Award recognises photographers who capture remote or unique places on earth
1/35 The High Street
Kompong Phluk high street. One of the floating villages on the Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia, October 2018
Mark Phoenix
2/35 Chong Kneas floating village
Chong Kneas. One of the floating villages on the Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia, October 2018
Mark Phoenix
3/35
“Surrounded by heavily polluting factories, this little owl manages to catch its food and raise its young in an increasingly hostile territory.”
Jose Luis Rodriquez
4/35 Milky Way and the Summer Triangle over Stonehenge
“In the early evening I walked to the monumental stones of Stonehenge. As the sun slowly disappeared behind the stones, I set up my photo equipment. The weather was changeable. But just in time after the blue hour, the sky cleared up.”
Sebastian Voltmer
5/35 March of the Echinoderms
“Early in 2018, I was down in South Africa to photograph some of the Cape’s less well known yet visually spectacular smaller critters that live beneath the waves. Pictured here is a seething, writhing intertwined mass of brittle stars and sea urchins.”
David Alpert
6/35 Abernethy Forest
“Explored over the course of three winters, the series is a look into the wildest and most endangered habitat in the UK. Only 1% of native woodland now remains in the Cairngorms. Pockets exist in isolation from one another, resulting in a fragmented landscape, which is home to some of the country’s rarest wildlife.”
Luke Brown
7/35 Loch Garten
“Its future hangs in the balance of a new rewilding initiative called Cairngorms Connect, funded by the Endangered Landscapes Programme. The aim is to fulfil the potential of the landscape by restoring its natural ecology, creating a new standard for habitat restoration in Britain. ‘Wooded Heights’ focuses on the landscape of the Ancient Caledonia Forest and Grampian Mountains of the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland.”
Luke Brown
8/35 Shark Bay
“I still have difficulties to comprehend something so otherworldly beautiful could be so devastating to our environment if not controlled correctly. These images are taken 4500 ft over some tailing ponds in Western Australia. Tailing ponds are the byproducts left over from mining and extracting resources from the oilsands or minerals.”
Yi Sun
9/35 Shark Bay
“Some of these can be as big as hundreds of square kilometres. They contain toxic substances and heavy metals such as lead, copper, and mercury, and have huge environmental impacts on the surrounding air, land, water, vegetation and wildlife. Breaches of these structures have already created some of the greatest environmental catastrophes. By focusing my lens on these Earth’s “untold stories” I wish to raise our awareness of these growing environmental time bombs.”
Yi Sun
10/35 Nenets Camp
“Last year I had the privilege of spending time with the Nenets reindeer herders in Siberia. The first night that I arrived at their remote camp, I was rewarded with the sight of the Aurora borealis over their camp. It was -30C so hard to set up this shot!”
Sue Flood
11/35 Big Blue Berg
“I have worked in the polar regions for almost 25 years now and the Antarctic is the most spectacular place on the planet. I wanted to take a shot which hopefully captured the grandeur and drama of this stunning iceberg, and sense of foreboding. Climate change is real.”
Sue Flood
12/35 In Line For Food
“I am a documentary photographer who has been working on human rights and social issues for the past 10 years. To date, about 1 million Rohingya refugee have fled the persecutions in Myanmar. Many of them have settled in overcrowded camps among the hills outside of Cox Bazaar. With over 60% of the refugees being women and children, and an estimated 80,000+ newborns this year, there is a high proportion of the population that are very vulnerable to health issues, violence and human trafficking.”
Larry Louie
13/35 The Water Pump
“It is estimated that there are over 580,000 children in these camps. The lucky ones are with family who can protect them. Many others have been separated from their family and are essentially fending for themselves and their younger siblings on their own. As these children move through their daily activities in the camps with eyes too old and serious for their age, one can only imagine what horrors and atrocities they have witnessed and endure on their journey here. In the meantime, with all the media coverage, foreign aid has made the lives of these refugees just bearable in these beautiful rolling hills.”
Larry Louie
14/35 Changing Forests
Plastic waste in the Amazon Rainforest
Elizabeth Streeter
15/35 Floating Village
Plastic pours into the Amazon river in the Floating Village of Belen in Iquitos, Peru.
Elizabeth Streeter
16/35 14 June 2018
“Remembering the losses and inequities of the Grenfell Tower fire one year on.”
Debbie Humphry
17/35 The Thicks – Yesterday’s Tomorrow
Captured in Staverton Forest, an ancient oak forest near the suffolk coast. “A small area of the forest, known as The Thicks, has been unmanaged for the last two hundred years and now contains many ancient oaks and oak stumps overgrown by holly and birch.”
