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The 1839 Awards has announced the winners of its 2026 Photographers of the Year contest. The competition presents Gold awards across 41 total categories in its professional and non-professional divisions. These include architecture, photojournalism, wildlife, conceptual photography and film. It also names an overall International Photographer of the Year and International Discovery of the Year. This year’s contest drew submissions from 79 countries, matching its record for international participation.
Explore highlights from the 2026 contest, which recognized professional and non-professional photographers across 41 categories.
Giacomo MarchioneThe awards take their name from a pivotal year in photography’s history. In 1839, the daguerreotype process was formally announced at the French Academy of Sciences, helping bring photography into the public sphere. The competition celebrates that legacy through contemporary work.
Giacomo Marchione earned this year’s top professional honor for The Invisible, a series documenting marine life after dark. Dammy Twitch received the International Discovery of the Year title for What If We Lived Among Gods, a medium-format film series that brings mythology into everyday Nigerian life. An international jury featuring representatives from institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Bonhams and Phaidon Press selected the winners.
A selection of winning photographs appears below; the full list of winners is on the competition website.
International Photographer of the Year
Giacomo MarchioneArtist: Giacomo Marchione
IG handle: @marchione.giacomo
Entry title: The Invisible
Entry description: At night, the sea doesn’t sleep. When the sun sets and the sea seems to fall silent, one of nature’s most extraordinary spectacles begins: the vertical migration of plankton. Millions of organisms rise from the depths to the surface, and in this upward migration.
International Discovery of the Year
Dammy TwitchArtist: Dammy Twitch
IG handle: @dammytwitch
Entry title: What If We Lived Among Gods
Entry description: What If We Lived Among Gods is a medium format analog photography series exploring myth, divinity, and everyday Nigerian life. Shot entirely on 120 format film, the work imagines a world where the sacred and the ordinary exist side by side, hand in hand.
Gold category winners: Professional
Professional – Wildlife
Xiaoping LinArtist: Xiaoping Lin
IG handle: @xiaoping.photo
Entry title: Pass By
Entry description: The big fish chased the small fish and rushed out of the water together, passing the egret. The egret looked surprised and did not know where the small fish would go? Just like a poem: I passed you by. You hurried here. Before I noticed, you had gone far away, leaving me a regretful back.
Professional – Travel
Leah BaradArtist: Leah Barad
IG handle: @leahbphotos
Entry title: Morning on the Lake
Entry description: A young boy paddles his first canoe
Professional – Storytelling
Sebastian KahnertArtist: Sebastian Kahnert
IG handle: @sebastian_kahnert
Entry title: Social Geometry
Entry description: How do humans organize themselves? Using a three-meter monopod and consistent overhead perspective, this series tells stories of food culture, ritual, and human gathering. From solo café to contemporary dining, each photograph reveals different patterns of organization.
Professional – Photojournalism
John ApplebyArtist: Hamish John Appleby
IG handle: @applebyphotographymelbourne
Entry title: The Human Waterline
Entry description: The Human Waterline traces our dependence on water from livelihood and food to pollution, waste and scarcity. Photographed across different communities, the series considers water as a shared resource where human need, environmental pressure and responsibility meet.
Professional – People
Roberto PazziArtist: Roberto Pazzi
IG handle: @roberto_pazzi_photo
Entry title: A Childhood Between Cattle and Dust
Entry description: The Mundari are herders in South Sudan. In their cattle camps, children do most of the work, collecting and drying dung and piling it up to be burned to repel mosquitoes. The ash, as fine as talcum powder, is rubbed onto their bodies and the cattle twice a day. It is also used as bedding.
Professional – Macro
Bevil TempletonArtist: Bevil Templeton-Smith
IG handle: @bevilts
Entry title: Angle of Extinction
Entry description: Crystals grown on glass slides and photographed in polarised light through a 1970 Leitz Orthoplan. The color is interference, not applied, and is visible down the microscope. The field of view is three to four millimeters. Printed, the same image goes up to 1.5 meters wide.
Professional – Landscapes
Anne NeiwandArtist: Anne Neiwand
IG handle: @fineartphotography_anneneiwand
Entry title: Little Bird
Entry description: A raven stands alone on a vast glacial snowfield, its iridescent black plumage the only dark note in a world of white. Behind it, ancient ice glows electric blue where the glacier has cracked open — a landscape vast and indifferent, and one small, still creature utterly at home within it.
