Heres what the Urban Photo Awards say on their website: "URBAN Photo Awards international competition is ready to restart for the twelfth edition with a prize pool worth over €23,000 and several important new features, among which stands out the presence of a living legend of street photography to chair the jury: Bruce Gilden! Submissions open from March 1 to May 31, 2021."

"Promoted by Italian cultural association dotART in partnership with Trieste Photo Days, Matrix4Design and Trieste Science+Fiction Festival, this year URBAN Photo Awards offers four categories in which photographers can try their hand.

Among the great novelties of this edition, the Bruce Gilden Special Award, which will be added to 'historical' sections dedicated to Single Photos (4 thematic areas: Streets, People, Spaces, Creative), Projects & Portfolio and URBAN Book Award which is dedicated to sketches of photographic books (the so-called 'dummies'). The Bruce Gilden Special Prize will be reserved for street photography projects destined to be part of a prestigious photographic volume edited by Bruce Gilden himself, from which a group exhibition will also be taken."

"As part of the Single Photos section, the prizes promoted in synergy with the URBAN partners also return: New Buildings, born from the partnership with Matrix4Design and dedicated to contemporary architectural photography, and the 'Trieste Science+Fiction Festival' Prize for photographs inspired by science fiction in everyday life, the result of collaboration with the main Italian review dedicated to science fiction."

"URBAN this year is giving away €1,500 for the winner of the Single Photos category (personally chosen by Bruce Gilden), €1,000 for the first Portfolio, €500 for the Best Author, €500 for the winner of New Buildings, a winners’ exhibit with award ceremony and gala dinner as part of the Trieste Photo Days 2021 festival (north-eastern Italy), as well as the publication of the photos in photographic magazines and in the seventh volume of URBAN unveils the City and its secrets. And, of course, several prize-exhibitions: at the Sartorio Museum in Trieste (thanks to the partnership with the Municipality of Trieste), at the Poreč Museum (Croatia) and at the Stelio Crise Library in Trieste."

"As president of the jury, Bruce Gilden will be the guest of honor via Zoom at the eighth edition of Trieste Photo Days to announce the winners and hold an unmissable talk. See you in Trieste on Saturday 30 October 2021.

URBAN Photo Awards each year sees thousands of photos competing and hundreds of participants from all over the world. It is an ever-growing international contest, one of the few to 'cross the boundaries' of the web, offering photographers real visibility through dozens of photographic exhibitions in the prestigious frames of the Trieste Photo Days, the Trieste Photo Fringe and the Photo Days Tour (in Italy and abroad). In 2020 alone, URBAN set up over 30 exhibitions for nearly 1,400 photos on display."