Announcing the Winners:
The LensCulture Portrait Awards 2026 present 39 photographers whose work defines the possibilities of portraiture today. These images go beyond mere likeness to reveal relationships shaped by history, identity, and lived experience.
The winners and finalists work fluidly between documentary and invention, between private worlds and public realities. These are images shaped by long attention and lived proximity: a son seen through the lens of acceptance; a mother photographed through the aftershocks of violence and care; communities reclaiming identity from the weight of colonial memory; bodies that insist on joy, on visibility, on being more than the limits imposed upon them.
Taken together, these portraits suggest that to look closely at another person is also to confront the structures that shape a life: family, nation, gender, belief, inheritance, war. Yet the prevailing tone is not didactic but attentive, even tender. What unites these award-winning photographers is a shared understanding that a portrait is never neutral. It is an encounter, a question, and sometimes, a quiet act of setting things right.
Series Winner
1st Place
Bulgaria
Blagovesta Semkova
Son
Series Winner
2nd Place
United States
Chance DeVille
Growing Tired of Calloused Knees
Series Winner
3rd Place
Bermuda
Nicola Muirhead
Descendants of Summer
From long-form documentary to spontaneous snapshots and artistic impressions, the submissions demonstrated the power of portraiture to draw us closer to lives and experiences beyond our own, revealing the world as it is lived today.”
— Ruby Rees-Sheridan, National Portrait Gallery
Single Winner
1st Place
Brazil
Asafe Ghalib
Loving in Danger
Single Winner
2nd Place
United Kingdom
James Clifford Kent
Yuma
Single Winner
3rd Place
Netherlands
Jelle Krings
The Costs of War in Ukraine
Jurors’ Picks
Each of our jury members selected one photographer to be awarded special distinction. Here are the jurors’ special selections, with a brief quote from each expert explaining what they especially appreciate about these photographers and their work.
Katherine Pomerantz
Director of Photography Time
United States
Lucia Jost’s Capital Daughters series features women in Berlin born in the 1990s, shaped by a decade they barely experienced but fully embody. Though captured in the present, the photographs evoke the textures and energy of a bygone era marked by freedom and reinvention. The vivid color portraits feel both intimate and commanding, with sophisticated compositions that give the subjects the authority over the viewer. The series is an effective visual depiction of how culture can be both inherited and reclaimed.
Francesca Marani
Senior Photo Editor Vogue Italia
Italy
I was instantly drawn to Jinyong Lian’s series because of the ambiguity and mystery of her staged photographs, which explore themes of vulnerability and power in relationships. It is rare to encounter artists who tread the line between reality and fiction so subtly, encouraging viewers to reconsider the private space as political.
Laura Sackett
Creative Director LensCulture
United States
I first saw the set of his jaw. And then — was that the trace of a smile? Or resignation? What was he thinking as he watched Putin on the small TV beside him?
This photograph, Heeding the President, is from Dmitry Ersler’s series Russia at Dusk, which tells the story of life in provincial Russia today. It is a photograph rich in detail: a man sitting alone at a table; the curl of cigarette smoke rising toward the window; the peeling wallpaper; the Virgin Mary on the wall. The exquisite light softens the threadbare room — and perhaps this man’s life as well.
Tamar Shemesh
United States
Rory Walsh
Photo Editor The New York Times Magazine
United States
I selected Tamar Shemesh’s series The King’s Daughter Is All Glorious Within. The project offers an intimate look into the Chabad Orthodox Jewish community, focusing specifically on the sheitel—the wig worn by ultra-Orthodox married women. A cohesive and engaging body of work, the series is composed of varied individual facets, each carefully crafted to reveal layers of beauty, connection and identity. The sense of the individual emerges, conveyed as powerfully through the still images of the sheitel as through the portraits themselves.
Nadav Kander
Photographer
United Kingdom
This picture just grabbed me the first moment I saw it. There is a beautiful upright and reserved old fashioned pensive dignity that is apparent in this photograph. Beautifully sparse too and reminding me of David Goldblatt whose work I really admire. It’s a terrific picture.
Sasha Maslov
Ukraine
Ruby Rees-Sheridan
Assistant Curator, Photography National Portrait Gallery
United Kingdom
Amid empty frames, shrouded displays and the rubble of bombed museums, these powerful portraits show Ukraine’s cultural workers standing firm, now forced to evacuate rather than exhibit. By setting his subjects against the vast backdrops of their institutions, Sasha Maslov’s portraits invoke a longer legacy of defiance against cultural erasure. I was struck by this series as an urgent tribute to those protecting Ukraine’s cultural heritage, and a reminder that remembering is an act of resistance.
Andrew Katz
Deputy Photo Director The New Yorker
United States
Will Warasila’s scene of forty-one-year-old Joshua Powell, living in his vehicle during Montana’s sub-zero temperatures, stopped me in my tracks. The spareness of the frame—a red vehicle mostly covered in white snow—smartly centers the viewer on the direct gaze of its blanketed occupant. This photograph, which was made for a magazine devoted to in-depth coverage of the American West, serves as both an important new record of a local housing crisis and an indictment on the societal forces that make gaps in vital services far too common across the country.
Chris O'Donovan
United Kingdom
Allyson Torrisi
Senior Photo Editor Print & Digital National Geographic
United States
The image retains a sense of calm and quiet serenity, despite the stark contrast of pale subjects set against a dark background—evoking the timeless quality of a Renaissance painting. The connection between photographer and subject is evident, resulting in a portrait that feels both intimate and deeply joyful.
Finalists
International Jury
Katherine Pomerantz
Time Magazine
United States
Andrew Katz
The New Yorker
United States
Francesca Marani
Vogue Italia
Italy
Ruby Rees-Sheridan
National Portrait Gallery
United Kingdom
Rory Walsh
The New York Times Magazine
United States
Allyson Torrisi
National Geographic
United States
Nadav Kander
Photographer
United Kingdom
Laura Sackett
LensCulture
United States
Thank You
Congratulations to all 39 photographers! And our thanks go to everyone who entered the competition. We are inspired by the work you do and we are always delighted to discover how image-makers around the globe are working with photography in new ways.
We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!