Professional – Film/Analog
Emily Hlavac GreenArtist: Emily Hlavac Green
IG handle: N/A
Entry title: Year of the Cicada
Entry description: Year of the Cicada follows my return to Aotearoa after a decade in New York. Guided by the familiar hum of cicadas, the photographs move through domestic rituals, changing landscapes and generations, considering how distance reshapes memory, makes home foreign and complicates belonging.
Professional – Event
Natalya PyrogovaArtist: Natalya Pyrogova
IG handle: N/A
Entry title: Half second before
Entry description: Half second before the incident and rescue
Professional – Animals
Andrew Raven RichardsonArtist: Andrew Raven Richardson
IG handle: @andewraven_
Entry title: Sweethearts in the Window
Entry description: For one Mayfair morning, Sweethearts appeared from every window.
Professional – Architecture
Derry AinsworthArtist: Derry Ainsworth
IG handle: @derryainsworth
Entry title: Dragon Gates of Hong Kong
Entry description: This series explores a unique Feng Shui design principle in Hong Kong. Voids known as dragon gates 龍門 are built into coastal high-rises so spirit dragons can fly from the mountains to the sea. Each image frames a different view, contrasting dense modern architecture with ancient culture.
Professional – Abstract & Aerial
Mark GrayArtist: Mark Gray
IG handle: @markgrayphoto
Entry title: Swarm
Entry description: Incredible colors and textures appear in Lake Tyrrell after the winter rains begin to subside. During this visit, I discovered a map of mainland Australia.
Gold category winners: Non-professional
Non-Professional – Wildlife
Graeme GuyArtist: Graeme Guy
IG handle: @wildlifephotographyguy
Entry title: Red-bearded Bee-eater 2
Entry description: There are 5 species of bee-eaters endemic to Malaysia. One of the most elusive is the forest-dwelling Red-bearded Bee-eater, shown here flying to a favorite perch with a captured insect.
Non-Professional – Street
Harriet PrattenArtist: Harriet Pratten
IG handle: @harrietpratten
Entry title: New York Eye
Entry description: After the auctions, the merchants were selling. A woman in a headscarf and New York Yankees cap looked at her smartphone among glimmering fish scales. A gull perched at the bow. Everything felt right: the juxtaposition, familiarity and unfamiliarity colliding at once.
Non-Professional – Storytelling
Shanthi SivananthanArtist: Shanthi Sivananthan
IG handle: N/A
Entry title: The Golden Harvest
Entry description: Two women share a joyful moment in a rustic room overflowing with a bountiful corn harvest. Bathed in a warm, amber light, thousands of hanging cobs create a golden texture that surrounds their daily work—blending traditional textile crafting with the vital rhythms of agricultural life.
Non-Professional – Photojournalism
João CoelhoArtist: João Coelho
IG handle: @joaocoelho_photography
Entry title: The Phoenix of Oblivion
Entry description: As the sun sinks, men and women comb the burning waste, braving smoke and embers for scrap metal. Like a Phoenix rising, discarded remnants find new purpose, while those who dwell here transform hardship into dignity—turning the ruins into sustenance and hope for their children
Non-Professional – People (BW)
Chia-Chieh YangArtist: Chia-Chieh Yang
IG handle: N/A
Entry title: Eyes to the Sky
Entry description: During the end of Buddhist Lent in a village in Laos, young novice monks gather at a temple to witness the launch of a single homemade rocket. As it ascends into the sky, their gazes rise in unison, capturing a fleeting moment of wonder, curiosity, and shared anticipation.
Non-Professional – Nude (BW)
Michael PottsArtist: Michael Potts
IG handle: @MRP_Visionaries
Entry title: The Keeper of Stories
Entry description: Series made in Iceland with model V
Non-Professional – Nature (BW)
Marketa ZvelebilArtist: Marketa Zvelebil
IG handle: N/A
Entry title: Galloping through the Sea
Entry description: N/A
Non-Professional – Architecture
Alex PolliArtist: Alex Polli
IG handle: N/A
Entry title: Urban break
Entry description: An exploration of contemporary architecture, where rigid geometry meets the softness of nature. This composition captures the stark contrast between sharp graphic shapes, monochromatic tones, and the organic form of a single, perfectly sculpted tree.
Non-Professional – Aerial
Xuejun LongArtist: Xuejun Long
IG handle: N/A
Entry title: Journey of Life
Entry description: Life is a long and unpredictable journey, and the colors of nature are the colors of life. I’d like to travel to Kenya in the past few years using my lens to document the awe-inspiring power and beauty of the natural world. This series was shot at Lake Magadi in Kenya from year 2023 to 2024.
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