2024 Sony World Photography Awards: Winners revealed

The winners of the 2024 Sony World Photography Awards have been announced, with Juliette Pavy named as Photographer of the Year

Pavy’s documentary project explores the lasting affects of birth-control practices carried out on Inuit Greenlanders by Danish doctors in the 1960s and 1970s.

The series examines the spiralkampagnen (“coil campaign”) in which several thousand Inuit women and girls, some as young as 12, were fitted with an intrauterine device (IUD) without their consent.

The photos range from shots of the city of Nuuk and its clinical spaces, to X-ray imagery and archival photographs of the young women involved.

Naja Lyberth, a psychologist in Nuuk, was one of the first to testify about her forced sterilisation. She set up a Facebook group to allow women to share their common experiences and help each other cope with the trauma.

Jytte Lyberth was 14 years old at the time she had the IUD inserted. Since then, she has never been able to have children.

Monica Allende, who chaired the 2024 Professional competition jury, praised Pavy’s “empathetic portrayal of her subjects, capturing them in a manner that is both dignified and profoundly intimate, thereby highlighting her exceptional talent”.

Pavy’s work triumphed in the Documentary Projects category of the Professional competition.

Here are the other category winners, alongside comments from the photographers.