Photographer
Photo Contest awards 2025
INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY COMPETITION
FIRST EDITION – NOVEMBER 1 / DECEMBER 1
Welcome
TRICASE PHOTO DAYS
Welcome to the Photography Festival, where the passion for images transforms into pure emotion! We celebrate diversity, art, and the transformative power of photography, giving space to talents of all levels and backgrounds. Here, every shot is a story, every photographer is a storyteller, and every image has the power to leave a mark. Our mission? To give voice to creativity and build a global community united by the love for images.
We believe that photography is much more than a simple image: it’s a universal language capable of breaking down borders, inspiring change, and touching the soul. Our dream is to create a world where every photographer can tell their own vision, be recognized, and leave an indelible mark. Because behind every great photograph is a beating heart, a story that deserves to be seen, and an emotion waiting to be shared.
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Photography contest reserved for young photographers in the area: “Your Tricase from another point of view” through your eyes, in an original and personal way. A dedicated exhibition and a cash prize for the winner are also planned for this section.
Prepare up to a maximum of 4 images (any theme related to Tricase). Name the files with first and last name.
Upload everything to the following link: https://form.jotform.com/251354856467366
Pay the registration fee of €10 for a maximum of 4 photos
Call to all Photographers Worldwide!
Participate in the 1st International Photography Competition Tricase Photo Awards 2025
Your chance to shine on the world stage has arrived! The competition is open to photographers of all levels, from emerging talents to established professionals, with any medium: cameras or smartphones. Selected works will be exhibited in the splendid setting of Palazzo dei Principi Gallone, in the heart of Tricase (Lecce), from November 1st to 30th, 2025, during the Salento International Film Festival.
Official inauguration and award ceremony:
During the opening event of the Tricase Photo Awards 2025 exhibitions, the winners of each category will be announced, with cash prizes.
The competition starts on May 15th and ends on July 30th, 2025
How to Participate
Simply upload the files via: https://form.jotform.com/251354856467366
name your files with first & last name and pay the registration fee.2 images → €10 | 6 images → €20 | 8 images → €30
For information: info@salentocinema.com
STREET PHOTOGRAPHY
The art of capturing everyday life, spontaneous moments, emotions, and stories that unfold in streets around the world. A genre that captures daily life and human emotions in urban environments. Framing and timing are key elements: the goal is to freeze unrepeatable moments, capturing the pathos and dynamism of the street.
LANDSCAPES
Landscape photography explores the beauty of wide spaces, whether natural or urban. It’s one of the most practiced genres, capable of evoking emotions through light, shapes, and the infinite variety of world panoramas. This category explores the urban landscape, capturing the complexity and aesthetics of cities
PORTRAIT
Portrait photography is the art of capturing a person’s essence, going beyond simple aesthetic representation. An encounter between light, expression, and identity. Through the use of light, composition, and expression, an image is created capable of telling stories, emotions, and identities.
TRAVEL
A visual narrative documenting places, cultures, and traditions. Travel photography explores the world through authentic gazes, conveying the emotions of territories and peoples. Travel photography narrates lands, cultures, and people in their natural state, transmitting emotions without geographical boundaries.
CINEMA PHOTOGRAPHY
A visual dialogue between two arts. This category celebrates the mutual influence between cinema and photography, through images that evoke cinematic atmospheres, set portraits, or shots that tell the behind-the-scenes of the big screen. Often ignored in official histories of photography
POST CONFLICT
War doesn’t end with a truce. Rubble, traumas, invisible scars, and the difficult search for a new normality remain. Through photography, we want to shine a spotlight on stories of survival, justice, reconciliation, and hope in territories marked by war.
Women in
Places of War
THE LENS AS A WEAPON OF TRUTH
They are ‘armed’ only with a camera, but they face the most dangerous fronts on the planet with the courage of soldiers and the sensitivity of those who choose to look rather than turn away. War photojournalists tell what the world often prefers to ignore: pain, loss, but also the dignity and hope that survive among the ruins.
Through their shots, these women transform silence into testimony, oblivion into living memory. With an empathetic gaze and unwavering inner strength, they penetrate contexts inaccessible to men, giving voice to those who have none, especially to women and children hidden behind the walls of houses and shelters.
Andreja Restek, Arianna Pagani, Isabella Balena, Francesca Volpi, Linda Dorigo, Matilde Gattoni: their names have rewritten the way we see war. Not just reporters, but messengers of truth, custodians of stories that we cannot – and must not – forget.
The International Photography Festival, in collaboration with the Salento International Film Festival, celebrates them with “Women in Places of War”, a project that is both tribute and denunciation, memory and act of resistance. Every photograph exhibited is an open wound, a cry, but also an embrace towards the humanity that still resists, despite everything.
Because choosing this profession means leaving without guarantees of return. It means accepting that certain faces will never leave you, and that every shot, if taken with respect, is an act of love towards those who have lost everything except their own story.
The Protagonists
Manoocher Deghati
Manoocher Deghati doesn’t just capture images—he captures stories the world is often too afraid to tell.
For over forty years, his lens has crossed frontlines, followed uprisings, and entered the silences of forgotten crises. It all began in 1978, when the Iranian revolution erupted in his homeland. Among the rubble and rising hope, he picked up his camera for the first time—not just to document, but to bear witness. This is a visual journey like no other, spanning nearly half a century of history, conflict, and humanity, all seen through the clear-eyed and compassionate gaze of Manoocher Deghati, one of the great masters of contemporary photojournalism.
The slideshow presentation titled “EYEWITNESS” is far more than a sequence of images—it is a powerful narrative told through 40 iconic photographs, carefully selected and curated. This compelling collection captures pivotal moments across Iran, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Italy.
The Protagonists
Isabella Balena
A photojournalist, she has worked for some of the main Italian and foreign periodicals, mainly dealing with social reportage and conflicts but also exploring portraiture and landscape. For several years, she has been trying to delve into themes related to contemporary history and social dynamics, including in crisis and conflict areas. She believes that photography finds its essence when it manages to be the “voice and gaze” of an otherwise invisible community. After the closure of the Grazia Neri Agency, she works independently. Her photos are present in public collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Farnesina Art Collection-Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, Donata Pizzi Collection and others. Born in Rimini, she works in Milan.
Andreja Restek
There are those who tell about war from afar, and those who choose to look it in the eye. Andreja Restek belongs to this second, courageous category: that of photojournalists who enter places where the world breaks, to give us the naked and often uncomfortable truth.
From roots in a small Croatian village, where childhood was marked by heavy silences and implacable realities, to the most dangerous war theaters on the planet, Andreja’s path is that of someone who has transformed pain into mission. Through her lens, every shot becomes a denunciation, every face a story that demands attention.
Based in Turin, she has documented conflicts, humanitarian crises, and shadowy areas of global geopolitics, establishing herself as one of the most authentic and determined visual voices in contemporary war journalism. But her fight doesn’t stop in the field.
Andreja is the founder and director of APR News, an online daily born to investigate beyond appearances: international terrorism, illicit trafficking, violated rights. Her independent investigations dig deep, where the noise of weapons blends with that of indifference.
For her, telling the world’s story means entering into its wounds. And staying there, until it’s no longer possible to look the other way.
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