Winners of the 2014 Sony World Photography Awards

The 2014 Sony World Photography Awards marked a high-water year for the World Photography Organisation’s annual program: more than 139,000 images from 166 countries across Professional, Open, and Youth competitions. Winners were celebrated at a gala in London on 30 April 2014, with work shown at Somerset House from 1–18 May. Seven years into the awards’ history, the edition still read as a survey of contemporary practice—documentary urgency beside still life, landscape, portraiture, and travel—rather than a single aesthetic house style.

What follows is a guide to that year’s headline results: who took L’Iris d’Or, how the Professional categories sorted, and which Open and Youth images cut through a crowded field.

L’Iris d’Or: Sara Naomi Lewkowicz

American photographer Sara Naomi Lewkowicz, then thirty-one, received the 2014 L’Iris d’Or—Sony World Photography Awards Photographer of the Year—for her Professional series Shane and Maggie. The jury selected her from the first-place winners across Professional categories. The prize included Sony imaging equipment and a $25,000 USD award, presented in London.

Lewkowicz’s project examines domestic violence as a process rather than a single incident: how a pattern builds, crests, and leaves after-effects for victims, families, and abusers. The pictures are intimate and difficult—color that feels raw, proximity that refuses easy distance. Jury chair W.M. Hunt described the work as vibrating with color, dramatic and full of impact, intimate and unsettlingly provocative. Lewkowicz, a New Yorker pursuing graduate study in visual communication at Ohio University after journalism training at the University of North Carolina, had already earned recognition including World Press Photo and College Photographer of the Year honors. The Iris win placed a hard documentary series at the center of a competition often remembered for scenic Open winners—an important signal about what “best” meant in 2014.

Professional category winners

Professional entries are judged as series. The 2014 first-place photographers spanned architecture, campaign work, wildlife, and sport:

• Architecture — Ludovic Maillard, France
• Arts and Culture — Viviana Peretti, Italy
• Campaign — Spencer Murphy, UK
• Conceptual — Thomas Brummett, US
• Contemporary Issues — Sara Naomi Lewkowicz, US
• Current Affairs — Guy Martin, UK
• Landscape — Roei Greenberg, Israel
• Lifestyle — Myriam Meloni, Italy
• Nature & Wildlife — Michael Nichols, US
• People — Mario Wezel, Germany
• Portraiture — Sophie Gamand, France
• Sport — Salvatore Di Gregorio, Italy
• Still Life — Amanda Harman, UK
• Travel — Ricardo Teles, Brazil

Harman’s Still Life Award, built around glasshouses, potting sheds, and the scullery of a country house, showed how quiet subject matter could hold its own beside news and wildlife. Gamand’s portraiture and Nichols’s nature work reminded viewers that craft categories still drive much of the Professional conversation. Martin’s Current Affairs and Lewkowicz’s Contemporary Issues kept photojournalism visible at the top of the table. Together, the list reads like a map of where serious photography was arguing in 2014: between beauty, evidence, and concept.

Open Photographer of the Year: Chen Li

The Open competition seeks a single outstanding image from amateurs and enthusiasts. In 2014, Chinese photographer Chen Li won Open Photographer of the Year with Rain in an ancient town. Category winners had been announced earlier in March; Chen Li’s Travel-category image then prevailed among ten Open category winners. Living in Fenghuang County, Hunan Province, he had photographed as an amateur for more than thirty years. The Open title still carries a particular romance: one frame, chosen from tens of thousands, that can hang beside Professional series without apology.

That romance matters for how audiences encounter the awards. Professional winners arrive with sequences and captions; Open winners often arrive as a single memorable picture. Chen Li’s rain-soaked townscape fit that tradition—atmosphere and place condensed into one printable moment—while the Professional slate carried longer arguments.

Youth, Student Focus, and Outstanding Contribution

Nineteen-year-old Paulina Metzscher of Germany became Youth Photographer of the Year with a photograph of a young girl on a night train in China—the best single image by a photographer under twenty. Scarlet Evans of the UK, representing Central Saint Martins, won Student Focus Photographer of the Year, bringing substantial Sony equipment support back to her institution. The Student Focus program that year involved hundreds of schools worldwide; the award’s point is pipeline, not only prestige.

Mary Ellen Mark received the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award. Her documentary humanism—decades of work with people often pushed to the margins—was honored with a special retrospective within the Somerset House exhibition. Previous recipients of the Outstanding Contribution honor had included William Eggleston, William Klein, Eve Arnold, Bruce Davidson, Marc Riboud, and Phil Stern. Placing Mark beside the year’s competition winners framed 2014 as a dialogue between emerging series and a lifetime of ethical looking.

Somerset House and the wider 2014 frame

Winning and shortlisted work filled East and West Wings at Somerset House—one of the larger UK presentations of its kind that year. The exhibition also folded in Sony Global Imaging Ambassadors commissions, including William Klein and photographers from Panos Pictures, plus Kraszna-Krausz Book Award winners: Sergio Larrain: Vagabond Photographer (best photography book) and Luke McKernan’s study of Charles Urban (best moving-image book). Public events across the opening weekend mixed talks, workshops, and book signings.

Entry volume—over 70,000 entrants and 139,554 images cited across coverage—matters less as a brag than as context. A competition that large inevitably rewards range. The 2014 slate did not resolve photography’s old tensions; it displayed them. Lewkowicz’s Iris series insisted on difficult intimacy. Chen Li’s Open frame insisted on atmospheric craft. Mark’s retrospective insisted on long attention. Youth and student awards insisted that the pipeline remained open.

How to read a winners list years later

Awards lists age into directories. Names that felt urgent in a London ballroom become citations in later essays; some careers accelerate, some quieten. What stays useful about the 2014 Sony World Photography Awards is the structure itself: Professional series judged by category, Open and Youth judged as single images, a lifetime contribution award that refuses to flatten history into the newest file format.

If you revisit the 2014 winners now, start with Lewkowicz’s Shane and Maggie for the year’s ethical center of gravity, then move through Harman, Gamand, Nichols, and Maillard for craft variety, and hold Chen Li and Metzscher as proof that one frame can still cut through noise. The ceremony date—30 April 2014—and the Somerset House run that followed remain the historical markers. The pictures, not the sponsorship, are what the URL promises: a winners feature from a year when the field was crowded, argumentative, and worth looking at carefully.