Sony World Photography Awards 2025
Image: Roseann on the way to Manhattan Beach, New York City, 1978
© Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos
PHOTOGRAPHY
Susan Meiselas
Outstanding Contribution to Photography
Susan Meiselas is the recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to Photography of the Sony World Photography Awards 2025. Born in Baltimore, USA, in 1948, Susan Meiselas completed her MA in visual education at Harvard University before working as a teacher. She began photographing during school summer breaks, creating her first project Carnival Strippers in the summers of 1972-75. She joined Magnum Photos in 1976 and has gone on to produce several significant bodies of work. Celebrated for her deeply engaged approach, Meiselas has created a powerful corpus of work, expanding perceptions of documentary photography through her insightful portrayals of people in their communities.
About the Sony World Photography Awards – Outstanding Contribution to Photography
Nam June Paik Prize 2024
Image: Joan Jonas. Still from Double Lunar Dogs. 1984. Video (color, sound), 24 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. © 2021 Joan Jonas. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
ART
Joan Jonas
Nam June Paik Prize
Korea's Nam June Paik Art Center has announced American artist Joan Jonas as the eighth winner of the Nam June Paik Prize. Jonas has had a significant influence on the development and diversity of contemporary art from the late 1960s to the present in a variety of media. Her early works, which combined then-new technologies such as portable video cameras and television monitors with performance, questioned how people see, think, and act in the video age and raised questions that remain relevant. More recently, her work has challenged the dichotomies of civilization and nature and human and non-human, providing opportunities for critical reflection on anthropocentrism, and she continues to explore and deepen her artistic practice.
2024 Sobey Art Award
Image: Nico Williams, Zhi-biindiged gwaya (in foreground), 2022. Glass beads, thread, plastic, metal, river rocks, 365.7 × 365.7 × 80 cm. © Nico Williams. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid
ART
Nico Williams
Sobey Art Award
Nico Williams has won the 2024 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s largest contemporary art prize. Nico Williams ᐅᑌᒥᐣ lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, and is a member of Aamjiwnaang First Nation (Anishinaabe). The jury felt compelled to recognize the undeniable energy and pertinence of Nico Williams’ approach to contemporary sculptural beadwork that allows us to imagine new possibilities for the medium. His impeccably precise artworks transform everyday objects to the level of the spectacular and weave personal experiences into broadly relatable narratives. Working with and through community, Williams’ practice challenges the persistence of colonial legacies through the surfacing of collective memory and shared nostalgias.
World Architecture Festival 2024
Image: fjcstudio, Darlington Public School, Sydney, Australia, 2023. © Brett Boardman
ARCHITECTURE
Darlington Public School
by fjcstudio
World Building of the Year
The Darlington Public School in Australia by fjcstudio has been declared the World Building of the Year at the World Architecture Festival 2024. fjcstudio previously won Building of the Year in 2013, making it the first practice to win the award twice. The community school is located on the fringe of the city of Sydney, and has a strong connection to Aboriginal people embodied in its redesign. The transformed school now seamlessly connects to its surroundings, offering glimpses of the inner courtyard from the main entrance, promoting a sense of privacy and community for the children, as well as providing facilities that are publicly accessible including the community hall, covered outdoor learning area and library.
About the World Architecture Festival
Prix StudioCollector 2024
Image: Amir Youssef, EMAN, film, 15min, 2024. Production Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains. © Amir Youssef / Courtesy Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains
ART
Amir Youssef
Prix StudioCollector
The Prix StudioCollector 2024 was awarded to Amir Youssef for his film EMAN (2024). The award celebrates video art and recognizes an artist from Le Fresnoy – Studio national, selected during the Panoramaexhibition. The work of Egyptian artist and filmmaker Amir Youssef has two main axes: the absurdity of war and historical events linked to post-colonialism, and religious themes, focusing on the transformation of sacred texts into poetic and transcendent forms. With EMAN, he tells the story of a young Egyptian Copt who goes to the basilica of Saint-Quentin (Aisne), hoping for a miracle to find his missing mother. There, he explores the existential questions of his faith in the labyrinth of his memories.
About the Prix StudioCollector
Paris Photo–Aperture
2024 PhotoBook Awards
Image: Disruptions by Taysir Batniji, Loose Joints Publishing, Marseille, France / London
Design by Loose Joints Studio
PHOTOGRAPHY
Disruptions by Taysir Batniji
PhotoBook of the Year
Taysir Batniji’s Disruptions was named PhotoBook of the Year. Opaque, yet frighteningly urgent, it compiles pixelated screenshots from WhatsApp video calls to his family in Gaza, taken between April 2015 and June 2017. The fragmentary aesthetic of fragile phone connections offers a metaphor for the breakdown of the psyche in the midst of daily life compromised by conflict. Amid warped portraits and pixelated landscapes, the viewer is confronted with bursts of vibrant color signaling failed communication, broken only by solid pages of green that display the date of each call. The images are accompanied by a poignant text from photo-historian Taous R. Dahmani.
About the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards
Prix Nadar Gens d’images 2024
Image: © Jean-Michel André
PHOTOGRAPHY
Chambre 207 by Jean-Michel André
Prix Nadar Gens d’images
The Prix Nadar Gens d’images, awarded for a book on photography published in the past year by a French publisher, has been awarded to Chambre 207 by Jean-Michel André, published by Actes Sud. On August 5, 1983, Jean-Michel André's father was murdered along with six other people in a hotel in Avignon while they were on vacation together. Chambre 207 is an autofictional visual essay in which Jean-Michel André travels in the footsteps of lost memories. He combines his photographs with elements of investigation, archives and family objects to compose a compendium that questions memory, mourning and reparation.
About the Prix Nadar Gens d’images
Eyes Wide Open
Bourses du 1er livre photo
Image: © Khashayar Javanmardi; © Stéphanie Lacombe; © Eva Diallo
PHOTOGRAPHY
Khashayar Javanmardi
Stéphanie Lacombe
Eva Diallo
Bourses du 1er livre photo
Eyes Wide Open has announced the 3 winners of the first edition of the Bourses du 1er livre photo. Khashayar Javanmardi received the grant for a photographer from a Global South country, Stéphanie Lacombe the SAIF grant for a French photographer or a photographer living in France and Eva Diallo the grant for a woman photographer of any nationality. Each grant is awarded directly to the photographer for the production of his or her photo book. This program is supported by the SAIF and the French Ministry of Culture.
