The year’s most delicious gastronomic photographs have the power to transport us to corners frozen in time, such as the remote Khoja Obi Garm sanatorium in the mountains of Tajikistan. It was in this Soviet-era concrete giant, dedicated to wellness therapies and rest, where the winning image of the World Food Photography Awards was taken. There, the British photographer Jo Kearney stopped the clock to capture a moving tableau: an elderly woman, her face lined with wrinkles, serving herself tea in complete solitude.
“There is much to see and much to feel in this image,” says Caroline Kenyon, founder of the competition sponsored by Bimi, to whom the beautiful expression of the weathered face of the woman moved to tears. “She is alone, her simple breakfast on the table in front of her evokes the fruit of the painting on the wall behind. Against the sun-bleached colors of the scene seen through the window, the rich crimson chairs lend a regal quality to the setting, and though dressed in humility, her dignified bearing is also worthy of a queen. We are sure she has seen a lot in life, but she keeps her head high.”
The intimate, everyday snapshot by Kearney, titled A Woman Eats in the Canteen of the Soviet-era Sanatorium and awarded 5,000 pounds, was the big winner of last night’s gala (it also triumphed in the Fortnum & Mason Food at the Table category), held at the Mall Galleries in London. Hosted by renowned chef and food writer Gennaro Contaldo, the evening brought together prominent figures from the worlds of culture, art, and gastronomy to reveal the winners of the 27 categories.
The Triumph of the Spanish Gaze
It is worth noting that the edition’s list left a distinctly Iberian mark. Among nearly 9,000 gastronomic photographs from around fifty countries, Spanish photographers managed to place 12 finalist works and crown two of the contest’s most hotly contested sections.
Albert González took the first prize in the category Cream of the Crop thanks to an idyllic image captured in Ine, a small fishing village in Japan, which shows the sun-drying of squid by the Himono, a traditional Japanese technique that seems to arrest the sun’s rays on the texture of the sea.
