Istanbul Photo Awards 2017 winners announced

ANKARA (AA) - Frederic Lafargue's "Fleeing from Daesh" was chosen Photo of the Year 2017 by the international jury of the 3rd Istanbul Photo Awards.

Sponsored by Turkish Airlines and Turkish Coordination and Cooperation Agency (TIKA), this year's contest saw an additional 22 photographers from 17 countries receiving awards.

Around 25,000 photos had been submitted to the contest and jury members picked the winners during a special meeting in Turkey's Cappadocia, a historical region in Central Anatolia, between March 19 and 22.

In addition to news and sports categories, the jury also determined winners in the newly-added portrait and nature/environment categories.

For the first time in the contest's three-year history, Hosam Salem, a freelancer photojournalist in Gaza, Palestine, received the Young Photojournalist award with his photograph "Street Training in Gaza". The newly-introduced award is given to a winner under the age of 28.

Aris Messinis, with his photo series "Death in the Mediterranean" taken for Agence France Presse (AFP), won the News Series Award.

Adam Pretty's photo "Below the Surface" taken for Getty Images won the Sports Single Award, while Patrick Smith won the Sports Series Award.

Mary Gelman won the first prize in Portrait-Multiple category with the theme of women victims, while there was no winner in the Portrait-Single category.

Kemal Jufri's photo titled "Feeding Orphaned Orangutans" won the Nature-Environment Story Award, while Johnny Miller's Papwa Sewgolum Golf Course photo series took home the Nature-Environment Single Award.

A total prize money of $133,000 was awarded across eight different categories, in addition to the $3,000 Young Photojournalist award, and a separate $10,000 Photo of the Year award.

The award-winning images will be exhibited at Istanbul’s Tophane-i Amire Culture and Arts Centre on April 2.

Last year, photographers Abd Doumany, whose image of an injured Syrian boy was chosen as the Photo of the Year by an international jury, and Sergey Ponomarev, who caught images of refugees arriving the Greek island of Lesbos for The New York Times, won the Single News category and later a Pulitzer Prize.

In 2015, Daniel Berehulak was the winner of the competition's Photo of the Year with his coverage of the Ebola epidemic in Liberia and later his work won the Pulitzer Prize.

2017 Photo Contest Jury

Award-winning staff photographer at Getty Images, Cameron Spencer; Anadolu Agency's Visual News Editor-in-Chief, Ahmet Sel; NOOR Images photojournalist, Yuri Kozyrev; founder of Shanghai Center of Photography (SCOP) and Pulitzer laureate photojournalist, Liu Heung Shing; photojournalist and visual media advisor Georges De Keerle; Anadolu Agency's Editor of Photography, Firat Yurdakul; Senior Digital Editor of Paris Match, Marion Mertens; Visual documentary producer and curator and a co-founder of "Screen", Liza Faktor and Director of Photo Business Development at Agence France-Presse (AFP), Michel Scotto.