At the Sony World Photography Awards 2023, UAE photographer Oday Shanshal’s image, Knights, took home a national honour. A celebration that took place in November featured knights riding horses through the Moroccan desert. The photograph was captured while panning the camera slowly to capture the riders’ movements.
He is one of a select group of Middle Eastern and North African champions who took home their respective national awards; horses frequently appear in these winners’ photographs. The snapshot Confident, by Abdulla Al-Mushaifri of Qatar, shows a young “knight” practising his riding in Oman while glancing at the crowd of photographers waiting to take his picture.
For his photograph, The Horse Rider, Egyptian photographer Abdelrahman Gabr captured kitesurfer Anna with her horse at a beach near El Gouna, where she spends most of her training time.
People were also a priority, as evidenced by the fact that Mansour Mohsen of Saudi Arabia won for a photograph of a young Saudi woman wearing traditional attire. The Girl with the Red Hat, an image by Cyprus native Elena Georgiou that depicts a little child passing past Eleftheria Square in Nicosia, a structure created by the late British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, focused on both people and architecture.
The Sony World Photography Awards 2023 include the National Awards. The World Photographic Organization and Sony created the programme to aid regional photography scenes around the globe. This year, a total of 55 nations participated; more than 415,000 photographs were taken from more than 200 locations; 200,000 of those were sent for the Open competition. Four Regional Awards, created specifically for regions in Europe, are new this year.
Along with the winners of the Student, Youth, Open, and Professional contests, all National Award winners receive Sony digital photography equipment and are featured in the book and exhibition of the Sony World Photography Awards. From April 14 to May 1, the show will be held at Somerset House in London.