2021 ILPOTY Awards - The Results!

To see and read the 2021 book here online, click here!

What a fantastic year! And what amazing photographs! Our congratulations to all the Top 101 photographers whose work will appear in the book presenting the 2021 International Landscape Photographer of the Year awards.

Our philosophy is that all approaches to landscape photography are valid. It is not up to us to say whether an image is a landscape or not. As a result, in the 2021 International Landscape Photographer of the Year awards, you will see exponents of many different styles presenting their rare and carefully considered compositions. Some of the landscapes are straight out of camera, others are from the photographer's imagination.

I find it quite compelling that what drives one landscape photographer can be so different to another. For some, the capture of nature at its most wonderful is reward enough. In fact, these are the moments photographers live for and being out in the landscape is often as enjoyable as shooting it with a camera.

However, the history of landscape art is much broader than merely creating a record of nature. It is interpretive, imaginative and inspirational. Other photographers take their captures and re-map the tonality; some take several captures to produce a landscape of the mind.

There's no doubt that our judges have strongly held views on what makes great photography, but equally we've invited judges who have a broad appreciation of photography. David Burnett, Jim M. Goldstein, Kaye Davis, Tim Parkin and Kelvin Yuen have very different backgrounds and very different tastes. This cornucopia of ideas curates our wonderfully diverse collection of the top 101 landscape photographs, but it also makes choosing the prize winners very difficult.

In our eighth year, we had 4504 entries and the threshold for inclusion in the book (a Top 101 entry) was a score of 85.2%. However, between 84% and 85% there were at least another 101 entries that would comfortably sit alongside as equals. Let’s face it, we put a ‘value’ on the entries because we need a way to select the images for this book and the reason we select 101 images is because we acknowledge that small differences in scores are, in many ways, quite meaningless. So congratulations to the Top 101 – and to the next 100 or so entries whose work is also exceptional.

In fact, the top 238 odd photos are just so good this year, we're going to drop them into a special gallery - it will include the top 101 plus the next 137 and we're going to call it the Top 202+ (there might be a few more than 202 which meet the score cutoff). The gallery ordering will be presented randomly and you can click on the small thumbnails to see a larger image. See the link under Archives above or click here.

There is US $10,000 in cash prizes for the best Photograph of the Year (single shot, 1st, 2nd, 3rd) and best Photographer of the Year (portfolio of four photographs, 1st, 2nd, 3rd), and there are five special subject awards which receive a one metre print from the high-end photo lab and framer, Created For Life. All 11 winners receive a physical copy of the annual Awards book, proudly printed by Momento Pro.

The 2021 winners are:

Photographer of the Year: Aytek Cetin, Turkey
2nd Max Rive, Netherlands
3rd Andrea Zappia, Italy

Photograph of the Year: Tanmay Sapkal, USA
2nd Cédric Tamani, Switzerland
3rd Ben Goode, Australia

Special subject award winners:
Heiner Machalett, Germany
Chris Byrne, USA
Mimmo Salierno, Italy
Hans Gunnar Aslaksen, Norway
Chris Kirby, Australia

Without in any way diminishing the accolades presented to our major prize winners, I'm sure many of them will be humbled and honoured when they look at the other entries. So while the prize winners are justifiably rewarded, the real recognition is being published in this book.

On behalf of David Evans, my co-convenor, we once again hope you enjoy the best landscape photographs in the world from 2021.

Peter Eastway
Chairman of Judges
International Landscape Photographer of the Year Awards