Cape Town in summer comes with built-in spectacle. The mountain poses. The light shows off and dusts everything in a crisp sparkle. The sea throws glitter at everything like a drag queen with a wind machine. You can go about your day thinking you’re simply buying an ice cream or attempting a parallel parking at the V&A Waterfront, and suddenly you’ve stepped inside a postcard. Everywhere you cast your eyes is a perfect snapshot.
Which is why the Ocean Photographer of the Year 2025 Exhibition at the Two Oceans Aquarium feels like such an intelligent provocation. It takes the ocean — Cape Town’s default background noise — and focuses your attention on it properly. Now in its last week, it runs until January 21, it is the first time this prestigious exhibition has been staged in Africa.
Co-ordinated by Oceanographic Magazine and Blancpain, with sponsorship from Canon, the exhibition gathers the winning work from this year’s contest — images chosen from more than 15,000 entries.
Two Oceans Aquarium’s guest experience manager Alichia Nortjé calls it “an incredible honour” to host the show “for the first time on the African continent.” But there’s also a hard edge beneath the celebration. These photographs, she says, “shine a light on the magnificence of the ocean and its inhabitants, illustrating what we have to lose without action.” It aligns, she notes, with the aquarium’s purpose: “Conservation, education and research with the aim of inspiring action for the future wellbeing of our oceans.”
The overall winner, Indonesia-based macro photographer Yury Ivanov, doesn’t go for grand tragedy or cinematic violence. He wins with something smaller than most people’s attention span: two amphipods, each 3mm long, perched on coral like tiny psychedelic commas. The judges responded to what the press release calls “the simplicity of its message” — that the ocean is “a place of wonder, colour and life of all sizes”. Ivanov himself says: “This award isn’t just about one image, but about celebrating the ocean itself — its fragility, its diversity and its extraordinary power to inspire us.”
The rest of the exhibition is a parade of the ocean’s many facets. There are “torpedo-like penguins”, a puffin in comic theft panic and fine-art visions of stingrays riding billowing sand clouds like underwater gods.
Entry is included in the aquarium day pass. Cape Town will still be photogenic outside, of course. But, for a few more days, take the opportunity to gasp at the ocean’s many wonders.
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