2026 Sony World Photography Awards
Image: © Joel Meyerowitz, New York City, 1975
PHOTOGRAPHY
Joel Meyerowitz
Outstanding Contribution to Photography
Joel Meyerowitz has been named the recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to Photography in this year’s Sony World Photography Awards. A retrospective of works by Joel Meyerowitz will be shown at Somerset House, London, as part of the Sony World Photography Awards 2026 exhibition. Born in New York City, USA in 1938, Joel Meyerowitz studied painting and medical drawing at Ohio State University before working as an advertising art director. After watching the Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank shoot an advertising project for him in 1962, Meyerowitz immediately quit his job and went out onto the streets with a borrowed camera and two rolls of colour film, and embarked on a career that would make an indelible mark on the medium.
About the Sony World Photography Awards
MAZE/Art Awards F.P.Journe
Image: Victor Fidelis, No limit do privado, 2025, Verve Galeria, São Paulo.
ART
Victor Fidelis
MAZE/Art Awards F.P.Journe
F.P.Journe presented the first MAZE/Art Awards F.P.Journe, recognising Brazilian artist Victor Fidelis for the work No limit do privado (2025, Verve Galeria, São Paulo), during MIRA in Paris. Within the MAZE constellation, MIRA is an intimate art fair dedicated to the contemporary Latin American scene, whose second edition was held at the Maison de l’Amérique latine from November 13 to 16. The jury highlighted the clarity of Victor Fidelis’s visual language and the emotional intelligence of his narrative. In No limit do privado, an ordinary pause becomes a space of meaning, where family, belonging, and identity intersect with the architecture that shelters them.
About the MAZE/Art Awards F.P.Journe
Prix du dessin d’architecte Louis Le Masson
Académie des beaux-arts
Image: Oberkampf © Frédéric Borel © ADAGP, Paris, 2025
ARCHITECTURE
Frédéric Borel
Premier Prix
Frédéric Borel is the inaugural winner of the first prize of the Prix du dessin d’architecte Louis Le Masson - Académie des beaux-arts, which aims to recognize a living architect presenting drawings at the inception of an architectural project. This award is intended to encourage architects, particularly those in mid-career, to develop their ideas and works. In 1984, Frédéric Borel founded his own agency. He completed several housing projects in Paris and developed a new approach to urban issues by proposing spaces that are freely accessible to citizens. This desire for openness extends to his neighborhood development projects, both in France and abroad. In 2010, he received the Grand Prix national de l'architecture.
About the Prix du dessin d’architecte Louis Le Masson Académie des beaux-arts
Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa 2025
Image: Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, bamboo Women’s Center, Sindh Province, Pakistan. Photo: Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, The Ideal City.
ARCHITECTURE
Yasmeen Lari
Lifetime Achievement Award
Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari received the Lifetime Achievement Award. After a successful career based in Karachi, Yasmeen Lari retired from her architectural practice in 2000 and focused on the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, dedicated to local, sustainable, vernacular architecture. In the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in 2005, Lari expanded her practice by embracing a bottom-up "humanistic humanitarian action" and rewriting the role of contemporary architecture. In response to the catastrophic floods that hit Pakistan in 2022, Yasmeen Lari pledged to help build over one million houses, guided by her "four zeros" philosophy: zero carbon, zero waste, zero donors, and zero poverty.
Image: ReSa Architects, Sparsh, Maharashtra, India, 2024. Photo: Studio Abhishek Sawant.
ARCHITECTURE
ReSa Architects
Début Award
Indian duo ReSa Architects, received the Début Award. The office explores architecture as a collective social process, through built projects and artistic research that test, perform, and discuss the margins of the discipline. For this duo of women architects, to think in terms of "situations" rather than fixed "sites" opens up new relationships between image, text, and body, expanding architecture's capacity for social subversion. "Spaces are made within bodies, within neck rotations — looking. In this process of space making we are also rewriting the bodies which live these spaces. The agency found within the bodies creates the possibility for a subversion of the structures of economic systems that sustain them." – ReSa Architects
About the Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa
Anonymous Was A Woman Award 2025
Image: Candida Alvarez, cbob 1, 2025. Acrylic on linen, 60 x 80 inches, 152.4 x 203.2 cm. Courtesy the artist, GRAY Chicago/New York, Monique Meloche Gallery. Photo: Evan Jenkins.
ART
Anonymous Was A Woman
Anonymous Was A Woman, a grant-making organization that provides funding to woman-identifying artists over the age of 40, has revealed the 15 artists who will receive grants this year. Those artists include Candida Alvarez, a painter who was recently the subject of an El Museo del Barrio retrospective in New York; Park McArthur, an artist who earlier this year staged an ambitious survey that took place concurrently at museums in Vienna and Mönchengladbach, Germany; and Lola Flash, a photographer whose work is now on view at the Museum of Modern Art.
About the Anonymous Was A Woman Award
Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year” 2026
Image: Lucia Tallová, A Room With A View. Object, mixed media. Installation view, Tomas Umrian Contemporary, Bratislava. Photo: Adam Šakový.
ART
Lucia Tallová
Deutsche Bank's “Artist of the Year”
Deutsche Bank has named Lucia Tallová its “Artist of the Year” for 2026. Born in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 1985, the artist graduated from the local Academy of Fine Arts and gained international recognition in 2022 through her participation in the 16th Biennale de Lyon. Tallová works at the intersection of painting, collage, assemblage, and installation. Her often room-filling installations resemble surreal tableaux that explore memory, human and geological history, and develop new forms of storytelling and archiving.
About the Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year”
Lewis Baltz Research Fund #12
Image: Andy Sewell, Known and Strange Things Pass. © Andy Sewell
PHOTOGRAPHY
Andy Sewell
Lewis Baltz Research Fund
Initiated by LE BAL, Paris, and supported by the Artworkers Retirement Society, the 12th Lewis Baltz Research Fund, an annual research grant supporting the creation and diffusion of an artistic or academic project, has been awarded to Andy Sewell for his project To Organize a Together. Through this work, the artist questions our collective ability to organize ourselves in the face of political and ecological collapse, to overcome dead ends and to make hope a common practice. With this project, Andy Sewell extends the visual and conceptual research conducted in Known and Strange Things Pass (2021) and Slowly and Then All at Once (2025), continuing his reflection on contemporary forms of power and how they shape an increasingly unstable world.
