At the start of the year, while the cultural calendar is still fresh, the dependable pleasure of the announcement of the Sony World Photography Awards shortlists comes like a delicious appetiser for the year ahead. It’s the annual reminder that while the world may be in full wobble, young photographers are still looking at it with clarity, curiosity and talent. This year’s Student and Youth competition shortlists, revealed this week, are a particularly bracing tonic.
Drawn from more than 430,000 entries across over 200 countries and territories, the final 20 shortlisted photographers represent the sharp end of an enormous, global visual conversation. If photography is how the world explains itself to itself, then these are the voices clearing their throats before speaking loudly to anyone who wants to listen with their eyes. The Student Competition — now in its 19th year — asked emerging photographers to respond to the briefTogether.
It’s the sort of word that seems harmless until you try to define it. Togetherness can be tender or claustrophobic, political or deeply personal, chosen or enforced. The shortlisted projects embrace all of it.
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These aren’t sentimental group hugs rendered in soft focus. They’re thoughtful, often searching visual essays that explore families, neighbourhoods, institutions and shared spaces — and the invisible threads that bind people, whether they like it or not. One of the most assured contributions comes from South Africa.
Chanel Grobler, shortlisted from the Open Window Institute, looks at shared places that hold the residue of human presence — spaces that remember us after we’ve left them. It’s an elegant, intelligent body of work — and her inclusion places South Africa in a global conversation about contemporary photography that’s nuanced and self-aware. Elsewhere on the shortlist, photographers turn both inward and outward.
An Argentine photographer documents the intimacy of growing up alongside his brothers. In Bangladesh, a rapidly changing neighbourhood is recorded with nostalgia and unease. In China and the US, communities face the slow, grinding reshaping of gentrification.
There are pigeon keepers in Kashmir, women navigating masculinity within the German armed forces, and young Latvians coming of age with the future pressing insistently at their backs. The Youth Competition, open to photographers aged 19 and under, offers a different register — bold, playful, startlingly precise. These are single images rather than series, but they punch above their weight.
Mountains are framed like stage sets, animals are photographed with regal intimacy and moments of motion — a football match, firefighters mid-rescue, a BMX rider suspended against the sky — all frozen with instinctive confidence. There’s also stillness, portraits that understand restraint (sometimes the most sophisticated choice of all). What unites both competitions isn’t just technical accomplishment, though there’s lots of that.
It’s a sense that these photographers already understand something essential: images are arguments, often demanding attention. The winners will be announced in April at a gala ceremony in London, with the shortlisted works exhibited at cultural hub Somerset House — a rite of passage for many photographers who’ve gone on to shape the medium. But awards aside, the real achievement is already evident.
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