Edgar Martins (Portugal) has won the Photographer of the Year title in the Sony World Photography awards for his project honouring his friend and photojournalist Anton Hammerl who was abducted and killed on 5 April 2011 by government militia, during the Libyan Civil War.

Martins’ work, ‘Our War’, was selected as the winning project from the 10 category winners of the Professional competition. His images, and those of the other category winners, alongside some of the second- and third-placed photographers can be seen at Sony World Photography Awards exhibition at Somerset House in London from the 14th of April to the 1st of May 2023.

The exhibition also features works by the recipient of this year’s Outstanding Contribution to Photography award, the esteemed Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi.

As well as the Photographer of the Year title, Edgar Martins wins a $25,000 (USD) cash prize and a selection of Sony imaging gear. He is also granted a solo presentation of his work as part of next year’s Sony World Photography Awards exhibition.

Professional Category Winners

All the category winners receive Sony’s digital imaging kit, this year’s winners are:

Architecture and Design
Winner: Fan Li (China Mainland) for his series Cement Factory

Finalists: 2nd place Servaas Van Belle (Belgium); 3rd place Andres Gallardo Albajar (Spain)

Creative

Winner: Lee-Ann Olwage (South Africa) for her series The Right to Play

Finalists: 2nd place Noemi Comi (Italy); 3rd place Edoardo Delille & Giulia Piermartiri (Italy)

Documentary Projects

Winner: Hugh Kinsella Cunningham (United Kingdom) for his series The Women’s Peace Movement in Congo

Finalists: 2nd place Mohammed Salem (State of Palestine); 3rd place Tariq Zaidi (United Kingdom)

Environment

Winner: Marisol Mendez (Bolivia) & Federico Kaplan (Argentina) for their series Miruku

Finalists: 2nd place Jonas Kakó (Germany); 3rd place Axel Javier Sulzbacher (Germany)

Landscape

Winner: Kacper Kowalski (Poland) for his series Event Horizon

Finalists: 2nd place Bruno Zanzottera (Italy); 3rd place Fabio Bucciarelli (Italy)

Portfolio

Winner: James Deavin (United Kingdom) for his submission Portfolio

Finalists: 2nd place Marylise Vigneau (France); 3rd place Marjolein Martinot (Netherlands)

Portraiture

Winner: Edgar Martins (Portugal) for his series Our War

Finalists: 2nd place Ebrahim Noroozi (Islamic Republic of Iran); 3rd place Jean-Claude Moschetti (France)

Sport

Winner: Al Bello (United States) for his series Female Pro Baseball Player Succeeds in All Male Pro League

Finalists: 2nd place Andrea Fantini (Italy); 3rd place Nicola Zolin (Italy)

Still Life
Winner: Kechun Zhang (China Mainland) for his series The Sky Garden

Finalists: 2nd place Carloman Macidiano Céspedes Riojas (Peru); 3rd place Jagoda Malanin (Poland)

Wildlife and Nature

Winner: Corey Arnold (United States) for his series Cities Gone Wild

Finalists: 2nd place Adalbert Mojrzisch (Germany); 3rd place Sriram Mural (India)

Open Photographer of the Year

This competition celebrates the power of a single image and it was won by Dinorah Graue Obscura (Mexico) who receives a $5,000 (USD) cash prize and Sony digital imaging equipment.

Student Photographer of the Year

Students were invited to submit 5 to 10 images on the theme ‘In a Changing World’, highlighting positive stories of development and progress from across the world. The competition was won by Long Jing (China Mainland) of Yunnan Arts University. Along with the title, Student Photographer of the Year, Long Jing won his university €30,000’s worth of Sony digital imaging equipment.

Youth Photographer of the Year

The theme for this year’s Youth competition was ‘Your Everyday’. It was won by Hai Wang (China Mainland, 17 years-old) whose work was selected from a shortlist of 7 by photographers under the age of 19.

Sustainability Prize

Alessandro Cinque (Italy) has been announced as the first winner of the Sustainability Prize. He receives a $5,000 cash prize and a presentation of his project as part of the Sony World Photography Awards exhibition in London.

This new prize was developed in collaboration with the United Nations Foundation and Sony Pictures’ Picture to recognise the stories, people and organisations whose actions highlight one of the United Nations’ environmental Sustainable Development Goals.

Cinque won the prize for his series ‘Atrapanieblas’ (Fog Nets) which documents an innovative solution helping to tackle chronic water shortages in Lima, Peru.

Outstanding Contribution to Photography

This year’s Outstanding Contribution to Photography award was bestowed on Rinko Kawauchi who is regarded to be one of the most important Japanese photographers working today.

People in the magazine business, people in the worlds of graphic art and design, people who were alive in the ’60s—like to talk about the famous Esquire look of the era. (Okay, sometimes too much, in our opinion, but we’ll take the attention.) Many of Esquire’s covers from that time have become iconic—reproduced, recognized, still discussed. And when we talk about the most famous of those covers—Muhammad Ali, Sonny Liston, Andy Warhol—we’re talking about the work of photographer Carl Fischer, who died this week at his home in New York at the age of 98. Fischer was part of a wave of groundbreaking photographers that included Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, and Bruce Davidson, whose work began appearing in popular magazines in the mid-’50s. Esquire was an oversized
magazine until 1971—it measured 10” by 13”—so the visceral impact of full-page photographs or two-page spreads was powerful.

Members of the last remaining firing squad in the country, Utah, 1966.

But here’s something people don’t talk about as much, or enough: These photographers were assigned not just covers but journalistic essays. Fischer may be best-known for his covers (he shot 44 for Esquire from 1963-’80), but the photo essays he contributed to the magazine—on white segregationists; bootcamp at Parris Island; the last remaining firing squad in the country, in Utah—were not merely a companion to the reporting of John Sack, Tom Wolfe, and Gay Talese that appeared in the same pages, but very often its equal. Photojournalism at its most evocative and personal.

Drill sergeant in boot camp, Parris Island, South Carolina, 1965.

Fischer began his career as an art director taking pictures on the side. But his hobby soon turned into a vocation. I had the good fortune of visiting Fischer at his studio in 2016. It was a neatly organized space and as we sat and discussed his career for a few hours. Fischer, still dapper, wore black slacks and a dress shirt, and spoke in an unhurried, friendly manner, his New York accent barely noticeable. He wasn’t without an ego but Fischer was more self-effacing that I expected; he seemed to genuinely enjoy the collaborative nature of his work more than needing to take credit for it himself. It was a pleasure spending that short time with him. We’ve reprinted the interview below. I hope you enjoy it.—Alex Belth

Carl Fischer’s Ten Most Iconic Esquire Covers

Open Gallery

Esquire: Did you study painting at Cooper Union?

Carl Fischer: We had painting classes but I was more interested in graphic design. When I graduated I was an art director for a half a dozen years. All of our careers were accidental. I got a Fulbright Scholarship and I went to England. I went there to do book design, typography, which I always liked and I did that for a while. Then I got bored with it and they had a dark room that was not being used. They didn’t have a photography instructor, so I got some books from the library and I learned how to develop film and I took pictures and I liked it, it was fun. When I came back, I was an art director again but I would do freelance pictures for agencies on the side.

Actress Claudia Cardinale from cover photo shoot, December, 1966.

ESQ: What kind of camera did you use?

CF: I used a rolleicord, I couldn’t afford a rolleiflex. When I got out of school, magazines were mostly illustrated, drawn pictures. Photography came in little by little in the ’50s but photography was not an art. It wasn’t sold in galleries, people didn’t collect photography.

ESQ: Even guys like Alfred Stieglitz? Wasn’t he recognized at that point?

CF: Only in a very small group of like five people. I have an Irving Penn color print. His work now sells for $50-60,000 a print. I worked at Look Magazine for a short while and I picked it up out of the garbage can. They had used it for something at the magazine and then when they were through with it they threw it away. Photography was a craft. It wasn’t art, it was just photography. Irving Penn’s stuff was not art. There were no photography galleries. In my lifetime, it changed from being a newspaper with a speed graphics camera and a flash bulb into what it’s become, completely different. Now everyone’s a photographer. Which is fine. A lot of people find that they like art and it’s not intimidating.

ESQ: As you said there was a change in magazine advertising from strictly illustration to photography, as an art director, were you starting to work with photographers?

Actor Robert Mitchum, 1964.

CF: Yes. I still wanted to see what photographers did. As an art director, I hired different photographers every time I had an assignment. I never worked with the same photographer twice. I wanted to see how they worked, Avedon and others, and often I was disappointed.

ESQ: Disappointed in their work? Or that you didn’t get as much out of them as you expected to?

