[imagesource: George Mendel]

We have already shown you some images from the National and Regional Awards Winners for the Sony World Photography Awards.

Now, the 2022 Professional Competition Finalists, as well as those shortlisted, have been announced.

As the largest annual photography competition on Earth, this year received the highest number of submissions in its history – 156 000 in total.

The Professional Competition is where photographers are judged based on a body of work consisting of several images in any of the 10 categories, including environment, landscape, portraiture, and documentary, per CNN.

Three finalists were selected for each category, and their striking images covered a few salient issues from the past couple of years or so.

Above, you can see a shot from Environment category finalist George Mendel’s series “Portraits in Ashes”. It portrayed the faces of individuals left in the gutted buildings from the aftermath of the wildfires in Greece, Canada, and the US.

Finalist Raphaël Neal from the UK created diptychs (a two-part image) that juxtaposes scenes of climate change with the portraits of teenagers, pointing to how they are the ones who will eventually inherit the effects of the climate crisis.

Each face shows a different reaction as they face the danger of environmental collapse:

Then, Ricardo Teles from Brazil documented the country’s Indigenous Xingu tribe and their martial art called Huka-Huka.

The ritual is done to honour the dead, the majority of whom were predominantly victims of COVID-19 last year:

Gareth Iwan Jones’ surreal images of trees are a result of his struggle to find work as a freelance portrait photographer during the UK’s COVID-19 lockdowns of 2021:

He then turned his lens to the figures of nearby trees, shot against dawn or dusk skies and lit using drones, leading to an otherworldly depiction of nature.

This is one of those shots:

There’s also Portraiture category finalist Brent Stirton’s image from his series called “Bushmeat Hunters”.

His composition does a good job of framing hunters with their wild game in a way that evokes traditional paintings of huntsmen:

Also in the Environment category is Shunta Kimura’s “Living in the Transition”.

This finalist explores the impacts of climate change in Bangladesh, which is battling river erosion, landslides, and rising salinity levels:

There are also the cottage-core images in Domagoj Burilović’s “Dorf,” which shows how nature has reclaimed the houses of Slavonia.

The region grew rich in the 19th century as a result of the exploitation of local forests and land, but Burilović’s shots give us hope that nature will always be there:

We’ll end off with an image that you will all probably recognise.

It is perhaps one of the more iconic photographs from the US Capitol riot of 2021, of the screaming “QAnon Shaman” taken by Getty photographer Win McNamee:

For more from each of these photographers’ series, as well as other finalists, you can explore here.

All of the above finalists will go on to the next stage of the competition to compete to be the winner of their category. If successful, they will be considered for the coveted title Photographer of the Year, announced April 12.

From there, the images will go on display as part of the exhibition at Somerset House in London from April 13 through May 2.

[source:cnn]