Sony World Competition: The year's most creative photography exploring culture and history
The Sony World Competition announced the finalists and shortlists for their 2026 professional awards. The Awards spotlights photographers telling the stories of our time. Here is the selection of images from the professional competition in the creative category.
A photo from the series Thereza, which restores life to what once seemed lost. (Photo: Daniela Balestrin, Brazil, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)
The series Thereza is born from an absence; the erased history of the artist’s great-grandmother. Without family records, the photographer has recreated an existence from fragments, silences and traces. Through photography, writing and experimental cyanotype processes, she transforms forgetting into sensorial matter. Photography ceases to be mere record and becomes recomposition — dissolved in water, reconstituted by light, reinvented through gesture. In opposition to linear time, the work proposes a circular temporality, where past and present intertwine. Thereza is a way of restoring life to what once seemed lost and of recognising that nothing ceases: everything transforms into another form of existence. (Photo: Daniela Balestrin, Brazil, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Becoming Herstory explores memory, family and migration. The photographer moved from Poland to the UK as a child, carrying a rupture between belonging and distance. Using self-portraits alongside archival images of female relatives, she engages with inherited garments and objects to trace intergenerational memory. The body becomes a site to negotiate absence, identity, and continuity, revealing how personal and collective histories are carried, performed, and transformed across generations. Using diptychs and triptychs, self-portraits are placed in dialogue with archival photographs of women from the photographer’s family. (Photo: Zula Rabikowska, United Kingdom, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) A part of Becoming Herstory, which explores memory, family and migration. (Photo: Zula Rabikowska, United Kingdom, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) This project is a memorial to 544 psychiatric patients murdered by the Nazis in 1941 in Latvia; there is one figurative cyanotype image for each person killed. The photographer’s grandmother worked at the hospital from where the patients were taken, and she visited it, finding that although the story is known, no memorial exists. The only official record seems to be a short paragraph in the Nuremberg report, and so far, the photographer has found no record of the patients’ names. The 544 is primarily intended as a memorial to remember the lives lived before these people entered the hospital; before they died. Not knowing anything about their identities, the photographer explains she has ‘tried to imagine each as a unique, precious being, and provide a little of the character stripped from them when they were reduced to a number on a list of nameless victims.’ The prints were made using original photographs posed by models. (Photo: Sarah Ketelaars, United Kingdom, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) A piece from a project that is a memorial to 544 psychiatric patients murdered by the Nazis in 1941 in Latvia. (Photo: Sarah Ketelaars, United Kingdom, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) ‘Home initially appears as a complete and protective place, separating us from an outside world that feels distant and incomprehensible. When trauma occurs within it and is later silenced by the family, the home changes its nature, becoming a scarred archive where silence reorganises daily life.’ The photographer returned to this space with a forensic gaze, exploring fragmented memory and confronting what was concealed. Photography became an act of persistence, revealing how home, body, memory and trauma intersect through traces, gaps and enduring scars. (Photo: Sergio Meléndez Cava, Peru, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026 Another photo revealing how home, body, memory and trauma intersect through traces, gaps and enduring scars. (Photo: Sergio Meléndez Cava, Peru, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Some places are not quite places. At the border between Ciudad Juárez, México, and El Paso, USA, belonging appears suspended. It is a space where identity becomes porous and unfinished; neither arrival nor departure. To cross from one place to the other is to negotiate language, customs and gestures; to leave fragments behind while acquiring new ones. If borders test brutality, they are also sites of encounter. The photographer explains that in these liminal spaces, the self stretches, dissolves and rearranges; the threshold holds tension and possibility, and the uncertainty of being neither here nor there. (Photo: Persia Campbell, Mexico, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Another photo by Persia Campbell about the liminal space of borders. (Photo: Persia Campbell, Mexico, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) This series explores the photographer’s ancestors' experience of living on a dairy farm downwind of the Nevada Test Site in the USA, where thousands of nuclear bombs