ Peace Movement in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Somali fish market, the latter perhaps enhanced by use of contrast, showed how outside the Western experience the World remains a very different and surprising place.

Perhaps a project that brought all of this together was Atrapanieblas or Fog Nets by Alessandro Cinque, which highlighted a project to combat water shortage in Lima, a city built in the desert.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS