Sinha, who graduated from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, in 2023, has been working on this collection of pictures for the past few years. When I reached him over a video call in February, he was on a photoshoot in India’s remote northern region of Ladakh and recalled that the title sprang from a real-life encounter. As he was sitting with a classmate on a stoop one evening, a friend’s mother happened to walk by and stop for a chat. On her departure, the woman bid farewell to Sinha’s friend in their native tongue (Norwegian) before turning to Sinha and, seemingly at a loss as to how to say goodbye, settled on “Namaste, or whatever.”

Aaryan Sinha, Schoolgirls, 2025

Aaryan Sinha, Fragments of a Gaze, 2023

As the only Indian student in his class at art college until his third year, Sinha was used to this kind of confusion about his culture, if not to the outright racism that often undergirded it. He could maybe even relate. “Through the media that I consumed, I was more connected to the West than to my own country,” he told me. “And even though I was not born in the West, I felt like I belonged there, which led me to see India through the Western gaze.”

Namaste or Whatever began with Sinha’s decision to “do a complete one-eighty, and just focus on the clichés.”

When he was in his teens, first toting his camera around the streets of New Delhi, he sought out picturesque images of poverty, focusing on the city’s street children. He learned to hunt these kinds of images down, he told me, by following the example set in the many photobooks by famous photographers, such as Steve McCurry, in his family home. A brief, life-changing critique by the Magnum photographer Rafal Milach, for whom Sinha interned, set him on his current path. His pictures, Milach warned him, merely skimmed across India’s surface, rehashing stereotypical scenes that wide-eyed Westerners might snap on vacation. Chastised, Sinha swore to himself that he would become a more self-critical image maker.

Aaryan Sinha, Untitled, 2024

Aaryan Sinha, Anti-Photographer, 2024

In 2022, he began a body of work, still ongoing, titled This Isn’t Divide and Conquer that documents the five Indian states that border Pakistan and Kashmir. Sinha was so mindful of his role as a photographic observer and the power relations implicit in it that he assiduously avoided including any of his subjects’ faces, for fear of somehow exploiting them. Aesthetically, he also kept himself on a short leash: Anything with even a whiff of cliché was immediately chucked in the discard pile.

Soon, however, these self-imposed constraints began to look like opportunities. Might deeper truths be found within the tropes that cast India as a mystical land of stark contrasts? Namaste or Whatever began with Sinha’s decision to revisit his abandoned pictures and endeavor to “do a complete one-eighty, and just focus on the clichés.” Indeed, the series gives you much of what you’d expect: A snake charmer’s cobra rears its head into the frame; men immolate a corpse on the banks of the Ganges; handprints in white paint left by pilgrims pile up on a ruddy temple wall. What distinguishes these pictures from the many like them is the sheer lushness of Sinha’s seeing.

But even when Sinha is trying to lean into what he considers his own worst tendencies, unexpected moments arise. His photograph of a pair of shirtless wrestlers twisted together in a strange embrace, for instance, is both erotically charged and physiologically flummoxing. A shot of a burned-out metal building in a misty mountain landscape, its siding distorted and picturesquely discolored, conjures both the hazy, baroque gardens of Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Morris Louis’s Veil paintings.

Sinha is the first to admit that crawling out from under the blanket of stereotypes that have been thrown over the Indian subcontinent by generations of colonial interlopers and assorted photographic lookie-loos is no easy task. But you get the sense that, even in the face of possible failure, his effort is passionate and dogged. Where cliché flattens the world into a dull procession of the foreknown, Sinha’s work intercedes, doing its part to revivify our vision.

Aaryan Sinha, Closer to Gods, 2021

Aaryan Sinha, Snake Charmer, 2024
All photographs courtesy the artist

Aaryan Sinha is winner of the 2026 Aperture Portfolio Prize. This piece will appear in Aperture No. 263, Summer 2026.

Crumm’s series began two years ago in the wake of her father’s death after his battle against Alzheimer’s disease. Crumm found herself turning to photography as a means to process her experiences with grief. Photographing with a large-format camera, Crumm choreographs scenes of her friends, her family, and herself that draw from her gestures and experiences as a caretaker for her father. Oscillating between the surreal and everyday, Crumm’s photographs reckon with the otherworldly nature of grief and loss. “I felt like my whole sense of reality had been reordered,” says Crumm. “I was trying to sort out how I could make a picture that embodies that.”

Based in Brooklyn, Crumm studied photography at Bard College before receiving her master’s degree from Yale University in 2025. Crumm’s photographic influences include Julia Margaret Cameron, Lieko Shiga, and Rosalind Fox Solomon—all of whom share a dreamy yet at times uncanny atmosphere in their images. She also cites Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home (1992) as a touchstone photobook, stating, “I’m most drawn to works that really lead with feeling.”

