The Best Pictures Of 2020 Siena International Photo Awards Have Been Announced, And They’re Truly Powerful

Homs, Syria's third-largest city, had been involved in the war for four years. A mother, who returned home after the end of the conflict, found her child's toy car in their destroyed house.

Riya and Sima are two little friends who live in the tea garden region of Sylhet, Bangladesh. Their smiling faces while playing in front of their house are a reflection of their purity.

The great grey owl is well known for its extreme hunting skill. After working on a story about this owl for many weeks in a row, I finally got a picture that told all I wanted to show in just one frame. I captured the owl seconds before it attacked a vole under the full moon. It's truly a hunter of the night.

Vietnamese workers sit surrounded by thousands of incense sticks in Quang Phu Can, a village in Hanoi, Vietnam, where the sticks have been traditionally made for hundreds of years. Incense plays an important role in the spiritual lives of Vietnamese people. People use incense in all worship activities. The bamboo bundles are arranged on the ground on sunny days so as to dry them.

A large group of Mobula Rays in the Sea of ​​Cortez. These creatures are as graceful in mid-air as they are in the water, throwing their wings like flying birds.

Only a single apartment's windows are lit in Tsing Yi district, a densely populated area of Hong Kong, right before sunset.

In the Israeli Negev desert, a Nubian Ibox looking for food is very carefully escorting her one-and-a-half-month-old puppy in a difficult and dangerous passage.

Leaves against the silhouettes of grey beech trunks in a cold winter forest. This scene immediately caught my eye and I captured it with my telephoto lens.

The name orangutan means "man of the forest" in the Malay language. There are 3 varieties of Orangutan, the one in this picture is Bornean Orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus). Adult male orangutans can weigh up to 200 pounds. Flanged males have prominent cheek pads called flanges and a throat sac used to make loud verbalizations called long calls. They mainly feast on wild fruits like lychees, mangosteens, and figs, and slurp water from holes in trees.

Early in the morning on a November day, inside the swamp, looking for the magnificent beauty of the Spanish moss. The late autumn colors made it appear almost monochromatic and the Bald Cypress stood in the still water creating an incredible reflection in the misty atmosphere.

I took this photo inside my home studio in Iran while I was working on a movie project about Afghan immigrants living in Iran. It was the first time that I'd witnessed someone wearing a burka in person. What struck me immediately upon seeing this woman was that I couldn’t see any part of her body except the soles of her feet as she walked. Since I captioned this photo as “Taboo,” the message I am expressing is one of rebellion.

Massive and mysterious habitats, icebergs are dynamic kingdoms that support marine life. As they swing and rotate slowly through polar currents, icebergs fertilize the oceans. Carrying nutrients from the earth, they are responsible for life blooms by developing phytoplankton and influence the carbon cycle by sequestering carbon dioxide from the air. They also thus shelter big animals such as crabeater seals that spend the entire year on the pack ice.

It was still very early and the Maat Museum was still closed. But the guard was already walking slowly along the building. There was only a narrow path between the building and the river Tejo and my feet got wet taking this shot.

Brenda, a 3-month-old female orangutan is ready for surgery to repair her damaged humerus. Orangutans are under threat from the ongoing depletion of the rainforest due to palm oil plantations, logging, mining, and hunting.

Diogo Cancela of Portugal is seen during practice prior to day three of the British Para-Swimming International meeting at Tollcross International Swimming Centre in Glasgow, Scotland.

I met the amputee dancer Koichi Omae, originally from Osaka, on my way. At 23, when he was entering his career, a car accident took away all his dreams. He had his left leg amputated below the knee. With great willpower, he decided to continue his career as a dancer, aware that without the limb, he would have to spend much more energy not only in performing the artistic gesture, but also just walking normally.

Detainees are terrified after one of them died due to meningococcemia at a detention center in Biñan, Laguna, the southern part of Metro Manila. Authorities also banned visitors for safety precautions.

Southwest of Tenerife, where one of the most important colonies of pilot whales lives, this 6-month-old young specimen had been hit and mutilated by a boat. The only thing left to do was to euthanize him. The traffic of ships poses a serious threat to whales worldwide.

I called the photo Utopia, because nowadays, in our anthropomorphized world, it's almost impossible to see a scenario like that, an unspoiled nature in a perfect wilderness state, like it has been frozen forever in time.

There are still places in the world where fortunately nature reigns. Among them are the wild cliffs of Portugal where it is still possible to observe the nesting of storks.

Symbiosis between a moray eel and a cleaner shrimp. This moray eel was having its routine dental checkup. The cleaner shrimps clean parasites, insects, algaes, etc. off of the eels, making them more healthy – in return, the shrimps get a free meal.

