Edgar Martins Named Human Photographer of the Year 2023
An AI-generated photograph won the Creative category of the Sony World Photography Awards, but the man who generated it refused to accept his prize.
Edgar Martins, Untitled (dissident freedom fighter in makeshift burka) (2023). From the series 'Our War'. © Edgar Martins, Portugal. Photographer of the Year, Professional competition, Portraiture, Sony World Photography Awards 2023.
The Sony World Photography Awards' top prize, which comes with a US $25,000 prize, went to Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins.
Martins' portrait series Our War pays homage to friend and photo-journalist Anton Hammerl who disappeared after being taken by government militia during the Libyan Civil War in 2011.
Martins travelled through Libya in search of the last resting place of his friend. The portraits he took attempt to understand the last days of Hammerl through the people he met, including fighters on both sides.
Martins described winning the prize as 'an emotional experience because I get to honour my friend on a world stage and bring attention to the family's plight to find his remains'.
Martins was selected as Photographer of the Year from among 10 finalists across a number of categories in the professional competition.
In the open competition, which is awarded not for a series of images but for a single image, much media attention was drawn to an image submitted by German artist Boris Eldagsen in the Creative category.
Eldagsen's portrait PSEUDOMNESIA | The Electricia (2023) was created using the AI image generator DALL-E 2. After winning the category, Eldagsen refused to accept his prize.
'Thank you for selecting my image and making this a historic moment, as it is the first AI generated image to win in a prestigious international photography competition. How many of you knew or suspected that it was AI generated? Something about this doesn't feel right, does it?'
'AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this. They are different entities. AI is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the award.'
Eldagsen has since proposed a different category for the types of images he creates, borrowing Christian Vinces' term 'promptography'.
In the professional section, Lee-Ann Olwage won the Creative category for her series on girls in rural Kenya entitled 'The Right to Play'.
Hugh Kinsella Cunningham won the Documentary category for his series following the women's peace movement in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while Fan Li won the Architecture & Design category for his haunting imagery of an abandoned cement factory in the south of China.
Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi—known for her luminous and ethereal imagery of nature and objects of everyday life—received the Outstanding Contribution to Photography award.
This year's Sony World Photography Awards also saw the first iteration of the $5,000 Sustainability Prize—awarded in collaboration with the United Nations Foundation—that recognises stories and activities relating to the UN's environmental Sustainable Development Goals.
Winner Alessandro Cinque documented Lima residents' use of of 'fog nets' to tackle the problem of chronic water scarcity. —[O]