Jeremy Young
18/35 The Thicks – Yesterday’s Tomorrow
Captured in Staverton Forest, an ancient oak forest near the suffolk coast. “Recognition of the value of the biodiversity supported by the decaying oak stumps is now widely acknowledged and makes The Thicks is a great example of landscape management in our fight against climate change, and so a significant landscape for our future.”
Jeremy Young
19/35 Northern Lights
“Just outside Grundarfjorour, at about 1am, the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights were at their strongest. A group of us had been photographing all evening, and this was the absolute highlight, with the green and purple colours in the sky so vivid, over the mountains and farmland below.”
Glyn Thomas
20/35 The Landfill Midwife
“Mak Muji, 56 years-old, is a litter-picker. She stands beside a litter-picker’s tent on the top of the main waste heap in “Bantar Gebang”, Jakarta’s landfill, at night. She is the only midwife for the 18,000 villagers living inside and all around the dumpsite.”
Elizabeth Zavoli
21/35 Oyster Harvesting on the Sherbro River Delta
Rugiatu (foreground) and Mabinty, collect oysters at low tide on a mudbank in the Sherbro River Delta, Sierra Leone in May 2018
Greg Funnell
22/35 Old Hedge, Venton Wood
“We shun the word ‘wilderness’ as something which describes a bygone age in another country a primordial memory from an imagined past. But I love finding tracts of ‘wildness’ like this boundary hedge at the edge of a field, which has grown free of the barbed-wire that imprisoned it.”
David Green
23/35 After First Snow
“Taken from a helicopter, this image illustrates the numerous channels and creeks on the face of the earth. Landmannalaugar is famous for its multi-coloured hills and slopes, but after the snow in October the whole area appeared monochromatic, almost black and white.”
Doron Talmi
24/35 After First Snow
“Taken from a helicopter, this image illustrates the numerous channels and creeks on the face of the earth. Landmannalaugar is famous for its multi-coloured hills and slopes, but after the snow in October the whole area appeared monochromatic, almost black and white.”
Doron Talmi
25/35 Forest Depths
“An amazing mystical wood, and very old tree above Blea Tarn in the Lake District. I’m not sure many people know about this tree!”
David Rippin
26/35 Evening Light
“Taken at the end of a long but magnificent winter’s day high in Langdale in the Lake District.”
David Rippin
27/35 Melting Glacier / Iceberg Lake MT
“Grinnell Glacier in Montana has seen excessive melting in the past decade. Soon enough Glacier park, hence the name, will have no more glaciers because of warming temperatures.”
Mona Miri
28/35 Ancient Path, Halsdon Woods
“This wood is now a Nature Reserve, managed by Devon Wildlife Trust. Fortunately, they’ve managed to leave much of it to grow wild. I love walking the old paths, like this one which is starting to hollow with age, and connects the River Torridge to a road.”
David Green
29/35 Forest of the crosses
“The silhouettes of blackened tree crosses rising up from hillsides in Odena in the north-west of Catelonia, Spain, are a haunting memorial to a forest which was ravaged by wild fires in 2015.”
Mark Benham
30/35 Thank You For Smoking
Drone capture of an arson of unsorted wastes in a tobacco field near Saint Angelo in Formis, southern Italy
Marco Casino
31/35 Thank You For Smoking
Night arson of a buffalo farm in Marcianise, southern Italy owned by the notorious camorra family Bellopede. At the beginning of 2018, anti-mafia magistrates touted the idea of setting up a “curfew” in Marcianise. The latest was established in 1998, after a series of murders related to the camorra
Marco Casino
32/35 Thank You For Smoking
Excavation in the ASI area of Capua shown at 6 points between 2003-2017, nowadays considered the largest illegal underground dump in Europe. “Here 2 million cubic meters of toxic waste have been buried” declared Sergio Costa, former general of the Forestry corp and current Italian-Minister-of-the-Environment.
Marco Casino
33/35 Oyster Harvesting on the Sherbro River Delta
Fishing boats on a mudbank at low tide in the Sherbro River Delta, Sierra Leone in May 2018
Greg Funnell
34/35 March of the Echinoderms
“This spiny sea star (Marthasterias glacialis) was an unwelcome traveller across a bed of fellow echinoderms. The brittle stars scattered as it approached. The larger starfish is a known predator.”
David Alpert
35/35
“This project aims to raise consciousness and to address individual responsibility for waste management, while insisting on the urgency of changing the central role that plastic plays in daily life and taking the collective action to make that happen.”
Aennor Bleu
1/35 The High Street
Kompong Phluk high street. One of the floating villages on the Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia, October 2018
Mark Phoenix
2/35 Chong Kneas floating village
Chong Kneas. One of the floating villages on the Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia, October 2018
Mark Phoenix
3/35
“Surrounded by heavily polluting factories, this little owl manages to catch its food and raise its young in an increasingly hostile territory.”