CF: Both. Disappointed in their work and disappointed in what I got. I rejected an Avedon photograph that he did for me. I hated it. Then he did another one that was even worse. I had an adventure one weekend where I shot the ad myself because we had no more money. I got free models to help me out and a stylist and I shot the picture on the weekend and it ran. We didn’t tell the client that it was not Avedon anymore because they had paid for him. It was an adequate picture, it wasn’t sensational but I said, “Oh, there’s no magic in this.” Like people who have iPhones now, there’s no magic in it. You can take a good picture with anything, as Apple is very wisely doing by running artful photographs as ads, to show how good you can take a photograph with iPhone, which goes back to the fact that people took great photographs with box cameras.

“Teen-Time” spread in Esquire, July, 1965.

ESQ: Did you find that you were just taking more and more photographs for yourself? Were you taking a camera around with you?

CF: I never became a fine artist photographer. I did some pictures for myself, yes, but I was so busy. I would work nights and weekends doing photography freelance until it got so busy that I just quit my job as an art director and opened a studio with a friend of mine.

ESQ: What was it like leaving art direction and working as a full-time photographer?

CF: I loved art direction, I loved design. I figured I was never going to make a living in photography so I’m going to have to go back to art directing eventually but I never had to. I got very busy doing photography. I hired a lot of people. We had a very big studio and so I never got back to doing designing which I was sad about because I like typography, I like designing. I like that but you can’t do everything.

ESQ: You first started appearing in Esquire in the Fifties but then really caught on as a regular in the Sixties.

Judge Leander Perez, Sr, 1963.

CF: I remember going around the south photographing segregationist leaders. Harold Hayes said, “Don’t use your wise-guy wide-angle lens. We want to be fair to these people, even though we hate their guts. We want to appear to be fair.” So I didn’t use my goddamn wide angle lens, I took straight portraits of them. Why closeups? Maybe that was my idea, I don’t know why. They had interesting faces. They were such nasty people that when I got back, I had shot it on a small camera and I enlarged it on 8 x 10 film on my studio enlarger, and I made it very contrasting so that the pores would stick out.

ESQ: You worked with several art directors at Esquire but your most recognized work are from Esquire covers and George Lois was in charge of them. Would you just take the photograph for him? Would he conceptualize the picture?

CF: He conceptualized most of them. He was very good at that. Not all of them though, although he took credit for all of them, which led to our falling out. Lois to me was the Donald Trump of art directors. We had a terrible blow up and I never worked with him after that. It had to do with him taking credit for things that he had nothing to do with, including covers. His name was on all the covers. Now when he publishes the covers, he airbrushes my name out. That was our relationship, like Gilbert and Sullivan, we just didn’t get along.

Original image featured on the July, 1968 cover of Esquire.

ESQ: But do you get a sense that there are some people who are successful because success is so important to them that the sort of material success, the ego-driven successes ?

CF: I had a theory once—I’m not sure it’s correct—that early success is poisonous. Paul Rand, an art director that I worked with, was successful because he was around during World War II when nobody else was around. He was able to become a big success right away. Who else? George Lois was a success young. I think everybody who is successful young has a fear they aren’t going to be able to sustain it. I think that goes with everybody—presidents, everybody. You can’t be at the top of the mountain without realizing that it’s a steep drop.

ESQ: And sometimes the work that you become famous for is out of your control.

Carl Fischer working in his studio with Muhammad Ali, 1968.

CF: The other side of the coin is when something you’ve done is very well-liked and you’re famous for it — I sell more pictures of Muhammad Ali as Saint Sebastian than anything else and that doesn’t make me happy because it’s an adequate photograph, certainly, but I’ve done better.

ESQ But it’s about something bigger than you.

CF: Yes.

ESQ: Which I can imagine is almost a detached kind of feeling. It would be one thing if it was a personal favorite photograph of yours that you adored for its aesthetic merits.

CF: But it’s not.

Outtake from 1973 Esquire photo shoot with Mama Cass Elliot.

ESQ: At the same point, at least you’re stuck with something that’s given you lots of wonderful things in your life.

CF: Yeah, it’s fine. You can’t be unhappy that you made a movie like The Graduate that was so great but then you couldn’t do it again. It’s frustrating: What did I do? What happened? Why can’t I do it again?

Saloon owner Toots Shor in the rubbles of the old Yankee Stadium, October 1973.

AB: Do you have fond memories of your magazine work?

