The Royal Photographic Society Awards 2025

The world’s longest running photography prize

The recipients of The Royal Photographic Society Awards for 2025, the world’s longest running photography prize, have been announced. The RPS’s most prestigious honour - The RPS Centenary Medal - has been awarded to Susan Derges in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the art of photography. Derges is based in Devon, UK, and creates photographic artwork exploring nature, often without a camera, using the landscape itself to create her imagery. Her work has been widely exhibited and is held in photography collections across the world.

The RPS Award for Achievement in the Art of Photography is given to Senegalese photographer, Omar Victor Diop. Working initially on photographic landscapes, Diop then moved into fashion photography. His personal practice focuses on fine art portraiture, including self-portraiture. He has been exhibited widely internationally.

Reflecting the science of photography, The RPS Progress Medal in the science of photography is presented to David Malin who developed new techniques to support astronomical photography, allowing for greater detail to be seen. The 'Malin 1' galaxy, the largest known spiral galaxy, was named after him.

One of the most significant curators and writers on photography, Charlotte Cotton receives The RPS Award for Photography Curatorship, Criticism or Research. Cotton has had a significant impact on photography through her exhibitions and publications. Her book, The Photograph as Contemporary Art (2004) is in its fourth edition and available in fourteen languages and is considered a key text in charting the rise of photography as an undisputed art form in the 21st century.

Among the new RPS Honorary Fellows is the UK photographer and educator Richard Billingham, best known for his 1996 book, the acclaimed Ray’s A Laugh, a stark documentation of his parents and wider issues of class and poverty.

Now in its 147th year, the Royal Photographic Society Awards is the world’s longest running and most prestigious photography honours, dating back to 1878. The Awards recognise individuals working across both still and moving image. Rather than rewarding a single image, the RPS Awards celebrate the photographers and recipients themselves - highlighting significant achievements and showcasing new and emerging talent across a range of categories that range across photography and the moving image’s genres and applications, including moving image; new media; science and imaging; education; publishing; and curation.

Sir Brian Pomeroy CBE ARPS, Chair of the judging panel, comments: “While the 2025 RPS Awards recipients reflect the diversity and breadth of the international photographic community, they are all united in celebrating photography's unique capacity to challenge societal perceptions and make complex issues both relatable and urgent.”

Simon Hill CPhot HonFRPS, RPS President, comments: “The Royal Photographic Society Awards are a powerful expression of how we, as one of the oldest photographic societies in the world, recognise and celebrate achievement across the full diversity of photographic practice. Each year, we shine a light on individuals and teams whose work exemplifies creativity, innovation, technical mastery, and a deep commitment to sharing knowledge and experience.

This year’s awardees reflect the extraordinary breadth of photography and moving image today; from those pushing artistic and scientific boundaries to those educating, publishing, and volunteering in ways that strengthen and sustain our community. Together, they demonstrate how photography continues to evolve as both an art form and a means of understanding the world around us.

Through these Awards, our Society honours those who inspire our members and the wider public through their imagination, expertise, and generosity, and who embody the Society’s enduring mission to promote excellence and celebrate the power of photography in all its forms.”

The awards are given across three pillars
The Art of Photography & Moving Image

Susan Derges, Shoreline © Susan Derges HonFRPS. The RPS Centenary Medal, Courtesy The Royal Photographic Society

Omar Victor Diop, Thiaroye-Senegal-1944 © Omar Victor Diop, The RPS Award for Achievement in the Art of Photography

Tami Aftab © Tami Aftab. The RPS Award for Achievement in the Art of Photography (under 30 years) Courtesy The Royal Photographic Society

The Science of Photography & Moving Image
The Knowledge and understanding of Photography & Moving Image

Jaskirt Dhaliwal-Boora, Tiegan © Jaskirt Dhaliwal-Boora, The RPS Award for Social Impact

About The Royal Photographic Society:
The Royal Photographic Society (The RPS) is an educational charity with an international membership. Founded in 1853, when photography was in its infancy, the objective of The RPS is to make the art and science of photography more widely available and is committed to bringing photography to everyone. Today, The RPS is a world-leading photographic community, made up of accomplished artists, dedicated academics, hobbyists, and seasoned professionals The RPS aims to inspire people through its innovative exhibitions, its award-winning RPS Journal, and its highly respected awards and events. The RPS helps photographers create images through its educational programmes, qualifications, and its public initiatives; and it seeks to connect photographers through specialist groups and its UK and international communities. Membership is open to everyone.

Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast

By Anastasia Samoylova

Publisher : Aperture and the Norton Museum of Art

2025 | 144 pages

Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast opens a vast, quietly unsettling portrait of the American East Coast — one in which nostalgia, dislocation and transformation are sewn into the landscape itself. In this new monograph, Samoylova retraces the route pioneered by Berenice Abbott in 1954, journeying from Florida to Maine to revisit the places Abbott once documented, and to observe what has become of them decades later. Her images — in vivid color and stark black and white — reveal the tension between myth and reality, between promises of progress and the traces of decay or displacement.

Where once small towns and coastal communities had a certain stillness, Samoylova finds change carved into facades and roadside signs, into suburban sprawl and shuttered shopfronts. She frames these scenes with a photographer’s patience and a poet’s sensitivity — capturing abandoned diners, empty motels, decaying houses, ghostly intersections. At the same time, there is stubborn life: occasional portraits of people, wildlife, reminders that behind every sign of decline, someone, something endures.