Natalya, Irina, and Tatyana are three twin sisters from the northern Russian city of Krasnoyarsk. I found out about their existence from social networks a couple of years ago and really wanted to take pictures of them. This year, I managed to do it. Three sisters, three friends, three soulmates. Their love for each other is respected.

Professional ice climber Will Gadd climbing on the remaining glacial ice on the crater of Mount Kilimanjaro. This ice wall is freestanding and looks like an iceberg emerging from the sand.

Nenets people during a snow storm in the harsh siberian winter. In this part of the world, during winter time, temperatures can go as low as -50° and wind blows over 100km/h making these reindeer herders' life very difficult.

Muslim women praying in Hamedan, Iran for Eid al-Fitr. The last day of Ramadan is celebrated by Muslims all over the word with special prayers and gatherings.

A big-scale sand smelt moving towards a moon jellyfish. To defend themselves from predators, these fish move together grouping in ever-changing forms. In this case, a single specimen appears to be making a "counter-current" decision.

A man desperately tries to save himself during a fire that destroyed a 22-story building in Dhaka. The blaze resulted in 25 deaths and 70 injuries. The man was lowering himself by holding onto a cable, but the heat forced him to suddenly let go and he crashed to the ground.

Nevigeser Wallfahrtsdom church has truly unique architecture, with this concrete ceiling that seems to be an abstraction in reality.

This image was taken during the Vijay Diwas celebration in Kolkata. This day is known as the victory of the Indian Army over Pakistan.

Reindeer breeding is probably one of the rarest professions. In our region, on Yamal, there are approximately 14,000 man that live together with the herds of reindeers. These people in majority are “Nents” by nationality and are representatives of native population. They are very hardworking and hospitable.

Matt Bush is an incredibly skilled free solo rock climber based in Cape Town, South Africa. In this image he takes his life into his own hands as he scales the Paarl Rock cliff face with no ropes.

The Arctic Fox saves his food in different locations before the winter to return back to it during the heavy winter in order to avoid the risk of dying of starvation.

Framed by the glow of street and car lights along Kuwait city, two Arabian red fox cubs explore the night just outside their den. I spent more than 2 months monitoring them in order to take this shot where all the lights were reflecting on the sea water.

A woman cries in her home destroyed by a fire in a slum in Mirpur. At least 10,000 people were left homeless after a violent fire hit the crowded slums of Dhaka.

I had come across a handful of snapshots of black leopards taken in Africa, but as far as I knew, nobody had ever captured a series of high quality images of a wild black leopard in Africa before. I travelled to Kenya in January 2019 and spoke to the guides, landowner and rangers who had seen the leopard. With their help, I set up camera traps and managed to capture this image of the cat under a full moon.

Mandarinfish usually mate every afternoon during sunset in very shallow water. These two emerged from the coral reef in the clear water, when the female left her eggs and the male his sperm.

The candid street photography photo was taken during the annual colorful and joyful carnival in Notting Hill, London, United Kingdom.

This shot captures that fraction of a second in which a diamond squid in the sea of ​​Anilao changes color from its original light purple to an orange-red, starting first from the tentacles and fins and then covering the whole body.

After a fire in a wooden house in Murmansk, firefighters are trying to prevent the explosion of gas cylinders by removing them from a dangerous vicinity and cooling them with water.

Bangladeshi firefighters at work to extinguish a blaze where 25 died in an office building in Dhaka. People were trapped in the top floors with fire burning in the lower portion of the building.

A breathtaking shot of a synchronized swimmer performing a flip outside the water during a cold winter night practice.

As-Salt is the most historic town in Jordan. For long periods in history, it was the most important settlement between the Jordan River and the desert to the east. Its golden age was at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, and it is the legacy of this period that makes As-Salt unique in Jordan and beyond. As-Salt has attracted settlers since the Iron Age at least.

Bats are one of the most misunderstood species. However, the truth is that bats play a vital role in our ecosystem as seed dispersers and pest-controllers. With ever-expanding city limits, some of the bat species are well-adapted to urban environments.

Juvenile fish protecting himself inside a stinging box jellyfish. The photo was taken during a blackwater dive in the Lembeh strait, Indonesia.

Night diving at a temperature of minus two degrees Celsius in Eastern Greenland, swimming among icebergs under the ice of a fjord.

HAVANA, CUBA-2018 March 18. Mercedes, 42 years old, posing in her house. The first Vitiligo marks appeared on her elbows and legs by the age of 35, after her grandmother's death. Now Vitiligo took over 90% of her body. She used Cuban treatments with good results but in the end she gave up using them because she was fed up of applying the lotion every day. Now she puts black makeup on her face in order to camouflage the white skin.