CF: I did a lot of work for Redbook at the time where they would send me the manuscript and say: “Do something.” That was really great, I’d read the manuscript and I could do anything, sometimes it was very good. Sometimes it wasn’t very good, but it was a great opportunity to do something. I find that I don’t do well when I see a blank white canvas. I don’t know where to begin. But if you’ve got an assignment—do something with this terrible story—you figure out something. It’s kind of like a puzzle. Art, in many ways, is like a puzzle. How do you solve this thing? There’s no magical ways for it, there’s no rules for it.

Outtake from Roy Cohn Esquire cover, 1968.

AB: In your industry, those decisions are made because you have your next assignment.

CF: Deadlines solves a lot of problems. I always loved the fact that there were assignments and a deadline where you had to finish it. A fine artist doesn’t know when it’s over. Limitations are great.

Cher photographed in New York for an Esquire cover, 1974.

[This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.]

By Shubhi Mishra: If you are looking for something that will absolutely tug at your heartstrings, stop your search as we have the perfect video for you. So, a photographer asked an elderly Sikh man to pose for some pictures at his grocery shop. A clip of the same has gone viral online and it is too sweet for words.

The now-viral video was shared on Instagram by a photographer named Sutej Pannu. The clip started with Pannu walking up to an elderly Sikh man who was sitting at his grocery shop. He asked him to give 10 candies and two packets of chips. Later, Pannu asked if he could photograph him at his shop.

The man obliged and posed for the photographs as directed. Pannu also printed one of the photographs instantly and gave it to the man. “That is very kind of you. Thank you so much, wish you a long life,” the elderly man said.

The man’s gratitude will make you cry happy tears, for sure!

Sutej also wrote a heartfelt caption about self-awareness and spiritual awakening while sharing the video.

“One of the most powerful aspects of spiritual awakening is the heightened sense of self-awareness that comes with it. Through self-reflection and introspection, individuals become more attuned to their thoughts, emotions, and behaviours,” read an excerpt from the caption.

Watch the viral video here:

The video has amassed over a million views since being shared online. Instagram users were quite overwhelmed after watching the clip.

“Why do I always cry with every video of yours? You so capture the hearts of the fantastic people of Punjab,” a user wrote.

Another user commented, “The way he said ‘Meri?’ as though it was shocking to him that someone would show an interest in him. It seemed like he had tears in his eyes by the end of it and not only was he grateful for the photo but also for the short amount of time spent interacting.”

See the comments here:

Even Sonam Bajwa reacted to the clip and was quite emotional.

Take a look:

We are not crying, you are!

As Duke men’s tennis forms their pre-game huddle against Wake Forest in late March, a seemingly extra team member walks into Ambler Stadium with a similar sense of purpose — except this team member has long dark hair and a Nikon D5 camera instead of a racket.    

Director of Athletics Photography Natalie LeDonne launches herself into the chaos of screaming Duke athletes.    

“Blue! Devils! Blue! Devils! Go Duke on three! One, two, three!”   

She’s tucked between junior Faris Khan and first-year Pedro Rodenas, close enough to snap the energy while positioned right outside their circle. Keeping a “respectful distance” is overrated. She’s immersed.   

“Go Duke!”   

Poised to shoot, Nat seems more ready to catch the first point than the players are to score it. If you look away for a second, she’s gone, teleported to another court. She’s perched on a bench, squatting behind a recycling bin or crouched next to a bright red Wilson tennis bag so big it almost seems like she could fit into it. Eyes aren’t often on her, but her eyes are on everyone and everything. She doesn’t miss a moment.      

Well, maybe a few. Nat looks behind her shoulder in mild disappointment as sophomore Connor Krug and first-year Teddy Truwit win their first doubles set against the Demon Deacons — even the best of sports photographers can’t catch it all.  

In 2021, Nat was featured in the U.S. Lacrosse Magazine after she captured the winning shots and saves of Duke men versus Syracuse and Carolina a week prior. Her photos have been published on ESPNW, Swimming World Magazine and the ACC Network.    

“When Nat started and came to photograph Duke football practices, I told her to take pictures of the quarterback,” Lunn said. “And she said, ‘What’s a quarterback?’”    

Nowadays, Nat’s finger is on the pulse of all 27 Duke teams. Two hours ago, it was women’s tennis. Tomorrow, women’s lacrosse. Right now, her lens is focused on the tensing jaw of the men’s tennis head coach. 