were detonated in the 1950s. Milk provides a sense of familial unity; it is the life-sustaining liquid critical to a baby's survival and a key signifier of maternal nurturance. However, in the 1950s, thousands of people were exposed to radionuclides through milk. The portraits in this series reference campaigns from the 1980s that printed images of missing people on milk cartons, combining personal, social and political issues to examine an ongoing nuclear legacy. (Photo: Abbey Hepner, United States, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) A part of the series exploring the photographer’s ancestors' experience of living on a dairy farm downwind of the Nevada Test Site in the USA, where thousands of nuclear bombs were detonated in the 1950s. (Photo: Abbey Hepner, United States, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Growing up without role models can make it difficult to dream or recognise one’s ability to shape the future. This photographic series seeks to create a precedent through collaboration with activists and artists from various Indigenous communities in southern Mexico, particularly from Oaxaca state. Their stories offer a glimpse into the world we are living in, and how their roles and work are generating meaningful impact and change in their communities and beyond. This project is intended to be published as a children’s book, with digital illustrations made by the photographer. (Photo: Citlali Fabian, Mexico, Finalist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Another image from Citlali Fabian's photographic series. (Photo: Citlali Fabian, Mexico, Finalist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) The Palm, On Piru is a photographic series exploring the spiritual connections and collective identities of rappers from South Los Angeles with Pirus/Bloods gang affiliations. The work focuses on the people and places central to the origins of West Coast hip-hop's G-funk music genre, and California's parallel gang culture, examining the interplay of their environment, community and artistic expression. The series was shot on colour infrared film, with its distinctive red and pink tones creating links between the environment and the artists, members, and families that form the Red side of the cultural divide, and the backbone of West Coast Hip Hop. (Photo: Ben Brooks, United Kingdom, Finalist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Part of Ben Brooks' The Palm, On Piru photographic series exploring the spiritual connections and collective identities of rappers from South Los Angeles with Pirus/Bloods gang affiliations. (Photo: Ben Brooks, United Kingdom, Finalist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) With more than 130,000 individuals currently reported missing in Mexico, and a new disappearance occurring approximately every 40 minutes, The Black Album transforms archival imagery into a haunting collective portrait of absence, loss, and unresolved grief. Rather than documenting disappearance directly, this photographic essay reinterprets the past to question the future. Through an intervention in a photographic archive, the project constructs a symbolic ‘album’ of Mexico’s disappeared — an unsettling reflection of a country living through a prolonged dark era in which absence has become routine and invisibility systemic. (Photo: Pablo Ramos, Mexico, Finalist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) A piece from The Black Album, which transforms archival imagery into a haunting collective portrait of absence, loss, and unresolved grief. (Photo: Pablo Ramos, Mexico, Finalist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Over 30 years have passed since the Dayton Agreement was signed and a 1,080-kilometre-long boundary line effectively divided Bosnia into two entities and one district. The photographer explains that ‘consciously or not, hatred is still passed on from generation to generation — a legacy from a war that is still fresh in people’s minds.’ Points of Impasse explores the lasting impact of the war and division on the people and places of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The project centres around a politically divided terrain that impacts individual and collective perceptions, ‘creating a space that cannot be separated from the holders of a shared identity.’ (Photo: Armin Graca, Bosnia And Herzegovina, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Another image from Points of Impasse that explores the lasting impact of the war and division on the people and places of Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Photo: Armin Graca, Bosnia And Herzegovina, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)
