Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition
Somerset House
 

THIS is an eclectic showcase of talent, with a few hefty themes emerging, including mankind’s hand in the immolation of our beautiful planet.

Another thread, with some gut-punching images, is the ubiquitous violence against women and girls, and the soaring power of sisterhood, as female photojournalists focus on telling their sisters’ stories.

The star of the show, in many ways, is the amazing Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, recipient of this year’s Outstanding Contribution to Photography.

His images have a cinematic beauty, but they’re shot through with melancholy, depicting industrial workers in the harshest of conditions. Gold (1986) reveals the grim existence of those toiling on the steep cliffs of the Serra Pelada gold mine in northern Brazil. The series Workers (1993) reports on exhausting manual labour in the oil, construction, agricultural and mining industries.

The forced displacement of people is the subject of Exodus (2000), while Genesis (2011) involved Salgado exploring remote and pristine areas of the world.

He famously took eight years to do around 30 trips, on foot, in light aircraft, boats, canoes, and even balloons, to capture this portfolio. It reflects his determination to convince us that we can mend our devastated planet.

There’s evidence of the wide-ranging nature of this award show in a curious piece from Mackenzie Calle (US), in which she came up with a fictional Gay Space Agency.

This creates an alternative history of Nasa, which Calle claims has never flown an openly LGBTQ+ astronaut. This is not simply artistic quirkiness on the photographer’s part. Her work reveals Nasa’s use of psychiatric tests, seemingly designed to screen out gay and lesbian astronauts.

As late as 1994, the agency wanted to include homosexuality as a psychiatrically disqualifying condition. Calle devoted hundreds of hours in archives to unearth this regressive practice. Photojournalism at its finest.

The glittering prize of Photographer of the Year has been awarded to Juliette Pavy from France, for her dedication to tell the world of the involuntary birth control campaign led by Danish authorities in Greenland between 1966 and 1975.

The Spiralkampagnen: Forced Contraception and Unintended Sterilisation of Greenlandic Women, saw thousands of young Inuit women and girls (some as young as 12) implanted with intrauterine devices, known as spirals, without their consent, in many cases leading to their sterilisation.

There’s a startling portrait in Pavy’s series, which generally centres on the women themselves. An unnamed male gynaecologist is quoted: “Spirals were what we had, what was available to us. The instruction was from the Danish authority. There was a social problem: many young women having their first child at the age of 15 or 16. The doctors thought they were doing something good, but it was terribly stupid. I regret it today.”

A regret which will do nothing to mend the damage done.

The stand-out piece, for me, is Sujata Setia’s A Thousand Cuts, the result of a lengthy project with survivors of domestic abuse from the UK’s South Asian community.

Portraits of the women are cut through with incisions in the surface of the photographs, revealing a layer of red paper underneath.

Setia says she wanted to show the continuous act of chipping at the soul of the abused.

Working with the charity Shewise, Setia set up a space in a Hounslow church: “Many of us met there, several times over. We held hands and spoke at length,” she says.

This is not the work of a snapper who took a few pics and moved on. Setia’s background as a TV and radio journalist has clearly underpinned her approach; she has listened to traumatised women for hour upon hour. Her empathy shines from every brilliant portrait.

Until May 6 2024, somersethouse.org.uk