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If you have not heard of the Saltzman-Leibovitz Photography Prize but, now’s the time to concentrate. Launched in 2025 by New York photographer and philanthropist Lisa Saltzman, by means of the Saltzman Family Foundation, and created in collaboration with Annie Leibovitz, it is explicitly designed to highlight rising feminine photographers at a pivotal level of their careers. It comes with actual cash ($15,000 for the winner, $5,000 for the runner-up), a severe jury and, crucially, an exhibition at Photo London. Only in its second 12 months, it is already making a robust case for itself.
The 2026 version takes Leibovitz’s guide Women as its inspiration, with 5 worldwide nominators every placing ahead a candidate, whose work is then judged by a panel of specialists. This 12 months’s winner is Marisol Mendez, a photographer and researcher from Cochabamba, Bolivia, whose challenge MADRE takes the $15,000 high prize. And it is price listening to how Mendez explains her personal follow.
“It’s usually easier to understand love or time through a poem or song than through a chemistry lesson or the manual of a clock,” she stated on receiving the nomination. That’s a line price pinning above your monitor: not as a result of it is significantly authentic, however as a result of it articulates one thing photographers usually know instinctively, but wrestle to behave on. Documentation is a ground, not a ceiling.
The winner and her work
MADRE weaves Andean folklore and Catholic iconography into an exploration of Bolivian id and matriarchal lineage, drawing on archival household images alongside Mendez’s personal staged and naturalistic imagery. It’s formidable, layered and formally placing.
The connection to Leibovitz isn’t merely institutional, either: Mendez cites being “enamoured” by Leibovitz’s images as what first drew her toward fiction and storytelling, which gives the whole thing a pleasingly circular quality.
Diverse voices
The shortlist around Mendez makes for a compelling survey of where serious photography is happening right now. It includes Cole Ndelu, working at the intersection of fashion, spirituality and Zulu identity in Johannesburg; Lindeka Qampi, a self-taught South African photographer documenting township life with formal rigour; Bettina Pittaluga turning her lens on queer community life in Paris with an emphasis on the quiet and unguarded over the spectacular.
Then there’s runner-up Miranda Barnes, whose project Social Season documents Black debutante balls in the United States.
A Brooklyn-born artist who studied humanities and justice before turning to photography, Barnes receives $5,000 for a project that uses colour photography to explore African American cotillion culture (a coming-of-age tradition where young women are introduced into society).
It’s simultaneously glamorous and pointed, a reminder, as she frames it, that within living memory “being a well-dressed, articulate black person was deemed inappropriate, even a dangerous offense”.
The images, shot with a warm and unhurried eye, treat their subjects with the seriousness the tradition deserves, and the tradition has rarely been photographed this carefully.
Why this matters
Awards like this one matter beyond the prize money, though $15,000 is genuinely useful at an early stage of a career. They matter because they set a standard and this prize is setting an interesting one.
The jury, the nominators and the winning work all seem to share a conviction that photography is most valuable when it’s doing something that a phone camera and a caption can’t do alone: building a world, interrogating a system of belief, finding the mythic inside the domestic.
A selection of works by all five nominees will be on show at Photo London, Olympia, from May 13-17 2026. If you are going, it is price making time for: that is the type of work that reminds you why you picked up a digital camera within the first place. For extra data, go to saltzmanfamilyfoundation.org.
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