Her book does not simply document physical places. It traces the shifting contours of identity, belonging and memory in a nation where the open road has long symbolized freedom — and where that ideal has become tangled with consumerism, environmental degradation, and socio-economic upheaval. Through Atlantic Coast, Samoylova asks whether the “American Dream” remains intact, or if it has fractured along with the towns her car passes through.

Reading this volume is to experience a slow, attentive journey — as a witness, as a traveller, as someone invited to reconsider what America has become. Her photographs linger, subtly unsettling the viewer’s assumptions about beauty, progress and decline. In its silence and restraint, the book whispers that memory, identity and place are fragile — and that every road carries stories worth listening to.

Lisette Model

By Lisette Model

Publisher : Prestel

2026 | 256 pages

Lisette Model presents a definitive exploration of one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, whose bold vision reshaped the way urban life and society were captured on film. This stunning hardcover features over 200 reproductions, ranging from her early Parisian portraits to the striking images of New York streets that defined her career.

Model’s photographic journey began in Vienna and matured in France, where her keen eye for social observation developed. Early works, including portraits of idle elites in Nice, reveal her sharp sense of critique tempered by empathy. These images, at once confrontational and intimate, established her as a formidable observer of human behavior. After emigrating to the United States, Model brought this incisive approach to New York, producing iconic images such as the Coney Island Bather and the Cafe Metropole series, which juxtapose vitality, vulnerability, and the stark contrasts of city life.

Her lens captured both the glamour and grit of her surroundings: the bustling streets of the Lower East Side, the grandeur of high-society gatherings, and the nuanced everyday gestures that reveal the inner lives of her subjects. Model’s distinctive framing, bold compositions, and unflinching attention to human detail created a visual language that remains influential to this day.

This collection also includes lesser-known works from her travels along the U.S. West Coast and Venezuela, highlighting her continued exploration of character, form, and place. Insights from scholar Walter Moser contextualize her work within the broader trajectory of twentieth-century photography, illuminating her enduring impact as both an artist and a teacher.

Lisette Model is more than a retrospective; it is an immersive journey into a world seen through a lens of unvarnished reality and poetic observation. It celebrates a photographer whose fearless engagement with her subjects, combined with her artistic rigor, forged a path for generations of street and documentary photographers, offering an essential resource for enthusiasts and scholars alike.

All About Lisette Model

Fred Herzog: A Color Legacy

By Fred Herzog

Publisher : Hatje Cantz

2026 | 144 pages

Fred Herzog: A Color Legacy opens a fresh chapter on the streets of Vancouver and beyond, offering the public previously unseen images from the archives of a man whose eye for color and life defied the conventions of his time. Herzog’s work in the 1950s and 60s stands out because he chose Kodachrome — a decision nearly heretical when art photography still equated seriousness with black and white. What emerges through his Leica’s lens is a world awash in warm reds, neon signs, and the soft glow of streetlights — a world that feels alive, tactile, and tender.

After emigrating from Germany to Vancouver in 1953 and working by day as a medical photographer, Herzog spent his evenings and weekends roaming the city streets. He captured storefronts, everyday people going about their lives, second-hand shops, Chinatown alleys, decaying cars, neon reflections — details often overlooked, but rich with character. He treated photography not as artifice but as observation, documenting modern urban life with precision and empathy. His photographs turned ordinary city scenes into a tribute to human presence and urban texture.

The volume collects these rediscovered gems alongside his best-known photos, offering a more complete portrait of a photographer who stubbornly trusted color when many of his peers turned away. The images span Vancouver and also trace Herzog’s travels to the U.S., the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America, showing a restless spirit and a worldwide curiosity. Each frame is infused with intimacy, subtle humor, and a respect for the quotidian — light on one face, a reflection in a shop window, the curve of a car hood shimmering in rain.

Fred Herzog: A Color Legacy is not just a homage to a photographer but a statement about memory, time, and beauty in the urban fabric. It reminds us how much of a city’s soul lives in small moments — a street sign, a storefront, a quiet onlooker — and how color, long seen as frivolous in serious photography, can reveal more truth than monochrome ever could.

All About Fred Herzog

Critical Photojournalism: Contemporary Ethics and Practices

By Tara Pixley, Judy Walgren

Publisher : ‎ Routledge

2025 | 226 pages

An essential introduction to the complexities of visual representation, this book offers a critical new framework for understanding and practicing photojournalism in a global digital context.

Critical Photojournalism guides readers through a variety of ethical, technical and business skills, plus the mental health, self-care and safety considerations necessary to thrive in the field. Drawing on their extensive industry and teaching experience, the authors provide real-world advice on how to navigate the demands of the profession while addressing the impact that photojournalism has on society and ways that photojournalists can mitigate harm. Consideration is given to understanding and disrupting implicit bias and power structures in newsrooms, as well as issues around access, working in breaking news environments and balancing informed consent with varying media laws around the world. In accessible language, this book highlights the importance of collaboration and community engagement in contemporary photojournalism and encourages students to adopt a decolonial approach to their work. Readers will learn to balance the needs for accuracy and thoughtfulness with the priorities of a global, social-media-engaged audience.

This is a key textbook for those seeking a nuanced introduction to visual journalism and/or a fresh approach to their craft. This book is supported by a website which can be accessed at www.criticalphotojournalism.com. The website includes a full-length bonus chapter on video and photojournalism, interviews with professional visual journalists, further tips and tools, and a glossary of key terms.

The Royal Photographic Society Awards 2025

The world’s longest running photography prize

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