RSU Lecturer Alnis Stakle Wins Prestigious Sony World Photography Award

Photographer Alnis Stakle, a lecturer at Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU) and the Head of the Photography programme, has won the Professional Competition of the Sony World Photography Awards for his series Mellow Apocalypse.

The Latvian photographer was one of nine candidates in the creative category. Alnis Stakle submitted Mellow Apocalypse, a series of collages created from visual materials of the art museums’, scientific institutions’, and image banks’ open-source collections. Various elements converge and collide in the detailed collages.

Speaking of the award, Stakle said, ‘I am very surprised and happy to be one of the winners of the Sony World Photography Awards. This is a great acknowledgement and encouragement for me as a photographer and as a teacher’.

Stakle’s works have been widely exhibited, including in the Latvian Museum of Photography, the Latvian National Museum of Art, and the contemporary art gallery Modern Art Oxford. The photographs have also been published in the British Journal of Photography, Leica Fotografie International and others.

The Latvian photographer competed against photographers from Germany, the United Kingdom, Romania, Mexico, and Russia. The professional competition required submissions (5-10 images) that told a story about a political or climate crisis, a personal, inner experience, or of family and loss, that showed a creative approach to nature and real-life photography.

Stakle is not the only Latvian who won in the Sony World Photography Awards this year. Viktors Rimarevs from Riga won the national prize in the open category for his image “Dūmaka” (Haze), which depicted the shores of the Baltic Sea shrouded in mist.

The winners of nine sub-categories in the professional competition were announced at the same time as Stakle: Adam Ferguson (Australia) won Photographer of the Year; Scott Wilson (UK) won the open competition; Ezra Bohm (Netherlands) won the student competition; Tri Nguyen (Vietnam) won the youth competition. Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky was honoured for his contribution to the development of photography.

Works from the winning photographers in the student, youth, open and professional categories will be exhibited at the Somerset House arts centre in London from 13 April. Solo exhibitions by Pablo Albarenga, Photographer of the Year 2020, and Craig Easton, Photographer of the Year 2021, will be on view along with the works of this year’s winners.

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