Sony World Photography Awards reveals stunning shortlist for 2019 Open and Youth competitions

As one of the world’s largest and most prestigious global photography events, the Awards annually celebrate and promote the best contemporary photography from the past year across a wide variety of photographic genres.

Over 326,000 entries were submitted across the four competitions for 2019, the highest ever number to date, with the UK, Italy, North America, Mexico, India and Korea seeing the biggest increase in submissions.

Today, the Open and Youth shortlists have been announced, showcasing an array of stunning and diverse images taken by photographers from around the world throughout 2018. You can expect to see the Professional shortlist later this month.

Looking more closely at the ​Open shortlist it includes works selected across 10 diverse categories. Expect to see everything from striking underwater photographs to majestic portraits, to urban scenes and magical landscapes. This year’s Open categories ​included the introduction of a new Creative category.

All Open shortlisted photographers will now go on to compete to become category winners, with the chance to be selected as ​Open Photographer of the Year ​winning​ ​$5,000.

The ​Youth shortlist, meanwhile, ​features the top eight single images taken by 12-19-year-olds responding to the theme of ‘Diversity’. Shortlisted photographers come from across the world from China and Zimbabwe to Bangladesh and Moldova, showing a truly international wealth of upcoming talent. One young photographer will be announced as ​Youth Photographer of the Year ​in April.

Now we'll share some of those shortlisted winners and their amazing images. You can see all shortlisted and winning images at the ​2019 Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition at Somerset House, London – running from 18 April until 6 May 2019.