About The Gala Awards

It all started in june 2009 when...

The Worldwide Photography Gala Awards was incorporated when launching an international competition for professional and amateur photographers. Winning images were exhibited in June 2010 at the Circle of Fine Arts. The two winners, Dilip Bhatia from India and Larry Louie from Canada, as well as the special selection of the Jury, John Delaney from US, were invited by The Gala Awards to attend the artist’s reception in Madrid.

Since then, we have provided juried competitions for professionals and amateur photographers from around the world to compete in five awards and selected thematic contests, offering artists opportunities for both awards and competitions. The four Awards include; the Pollux Award, The Jacob Riis Editorial and Documentary Award, The Julia Margaret Cameron Award for women photographers, The Charles Dodgson Black & White Award, and the Robert Cornelius Portraits Award. The Gala Awards also organize thematic competitions, such as, The Urban & Rural Landscape Competition and the Street Photography Competition.

We host the above mentioned Awards to honor talented photographers as well as a means of establishing and maintaining a continuous effort to help them further their careers, promoting appraisal for contemporary photography. The Worldwide Photography Gala Awards recognize artists’ talent through competitions juried by industry leaders, exposing their work in the media, publishing their work, hosting collective exhibitions, and by exhibiting their work online and in the Biennial of Fine Art and Documentary Photography. 

Starting in 2010, we hosted The Biennial of Fine Art and Documentary Photography. The first edition was held in Madrid at the Circle of Fine Arts, the 2nd edition in Buenos Aires, 2012, at the Borges Cultural Center, the 3rd edition was held from September to November 2014 at the Heritage Museum of Malaga, exhibiting 520 artworks of 162 photographers from 25 countries. The 4th edition was held in Berlin, as part of the European Month of Photography in October 2016. In this last edition there was a participation of 440 artists from 44 countries, and Steve McCurry was the special invitee featuring his Retrospective: Asia, a Life in Pictures. The 5th edition was held in October 2018, in Barcelona. The 6th edition was help in Barcelona in 2021.

In October 2019, we installed our own physical space in Barcelona, FotoNostrum, The House of the Mediterranean Photography (https://fotonostrum.com). During the Covid-19 lockdown, we began publishing our photographic magazine, FotoNostrum Magazine (https://fotonostrummag.com).

The Gala Awards thanks the many jurors that have performed the difficult task of selecting 'winning' images. To name just a few that have cooperated with The Gala Awards since 2009: the photographers Mary Ellen Mark, Chris Steel-Perkins, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Olivia Arthur, Kim Weston, Vanessa Winship, Per Valentin and Steve McCurry; the publishers Susan Zadeh, Stephen Perloff and Tim Anderson; the curators Philip Brookman, Carol McCusker, Elizabeth Avedon, Elisabeth Biondi and Julio Hirsch-Hardy; the gallerists Laura Noble and Alexander Scholtz; the photo editors Amber Terranova and Larry Padgett, and many other that cooperated with us in the different awards and competitions.