50 Photos From RPS Awards, the World’s Oldest Photography Prize

The Royal Photographic Society Awards are the world’s longest-running images prize, and the implausible 2025 winners have been unveiled. The recipients exemplify vital expertise and contribution throughout the artwork and science of images.

The Royal Photographic Society Awards started 147 years in the past. Although images itself has modified dramatically over that point, the awards have at all times been targeted on celebrating images as an artwork type. This 12 months’s winners mirror new and rising expertise alongside notable contributions by longtime professionals. The Royal Photographic Society notes the 2025 winners’ work “is a testament to the power of photography to inspire, uplift, incite change and bring about personal, social, and cultural wellbeing.”

The RPS Awards rejoice images throughout three major pillars: The artwork, the science, and the information and understanding of images and the transferring picture.

RPS Award Centenary Medal — Susan Derges

The RPS’s “most prestigious honor,” the RPS Centenary Medal, has been awarded to photographer Susan Derges this 12 months. The photographer, based mostly in Devon, U.Ok., creates fascinating photographic paintings in nature with out a conventional digicam or lens. Derges is among the many most influential and pioneering camera-less photographers of her era.

Derges, born in 1955, studied portray in London and Berlin within the Nineteen Seventies, which paved the way in which for her later photographic explorations. She started experimenting with camera-less images shortly thereafter, doing fascinating work with photosensitive supplies and pure processes, together with sound and lightweight.

The RPS notes that Derges’ photographic work explores humanity’s relationship to the pure world, typically by bringing pure phenomena to life within the photographic medium in new and thrilling methods. For instance, Derges has uncovered the bodily motion of rivers and oceans onto photosensitive supplies at night time utilizing moonlight, fastidiously composing crops and different pure matter in entrance of photosensitive paper, after which exposing it to gentle, and exposing photosensitive supplies to sound waves, letting the frequencies create the ultimate prints.

Throughout her prolonged profession, throughout which her work has been awarded and exhibited many, many instances worldwide, Derges has at all times maintained a robust, bodily connection to nature by way of images. Her work pushes the boundaries of what images is and the way individuals relate to nature itself.

RPS Award for Achievement within the Art of Photography — Omar Victor Diop


Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop obtained his begin in panorama images earlier than transferring into high-quality artwork portraiture and vogue images, the place he has turn into a really outstanding and acclaimed artist.

His work has been broadly exhibited worldwide, together with on the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the place the photographer spends a lot of his time, the Brooklyn Museum within the U.S., and the Musée de la Photographie de Saint-Louis in Senegal.

Diop’s work is vivid, imaginative, inventive, and visually placing. His paintings extends past images, as he’s additionally a author, dressmaker, and textile artist.

RPS Award for Achievement within the Art of Photography (Under 30 Years) — Tami Aftab

English-Pakistani photographer Tami Aftab earned the RPS Award for Achievement within the Art of Photography for photographers below 30. Aftab’s work explores ideas of household, identification, and play, and is well known for its capability to method delicate subjects with heat and lightness.

Aftab obtained her begin in images engaged on a private mission together with her father, who suffers from short-term reminiscence loss. Aftab and her dad handled the very difficult matter by way of humorous staged portraits. This sequence knowledgeable Aftab’s debut images guide, The Rice is on the Hob, which was photographed in Lahore. The guide explored meals, heritage, and the way reminiscence pertains to household.

Aftab’s images crosses quite a few style boundaries, encompassing vogue, portraiture, way of life, and extra. Aftab’s vibrant, playful type has attracted many main purchasers, together with Adidas, Apple, Burberry, and extra. Her work has been exhibited on the National Portrait Gallery, ICA, The Photographer’s Gallery, and extra.

The RPS Award for Environmental Responsibility — Ragnar Guðni Axelsson

For greater than 4 a long time, Ragnar Guðni Axelsson has photographed the individuals, animals, and landscapes in distant Arctic areas, among the many harshest and most unforgiving locations on Earth.

Axelsson’s unbelievable black-and-white images seize the Arctic in beautiful element, showcasing how individuals thrive on the very fringe of civilization.

Throughout his 40-plus years of photographic work, Axelsson has documented how local weather change and environmental shifts have impacted the individuals, animals, and locations of the Arctic, successfully capturing how the relationships between people and nature have been profoundly altered within the Arctic.

Axelsson is at the moment engaged on a three-year mission documenting individuals’s lives throughout all eight Arctic nations.

RPS Award for Editorial or Documentary Photography — Raghu Rai

Civil engineer-turned-photographer Raghu Rai has been working as a photojournalist because the mid-Nineteen Sixties. He has been chief photographer for The Statesman, labored for The Times in London, and joined Magnum Photos within the Nineteen Seventies, a company Rai stays part of as we speak.

Rai’s picture essays and work have appeared in main publications worldwide for many years, and Rai has printed greater than 60 images books on totally different themes in India.

In 2012, Raghu Rai and his son, Nitin Rai, based the Raghu Rai Center for Photography, which shares Rai’s 50 years of photographic experience with the subsequent generations of photographers.

RPS Award for Photojournalism — Amak Mahmoodian

Multidisciplinary artist and educator Amak Mahmoodian is that this 12 months’s recipient of the RPS Award for Photojournalism. She began her profession as a research-based photographer in Iran in 2003 and moved to the United Kingdom in 2010, unable to return to her homeland.

Mahmoodian’s work typically intersects between conceptual images and documentary work, and routinely consists of textual content, video, drawings, and sound alongside pictures.

RPS Progress Medal within the Science of Photography — David Malin

In 1957, when he was simply 15 years outdated, David Malin started his working life. He was serious about chemistry and science, so he began working at a lab in Manchester, U.Ok., making pesticides. Rachel Caron’s influential 1962 guide, Silent Spring, put an finish to this explicit model of chemistry. Malin then moved to pigments and dyes, the place he used specialised photographic strategies to be taught extra about them. It is right here that Malin started growing his personal distinctive photographic processes and creating photos of chemical substances for the sake of artwork.

Malin progressed up the ranks however finally hit a wall because of his lack of high-level formal schooling. Malin started trying to find new alternatives and located an commercial for a scientific photographer in a problem of Nature. The job was to function a telescope within the Australian Outback. Malin took the job and moved his household to Australia.

Malin’s enterprising spirit and scientific acumen had been quickly on full show as he invented methods to amplify knowledge on astronomical photographic plates, revealing that the smudges had been, the truth is, distant galaxies. One of those galaxies was named “Malin-1” and stays the most important identified spiral galaxy.

Malin developed further strategies to get well faint knowledge and devised a way for creating true-color astronomical photos, a major breakthrough that spurred a surge in scientific analysis and publications.

When chemical images gave approach to digital, Malin retired and started touring the world.

More From the Royal Photographic Society Awards 2025

There are many extra recipients within the Royal Photographic Society Awards 2025, together with for achievements within the artwork of the transferring picture, contributions to the science and artwork of images, scientific imaging, imaging science, images schooling, and extra. The full record of all award winners and this 12 months’s class of RPS Honorary Fellows is obtainable on the Royal Photographic Society’s website.

Image credit: Royal Photographic Society. Individual photographers are credited within the captions.