A Chinese amateur has scooped the world’s richest photography award with an image of a makeshift classroom in a poor village in the southeast of his country.
Construction entrepreneur Zhou Fuyang, 54, won the US$120,000 top prize in the annual Hamdan International Photography Awards (HIPA) in Dubai.
“I took this photograph in the home of the mayor of an extremely poor village in Jiangxi province, where classes were being held for the village children,” Zhou said on Tuesday.
The theme of this year’s competition was “Building the Future” and Zhou said: “I wanted to show that these people go to enormous efforts to educate themselves and develop their region.”
Jiangxi is one of China’s poorest provinces, and Zhou’s photograph shows the children being taught in a bare room with the wall being used as an improvised blackboard.