12 Gold And Silver Award-Winning 2022 Images By The Association Of Photographers

The Association of Photographers (AOP) has unveiled the gold and silver winners in nine categories of its 37^th Photography Awards (first launched in 1984), along with the winners of its Open Award category.

The categories include lifestyle, documentary, portrait, environment, still life, food and drink, fashion & beauty and sport & project.

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Open to professionals and amateur photographers, the AOP was started in 1968 as the Association of Fashion and Advertising Photographers and has become one of the leading organizations for photographers in the commercial photographic industry.

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“The Covid epidemic meant the latest awards have been put together across two years, so we received many more moving image and series entries this time round than ever before, and as such there is a strong sense of storytelling to the subjects,” said Isabelle Doran, CEO of the organization.

A personal project photographed between the first and second lockdown and focusing on the outcomes of the pandemic such as the challenges of working from home, tackling home schooling, endless Zoom calls, finding somewhere quiet to fire some emails…

Gino, an experienced Lithuanian butcher, carries a pig carcass over his shoulder. He holds the considerable weight of the animal with great care, while maintaining a direct gaze with the camera, bringing a sense of dignity and stoicism in his stance and expression.

The idea behind the shot was to celebrate butchery without shying away from the realities of meat production. Gino was therefore captured in the blood-stained outfit he had arrived in, coming straight from a morning shift behind the counter.

Calcio Storico is an annual game fought among the four districts of Florence, Italy. Each team fields 27 men who play a 50-minute game, with two semifinals on the third weekend in June and then the final played on June 24, the day of La Festa di San Giovanni (the feast of John the Baptist).

The game has been played since the 16th century in the Piazza Santa Croce. Passions run high. They do it for the love of their districts. No money is involved. The rules: no sucker punches and only one-on-one fighting. Other than that…pretty much anything goes.

The civil war in Sierra Leone (1991 – 2002) not only killed more than 50,000 people, it also led to thousands of innocent civilians suffering forcible amputation of legs, arms or hands by rebel soldiers amid limb losses from landmines and bullets.

The Flying Star Amputees are a group of football teams across Sierra Leone born out of the adversity of this war. All the players are victims of the civil war and football has brought them together.

The Old Faithful geyser in Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park shoots into the night sky beneath the Comet Neowise.

An arrangements of plastic balls brought by the sea to the beaches of Bermuda. Tragically there is no shortage of plastic materials for the photographer to arrange as humanity is facing a potentially catastrophic situation where there is more discarded plastic than fish in our oceans.