Mauricio Rossanigo’s image of two Andean condors grooming each other on rocky ledges near El Chaltén, Argentina, won Patagonia Photographer of the Year at the 7th Patagonia Photo Contest, and it did so for more than the drama of the frame. The awards ceremony was held June 25 at Centro Cultural Las Condes in Santiago, Chile, where the winning photographs were shown for the first time and the documentary El Otoño de los Glaciares premiered, putting Patagonia’s glaciers and the pressures they face into the same conversation as the contest’s best pictures.
Patagon Journal has run the contest since 2012, and this seventh edition was built around five categories: Wildlife, Landscapes, Outdoor Adventure, Travel and Culture, and Last Wild Places. That last category is the contest’s sharpest conservation tool because it accepts images from anywhere in the world, as long as they speak to the urgency of conserving and restoring wild places. The lineup of finalists also showed how hard the field was this year: organizers selected 10 finalists in each category, 50 in all, after saying the quality of the entries forced them to take extra time.
Rossanigo’s winning frame works because it does what the strongest wildlife images do: it shows behavior, not just a pretty animal. He used a 600mm telephoto lens to keep a respectful distance from the condors, which matters as much as the composition itself. The birds are not posed for the camera. They are grooming each other, and that detail gives the image a private, lived-in feel that turns spectacle into a story about a species and its place in a fragile landscape.
The other category winners reinforced that balance between beauty and place. Felipe Zanotti took Landscapes with Monte Chaltén, Daniel Claveria won Outdoor Adventure with Toward the heart of the mountain, and Timothy Dhalleine won Travel and Culture with Another day at the office. The judging panel included Juanita Ringeling, Andel Paulmann, Pablo García Borboroglou, Eliseo Miciu, Cristian Larrere, Nicolás Gantz, and Guy Wenborne, while the Reader’s Choice Award was decided through public voting.
Rossanigo received a Sony Alpha 6700 and a five-night trip for two to Puelo in Chilean Patagonia. But the bigger prize was the reminder that the best Patagonia frames are not only about scale and weather and ice; they are about restraint, timing, and a conservation message that stays with the image long after the condors leave the ledge.
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