Bangladesh shipbreaking photo wins top prize at Siena Drone Photo Awards

An aerial photograph of shipbreaking off the coast of Bangladesh has won the overall prize at the 2026 Siena Drone Photo Awards. The image by photographer George Steinmetz shows an enormous tanker, specially designed to transport liquefied natural gas, stranded and partially dismantled on the mudflats of the Bay of Bengal, with workers moving around it.

The photograph is titled “Shipbreaking on the mudflats, Bay of Bengal.” It shows a crew of 60 men using blow torches and winches to break down the ship, with tons of metal parts to be harvested and resold overseas.

Each year, the Siena Drone Photo Awards highlight bird's-eye views of the planet, revealing landscapes, livelihoods and human stories often invisible from the ground. This year's selected winning and highly commended photographs focus on countries of the Global South.

In an interview with NPR, Steinmetz said he has long been fascinated by Bangladesh's shipbreaking industry, where enormous vessels from around the globe, nearing the end of their working lives, are dismantled and their materials recovered for reuse. He sent up his drone north of Chattogram, along a 13-mile coastal strip, offering a glimpse into the industry.

He was exploring the relationship between human populations and the environment for a book project, and saw the industry as an extraordinary example of recycling on a vast scale.

Photographing it proved difficult. The shipbreaking industry has faced criticism from environmental organisations, human rights groups, labour unions and non-governmental organisations for unchecked pollution, chemicals leaching into the sea and dangerous working conditions. Shipyard owners are wary of journalists and photographers, and local photographers initially warned Steinmetz that securing access might be nearly impossible.

Undeterred, he surveyed and photographed the entire coastline north of Chattogram with his drone, searching for a vessel that would make an especially striking photograph, and eventually settled on the liquefied natural gas tanker. He said the trick was to find the right ship in a really interesting state of disassembly, noting that these tankers are very unusual boats that looked like a spaceship, take workers a long time to break down, and require waiting for the right tide to pull the pieces ashore with big winches and boats.

He was able to convince the owner of the tanker to allow him to photograph it. The timing was crucial: he wanted to capture the vessel at low tide, when the surrounding mudflats were exposed and workers could be seen moving around its enormous hull, their tiny figures giving viewers a sense of the ship's mammoth scale. He spent several days photographing the vessel, returning as the tides shifted and workers continued to take the ship apart for scrap metal.

After graduating from Stanford with a degree in geophysics in 1979, Steinmetz first dreamed of photographing landscapes from above while hitchhiking across Africa, often travelling on the roofs of trucks. In 1996, National Geographic agreed to finance an aerial photography project around the Sahara, for which he learned to fly a motorised paraglider. Drones have now completely transformed aerial photography, allowing photographers to capture perspectives that were once difficult, expensive or impossible, he says.

First place in the contest's People section went to a photograph of fields of handwoven carpets in southern Türkiye, laid out under the sun to dry. Weeks, even months, of exposure to intense sunlight gives handmade rugs their sought-after, softly faded colours. Ankara-based documentary photographer and lawyer Dilek Yurdakul travelled six hours from Ankara to the Döşemealtı district of Antalya to capture thousands of carpets and kilims in different colours, sizes and patterns stretched across an enormous landscape.

A highly commended entry in the Nature category shows the Tumpak Sewu waterfall in East Java, Indonesia, cascading from cliffs at sunrise, with Mount Semeru erupting behind it. Boston-based French-British drone photographer Colas Decloitre said the only way to get the right alignment of the waterfall and the volcano was with a drone.

Another commended Nature entry, The Last Ember, by Italy-based photographer Isabella Tabacchi, was taken in the Argentine Puna, a high-altitude plateau in the Andes of northwestern Argentina. It shows a small reddish volcanic cone amid ancient lava flows, its colour coming from iron-bearing minerals in the volcanic rock.