Siena International Photo Awards 2022

The great international photography and the world of visual arts return to animate Siena and its surroundings with a new edition of the Siena Awards. The eight photographic exhibitions have been set up in the most beautiful places in Siena and Sovicille and will be open until November 20, 2022, thus keeping beauty alive through photographic art and exhibiting extraordinary reportages made by photojournalists from all over the world.

Like every year, the exhibition "Imagine all the people sharing all the world" will be set up in the former Lo Stellino Distillery, which offers the winning images of the various categories "Siena International Photo Awards", authentic works of art from all over the world.

The exhibition in the Magazzini del Sale “I Wonder if You Can” exhibits the work of contemporary photographers who push the limits of this centuries-old medium beyond reality. The exhibited artists use an innovative approach to photography to subvert the visitor's expectations. Challenging the conventions of art photography, the authors exploited the beauty of everyday events, giving meaning and purpose to scenes and experiences that we might otherwise have taken for granted.

In the wonderful rooms of the Natural History Museum of the Accademia dei Fisiocritici you will find a selection of the most beautiful photos awarded at the "Drone Photo Awards". The shots on display border the abstract, subverting spatial relationships and the scale factor, creating a simultaneously seductive and disorienting experience for the viewer. “Above us Only Sky” represents the most important collective exhibition on aerial photography.

The Accademia dei Rozzi welcomes two unpublished reportages by photographer Peter Mather. The first, "Urban and Wild", is dedicated to the red foxes who in a city in northern Canada have found an ideal community between the new urban world and their natural wild habitat, cohabiting with humans thanks to their surprising spirit of adaptation. The second project, "The Last Ice Bears", features grizzlies who fish for salmon in the southwestern Yukon, north of Canada, competing for prey with the locals, with whom they have shared the territory for thousands of years despite the disappearance of salmon, hunting and climate change threaten their survival.

The “Accademia dei Fisiocritici” Natural History Museum also houses the shots of Ami Vitale, Nikon ambassador and National Geographic photographer. On display the story of an elephant orphanage in Kenya, the dramatic rescue of two Rothschild's giraffes and the last moments of Sudan's life, a white rhino, the last male of the species.

The Camollia 85 Green Area, on the other hand, is the setting for the last two reports by the young Indian photographer Danish Siddiqui, killed in Afghanistan on July 16, 2021 while documenting the fighting between Afghan troops and the Taliban in the Spin Boldak district. The works of the young photojournalist, born in 1983 and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, arrived in Siena thanks to his colleague and friend Adrees Latif, and are entitled "Last Stand Against Taliban", with images taken by Danish Siddiqui shortly before his death, and "COVID, India's Second Wave”, made in the spring of 2021 when India went through the second wave of Coronavirus infections.

Sovicille host two beautiful portrait exhibitions. Following a circular route along the streets of the historic center and in the main square, it is possible to admire the outdoor exhibition "Face to face", where dozens of faces of people of all ages and from all over the world look out from the windows and doors of the ancient buildings.

From the main square of Sovicille it is then possible to access the Cultural Center "La Tinaia" to visit "Dan Winters: Portraits", a personal exhibition of the photographer known and awarded all over the world for his portraits of celebrities, for his photographs and scientific illustrations. and space and for his photojournalism works published in numerous American and international magazines. Some of the characters exhibited in Sovicille are Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Denzel Washington, Nicole Kidman, Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bono, Eminem, Willie Nelson.

For more information https://festival.sienawards.com/