More than 5,200 photographers entered. Just 48 made the lower. That’s successful charge of lower than one per cent. Which makes getting a spot within the Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition really feel extra like entering into an Ivy League college than coming into a images content material.
But IPE167, which opens at London’s Saatchi Gallery on August 7 and runs till September 11, is way over a contest. Now in its 167th consecutive 12 months, it is the world’s longest-running images exhibition, and it is as important as ever.
The 113 chosen prints span the whole lot from Nineteenth-century wet-plate collodion processes to movement image movie and thermal imaging, and the themes working by means of the work are something however comfy.
The present lands at a second when images’s social and political energy feels significantly charged. So it is no shock that that is an exhibition in regards to the world because it really is, made by folks paying very shut consideration.
Female views
The two award recipients this 12 months are each girls whose work tackles the feminine expertise head-on, however in very totally different registers.
Marcy Palmer, a US-based artist, receives the IPE Award for Seeds of Strength and Resilience, a collection that makes use of botanical images to discover the historical past and contested way forward for reproductive rights.
The crops she images, printed on delicate Japanese Kozo paper and highlighted with gold leaf, are historic natural abortifacients; crops girls have used for hundreds of years when different choices have been unavailable to them. The gold leaf carries a double that means: hope, and a reference to kintsugi, the Japanese artwork of mending damaged objects with gold to make the restore a part of the wonder.
The Under 30s Award goes to Léa Chen, a Taiwanese artist currently based in London, for The Stars That Don’t Look Back. This series weaves together family archive photos, historical events and Taiwanese literature to document the private memories shared by three generations of women navigating colonial trauma and everyday life.
The images range from a close-up of white hair, shot so tight it becomes almost abstract, to a grainy, spotted black-and-white snapshot of women playing outdoors: fragile, precious, irreplaceable. Chen’s ambition is to help viewers find inner peace in the safety net women have woven through history.
Worlds of water
Beyond these two winners, the range of photographic approaches on display is quite staggering. Take Abbey Hepner’s portrait of Jane, a third-generation resident of the erased Colorado uranium town of Uravan, made using wet-plate collodion. That’s a process more commonly associated with the 1850s, and brilliantly, the plates were washed with water from the river that still flows through the buried town.
That approach is subtly echoed by Siân Cann, a visually impaired photographer, who created her Retinopathy Forest series by decaying Polaroid photographs in saltwater and post-surgical eye drops. The resulting images mirror the visual disturbances of her own condition.
Elsewhere, Attilio Fiumarella’s Swimmers gathers more than 100 people in the drained pool of Birmingham’s Grade II*-listed Moseley Road Baths to protest its threatened closure. And Thomas Mandl’s 5 Superheroes depicts kids displaced from eastern Ukraine, wearing homemade superhero costumes, standing in the rubble of a roofless ruin during a project trip with NGO ArtHelps. The costumes are improvised and the setting is bleak, but the impulse behind the image, that growing up amid war requires a particular kind of heroism, lands with real force.
Why this matters
In an era when everyone with a phone thinks they’re a photographer, and images are produced and discarded at a near-incomprehensible rate, a show that selects 113 prints from more than 5,200 submissions, anonymously, with a panel that argues about what matters, is doing something worthwhile. IPE167 is a reminder that photography isn’t just documentation. Done well, it’s one of the sharpest languages we have for saying what needs to be said.
Last year’s show at Saatchi Gallery attracted over 65,000 visitors, and this edition returns to the same venue, so the work will reach a larger audience than most art photography ever does. After London, the exhibition will tour to Taunton Museum (October 2026 to January 2027) and the Royal Geographical Society (April 2027).
RPS International Photography Exhibition 167 is at Saatchi Gallery, London, 7 August – 11 September 2026. Free entry. Details at rps.org.