Sony World Photography Awards & Martin Parr, review: Into a world of imagination

This show doesn’t offer a beautifully presented journey into the latest experimental photography. Most of the photographs are fairly conventional in approach, even in what’s called the conceptual category. The works are hung closely together, in odd juxtapositions and in similar formats, which can prompt a deadening overall effect.

The judges’ preference for George Mayer’s sleek but dull light-and-shadow studio experiments as portrait winner, over Ren shi Chen’s moving images of the “left-behind” children of Gansu province in China, is mystifying. But it’s best not to dwell on the show’s flaws: much captures the imagination and stirs the emotions. Yuan Peng’s series capturing the experiences of twins training to be professional gymnasts in China is tremendously affecting.

The overall winner is Frederik Buyckx, whose snowbound images of Balkan, Scandinavian and Central Asian people and landscapes brilliantly use the whiteness of the paper: these are both immaculate objects and striking images.

A discrete Martin Parr show reflects his acute eye for the surreal in familiar situations, whether in black and white pictures of abandoned Morris Minors in Irish landscapes or colour images of tourist hotspots.

Until May 7, Somerset House; worldphoto.org