Les Rencontres d’Arles 2025
Image: Nan Goldin, Stendhal Syndrome, 2024, still. Courtesy of the artist / Gagosian.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Nan Goldin
Prix Women In Motion
American artist, Nan Goldin, has been awarded the Prix Women In Motion. Through her work, Nan Goldin has recast the representation of women outside patriarchal norms, but also of overlooked communities. Her intimate and raw portraits highlight issues like domestic violence, sexuality and life on the fringes of society. Exhibited at Les Rencontres d'Arles, her work Stendhal Syndrome takes the form of a slide show juxtaposing images of classical, Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces with portraits of Nan Goldin's friends and lovers. The structure of the work is inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, depicting the artist's friends and family as mythological figures such as Galatea, Orpheus and Hermaphrodite.
Image: Diana Markosian, The Cut Out, Father series, 2014-2024. Courtesy of the artist.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Diana Markosian
Prix de la Photo Madame Figaro Arles
Diana Markosian has been awarded the Prix de la Photo Madame Figaro Arles for her work Father. Born in Moscow, she was seven years old in 1996 when her mother woke her up in the middle of the night. She told her that the family was going on a trip. The family boarded a flight to the United States. Markosian never said goodbye to her father. Father is an intimate portrait of the complex journey of a father and daughter trying to rebuild the emotional foundation they once shared. Through documentary photographs, archival documents and vernacular images, Diana Markosian explores her father’s absence, their reconciliation and the shared emptiness of their prolonged estrangement.
Image: Octavio Aguilar, Tajëëw, ja tsa´any [Tajëëw, the snake], 2020. Courtesy of the artist / Parallel Oaxaca.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Octavio Aguilar
Prix Découverte Fondation Louis Roederer
Octavio Aguilar has been awarded the Prix Découverte Fondation Louis Roederer for his work Tajëëw its Kontoy, in which mythology offers an opportunity to reconstruct memories of Santiago Zacatepec (Oaxaca, Mexico), his birthplace and current residence. Tajëëw and Kontoy are the names of the ancestors of the Ayuuk community, whose origins have been passed down via orally from one generation to the next. Aurea Romero, his grandmother, was an important guide in helping him understand his cultural genealogy. Through conversations with her and other inhabitants in the region, Octavio Aguilar has been able to reconstruct a narrative that resists processes of symbolic colonisation.
Image: Binom, Nata Drachinskaya. Design: Nata Drachinskaya. Russia, 2025.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Binom by Nata Drachinskaya
LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award
Binom by Nata Drachinskaya has been awarded the LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award. The project began as a personal story of overcoming the family trauma caused by her father's suicide in 2001. Exploring her father's photographic archives and personal effects after his death, Nata Drachinskaya realised that he had had another, secret life. For more than 25 years, he worked as a cryptographer for the KGB, developing encryption algorithms to secure government communications. His role was so secret that not even his family knew the full extent of it. In the photo book Binom, the artist depicts his two distinct lives in a dual-volume visual narrative.
Image: A Woman I Once Knew, Rosalind Fox Solomon, MACK. Twana's box, Rawsht Twana, Fraglich publishing. Popihuise, Vuyo Mabheka, Chose Commune.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Prix du livre
The Prix du livre photo-texte for the best book in which photographs and words contribute equally to the work was awarded to A Woman I Once Knew by Rosalind Fox Solomon. The Prix du livre historique for the best documented work on photography or a photographer, whether thematic or monographic was awarded to Twana's box by Rawsht Twana. The Prix du livre d’auteur for the best photographic book presenting a project by a contemporary author was awarded to Popihuise by Vuyo Mabheka.
