Despite masterfully capturing a decisive emotional moment after a boxing bout, Vladimir Tadic doesn't even consider himself to be a sports photographer – landscapes are his specialty.
But genre-swapping didn't stop him topping the Sports category in the fourteenth season of HIPA (the Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum International Photography Awards), which was themed 'Power'.
HIPA is the world's richest photography competition and has a prize pot of US$1 million [£739,550/AU$1,490,000]; the single-photo category winners of 'Power' take home US$40,000 [£29,500/AU$60,000].
Photographed at a European boxing championship held in Vladimir's hometown in Bosnia Herzegovina, the winner of the bout was Irish and her opponent was Russian.
Vladimir wanted to capture something at the fight that would stand out, initially hoping to get the moment a punch landed, throwing up sweat in its wake.
But searching through his frames after the fight, he soon realised he had managed to capture something with even more impact.
"If you think of sports photography, you usually imagine action," he told Digital Camera World after the ceremony in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, in November 2025. "But this is different: this is 'reaction.'
"Here you have a facial expression and you have body language. And I think this is what makes it stand out from other sports photographs."
Shot on a Nikon Z7 II and a Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G lens, Vladimir converted the photo to black and white afterwards, to heighten the emotional effect.
"When you want to make a photograph simpler, you pull out unnecessary information," he explains. "If you pull out the color all the distractions are gone so you can easily get to the idea of the photograph."
It's clear that 'Victory and Defeat' meets the brief of the 'Power' theme, given there's a winner and a loser in the same frame, but the extremes of emotion evident in the picture make an even bigger impression.
"Sports are competitive and the winner is projecting power onto the losing side, so this connects with the 'Power' theme," notes Vladimir.
"Both boxers would have invested a lot of time training – years, maybe – so there was a lot at stake. If you lose, it is a big disappointment. But in that emotional contrast lies the idea of this photograph, I think."
Vladimir tells me he uses his main photographic practice to bring people together.
"In Bosnia Herzegovina people are divided, and through my photography I am trying to unite them.
"When someone looks at a photograph, especially if it's a beautiful photograph of nature, that beauty will unite people.
"My mission is to make people move on with their lives, and for the moment to forget about things that divide them.
"Bosnia Herzegovina is a beautiful country, but we have a lot of ecological problems and this is also my mission – to present nature in its full beauty so that we can have a picture of what we will lose if we don't preserve our natural world."
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About the competition
The Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum International Photography Award (HIPA) rewards excellence in still photographs and moving images and has a prize pot of US$1,000,000 [£739,550/AU$1,490,000], with the winner of the grand prize taking home US$200,000 [£152,000/AU$307,000]. Free to enter, the theme of the 15th season is 'Family' and will open for entries early in 2026. Find out more at www.hipa.ae
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