The Sony World Press Photograph, organized by the Japanese company in collaboration with London-based Creo and the World Photography Organization, celebrates photography by elevating stories and visuals from a wide range of countries and backgrounds.
This year's overall winner and Photographer of the Year is Zed Nelson. The British Photographer also won the Wildlife & Nature professional category with his "The Anthropocene Illusion" project. Over six years and across four continents, Nelson explored the way humans immerse themselves in a choreographed and fictional representation of nature and wildlife, simulating natural environments to hide the actual destruction humans bring onto the Earth. "So, while we devastate the world around us, we have become masters of a stage-managed, artificial 'experience' of nature – a reassuring spectacle, an illusion," said Nelson.
Canadian and Hong Kong-based photographer Ulana Switucha won the architecture Category with the project "Tokyo Toilets," which documented the unusual and sophisticated designs of Shibuya's public restrooms. The category was particularly rich this year, with Owen Davies' spectacular Light/Mass project coming in third place.
In the creative category, Rhiannon Adam's winning project, Rhi-Entry, documents the crazy story of the DearMoon project, a residency for artists on the Moon for which the Photographer was selected.
In 2021, Adam was picked as the only female crew member from one million applicants. She had the chance to achieve the seemingly impossible of visiting the Moon again decades after the last humans set foot on the Earth's satellite. For three years, Adam immersed herself in the space industry until, in June 2024, the project's backer, the Japanese billionaire and art collector Yusaku Maezawa Maezawa, abruptly canceled the mission. The project recounts the disruption this brought to Rhiannon and all the other crew members' lives.
In our gallery above we collected all the winners of the 10 professional categories, plus the non-professional winner of the open competition, French photographer Olivier Unia.