/file/attachments/orphans/3879_10357_DanielaBalestrin_Brazil_Professional_Creative_2026_656853.jpeg "The series Thereza is born from an absence; the erased history of the artist’s great-grandmother. Without family records, the photographer has recreated an existence from fragments, silences and traces. Through photography, writing and experimental cyanotype processes, she transforms forgetting into sensorial matter. Photography ceases to be mere record and becomes recomposition — dissolved in water, reconstituted by light, reinvented through gesture. In opposition to linear time, the work proposes a circular temporality, where past and present intertwine. Thereza is a way of restoring life to what once seemed lost and of recognising that nothing ceases: everything transforms into another form of existence. (Photo: Daniela Balestrin, Brazil, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3887_10413_ZulaRabikowska_UnitedKingdom_Professional_Creative_2026_228250.jpg "Becoming Herstory explores memory, family and migration. The photographer moved from Poland to the UK as a child, carrying a rupture between belonging and distance. Using self-portraits alongside archival images of female relatives, she engages with inherited garments and objects to trace intergenerational memory. The body becomes a site to negotiate absence, identity, and continuity, revealing how personal and collective histories are carried, performed, and transformed across generations. Using diptychs and triptychs, self-portraits are placed in dialogue with archival photographs of women from the photographer’s family. (Photo: Zula Rabikowska, United Kingdom, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3887_10411_ZulaRabikowska_UnitedKingdom_Professional_Creative_2026_958570.jpg "A part of Becoming Herstory, which explores memory, family and migration. (Photo: Zula Rabikowska, United Kingdom, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3885_10407_SarahKetelaars_UnitedKingdom_Professional_Creative_2026_789740.jpg "This project is a memorial to 544 psychiatric patients murdered by the Nazis in 1941 in Latvia; there is one figurative cyanotype image for each person killed. The photographer’s grandmother worked at the hospital from where the patients were taken, and she visited it, finding that although the story is known, no memorial exists. The only official record seems to be a short paragraph in the Nuremberg report, and so far, the photographer has found no record of the patients’ names. The 544 is primarily intended as a memorial to remember the lives lived before these people entered the hospital; before they died. Not knowing anything about their identities, the photographer explains she has ‘tried to imagine each as a unique, precious being, and provide a little of the character stripped from them when they were reduced to a number on a list of nameless victims.’ The prints were made using original photographs posed by models. (Photo: Sarah Ketelaars, United Kingdom, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3885_10395_SarahKetelaars_UnitedKingdom_Professional_Creative_2026_368930.jpg "A piece from a project that is a memorial to 544 psychiatric patients murdered by the Nazis in 1941 in Latvia. (Photo: Sarah Ketelaars, United Kingdom, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3883_10385_SergioMelndezCava_Peru_Professional_Creative_2026_221544.jpg "‘Home initially appears as a complete and protective place, separating us from an outside world that feels distant and incomprehensible. When trauma occurs within it and is later silenced by the family, the home changes its nature, becoming a scarred archive where silence reorganises daily life.’ The photographer returned to this space with a forensic gaze, exploring fragmented memory and confronting what was concealed. Photography became an act of persistence, revealing how home, body, memory and trauma intersect through traces, gaps and enduring scars. (Photo: Sergio Meléndez Cava, Peru, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026")
/file/attachments/orphans/3883_10381_SergioMelndezCava_Peru_Professional_Creative_2026_738238.jpg "Another photo revealing how home, body, memory and trauma intersect through traces, gaps and enduring scars. (Photo: Sergio Meléndez Cava, Peru, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3881_10373_PersiaCampbell_Mexico_Professional_Creative_2026_950581.jpg "Some places are not quite places. At the border between Ciudad Juárez, México, and El Paso, USA, belonging appears suspended. It is a space where identity becomes porous and unfinished; neither arrival nor departure. To cross from one place to the other is to negotiate language, customs and gestures; to leave fragments behind while acquiring new ones. If borders test brutality, they are also sites of encounter. The photographer explains that in these liminal spaces, the self stretches, dissolves and rearranges; the threshold holds tension and possibility, and the uncertainty of being neither here nor there. (Photo: Persia Campbell, Mexico, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3881_10369_PersiaCampbell_Mexico_Professional_Creative_2026_563279.jpg "Another photo by Persia Campbell about the liminal space of borders. (Photo: Persia Campbell, Mexico, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3877_10337_AbbeyHepner_UnitedStates_Professional_Creative_2026_549751.jpg "This series explores the photographer’s ancestors' experience of living on a dairy farm downwind of the Nevada Test Site in the USA, where thousands of nuclear bombs were detonated in the 1950s. Milk provides a sense of familial unity; it is the life-sustaining liquid critical to a baby's survival and a key signifier of maternal nurturance. However, in the 1950s, thousands of people were exposed to radionuclides through milk. The portraits in this series reference campaigns from the 1980s