Sony World Photography Awards 2026: National and Regional Winners

Every year, from the rice terraces of Southeast Asia to the fractured ice shelves of the polar south, from the labyrinthine alleyways of ancient cities to the quiet interiors of lives rarely witnessed, photographers set out with a singular purpose: to look, and to make the looking matter. The Sony World Photography Awards 2026 National and Regional Awards stand as a record of that effort, a cartography of human vision drawn from over 430,000 images submitted across more than 200 countries and territories.

What emerges is not merely a competition, but a portrait of the world as it exists right now, rendered in light and shadow, in color and silence, in the faces of women rebuilding ecosystems and the grief of parents holding time still.

The Americas: Witnessing, Belonging, and the Architecture of the Everyday

In the highlands and coastal communities of Latin America, photographers are doing what the region’s most vital storytellers have always done: turning their lenses inward, toward the textures of belonging, survival, and identity that outsiders so rarely see.

Citlali Fabian of Mexico has been awarded first place in the Latin America Professional Award for Bilha, Stories of my Sisters, a body of work that refuses the boundaries between documentary photography and art. Moving fluidly between portraiture and digital illustration, Fabian collaborated directly with activists and artists from Indigenous communities in southern Mexico to reconstruct and honor the stories of remarkable women. The result is something closer to visual testimony than exhibition, a series in which image-making becomes an act of cultural stewardship.

Second place is awarded to María Fernanda García Freire of Ecuador for Study on Flying, a deeply personal meditation born from close and loving observation of her son’s fascination with birds. In the natural world’s capacity for flight, García Freire finds a metaphor vast enough to carry questions of freedom, aspiration, and the wordless communication between parent and child.

Third place goes to André Tezza of Brazil for Everyday Structures, a patient and quietly profound series devoted to the neighborhood grocery stores of southern Brazil. In their modest facades and functional geometries, Tezza locates something essential about community, about the humble architecture through which daily life organizes itself, and about the dignity embedded in what is most often overlooked.

The shortlisted photographers for the Latin America Professional Award are Sebastian Di Domenico (Colombia), Sergio Meléndez Cava (Peru), Yris Pablo (Venezuela), Manuel Seoane (Bolivia), Bienvenido Velasco (Panama), Benjamin Villela (Chile) and Irina Werning (Argentina).

India: At the Edge of the Mangroves

Introduced for the first time in 2026, the India National Award recognizes outstanding series by Indian photographers entering the Professional Competition. Its inaugural recipient is Avijit Ghosh, for Keepers of Mangroves, a series of striking moral and ecological weight.

In the Sundarbans, one of the world’s largest mangrove ecosystems and a critical habitat for the Bengal tiger, the line between human life and wilderness is drawn in blood. The women Ghosh photographs have each lost a husband to tiger attacks, yet rather than retreat from that grief, they have directed it outward, into the painstaking work of mangrove restoration. These tiger widows, as they are known, are engaged in something that science increasingly recognizes as essential: the understanding that conservation is not a project imposed upon communities, but one that can only succeed through them. Ghosh’s lens bears witness to that truth with clarity and compassion.

Japan: Photography as an Act of Grief and Memory

The Japan National Award, awarded to Hayate Kurisu for Living Photographs, enters territory that few photographers dare approach. The series documents the days following the stillbirth of Kurisu’s child, the time he and his wife spent together with the infant before cremation, holding what could not be held for long. It is an act of extraordinary courage and an inquiry into photography’s deepest purpose: its capacity to resist the erasure of time, to insist that something existed, that it mattered, that it was here.

In a medium so often associated with the external world, with landscapes and events and strangers encountered in passing, Kurisu’s work turns to face the interior with unflinching tenderness. It is a reminder that the most significant explorations are sometimes the smallest in scale and the most immense in feeling.

The shortlisted photographers for the Japan National Award, whose work spans the ceremonial grandeur of local traditional costumes, still lifes shaped by the compressed wisdom of haiku poetry, and the vast, breathless silence of the Antarctic landscape, are Mitsuaki Fujiwara, Hajime Hirano and Keiichiro Muramatsu.

Europe’s Emerging Voices

Also new to 2026, the European Student Award was established to bring into focus the most compelling emerging photographic voices from across the continent. Its first recipient is Teresa Halbreiter of Germany, studying at the University of Applied Sciences Hamburg, for Stillgestanden (‘Attention!’), a series that examines what it means to seek individuality within an institution designed to suppress it.

Set within the German Armed Forces, the work investigates the experience of women navigating a structure built, over centuries, in the image of men. Halbreiter photographs the tension between obedience and self-assertion not as abstraction, but as something lived in the body, in posture, in uniform, in the space between a regulation and a self. It is a study in the quiet resilience required to remain oneself within systems that ask, persistently, that you become something else.

The shortlisted photographers, whose work traverses narratives from the scarred landscapes left behind by environmental disaster to the fragile and sustaining bonds of friendship and community, are Bennet Böckstiegel (Germany, Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie), Laurie Broughton (UK, University of West England), Laura Anna Rossa (Belgium, LUCA School of Arts Sint Lukas Brussels) and Albert Słowiński (Poland, Academy of Art in Szczecin).

The Single Frame: Open Competition

There is a particular kind of discipline required to compress an entire world into one image. The Open competition, from which National and Regional Award winners have been drawn across more than 30 countries, is a testament to that discipline and to the photographers who have mastered it.

Sweeping landscapes carry the geological weight of deep time. Portraits hold the specificity of a single human life against the immensity of shared experience. Images of the natural world remind the viewer that the planet remains, in spite of everything, astonishing. Each of the winning and shortlisted single images from the Open competition represents not merely a photograph, but a point of entry: an invitation to pay attention to what has always been there, waiting to be seen.

The overall winners across the Student, Youth, Open and Professional competitions of the Sony World Photography Awards 2026 will be announced on 16 April 2026. Their work, alongside that of the National and Regional Award recipients, will go on display at Somerset House, London, from 17 April to 4 May 2026, where the world, refracted through thousands of lenses, will be available to anyone willing to look.

This year’s National & Regional Award winners are:

OPEN COMPETITION