From directly overhead, the villages of Bangladesh's Haor wetlands read like scattered islands, clusters of homes raised against a landscape that spends part of each year underwater. Joy Saha's aerial series Homes of Haor captures that precarious beauty, and it earned the photographer the Architecture and Design prize at the 2026 Sony World Photography Awards, one of the world's largest photography competitions.
Architecture as survival
Homes of Haor documents vernacular building in the Kishoreganj district, where communities construct and raise their dwellings to withstand seasonal flooding. Saha's overhead vantage turns necessity into pattern, revealing how human settlement adapts to a shifting, water-dominated environment. The result reframes architecture not as monument but as an ongoing negotiation with nature.
The power of the aerial view
Shot from above, the images strip away eye-level detail and expose underlying structure, the logic of how homes cluster, connect and hold their ground. That perspective transforms a documentary subject into something close to abstraction while never losing its human stakes.
- Photographer: Joy Saha, Bangladesh
- Series: Homes of Haor
- Award: Architecture and Design category, Sony World Photography Awards 2026
- Subject: Vernacular building in the Haor wetlands, Kishoreganj
- Exhibition: Somerset House, London, April 17 to May 4, 2026
A global stage
The 2026 Sony World Photography Awards drew more than 430,000 submissions from over 200 countries and territories, with the ceremony held in London in April. Winning a category at that scale places Saha's regionally specific subject in front of a worldwide audience, spotlighting a corner of Bangladesh rarely seen in international photography.
Why vernacular architecture resonates now
As climate pressures reshape how and where people can live, images of communities adapting to water take on fresh urgency. Homes of Haor speaks directly to that reality, honoring the ingenuity of everyday builders whose work rarely earns recognition. The photographs were shown at Somerset House alongside the other winners, giving London audiences a close look at resilience rendered from the sky.