This year’s TPOTY (Travel Photographer of the Year) competition received more than 20,000 photographs from 142 countries. Matjaž Krivic, who has been capturing the emotional and shocking moments of life from around our planet for more than 15 years, won in the Travel Portfolio category. He has been awarded for his collection of eight photographs, which mostly provide glimpses of everyday life in Africa and the Middle East. Krivic is not new to the competition, which he won in 2003 – the first year the competition for best travel photography took place on the initiative of photographer Chris Coe.

Krivic’s photographs which convinced this year’s jury have actually already been awarded at other competitions. The competition did not set any time limit for the photographs, which meant that award-winning photos could also be part of this year’s TPOTY. Krivic said that some of his photographs were taken with a reversal film, as it was only in 2005 that he started working with a digital camera.

The main winner of the competition was Italian photographer Stefano Pensotti. He won the Travel Photographer of the Year title thanks to his photographs from eight countries ‒ including from Ethiopia, Georgia and Myanmar. In his images Pensotti hunts for those intimate moments of everyday life, from the man in India trying to have a nap, to a religious ritual in Senegal. The winner in the Faces, People, Cultures category was Marinka Masséus from the Netherlands, with her touching minimalistic features of Tanzanian albino children. "Connecting with people is most important for me," she said. "I remember how, for a short moment, the let me into their lives."

Awards were also given out in the Young Travel Photographer of the Year category (the title went to 14-year-old Isabella Smith) and the Hot/Cold category, where the winner was He Jian from China. All the winning photographs will be put on display in spring in London, and later also elsewhere in the world.

Matjaž Krivic has been putting his photographs on display in Slovenia and abroad since 1999. He has received many prizes for his work, including the GEA Photographer of the Year title in 2001, and the second prize in the People category at the International World Press Photo 2016 competition. In February this year he received an award for second place in the Nature and Environment category at the Istanbul Photo Awards. Krivic also made it into the final selections at many big photo competitions and calls for photographs, among them at the Photographic Museum London UK, CDS Documentary Essay Prize / Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and at the Phillip Jones Griffits Awards.