SIENA, Italy – "The Lake" by Iranian photographer Masoud Mirzaei is the overall winner of the 2021 Creative Photo Awards, the international contest of creative and artistic photography of Siena Awards, an international visual arts festival. The photo was shot at Lake Urmia, the largest lake in the Middle East and the sixth-largest saltwater lake on Earth, located between the provinces of East Azerbaijan and West Azerbaijan. It was selected among tens of thousands of images submitted by photographers from 137 countries. The Creative Photo Awards competition includes 17 categories for contemporary photographers, whose innovative approaches to photography challenge the viewer's expectations and offer surprise and delight at every turn. The winning images for each category will be showcased at the exhibition "I Wonder If You Can" during the Siena Awards Festival, from October 23rd to December 5th.
The photographic Festival Siena Awards 2021 will showcase solo and group exhibitions that will collect extraordinary shots arriving from all over the world, and offer workshops, photo tours, seminars, conferences, screenings, and guided tours to discover the Sienese territory.
The main guest of the Festival will be Steve Winter, for the first time in Italy, with "Big Cats," the largest retrospective ever on his career as a National Geographic contributor.
The solo exhibition of Brent Stirton and the exhibitions of the photographic awards “Siena International Photo Awards” and “Drone Photo Awards” will also be part of the Festival.
More info: creative.sienawards.com | festival.sienawards.com
#24 Plenty Of Starlings (Commended In Nature And Landscape)
"Every day in the evening at the sunsets, thousands of starlings looking for a place into the reed to spend the night. Therefore they are making beautiful shapes in the sky."
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59points
#25 Palm Grove (1st Place In Nature And Landscape)
German photographer Hans Wichmann earned the top spot in Nature with the image "Palm Grove,” shot from a deck of a cruise ship on the Nile River in Egypt.
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58points
#26 The Flying Bride (1st Place In Wedding)
"The Flying Bride," shot in London by British photographer Soven Amatya, won the Wedding category. The photo was taken on the occasion of a Jewish wedding during the Horah, a dance that usually ends with the spouses being thrown into the air.
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52points
#28 The Fork 28 (1st Place In Abstract)
Filippo Drudi from Italy won the Abstract category with "The Fork" shot in Savignano sul Rubicone (Italy). The work offers a symbolic homage to the fork, an everyday object that he defines as "sinuous, elegant, feminine and symmetrical, but also threatening and seductive and with almost abstract geometric characteristics".
"I like forks, I'm fascinated by them. Sinuous, elegant, feminine, and symmetric, yet menacing and seductive. I wanted to look deep into it and find out its many personalities. In this photograph - part of my project 'The Fork'- I wanted to bring out the geometric, almost abstract qualities of this daily object."
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49points
#29 Eternit (1st Place In Architecture)
Norwegian photographer Ingun Alette Maehlum won in Architecture with "Eternit”. The photo testifies to the existence of buildings still built with cement mixed with asbestos, despite the material being banned in Norway since 1978.
"Eternit boards were the perfect building material. The cement mixed with asbestos was supposed to be maintenance-free and became very popular, particularly along the coast where the weather can be rough. In the seventies, it was discovered that asbestos was highly dangerous when handled. In Norway, it was forbidden in 1978. Still, there are eternit board houses spread around the country."
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46points
#30 Innocence (1st Place In Conceptual)
In the Conceptual category, photographer Jairo Alvarez from Argentina won with "Innocence," shot in Puan (Argentina). The image intends to make us reflect on the path to take when no road seems marked or when trapped in our own thoughts, we are unable to see the surrounding world.
"Where to walk when no path seems clear? Or is it that trapped in our thoughts we are not able to see the infinite possibilities of the landscape?"
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46points