The 2025 International Photo Jury is pleased to announce that Javier Arcenillas is the recipient of this year’s Grand Prize for his essay The Silent Death Mine.
The Grand Prize will be presented on Saturday, November 8 at the 2025 Festival in Banff, Alberta.
"The long-term project, which began in 2014, aims to raise awareness of the health problems in mining operations. While the risk of another lost decade in the climate fight intensifies, mines in Cerro de Pasco (Peru) and Potosí (Bolivia) transmit poisoned lead dust particles through water and air. Until now, the companies exploiting these areas have lived with plenty. In the mountains, destiny was coloured by gold, silver, zinc, or copper. Wealth enveloped a poor land and made its population dependent on the subsoil. Now, this aging population is plagued by the problems of metal mining; children grow up with toxins in their blood, the once clear lagoon now gives off a nauseating stench, and companies must pick up the remains before leaving the region. This reality is reconfiguring the social fabric and changing some mentalities; silver in the pocket or lead in the body?"
-Javier Arcenillas, 2025 Photo Essay Competition Winner
Javier Arcenillas is a Photographer and Editor with a degree in Developmental Psychology. He also teaches Documentary Photography at the PICA School. All of his projects and photographs are long-term projects framed within the New Documentary genre, where his essays are constructed as stories with a visual narrative fragmented into utopian borders. They present an emotional photography that explores the psychology of social realities and the portrayal of conflicting territories shaped and fabricated by the collective imagination.
His most comprehensive reports can be seen in Time, Stern, GQ, L'Expresso, Sunday Times, El País, El Mundo, GEO, and IL Magazine. Dedicated to photography since 1993, he has received international awards, such as the UNICEF Prize, Sony World Photography Award, Eugene Smith Grant, Getty Images Grant, ISEM Prize, POYI Award, and World Press Photo. Among his recently published photobooks are UFOPRESENCES from Editorial RM and the self-published LATIDOAMERICA available on his Instagram channel.
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The 2025 Banff Mountain Photo Essay Competition is sponsored by Nikon and Fjällräven.
Find out more about the Banff Mountain Photo Essay Competition.
The international jury is composed of three photographers: Irene Yee (USA), Hamish Frost (UK), and Mason Mashon (Canada). To see more information about the jury members click here.
"Many of us have the privilege of seeing mountains only as places of sport and recreation, forgetting that for many, mountain life is a harsh and demanding way of survival. Javier Arcenillas’ photo essay offers a window into this world, confronting us with the reality that the same mountains we explore with computers, software, and gear are also sites of extraction and exploitation—of both people and the earth itself. These photographs were chosen for this stage because of their powerful reality. They ask us to pause, reflect, and recognize how our changing world is deeply connected to these unseen struggles."
- Irene Yee, 2025 Jury
"As our planet reaches an increasingly perilous state of climate emergency, photographers have the power to tell stories of humanity’s impact and share them with a wider audience. Javier’s case study of silver mines in Peru and Bolivia encapsulates the wider climate crisis. Profits placed before people, with a population now suffering severe health effects of lead-contaminated air and water. The images have a haunting beauty to them. Black and white emphasises textures and the brutality of the workers’ lives, as the essay moves seamlessly from the vast scale of the strip mines to intimate human portraiture. A powerful and memorable set of images."
- Hamish Frost, 2025 Jury