The world’s most prestigious medium-format camera maker has crowned its 2026 Hasselblad Masters, and the seven winners — one per category — walk away with serious gear and a brand-new title.
Each laureate earns the right to call themselves a Hasselblad Master, plus a 100-megapixel Hasselblad camera kit of their choosing, two XCD lenses, and €5,000 (just over US$5,700). They’ll also collaborate with Hasselblad on a project and see their work printed in a commemorative Masters book.
The path here was not without drama. Of the 70 finalists, one was a late addition following an AI-related disqualification — a reminder that even the loftiest contests are now wrestling with machine-made imagery. An internal jury picked the finalists; a Grand Jury, with input from public voting, chose the winners on “conceptual strength, originality, creativity, and technical excellence.”
Grand Jury Chair Kalle Sanner, Executive Director at the Hasselblad Foundation, summed up the through-line: “The most compelling photography does not simply record, it constructs.” The strongest work, he said, stays “legible on first encounter, yet resistant to easy interpretation.”
The winners span continents and disciplines:
- Art — Indonesia’s Yudha Kusuma Putera for Waste Colonialism, shot at the Piyungan landfill in Yogyakarta, tracing how developed nations export refuse to developing ones.
- Architecture — Canada’s Kevin Boyle for Daysleeper | Movieland, a decade-long study of abandoned prairie venues, built from multiple hand-lit exposures composited in post.
- Portrait — Dutch photographer Svetlana Jovanovic for Otherness, an exploration of identical twins and the tension between shared and individual identity.
- Landscape — Ireland’s Rohan Reilly for Ephemeral Visions, long exposures of poplar rows along Italy’s Po River, leaning on texture, tone and negative space over color.
- Project//21 (entrants 21 or younger) — Thailand’s Panitbhand Paribatra Na Ayudhya for Dwellers of the Night, a dream-like underwater series shot in Anilao, Philippines, using colored light and slow shutter speeds.
- Street — Dutch photographer Gosse Bouma for Morning Ritual, recasting bustling city markets as tranquil, cool-toned scenes pierced by warm kiosk glow.
- Wildlife — South Africa’s Alfred Minnaar for The Forest I Roam, an underwater series where a tiny goby anchors each frame against vivid coral, lending macro subjects a landscape-like scale.
If there’s a unifying thesis, Sanner offers it best: photography’s real power “lies not in what it shows, but in what it withholds, reframes, and quietly insists upon.” These seven images reward staying a while.
