HIPA 2025 14th Edition: How Dubai Exemplifies Soft ‘Power'

The Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum International Photography Award HIPA) closed its 14th season recently in Dubai with an awards ceremony at the Museum of the Future MOTF), celebrating a global set of images that interpreted the theme of Power’. The images included a touch of the elements to the intimate, including the nature’s fury to human endurance.

- BHAVYA DESAI

This year's edition drew an extraordinary 87,000 submissions from roughly 50,000 photographers worldwide – that's a lot of entries – making the jurors' life difficult.

And at the heart of it all was an evening – set with the winning photographs of those whose work literalises the show's theme. The US$200,000 Grand Prize went to Italian photographer Gianluca Gianferrari for a monumental shot of Mount Etna – molten fragments lighting up snow – an image that speaks to geological force and visual drama.

Other category winners included Karine Aigner's jaguar portrait (General–Colour) and Ali Jadallah's portfolio “Burden of Survival”, which documents life under siege and uses storytelling to register human power and its costs. Those images – whether volcanic, predatory or political – treated power as a physical and moral force the camera can both reveal and question.

But what caught my attention was that HIPA's organisers framed the competition itself as an exercise in civic and cultural soft power: HIPA Secretary-General Ali Khalifa bin Thalith highlighted the award's growing global reach and its aim of promoting photography as a tool for communication and social reflection.