Marcin Giba and Marek Biegalski were honored at a ceremony held at the Museum of the Future in Dubai on November 11, marking the first time Poland has been represented among the winners of the prestigious Dubai-based contest.
The competition, held under the auspices of the Crown Prince of Dubai, Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, offered a total prize pool of more than USD 1 million.
Biegalski, a landscape and travel photographer who was born in Poland and has lived in County Dublin, Ireland, for some 20 years, shared second place in the Portfolio category with photographer Ammar AlSayed Ahmed from the United Arab Emirates.
Palestinian photographer Ali Jadallah took first place in that category.
Giba, who is based in the southern Polish city of Rybnik, won third place in the General Color category.
American photographers Karine Aigner and Jack Zhi took first and second place.
Giba's winning photograph shows a frozen lake in Rybnik captured from above by a drone, with patterns of snow and ice forming what the photographer describes as a suggestive "prophet's eye" on the surface.
The image is part of his ongoing project titled Last Winter, which documents what he sees as the disappearing beauty of harsh Polish winters.
"Winter as I remember it from childhood, frosty and white, occurs less and less often," Giba wrote about the work. "Snow in the city has become a short-lived, almost ephemeral phenomenon. That's why when the right conditions finally come and I go out to 'fly,' I feel like I'm documenting a disappearing beauty."
The 45-year-old photographer graduated with a master's degree in photography from the Institute of Creative Photography at the Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic, and serves as artistic director of the Rybnik Photo Festival.
Biegalski submitted a portfolio focused on Factory Butte in Utah, where he captured desert landscapes, rock formations and canyons.
He described how light transforms the raw landscape into a spectacle of contrasts, from delicate pastel tones at dawn to the saturated colors of sunset.
The Ireland-based photographer has won numerous international awards, including Nordic Nature Photographer of the Year for 2024 and the Smithsonian Magazine Aerial Award 2025.
More than 87,000 photographs from photographers around the world were submitted to this year's HIPA competition, which had "Power" as its main theme.
Among other prizewinners were American photographer and book producer Rick Smolan, who won the Lifetime Achievement Award, and Omani Salem Al-Hajri, who took home the title of HIPA Photographer of the Year.
The Grand Prize of USD 200,000 went to Italian photographer Gianluca Gianferrari for his image of a Mount Etna eruption.
(rt/gs)