CitiesToBe Photo Award

Organized by CitiesToBe & anteverti,

the CitiesToBe Photo Award is an international photography contest

for images that portrait cities and their complexity.

1st edition of the CitiesToBe Photo Award

533 photographs from more than 60 countries – and all continents – were submitted to the call of the 1st edition of the CitiesToBe Photo Award, which remained open from 12/19/2019 to 2/16/2020.

Among them, the Jury decided to reward the photograph ‘Vorkuta’, by Roman Demyanenko (1984), a freelance documentary photographer based in Voronezh, Russia.

Roman Demyanenko‘s image reflects on the past and present of cities and the volatility of urban realities – through the effervescence and decadence of Europe’s easternmost town, Vorkuta.

For its artwork, Demyanenko received an acquisitive prize of 1,500 euros.

Vorkuta by Roman Demyanenko — ‘Vorkuta’, by Roman Demyanenko

«Vorkuta is situated in a permafrost zone near the Arctic Circle, and after the beginning of Stalin’s mass repressions in Vorkuta was formed one of the most cruel Gulag camp. Prisoner’s forced labour was used for the coal mining, where more than 200 thousand prisoners died. After the fall of the USSR, profitability of coal mines was doubted. The collapse of the Soviet economy set in motion the decline of the town, and many people left their houses and moved from Vorkuta, which became one of the most rapidly dying cities in Russia.»

Roman Demyanenko

Since 2013, Demyanenko has been working as staff news photographer for the newspaper Molodoj Kommunar and the TASS news agency. His work has been published in globally known newspapers and magazines including The Washington Post, Forbes, The Moscow Times or Meduza, where his complete photo report on Vorkuta was featured.

At the same time, 10 Honorary Mentions were awarded by the Jury of the competition to the photographs below:

‘World’s biggest refugee camp’, by Azim Khan Ronnie from Bangladesh

'Door to Aridity', by Jordi Jon Pablo Acebedo — ‘World’s biggest refugee camp’, by Azim Khan Ronnie from Bangladesh

Read more on the winning image and the 10 Honorary Mentions here.

The 11 awarded images are part of the 50 shortlisted finalists that the Jury had previously selected, which will be featured in a commemorative book of the 1st edition of the CitiesToBe Photo Award, to be edited during 2020 to acknowledge and disseminate the authors’ artwork. This book will be published at CitiesToBe and digitally and physically distributed.

The non-awarded photographers that will see their artwork showcased in the CitiesToBe Photo Award book are:

Sameer Al-Doumy
Antonio Emanuele Alterio
Manuel Álvarez Diestro
Guillermo Astiaso Llamazares
Alexandr Bormotin
Mpumelelo Buthelezi
Manolo Espaliú
Ben Etienne
Inés García Ruiz
Enrico Gatti
David Eliud Gil Samaniego Maldonado
Juan Manuel Gómez Sandoval
Ralph Gräf
Ihar Hancharuk
Liz Hingley Hingley
Muhammad Amdad Hossain
Pablo Izaguerri
Willem Kuijpers
Diego López Calvín
Jorge López Muñoz
Adrián Markis
Debarshi Mukherjee
Ana Nance
Natalia Oreshina
Ben Parker
Camilo José Peña Pérez
Christof Pluemacher
Cetywa Powell
Reza Rohani
Sujit Saha
Sanghamitra Sarkar
Shridarshan Shukla
Suvro Paul Suvro
Mouneb Taim Taim
Dana Taylor
Marlon Villaverde
Elizabeth Vinck Monroy
Giovanna Wilson Morello
Edo Zollo

More information on the CitiesToBe Photo Award

THE JURY

The Jury of the CitiesToBe Photo Award was composed by:

Roger Grasas, photographer and visual artist
Pilar Conesa · anteverti CEO & founder
Ana Alcantud · Consulting Director of anteverti
Cristina Garrido · Director of Innovation & Strategic Development of anteverti & Co-Director of citiestobe.com
Sergio García i Rodríguez · Communication Coordinator of anteveri & Co-Director of citiestobe.com

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