The World Photography Organisation has announced the winners of the 2024 Sony World Photography Awards. The title Photographer of the Year 2024 was awarded to Juliette Pavy of France for Spiralkampagnen, a series about forced contraception and involuntary sterilization of Greenlandic women.
Juliette Pavy received the title together with its $25,000 (USD) cash prize and Sony digital-imaging equipment. Pavy was also given the opportunity to present new work at the Sony World Photography Awards 2025 exhibition.
Spiralkampagnen is a documentary project examining the serious and lasting consequences of the involuntary birth-control campaign led by the Danish authorities in Greenland in the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies, during which several thousand Inuit women—some as young as twelve—were fitted with IUDs without their consent.
Pavy’s project builds its narrative by photographing from the victims’ perspectives, presenting difficult and important reflections on the collective trauma experienced by the community.
She also uses a range of photographic approaches: establishing views of Nuuk and its clinical spaces; X-rays and archival photographs of the young women involved; recent portraits of victims and doctors who worked in Greenland during and after the program; and the Danish parliamentarian investigating Spiralkampagnen.
The Dutch photographer Eddo Hartmann won the Landscape category. In his series The Sacrifice Zone he explores a remote area of Kazakhstan that once housed the Soviet Union’s principal nuclear testing facilities. He uses infrared photography to reveal the effects of radiation contamination that are invisible to the human eye.
Among the ten winners of the Open competition, Liam Man of the UK was named Open Photographer of the Year 2024, receiving a prize of $5,000 plus Sony equipment for his photograph Moonrise Sprites over Storr, on which the famous rock formation of the Old Man of Storr on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, is pictured illuminated by drone lights and the rising orange moon.
Taken late at night during a powerful snowstorm, this shot highlights the vast mountainous landscape and striking winter sky.
Liam Man: “Blizzards howled most of the night, leaving only a few minutes to capture this photo before the moon became too bright.”
The Sony World Photography Awards 2024 exhibition ran from April 19 to May 6, 2024 at Somerset House in London, with more than two hundred prints and hundreds of additional images on digital displays by winning and shortlisted photographers. It also presented work by that year’s Outstanding Contribution to Photography recipient, the acclaimed Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado.
More information at: www.worldphoto.org.
