This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The Italian photojournalist Federico Borella has won the top prize in the Sony World Photography Awards, including a $25,000 (£19,000) cash prize.

His photo-series Five Degrees was commended by judges for sensitively documenting a little-known but tragic side-effect of climate change: male suicide among Indian farmers.

Borella is a photojournalist with over 10 years’ experience, who has worked across the world. In 2015, he embarked on a trip to India to photograph victims of acid attacks. While there, he became increasingly aware of extreme weather in India but wanted to tell the story in a different way.

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“I wanted to be able to show how our choices in the west affect people in places like India,” Borella said. “I felt obliged – but I didn’t want to produce cliched photos of desperate conditions in India. I wanted this to tell a personal story.”

He set about researching and months later he stumbled across a paper from the University of California, Berkeley, documenting a correlation between climate change and almost 60,000 Indian farmers taking their own lives.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A skull, believed to be from a farmer who killed himself. Photograph: Federico Borella

“For me, this story spoke to the connection between environmental destruction and self-destruction. I felt obliged to tell it. I wanted to show how our choices in the west are having these huge consequences for people in the rest of the world, in terms of climate change.”

His photographs, telling the story of a farming community in Tamil Nadu facing its worst drought in 140 years, were praised by the judges who said it instantly stood out as winner.

The chair of judges Mike Trow, who was previously a picture editor for British Vogue, said Borella’s work was urgently needed, adding: “Borella documented this with incredible sensitivity, imagination and a direct aesthetic that we all agreed worked on a number of levels.”

Borella wanted the photographs to speak to the absence created by suicide, and decided to photograph some of the widows, choosing a square format to create intimacy. Although it was his first time entering the competition, he was quietly confident because of the personal power of the stories he was capturing.

“Of course it was a beautiful surprise when I got the call,” he said, adding “but as a journalist, you can recognise when you are really on to something that is outstanding. I really felt something about this project. I knew it had the possibility of raising huge awareness.”

“Every story of every widowed woman was so intimate and so moving,” he said, talking about a woman whose husband killed himself in front of the bank whose loan he could not replay, by drinking the pesticide that he used for his crops.

Borella found it difficult not being able to immediately help the women that he was photographing, but hopes the award will bring international attention to their stories.

Alongside winning Photographer of the Year, he also won in the Professional Documentary category.