Grands Prix de l’Académie des beaux-arts 2025
Image: Le geste, 2000. © Sarah Moon © Adagp, Paris, 2025
PHOTOGRAPHY
Sarah Moon
Grand Prix de l’Académie des beaux-arts en photographie
The Grand Prix de l’Académie des beaux-arts en photographie was awarded to Sarah Moon. With a career spanning more than fifty years, Sarah Moon is distinguished for her work in perpetual metamorphosis always carried by a singular signature: a dark and dreamlike atmosphere, often crossed by the recurring motif of childhood. Since her beginnings in fashion and advertising, Sarah Moon has worked to make a photograph ‘a one-second fiction’. Each of her images is a story that she does not tell but suggests by containing it in the suspense of a gesture or the enigma of a look: a whole possible world, still to come, that she has been able to perceive and of which she gives us a glimpse. (Anne Maurel)
Image: Herzog & de Meuron, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany, 2006-2016. © Iwan Baan
ARCHITECTURE
Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron
Grand Prix de l’Académie des beaux-arts en architecture
The Grand Prix de l’Académie des beaux-arts en architecture was awarded to Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. After graduating, the duo founded Herzog & de Meuron in Basel in 1978, which quickly established itself as a major figure in contemporary architecture thanks to a singular approach centred on materiality and technical precision. Their work is characterised by a particularly rigorous and inventive use of building materials, notably concrete, stone and wood. Their architecture is both rational and expressive, in dialogue with its urban and cultural context.
Image: Pascale Marthine Tayou, Survival Tree, 2018, wood, crystal, alabaster, cloths, 3 x 3 x 3,5 m. Courtesy the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA. © ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Hafid Lhachmi
ART
Pascale Marthine Tayou
Grand Prix de l’Académie des beaux-arts en sculpture
The Grand Prix de l’Académie des beaux-arts en sculpture was awarded to Pascale Marthine Tayou. Born in Nkongsamba, Cameroon, in 1966, he lives and works between Belgium and Cameroon. A self-taught artist and tireless traveller, Pascale Marthine Tayou is a sculptor of identities in motion. His seemingly lightweight creations explore the tensions between the individual and the collective, between ancestral memory and contemporary change. Deeply humanist, his work aims to bring human beings together beyond their differences, portraying the image of man on the move across the world and exploring the question of the global village. It is in this context that he addresses his African origins and the questions they raise.
About the Grands Prix de l’Académie des beaux-arts
Biennale Images Vevey 2026
Image: Rotting from Within, Untitled, 2014-2024 © Abdulhamid Kircher
PHOTOGRAPHY
Abdulhamid Kircher
Grand Prix Images Vevey
The Grand Prix Images Vevey 2025/2026 was awarded to German-American artist Abdulhamid Kircher for the next chapter in his Rotting from Within project. This straightforward visual investigation into the complex relationship between the photographer and his estranged father made a deep impression on the jury. Based on the artist's transnational family history, the project touches on universal themes such as intergenerational trauma, the construction of masculinity, fatherhood and the emotional ties between men, which are often hidden or invisible.
About the Biennale Images Vevey
Prix pour la Photographie du musée du
quai Branly – Jacques Chirac 2025
Image: Emmanuelle Andrianjafy, The Maze © DR
Kurt Tong, The Cult of Illusion: Satirical Art Project on Superstition, Manipulation, and Hope, detail © DR
PHOTOGRAPHY
Emmanuelle Andrianjafy
Kurt Tong
Prix pour la Photographie du musée du
quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
The Prix pour la Photographie du musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac 2025 was awarded to Emmanuelle Andrianjafy and Kurt Tong. After twenty years spent abroad without ever returning to her native country, Emmanuelle Andrianjafy initiated The Maze, a project as a way of questioning her link with Madagascar, where her parents still live. Marked by childhood memories of inner tensions and social violence, she slowly reinvests her personal history. Hong Kong artist Kurt Tong was awarded for The Cult of Illusion: Satirical Art Project on Superstition, Manipulation, and Hope. This multi-media project adopts a satirical tone to explore the resurgence of superstition in Hong Kong and the exploitation of vulnerable communities through certain religious practices.
About the Prix pour la Photographie du musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