that printed images of missing people on milk cartons, combining personal, social and political issues to examine an ongoing nuclear legacy. (Photo: Abbey Hepner, United States, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3877_10335_AbbeyHepner_UnitedStates_Professional_Creative_2026_614227.jpg "A part of the series exploring the photographer’s ancestors' experience of living on a dairy farm downwind of the Nevada Test Site in the USA, where thousands of nuclear bombs were detonated in the 1950s. (Photo: Abbey Hepner, United States, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3875_10333_CitlaliFabian_UnitedKingdom_Professional_Creative_2026_605639.jpg "Growing up without role models can make it difficult to dream or recognise one’s ability to shape the future. This photographic series seeks to create a precedent through collaboration with activists and artists from various Indigenous communities in southern Mexico, particularly from Oaxaca state. Their stories offer a glimpse into the world we are living in, and how their roles and work are generating meaningful impact and change in their communities and beyond. This project is intended to be published as a children’s book, with digital illustrations made by the photographer. (Photo: Citlali Fabian, Mexico, Finalist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3875_10319_CitlaliFabian_UnitedKingdom_Professional_Creative_2026_302269.jpg "Another image from Citlali Fabian's photographic series. (Photo: Citlali Fabian, Mexico, Finalist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3873_10307_BenBrooks_UnitedKingdom_Professional_Creative_2026_609324.jpg "The Palm, On Piru is a photographic series exploring the spiritual connections and collective identities of rappers from South Los Angeles with Pirus/Bloods gang affiliations. The work focuses on the people and places central to the origins of West Coast hip-hop's G-funk music genre, and California's parallel gang culture, examining the interplay of their environment, community and artistic expression. The series was shot on colour infrared film, with its distinctive red and pink tones creating links between the environment and the artists, members, and families that form the Red side of the cultural divide, and the backbone of West Coast Hip Hop. (Photo: Ben Brooks, United Kingdom, Finalist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3873_10305_BenBrooks_UnitedKingdom_Professional_Creative_2026_265720.jpg "Part of Ben Brooks' The Palm, On Piru photographic series exploring the spiritual connections and collective identities of rappers from South Los Angeles with Pirus/Bloods gang affiliations. (Photo: Ben Brooks, United Kingdom, Finalist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3871_10291_PabloRamos_Mexico_Professional_Creative_2026_199927.jpg "With more than 130,000 individuals currently reported missing in Mexico, and a new disappearance occurring approximately every 40 minutes, The Black Album transforms archival imagery into a haunting collective portrait of absence, loss, and unresolved grief. Rather than documenting disappearance directly, this photographic essay reinterprets the past to question the future. Through an intervention in a photographic archive, the project constructs a symbolic ‘album’ of Mexico’s disappeared — an unsettling reflection of a country living through a prolonged dark era in which absence has become routine and invisibility systemic. (Photo: Pablo Ramos, Mexico, Finalist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3871_10289_PabloRamos_Mexico_Professional_Creative_2026_247684.jpg "A piece from The Black Album, which transforms archival imagery into a haunting collective portrait of absence, loss, and unresolved grief. (Photo: Pablo Ramos, Mexico, Finalist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3869_10283_ArminGraca_BosniaAndHerzegovina_Professional_Creative_2026_214836.jpg "Over 30 years have passed since the Dayton Agreement was signed and a 1,080-kilometre-long boundary line effectively divided Bosnia into two entities and one district. The photographer explains that ‘consciously or not, hatred is still passed on from generation to generation — a legacy from a war that is still fresh in people’s minds.’ Points of Impasse explores the lasting impact of the war and division on the people and places of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The project centres around a politically divided terrain that impacts individual and collective perceptions, ‘creating a space that cannot be separated from the holders of a shared identity.’ (Photo: Armin Graca, Bosnia And Herzegovina, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
/file/attachments/orphans/3869_10277_ArminGraca_BosniaAndHerzegovina_Professional_Creative_2026_303324.jpg "Another image from Points of Impasse that explores the lasting impact of the war and division on the people and places of Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Photo: Armin Graca, Bosnia And Herzegovina, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)")
A photo from the series Thereza, which restores life to what once seemed lost. (Photo: Daniela Balestrin, Brazil, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Creative, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)