It almost seemed natural for Nat to end up on a college campus. Nat and her mom Patricia moved around Virginia while Pat worked in college admissions, settling at Roanoke College. Her aunts, uncles and grandparents all worked in education, from kindergarten teachers to biology professors.    

Pat adopted Nat from rural China when she was 9 months old. 

“When I picked her up from the orphanage, they had nicknamed her Yi Feng Zhang, which translates to Mighty Phoenix,” said Pat, who raised Nat as a single mom. “She was sick, stubborn, and feisty, but she was a fighter.”   

The two took to each other quickly, and it’s been Pat and Nat ever since.

After second grade, Nat transferred to Holy Cross Catholic Regional School in Lynchburg, VA. The family started a tradition of shopping for shoes, the only way Nat could show her identity in a school uniform. Neon orange Nikes, to be exact.     

“I think I probably have like 17 or 18 pairs now,” Nat said, laughing. Her current favorites are a pair of Air Max 270s.     

Despite an uncharacteristic dislike for watching professional sports — “It’s only interesting if I know the players,” she said — Nat grew up playing volleyball, basketball and soccer. Sports followed her to Lynchburg College, where she took up photography in the athletics department. In her sophomore year, she won a summer internship with the Minnesota Zoo.

“I left her at a reptile trainer’s house. The place was full of aquariums, snakes, and hawks eating mice on the dresser,” Pat said. “It was probably one of the hardest things I did as a mom, but one of the best things for her.”     

The next summer, Nat interned at the North Carolina Zoo. Fully intending to go into zoo photography, a freelancing opportunity at a Virginia Tech football game upended her plans.

Metallica’s Enter Sandman boomed over the loudspeakers. Students jumped to the beat, waving orange pom poms wildly. The energy was addictive. Nat was hooked.   

Senior year spring brought Lunn to Lynchburg’s campus, where a brief connection and lots of likes dropped by Nat on Lunn’s instagram led to Nat’s first job at Duke — shooting football and basketball games. She made the two-and-a-half-hour commute to Durham two to three times a week.

“Nat’s always been a risk-taker in many ways,” Pat said. 

The long drives in her 2003 Honda CRV and spending Thanksgiving and Christmas freelancing proved worthwhile. Nat graduated in 2018 from Lynchburg with a degree in communications and art, and that very August she was working full-time at Duke.

We planned to meet in her office the day before the Wake Forest tennis match. As she sat down in the oversized swivel chair behind her desk, she admitted that the pictures of the Labrador and the memorabilia on the shelves didn’t belong to her — it was technically Lunn’s office that they shared. 

My offer to move outside was met with a sigh of relief and, “Yes, please! I’m trying to work on my tan!”      

She stretched herself across two chairs, feet up, soaking in the sun. On her wrist was a neon orange watch. At times, I found myself feeling more interviewed than the other way around. Nat is working on a tattoo sleeve of all 50 states on her right arm — her last one was the Kansas state flower — but somehow the attention turned to a corgi sticker on my phone case.  

“Do you have a corgi?” she asked excitedly. My answer was barely out when she started inquiring about the other stickers. “What does this one say …”     

As we chatted about Duke Athletics and I rattled off friends on different teams, Nat’s face lit up. “Oh my gosh, Ellie on tennis! She’s the sweetest!” 

Rarely could I bring up a name that she didn’t recognize. “Alayna? I helped her with her Italian homework! Or tried to, at least,” she said with a small laugh at her dyslexia and ADD. 

This is what she’s good at. 

“In the studio, Nat makes the student athletes she works with feel so comfortable,” said Madison Olmo, a producer/editor for Blue Devil Network and friend of Nat. “She brings out their personalities beyond the stoic athletics photos that you normally see.”

Her role as the observer instead of the observed comes from an innate sincerity and curiosity, a genuine desire to learn more about her subjects. 

“She refers to the athletes as ‘her athletes,’” said Liv Warren, Nat’s girlfriend. “She tries to connect with each and every one of them.” 

Nat would never admit it, but she’s a campus celebrity among Duke Athletics. Every athlete knows the tattooed, Luke Combs-loving photographer with an affinity for puns, and every Duke employee knows of her undying loyalty and meticulous work ethic.     

“Nat’s a unicorn,” Lunn said. He’s right. 

Editor’s Note: Christina Ferrari is co-captain of the Duke fencing team.