Sara Naomi Lewkowicz has been named this year’s winner of the coveted Iris d’Or Award, earning the title of Sony World Photography Awards Photographer of the Year. The announcement was made last night during the Gala Awards Ceremony in London.
The jury unanimously selected Lewkowicz’s powerful series Shane and Maggie —an intimate examination of domestic violence as a process—as the 2014 winner. The American photographer received $25,000 and a Sony camera kit.
Maggie sat in front of her best friend Amy's house and smoked the morning after the assault, while Kayden and Amy's daughter Olivia, three, played in the window. A few days later, she decided to move to Alaska to be closer with her estranged husband and father of her children.
Lewkowicz: ‘I’m completely surprised; so much incredibly strong work was submitted, and I never thought I would win.’
Sara Lewkowicz was born in New York and earned a master’s degree in visual communication at Ohio University in Athens. Through her photography, she explored how a pattern of violence develops and what its consequences are for the victim, the victim’s family, and the perpetrators. The story is inescapable: both horrific and tender, fierce and inscrutable, rendered in somber tones.
The Sony World Photography Awards Open Photographer of the Year title went to Chen Li for Rain in an Ancient Town, selected from no fewer than 65,000 entries from around the world.
Other highlights of the gala ceremony included the presentation of the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award to Mary Ellen Mark, and the Student Focus award to British photographer Scarlet Evans of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Nearly 140,000 photographs from 166 countries were submitted to the competition in total.
All winning and nominated photographs from the 2014 awards were exhibited at Somerset House in London from May 1 through May 18, 2014, together with work by American photographer Mary Ellen Mark.
More information: www.worldphoto.org
