6 Sensational Photos From A Global Contest With 230,000 Entries

By NPR Staff / NPR

Published April 30, 2016 at 4:00 AM PDT

This story was published more than 8 years ago.

A young man from Bali, Indonesia, shows off his rainbow-colored rooster before a cockfight.

For the Ekondas pygmies in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the most important moment in a woman's life is the birth of her first child. The young mother goes through an elaborate beautification ritual to draw attention to herself, spreading pastes of palm oil and other ingredients over her hair and body.

Men push a cart through a neighborhood in northern Shanxi, China as smoke billows from a coal-fired power plant in the distance.

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A yawn from one of the girls who'll perform a traditional dance at the Hindu Melasti Festival in Bali, Indonesia.

Tibetan nomads put up a string of Buddhist prayer flags in Qinghai, China. They face many challenges to their traditional way of life, including political pressure to resettle, climate change and rapid modernization.

A woman in Iran shows her injuries from an acid attack. This victims of this kind of violence are often women and children. The trigger may be a family conflict, a rejected marriage proposal or a desire for revenge.

One photo of a pensive Congolese woman in her distinctive makeup could be mistaken for a Renaissance painting. Another, of a coal plant sending smoke plumes over a town in China, looks like a still from a 1950s propaganda film. And another, of a little girl yawning during an Indonesian festival, will just make you smile.

The images from the ninth annual Sony World Photography Awards, the largest photo competition in the world, come in many styles and flavors. More than 230,000 photos, taken from the past 12 months, were submitted by photographers in 186 countries. The World Photography Organization announced the grand prize winners for the 14 categories, ranging from sport to travel, last week.

The top award, the L'Iris d'Or Photographer of the Year, along with a $25,000 prize, went to a sobering subject: acid attack victims, documented by Iranian photojournalist Asghar Khamseh in his heart-wrenching series "Fire of Hatred."

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The winning and shortlisted photos are on display at the Somerset House in London until May 8. We selected a few featured entries that show the faces and places we cover on our blog.

Editor's Note: Viewers may find the last image in this sequence disturbing.