Sourav Das Wins 2025 High Note Global Prize in Photography

Award-Winning Photograph Captures the Human Toll of India’s Century-Long Coalfield Fires

(New York, NY — December 10, 2025) — Photography 4 Humanity, the photography pillar of the High Note Global Initiative since 2018, proudly announces Sourav Das as the winner of the 2025 High Note Global Prize in Photography. His haunting photograph, In Jharia’s Fire, Both Earth and Mothers Weep, provides a powerful visual testament to one of the world’s longest-running environmental disasters and the human dignity sacrificed in its wake.

The announcement, made today on United Nations Human Rights Day, underscores that climate, environment, and human rights are inseparable, and that the burden of environmental collapse falls hardest on the world’s most vulnerable communities. Das’s winning image, taken in Jharia in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, captures an elderly woman collapsed in grief amid the smoldering coalfields — her tears rising through the smoke in silent witness to the lives lost and forgotten in the flames. The Jharia coalfields have been burning underground since 1916, with fires today smoldering across more than twelve square kilometers and an affected population of over one million bearing the daily cost in toxic air, respiratory illness, ground subsidence, displacement, and lives cut short by a decade or more.

In official partnership with United Nations Human Rights, Photography 4 Humanity invites both amateur and professional photographers from around the world to bear witness to the human dimension of our most urgent challenges. As one of the two founding pillars of the High Note Global Initiative — alongside High Note Music — the program has stood since 2018 for the conviction that a single image can move the conscience of the world.

“Sourav Das’s photograph does what only the greatest photography can do. It takes a story too vast to comprehend — a fire that has been burning for more than a century, a million lives shaped by smoke and loss — and gathers it into one woman’s grief. Announcing this year’s winner on UN Human Rights Day is a reminder that the climate crisis and the human rights crisis are the same crisis, and that the world’s most vulnerable communities carry the heaviest burden of both.” — David Clark, founder, High Note Global

This year, Photography 4 Humanity received submissions from across the globe, showcasing the work of photographers committed to illuminating the stories of those most impacted by the converging climate and human rights emergencies of our time. Das’s winning image and other top entries will be exhibited at the United Nations headquarters in New York on UN Human Rights Day, and viewed globally on UN.org.



For more information about Photography 4 Humanity, the High Note Global Initiative, and this year’s winning entries, visit www.photography4humanity.com.