Jose Luis Rodriquez
4/35 Milky Way and the Summer Triangle over Stonehenge
“In the early evening I walked to the monumental stones of Stonehenge. As the sun slowly disappeared behind the stones, I set up my photo equipment. The weather was changeable. But just in time after the blue hour, the sky cleared up.”
Sebastian Voltmer
5/35 March of the Echinoderms
“Early in 2018, I was down in South Africa to photograph some of the Cape’s less well known yet visually spectacular smaller critters that live beneath the waves. Pictured here is a seething, writhing intertwined mass of brittle stars and sea urchins.”
David Alpert
6/35 Abernethy Forest
“Explored over the course of three winters, the series is a look into the wildest and most endangered habitat in the UK. Only 1% of native woodland now remains in the Cairngorms. Pockets exist in isolation from one another, resulting in a fragmented landscape, which is home to some of the country’s rarest wildlife.”
Luke Brown
7/35 Loch Garten
“Its future hangs in the balance of a new rewilding initiative called Cairngorms Connect, funded by the Endangered Landscapes Programme. The aim is to fulfil the potential of the landscape by restoring its natural ecology, creating a new standard for habitat restoration in Britain. ‘Wooded Heights’ focuses on the landscape of the Ancient Caledonia Forest and Grampian Mountains of the Cairngorms National Park in Scotland.”
Luke Brown
8/35 Shark Bay
“I still have difficulties to comprehend something so otherworldly beautiful could be so devastating to our environment if not controlled correctly. These images are taken 4500 ft over some tailing ponds in Western Australia. Tailing ponds are the byproducts left over from mining and extracting resources from the oilsands or minerals.”
Yi Sun
9/35 Shark Bay
“Some of these can be as big as hundreds of square kilometres. They contain toxic substances and heavy metals such as lead, copper, and mercury, and have huge environmental impacts on the surrounding air, land, water, vegetation and wildlife. Breaches of these structures have already created some of the greatest environmental catastrophes. By focusing my lens on these Earth’s “untold stories” I wish to raise our awareness of these growing environmental time bombs.”
Yi Sun
10/35 Nenets Camp
“Last year I had the privilege of spending time with the Nenets reindeer herders in Siberia. The first night that I arrived at their remote camp, I was rewarded with the sight of the Aurora borealis over their camp. It was -30C so hard to set up this shot!”
Sue Flood
11/35 Big Blue Berg
“I have worked in the polar regions for almost 25 years now and the Antarctic is the most spectacular place on the planet. I wanted to take a shot which hopefully captured the grandeur and drama of this stunning iceberg, and sense of foreboding. Climate change is real.”
Sue Flood
12/35 In Line For Food
“I am a documentary photographer who has been working on human rights and social issues for the past 10 years. To date, about 1 million Rohingya refugee have fled the persecutions in Myanmar. Many of them have settled in overcrowded camps among the hills outside of Cox Bazaar. With over 60% of the refugees being women and children, and an estimated 80,000+ newborns this year, there is a high proportion of the population that are very vulnerable to health issues, violence and human trafficking.”
Larry Louie
13/35 The Water Pump
“It is estimated that there are over 580,000 children in these camps. The lucky ones are with family who can protect them. Many others have been separated from their family and are essentially fending for themselves and their younger siblings on their own. As these children move through their daily activities in the camps with eyes too old and serious for their age, one can only imagine what horrors and atrocities they have witnessed and endure on their journey here. In the meantime, with all the media coverage, foreign aid has made the lives of these refugees just bearable in these beautiful rolling hills.”
Larry Louie
14/35 Changing Forests
Plastic waste in the Amazon Rainforest
Elizabeth Streeter
15/35 Floating Village
Plastic pours into the Amazon river in the Floating Village of Belen in Iquitos, Peru.
Elizabeth Streeter
16/35 14 June 2018
“Remembering the losses and inequities of the Grenfell Tower fire one year on.”
Debbie Humphry
17/35 The Thicks – Yesterday’s Tomorrow
Captured in Staverton Forest, an ancient oak forest near the suffolk coast. “A small area of the forest, known as The Thicks, has been unmanaged for the last two hundred years and now contains many ancient oaks and oak stumps overgrown by holly and birch.”
Jeremy Young
18/35 The Thicks – Yesterday’s Tomorrow
Captured in Staverton Forest, an ancient oak forest near the suffolk coast. “Recognition of the value of the biodiversity supported by the decaying oak stumps is now widely acknowledged and makes The Thicks is a great example of landscape management in our fight against climate change, and so a significant landscape for our future.”
