The Urban Photo Awards has announced its 2023 finalists, settling on a collection of visually arresting images of city life from photographers worldwide. Here’s a handpicked selection of the images still in the running to take out awards this year.
Photographs are organized into themed categories – streets, people, spaces, and creative – and run the gamut from moody black-and-whites to color-saturated moments in time and brain-bending artistic pieces.
Many of the photos are a celebration of human strength, vulnerability, or wonder. A balding man’s windswept white hair mimics the clouds he’s gazing at. Three maiko, apprentice geishas, sit in a taxi in Kyoto, waiting for their driver. A tourist on LA's Hollywood Boulevard gets directions from Superman. A solitary woman dressed head-to-toe in red walks unhurriedly past a thundering fountain in Paris.
Images of spaces that don’t feature people (or feature few people) still have a living quality about them expressed through their symmetry and scale.
Whereas photographs in the creative category push boundaries, sometimes into the wonderfully absurd, such as the image of a poodle sitting in a car, waiting for its owner to finish making repairs.
Unlike previous years, the jury’s rankings of this year’s finalists remain a secret; the images appear alphabetically, sorted according to the photographer’s name.
The winner’s shortlist will be announced in mid-September, followed by the unveiling of the winners during the Trieste Photo Days festival from the 27th to the 29th of October, 2023.
In the meantime, take a look through our gallery for more highlights from 2023’s finalists.