Heaps of digital pictures, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, were uploaded for the purview of the judges earlier this year to compete in Sony’s World Photography Awards 2022, now in its 15th year.
Cameras in 211 different nations or territories across the globe trained their lenses on sights—breathtaking, melancholic, weird, or wonderful—to portray a year when life was put on hold for many of its citizens; a year when trials, societal- and health-related, loomed; where nature and wildlife waxed, while human industry and prosperity waned in the wake of a pandemic. In many ways, it was terrifying and awful.
