Rosie Hallam has won the 2021 Earth Photo competition with her stunning triptych A Right to an Education depicting one family’s story: daughter Selamaw, the first person in her family to stay on at school past primary age, her mother Meselech, and finally her father Marco, who are all subsistence farmers participating in an education programme in Ethiopia. Rosie’s series of images also won the competition’s People category.
Rosie Hallam and the five other category winners were selected from over 2,000 submissions by an expert panel of judges, chaired by Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Marissa Roth. She said of Rosie’s winning work: “This series exemplifies hope and possibility, and it is eminently clear that [Rosie] has a heart-felt interest in telling Selamaw’s story as evidenced in the outstanding portrait of her studying in her home and through the sensitive portraits of her parents. Rosie is an accomplished and dedicated photographer and is trying to interpret the world with an eye towards positive change, while raising awareness of the importance of literacy.”
Edward Bateman won the Place category for his playful image of Yosemite’s Half Dome in Winter. COVID restrictions made travel to the national park impossible, so the photographer recreated this scene on his kitchen table with a 3D printed landscape derived from geographical data from the USGS, and a small fog machine.
Markus van Hauten won the Nature category for his work Blue Pool, which depicts a hidden geothermal spring located on the sparsely inhabited highland plateau of Iceland’s interior.
Pierpaolo Mittica and Alessandro Tesei won the video category for their work Semipalatinsk Polygon, the crime of nuclear testing, a short film revealing the human and environmental legacy of Cold War weapons testing.
Roberto Bueno won the Changing Forests category for his work Forest Like Garden, an aerial image of lush forest slopes juxtaposed against human-made stepped vineyards in Spain.
Antonio Pérez won the Climate of Change category for his series The Sea Moves Us, the Sea Moves (Fuvemeh, Ghana) depicting engaging and dignified portraits of individuals whose lives have been directly and significantly affected by coastal erosion in West Africa.
Director of the Society, Professor Joe Smith, said: “Earth Photo plays a unique role in the landscape of photo competitions. Just like the subject of geography, Earth Photo invites photographers and filmmakers, and their audiences, to take an integrated, whole-system view of the relationships between humans and their world. The responses are varied in location, subject and approach. But these images, taken together, invite a range of responses, including curiosity, wonder, care and concern.”
You can view the Earth Photo shortlist, including the winning images, on the Earth Photo website, and at the Society in London until Wednesday 25 August.
A selection of the shortlisted photos will also be shown at Forestry England forests including Dalby Forest, North Yorkshire until 19 September, Moors Valley Country Park and Forest, Dorset, from 4 October to 19 December, and at Grizedale, Cumbria, from 20 December 2021 to 24 April 2022.