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The fifth exhibition of the Istanbul Photo Awards 2025 has opened to the public in Sakarya, a province in northwestern Türkiye, bringing together award-winning images that document major global events through the lens of international photojournalism.
Organized by Anadolu Agency (AA), Türkiye’s news agency, the exhibition highlights photography as both a historical record and a tool for bearing witness.
Hosted at the Ofis Art Center, the exhibition forms part of Sakarya Metropolitan Municipality’s December cultural and arts program.
Visitors can view the selected works until Jan. 11, 2026. The display features photographs that received awards across 10 categories in the Istanbul Photo Awards, an international competition that focuses on news, sports, nature, portrait, and daily life photography.
The images were chosen by an international jury from nearly 22,000 submissions sent in by photographers from 114 countries, underlining the contest’s global reach and its standing within the international press photography community.
For readers unfamiliar with the event, the Istanbul Photo Awards has become one of the prominent global platforms where photojournalists showcase work produced under demanding and often risky conditions.
Speaking at the opening ceremony, Anadolu’s Türkiye News Director Hasan Ay emphasized that the agency’s work in photography goes beyond technical production.
He said Anadolu aims to record history and bring attention to realities that are often overlooked or deliberately ignored.
One of his notable remarks, kept intact due to its emphasis, was that the agency does not merely press the shutter but documents history itself.
Ay also noted that Anadolu distributed more than one million photographs worldwide this year, a figure he cited to underline the scale of the agency’s visual news output.
He added that recent global events, including Israel’s genocide in Palestine, once again demonstrated how photography can serve as a powerful means of revealing realities to international audiences.
The Sakarya stop follows earlier exhibitions held in Ankara and Istanbul, as well as international showings in New York and Madrid.
The exhibition also reflects cooperation between public institutions and global brands. The 2025 competition is held with Turkcell as its communications sponsor, the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) as the overseas events sponsor, and Turkish Airlines as a partial transportation sponsor.
Applications for the 2026 Istanbul Photo Awards are currently underway. The upcoming edition will distribute a total of 58,000 U.S. dollars in prize money across the same 10 categories. Submissions will be accepted until Jan. 9, 2026, continuing the competition’s role as an open platform for professional photographers working in different parts of the world.
With its stop in Sakarya, the Istanbul Photo Awards 2025 exhibition continues to bring global stories to local spaces, linking international photojournalism with regional audiences in Türkiye and beyond.
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