A picture is worth a thousand words. Now more than ever, photography has the power to celebrate the natural world and create conversations about our environment.
Developed in partnership with the Forestry England, Earth Photo is an international competition and exhibition which rewards photographs and videos that tell stories about our planet, its inhabitants, its beauty, and its fragility. Earth Photo showcases the very best in geographical and environmental visual media and aims to enable a better understanding of the world around us through the complementary disciplines of the environment, geography and photography.
2022 competition
The deadline for entries has now passed. Shortlisted photographers will be notified of inclusion in the exhibition by Tuesday 24 May.
Find out more about the competition the submission process
The entries are judged by a panel made up of experts from the fields of photography, film, geography, and ecology, including distinguished curators, environmentalists, writers, and artists, and chaired by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, Marissa Roth.
The shortlisted photographers and videographers will show their work in the Earth Photo exhibition at the Society in London (from 17 June to 26 August 2022) and on a national tour to three Forestry England forests later in the year. They will also have the chance to win cash prizes, and the overall winner will receive unique prizes from the Society and Forestry England.
Previous winners of the Earth Photo competition have covered a wide range of topics in their images. Last year’s overall winner, Rosie Hallam, produced a stunning triptych, A Right to an Education, depicting one family’s story: daughter Selamaw, the first person in her family to stay on at school past primary age, her mother Meselech, and finally her father Marco, who are all subsistence farmers participating in an education programme in Ethiopia. 2020 overall winner, Jonk’s images depicted abandoned spaces reclaimed by nature, whilst 2019 overall winner, Elizabetta Zavoli’s winning image showed the only midwife for 18,000 villagers living inside and around Jakarta’s Bantar Gebang landfill site.
Created in 2018, Earth Photo is already highly-respected in the field of nature photography, with shortlisted and winning images being published each year by news outlets such as the BBC, the Guardian, El Espectador, and magazines like Geographical, Vice, Digital Photographer, and National Geographic.
Earth Photo competition is run in partnership with: