2025 SUGi x NAVA Photography Contest – Winners
We are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2024 SUGi x NAVA Photo Contest.
Thank you to everyone who submitted. We received 12,895 submissions from 1,288 Photographers from 105 countries, so many of which really embodied the contest theme.
The jury certainly had a tough time deciding, but felt that the selected winning images best showed us how to bring nature closer.
Congratulations to the winners!
Grand Prize Winner
Young cowherd on the summer pastures
Natela Grigalashvili
This photograph is part of the series “The Final Days of Georgian Nomads,” which documents a fading way of life in the highlands of Adjara, where families migrate with their livestock in tune with nature’s seasonal cycles — a tradition now under threat from social and economic change.
Climate – 1st Prize
Fragments Of Climate Change 09
Gil Bartz
“Fragments of Climate Change” captures a society on the brink of climate collapse and documents Germany’s ambitious plans to become a climate-neutral industrial nation by 2045. The country has committed to phasing out nuclear energy and coal-fired power generation by 2038. Additionally, Germany’s climate law mandates significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate – 2nd Prize
Where Graves are Made
Avery Nielsen-Webb
This is just one of the 173 lumber mills located in Oregon. Trees are a renewable resource in Oregon due to new regulations of having to replant clear cut forest in recent years. With the introduction of these regulations, there has been a monumental increase to sustainability forest consumption.
Conceptual – 1st Prize
Paralleled Paths
Sarfo Emmanuel
This artwork captures the nuanced relationship between generations. The two figures represent different stages of life, bound together yet facing different directions. The younger one holds the rope tightly, looking towards a future unknown, while the elder holds it loosely, symbolizing wisdom tempered with freedom. The green background speaks to growth, while the blue rope remains a constant line of connection, heritage, and shared journey-a reminder that even as each generation moves forward, they are tethered to those who came before them.
Conceptual – 2nd Prize
W.E.I.R.D. 020
Nicolò Rinaldi
W.E.I.R.D. (Wilderness Emulation Implicates Rapid Destruction) "Everything you can imagine, nature has already created."This quote, among Albert Einstein's most famous, is the very essence that drives the study and research of biomimicry today, the scientific discipline that analyzes biological systems in nature to replicate their designs and processes, finding technological solutions for industry and research.
Fashion – 1st Prize
Juxtaposition
Natalia Klimza
The photograph is part of the “juxtaposition” series which explores cultural identity through the relationship between the human and nature. At the center of the image are the human body and the plant the only elements that retain their physical recognizable form while everything around them is a creation abstract symbolic and shifting.
Fashion – 2nd Prize
Soft Power
Lena Krämer
A photographic project about quiet strength, female presence, and intuitive connection. In Soft Power, the artist portray women in close interaction with animals, not as decoration, but as a visual exploration of inner power. The animals symbolize instinct, rawness, and the untamed, as reflections of emotional and spiritual depth. The women they photographed are not professional models. They are their friends, sisters, and mothers – women who have shaped, supported, challenged the artist. By choosing them, they wanted to ground this project in authenticity and real connection, and to celebrate the quiet power they experience in the women closest to me.
Hidden Life – 1st Prize
The microbiome from the roots of Senecio congestus
Tineke van der Pouw Kraan
Cultured bacteria and fungi from the roots of Senecio congestus (marsh fleawort). What emerged was something quietly magical, an entire hidden world of microbes, delicate and diverse, forming patterns so intricate they felt almost intentional. It’s humbling to see so much life unfolding in silence, right beneath our feet.
Hidden Life – 2nd Prize
The Lost World
Maan Limburg
Published in 2022, “The Lost World” photobook is a personal hommage to the magically desolate places of Japan. Here, almost 8,5 million houses stand abandoned - 13,6% of all houses. This was an unimaginable amount for the Dutch photographer Maan Limburg. She was so fascinated by this cultural disaster she spent months in these locations, traveling from Tokyo to Hokkaido and all the way to Hiroshima. The photographer found a real (taxidermy) tiger in a deserted second hand shop. The poor guy lost his life once, only to be lost again.
Landscape – 1st Prize
Ctonio
Alessandra Cal
This photographic series is my personal vision about the landscapes and humans stories around Mediterranean area leads me to question the meaning that lies behind the infinite expressions that nature offers to the gaze. through stones, nature and human presence, I tried to restore the vision of a timeless dreamlike place and called it Ctonio (chthonic, relating to or inhabiting the underworld) because I started from the dark and earth depth to tell a ancient story, where the past and the present mixing with reality, legends, possible truths and mythologies. focus on "Ipogeum garden" concept, understood as a phisical place and also as a generative space.
Landscape – 2nd Prize
Embrace
Weronika Nitsch
“Embrace” is a photographic love letter to the ocean, and at the same time an invitation to the viewer to feel the connection with the ocean and get closer to themselves. In a perspective where humans are seen as part of nature, the project will strengthen the bond between us and the ocean. The photographer wants to inspire reflection, action and love for the ocean – before it’s
too late.
New Nature – 1st Prize
Smiling Cactus
Sean Ellingson
Moonrise Over Two Parking Meters is a yearlong photographic exploration that closely examines the offbeat urban landscape and inhabitants of Los Angeles, California. The photographer’s engagement with the city began when they relocated to Southern California after living abroad in Hong Kong for nearly five years. Upon returning to the US, what quickly developed within their practice as a photographer was the absence of an agenda when they arrived in Los Angeles.
New Nature – 2nd Prize
Low Tide 01
Marcello Bonfanti
This visual art project explores the complexity of nature through the lens of chaos theory, using visual language to evoke the hidden structures of ecological systems. Central to each composition is a histogram generated from chaotic mathematical functions –symbols of dynamic systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions and tend to reproduce intricate, self-similar patterns over time. Each image consists of three distinct, non-AI-generated components: a photograph of a real sky, a CGI-rendered shoreline, and a mathematically derived histogram. CGI (computer-generated imagery) refers to the creation of digital visuals through algorithmic modeling and 3D rendering.
People & Nature – 1st Prize
Rebirth
Natalie Karpushenko
We all emerged from water. Scientists search for water on distant planets, for water is the source of life. The ocean is salty, like our own blood – a reminder of our shared origin. In the artist’s work, they seek to reveal this inseparable connection to water and the truth that we are all part of something vast and magnificent.
People & Nature – 2nd Prize
Plantlife 01
Niqui Carter
The Plant Life series, a tangle of leaves, fronds, and subtle shadows form a rhythmic choreography that pushes beyond traditional botanical photography. This image reads less like documentation and more like a meditation than an invitation to enter the intimate, overlooked space between wildness and design. Niqui Carter renders a common subject – urban plant life – with reverence, abstraction, and psychological depth.
Urban Wildlife – 1st Prize
King(d) of Blue
Sergio Autrey
Urban wildlife exists between what we build and what we forget. It adapts to our designs without resistance, finding balance where we see separation. Nature does not leave the city. It adapts quietly and stays.
Urban Wildlife – 2nd Prize
Untitled
Franziska Nagelová
People's Choice Award
Waiting for a Fruit Seller in the Flood
Muhammad Amdad Hossain
A fruit vendor perches barefoot atop crates to avoid the floodwaters as he awaits customers amid submerged streets in Chittagong, Bangladesh, on August 5, 2023.
