Photo Insight
This amazing scene won International Landscape Photographer of the Year 2022, beating plenty of traditional landscapes in the process. Amy Davies finds out more
International Landscape Photographer of the Year has been running for nine editions and seems to be going from strength to strength. In 2022, the competition received 3,813 entries, with the top 101 finding a place in the ILPOTY book, and a further 101 being published on the competition website.
Each year an overall Photographer of the Year is announced for the person with the best portfolio of four images, while an overall Photograph of the Year goes to a single image. The prize pot includes $10,000 worth of cash prizes, so as well as international kudos, it’s certainly worth considering entering next year.
In 2022, Photograph of the Year was awarded to this stunning image by American photographer Martin Broen. It was taken in one of the biggest flooded cave systems in the world, at the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. It’s easy to see why an unusual shot like this stood out from the typical landscape photography shots the judges must be used to seeing. In fact, it arguably turns on its head the very notion of what landscape photography actually is.
Keen to know more about this fantastic capture, I asked Martin for some insight. He explains, ‘It shows a chamber flooded with crystal-clear water, displaying a pristine array of needle-like stalactites, stalagmites and massive columns decorating it. It includes my dive buddy, Nicolas Casella, diving through it to provide a sense of scale. This is a prehistoric-looking environment that took millennia to form and is now preserved underwater, and in total darkness.
‘I’ve been obsessed with capturing the beauty of the “underworld”, as the Maya call it. The chamber in this photo is 70 minutes’ swimming away from the entrance of the cave and the closest safe exit to the surface, you have to navigate through a labyrinth of flooded caves in total darkness to reach it. Few people have been in it, and most likely it’s not been captured in a photo before. ‘While I’ve been diving for close to 30 years, it was those flooded cave systems and Cenotes, which are the entrance to this magical world, that got me into photography seven years ago. Besides learning photography, and the need to develop some particular techniques for this environment, I had to improve my technical diving skills with specific cave training to get to these places, often using four tanks through the tunnels.
‘I got attracted to the challenge of photographing these environments, as they provide a surreal experience that is closer to exploring an exoplanet in space than to anything we know.