Jeremy Young
19/35 Northern Lights
“Just outside Grundarfjorour, at about 1am, the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights were at their strongest. A group of us had been photographing all evening, and this was the absolute highlight, with the green and purple colours in the sky so vivid, over the mountains and farmland below.”
Glyn Thomas
20/35 The Landfill Midwife
“Mak Muji, 56 years-old, is a litter-picker. She stands beside a litter-picker’s tent on the top of the main waste heap in “Bantar Gebang”, Jakarta’s landfill, at night. She is the only midwife for the 18,000 villagers living inside and all around the dumpsite.”
Elizabeth Zavoli
21/35 Oyster Harvesting on the Sherbro River Delta
Rugiatu (foreground) and Mabinty, collect oysters at low tide on a mudbank in the Sherbro River Delta, Sierra Leone in May 2018
Greg Funnell
22/35 Old Hedge, Venton Wood
“We shun the word ‘wilderness’ as something which describes a bygone age in another country a primordial memory from an imagined past. But I love finding tracts of ‘wildness’ like this boundary hedge at the edge of a field, which has grown free of the barbed-wire that imprisoned it.”
David Green
23/35 After First Snow
“Taken from a helicopter, this image illustrates the numerous channels and creeks on the face of the earth. Landmannalaugar is famous for its multi-coloured hills and slopes, but after the snow in October the whole area appeared monochromatic, almost black and white.”
Doron Talmi
24/35 After First Snow
“Taken from a helicopter, this image illustrates the numerous channels and creeks on the face of the earth. Landmannalaugar is famous for its multi-coloured hills and slopes, but after the snow in October the whole area appeared monochromatic, almost black and white.”
Doron Talmi
25/35 Forest Depths
“An amazing mystical wood, and very old tree above Blea Tarn in the Lake District. I’m not sure many people know about this tree!”
David Rippin
26/35 Evening Light
“Taken at the end of a long but magnificent winter’s day high in Langdale in the Lake District.”
David Rippin
27/35 Melting Glacier / Iceberg Lake MT
“Grinnell Glacier in Montana has seen excessive melting in the past decade. Soon enough Glacier park, hence the name, will have no more glaciers because of warming temperatures.”
Mona Miri
28/35 Ancient Path, Halsdon Woods
“This wood is now a Nature Reserve, managed by Devon Wildlife Trust. Fortunately, they’ve managed to leave much of it to grow wild. I love walking the old paths, like this one which is starting to hollow with age, and connects the River Torridge to a road.”
David Green
29/35 Forest of the crosses
“The silhouettes of blackened tree crosses rising up from hillsides in Odena in the north-west of Catelonia, Spain, are a haunting memorial to a forest which was ravaged by wild fires in 2015.”
Mark Benham
30/35 Thank You For Smoking
Drone capture of an arson of unsorted wastes in a tobacco field near Saint Angelo in Formis, southern Italy
Marco Casino
31/35 Thank You For Smoking
Night arson of a buffalo farm in Marcianise, southern Italy owned by the notorious camorra family Bellopede. At the beginning of 2018, anti-mafia magistrates touted the idea of setting up a “curfew” in Marcianise. The latest was established in 1998, after a series of murders related to the camorra
Marco Casino
32/35 Thank You For Smoking
Excavation in the ASI area of Capua shown at 6 points between 2003-2017, nowadays considered the largest illegal underground dump in Europe. “Here 2 million cubic meters of toxic waste have been buried” declared Sergio Costa, former general of the Forestry corp and current Italian-Minister-of-the-Environment.
Marco Casino
33/35 Oyster Harvesting on the Sherbro River Delta
Fishing boats on a mudbank at low tide in the Sherbro River Delta, Sierra Leone in May 2018
Greg Funnell
34/35 March of the Echinoderms
“This spiny sea star (Marthasterias glacialis) was an unwelcome traveller across a bed of fellow echinoderms. The brittle stars scattered as it approached. The larger starfish is a known predator.”
David Alpert
35/35
“This project aims to raise consciousness and to address individual responsibility for waste management, while insisting on the urgency of changing the central role that plastic plays in daily life and taking the collective action to make that happen.”
Aennor Bleu
The shortlist has been announced for Earth Photo 2019, the international photography competition specialising in geography and the environment.
The Earth Photo prize invites entries from photographers who capture remote or unique parts of the world and especially welcomes pictures that highlight the impact of humans on the planet.
Shortlisted pictures range from the floating villages of Cambodia’s Tonle Sap lake to ancient forests in the Scottish Highlands.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
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All of the shortlisted images will feature in an exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society in London from 6 July to 22 August 2019.
“The aim of the project is to really draw attention to the number of voices that make up the conversation about our planer and the way we treat it,” says competition organiser Professor Joe Smith of the RGS.
The Independent has compiled the best pictures from the shortlist in the gallery above.
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