2019 iPhone Photography Awards winners are 'off-the-charts great'

Because it’s an official contest, we are obliged to say that the stunning photos before you were all shot on iPhone.

But the winning images of the 2019 iPhone Photography Awards should by no means include an asterisk. They’re just great photographs.

Mobile photographers from 140 countries competed in 18 categories. Photographers from China brought home seven first-place awards and won two of the three top awards in six categories.

One of the judges called the 2019 winners “off the charts great” and said the work “pulls the planet together through photographs.”

The Grand Prize Winner in the category of Photographer of the Year went to 23-year-old Gabriella Cigliano of Napoli. Her photo titled Big Sister shows a fierce young girl holding a younger brother close to her on a beach in Zanzibar, Tanzania.

“I still wonder how could I capture that exact moment in all its beauty,” Cigliano wrote in her caption. “I was just observing, a few meters from them, but they were probably more curious about me than I was about them, and that’s probably why the girl was looking at me. We couldn’t talk much, except for a few words in Swahili I had learned in the previous weeks, but those kids could definitely talk with their eyes. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in my life, and I’ll keep it in my memories forever. The best part was showing them and their mums the photos, for some it was the first time they were seeing their faces, and their excitement was unexplainable, unfortunately, my iPhone was in their hands and I couldn’t capture that!”

Below are the other first-place images by category for the 12th-annual contest, which started one year after the release of the first iPhone in 2007.