Wall Exhibition – Frontlines and Fault Lines – The SOPA Excellence in Photography Award 2025
Date: 1 Sep 2025 — 30 Sep 2025 | Venue: Main Bar & Lounge
What makes a picture stand out from the hundreds that newsroom photo editors review every day? How can the complexity of a conflict be conveyed through only a few images? And in the heat of the moment, how can a photojournalist successfully balance accurate reportage with the craft of creating a striking image?
The judges for the SOPA Awards, widely regarded as Asia’s most prestigious journalism accolades, ponder these questions and more when selecting the finalists and winners of its Excellence in Photography Award, which “honours work that demonstrates high standards of feature photography”.
All nine finalists for this year’s award are presented as a group exhibition on the Van Es Wall – a showcase of powerful visual storytelling that captures resilience, loss and human dignity across the region.
From climate crises to political upheavals, the works reflect the breadth and depth of contemporary photojournalism. In SOPA’s Global group, Adam Ferguson’s portraits of the Rohingya, published by The New York Times, reveal both suffering and strength with the quiet intensity of oil paintings, while Navesh Chitrakar’s series Mad Honey, for Reuters, offers a rare glimpse into a vanishing tradition in Nepal.
In the Regional/Local group, Iqbal Lubis exposes the human toll of Indonesia’s nickel industrialisation in work published by Bollo.id, while Richard Reyes of the Philippine Daily Inquirer captures the grief of typhoon survivors in a striking image the SOPA judges describe as “reminiscent of a Baroque painting”.
In the Chinese-language group, Initium Media charts the aftermath of Taiwan’s Hualien earthquake with poignant detail, “capturing the relentless power of nature”, and The Reporter “conveys intense emotions, reflecting the anxiety and helplessness of the crowd” in its images capturing Taiwan’s parliamentary turmoil. These works remind us why photojournalism matters — not just to document events, but to connect us, viscerally, with the lived experience behind the headlines.