A leopardess perches in a tree. This photo was taken after sunset, so the usage of a spotlight to light up the leopardess was necessitated. Spotlights are better for the animals than flashes, since it doesn’t induce temporary blindness. If you look carefully, you can see droplets of water on the leopardess’s back; I had been sitting with this leopard for hours in the rain, waiting for her to move.

Due to poverty and overpopulation, an estimated 10,000+ people are literally living with the dead at Manila North Cemetery. The owners of the graves allow people to live there ― and even inside the mausoleums ― as long as they keep the area clean.

Laurane Ivey, 37, sinks deep into a pink plastic tub filled with water from a fire hydrant as she begins to scrub the dirt from her worn feet. Above her is a barbed wire fence surrounding the shelter she used to live in before it closed. With no place to go she lives in her car joining other homeless in parked cars across the street including her mom. California has the highest poverty and income inequality in the nation.

A Syrian woman and child walk down a destroyed street, as civilians and rebels prepare to evacuate one of the few remaining rebel-held pockets in Arbin, Eastern Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus.

Horses clear a fence during the Racing UK Profits Returned To Racing Handicap Steeple Chase at Wetherby Racecourse in Wetherby, England.

This unique staircase is located inside the Chianti Classico Antinori winery near Florence. The shot captures the moment when a woman is passing.

In everyday life it is often the case that people walk past buildings on the street without taking a closer look at them.

An interesting entrance guides the way into a place called the World of Illusion. The entrance makes you somewhat lose focus, especially when standing in the middle.

It is always nice to see the Grizzly bears fishing. Each grizzly has their own technique to hunt fish. In this picture, the fish just got escaped as it hit the outer part of the bear's teeth. Uniqueness: Speaking eyes of the bear & the fish.

Pure, uninterrupted wildlife experience at its best: a giraffe in the middle of the Mara River, in the Serengeti Park, with soft, orange light, and wildebeests passing by... and all of that in a complete solitude... for ten fantastic minutes.

In this image the cracks are white salt crystals and where soil and salt mix the cracks become dark. In the middle a small green salt lake seems to form a broken egg.

One winter day, walking along the banks of the river, I noticed a fairytale scenario: several willow branches had fallen and frozen, creating a wonderful landscape.

This image was captured from an aircraft flying over Iceland. Braided Rivers exhibit numerous channels that split off and rejoin each other to give a braided appearance. They typically carry fairly coarse-grained sediment down a fairly steep gradient. Consequently, braided rivers usually exist near mountainous regions.

Free diver and former world record holder Anna von Boetticher in East Greenland, with water temperature of -2°, ready to swim around icebergs under the ice in a frozen fjord.

A man with a blue shirt is carrying a big new rectangle-shaped mirror on his shoulder along the street and passes a man with a blue shirt standing behind a sale stand with cellphone accessories in Medellin Colombia.

In Tokyo there are many vacant taxis which are mostly driven by old men. They usually spend very long hours simply waiting for their next customer.

A young baboon looks through a porthole in a photographic hide. This photo was taken from a photographic hide, which allows for viewing and photography of animals without adversely affecting their behaviour. This baboon noticed me moving around inside the hide and stopped to look, posing in a unique way. This baboon was still very young, and was following its mother around - after a while its mother came to fetch it.

Activists of the climate action group "Ende Gelaende" run into a brown coal open mine at Garzweiler, in North Rhine Weszfalia, to stop the excavator from digging.

Two Rohingya children are fetching drinking water to their homes from hundreds of meters below. The scarcity of drinking water is acute at the Rohingya camps in Kutupalong, Teknaf, Cox’s Bazar.

A gymnast's jump on the parallels at the Flanders International Team Challenge. Her expression clearly shows her tension and fear.

I took this upward angled view of the beautifully textured curves of the Citizen M hotel staircase in London, including one of the lights to form an eye.

Brown Bear at Kuril Lake, Kamchatca, catching a salmon. The picture was taken in the exact moment when the salmon was losing all of its eggs and its life too.

A school of uniquely patterned spotted eagle rays passes beneath me on an unforgettable dive in the Maldives. Like most divers, I have always found these rays to be especially spellbinding. Scientists have just recently confirmed that the spotting on each ray is a unique identifier, the equivalent of a human fingerprint. I love how B&W reinforces that uniqueness, keenly displaying the distinctive spotting and shading differences between each.

This storm raced across Kansas at 60 mph which made it very difficult to chase. The storm smashed up several towns, cut off power and produced golf ball-size hail with 85 mph straight-line winds.

The wicker stems of Cañamares, Cuenca, are one of the plant elements that most lend themselves to artistic visualization.