Throughout Wake, Crumm weaves together the visual languages of reflection, layering, and scale to complicate and disorient the landscape of her photographs, which she describes as “constructing a world that feels aligned with my experience of grief.” There is an eerie, heightened sense of mundanity across all of Crumm’s images: a pair of twins pose with faces touched, as if they are merging into the other’s reflection; a ghostly, hazy veil of light obscures two figures staring into the sky at night in a snowy backyard; a dollhouse is cradled gently while fracturing in a mirrorscape. Her use of black-and-white film deepens this eeriness, as she states: “I’m drawn to black and white because it’s not the way we see the world. It creates a separation, bringing us somewhere else.”

Across her series, Crumm threads in mirrors (which she sees as “portals to another world”) as a simultaneous means for reflection and for creating dual selves. In one image, three figures are framed inside a hung mirror, one on each side gently brushing back the hair of the central figure, a mundane yet intimate act of care. Yet an ornate mural on the wall behind them transforms our view of this moment into a painting-like portal, removing it from our own sense of reality. Archival images of her father act as another recurring motif throughout Wake, evoking the multifaceted ways that memory and grief are interlinked. In one image, we see her father’s face scattered across an expanse of sand, slowly disappearing beneath the surface, and in another frame, a series of headshots are obsessively plastered along the interior of a dollhouse room. “It’s a question that a lot of image makers deal with: How do you photograph something that’s no longer there?” states Crumm. “This felt like a way to physically keep him part of the work.”

At the heart of her work, Crumm grapples with the ever-shifting reverberations caused by mourning. Yet, although her series Wake was made in the aftermath of immense loss, she has found a new form of connection in embracing her grief. “I do think I’ve always had, as I’m sure everyone who takes pictures does, a heightened awareness of the mortality you just can’t avoid when you’re photographing people,” Crumm reflects. “But what I feel has shifted is that after death, it’s become a way to stay connected. It feels like more of a bridge.”

Olivia Crumm is a shortlisted artist for the 2026 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an international competition that spotlights new talent in contemporary photography.

While in school at FIT, Llorente was hired to take photos for an international dance festival held on campus. It was there that Llorente first came into contact with Los Andulleros de Santiago, a Dominican cultural group that would serve as the subject of his yearslong photographic project titled Folklore. 

“I saw these guys dancing and they had these crazy costumes on,” says Llorente of that first meeting. “I went backstage after the show was done, and I was talking with them and the organizer of their group.” Llorente kept in touch with them, but it wasn’t until a year later in 2018, when the dance group was planning to participate in a Dominican parade in New York, that Llorente was invited to ride along in the parade and photograph them. 

From 2018 to 2023, Llorente regularly followed Los Andulleros de Santiago, photographing the evolution of the group. “There’s a story about these kids growing up, going from an early teen to a late teen and learning from the older generation,” says Llorente. Some of the members were twelve years old when Llorente began photographing them and sixteen by the time the project was completed. Comprised of a mix of diasporic Dominican residents, some of whom are first- or second-generation Americans, ranging from teenagers to seniors, Los Andulleros de Santiago is a carnival group based in the Bronx who perform traditional dances in folkloric costumes at various parades and festivals throughout New York. “The older generation wanted to try and keep this part of the culture alive,” says Llorente. 

As he built closer relationships with various participants, Llorente says he observed that older members of the group were eager to teach younger generations about the Dominican history and heritage that many of them didn’t have first-hand experience with living in the United States. “I think being part of this group would connect them back to their roots a little bit and where they came from,” says Llorente. “They’re learning how to put the costumes together. There’s a whole art behind it—it’s all about how you dance, how good you are with the whip, how loud you can make the whip sound,” he says.

Prior to Folklore, Llorente had been mainly shooting street photography with little directorial intervention toward his subjects. For this project, Llorente began experimenting with lighting and shadows, often shooting with movement and in small spaces. The photos in Folklore range from candid shots, such as a pool party scene shot in the Bronx, to more formal setups, like a seated portrait of a younger member at home or an infant holding a ceremonial whip used during performances. For Llorente, the crux of the project was Los Andulleros de Santiago and their philosophy, which, he says, was based around “their culture, how much they care about it and wanted to spread it.” 

To differentiate this body of work from his previous documentary street photography, Llorente set up a single light on a tripod, allowing the light to be diffused throughout various interior and domestic spaces in order to create a layering effect and dynamism within the frame. Still Folklore sets itself apart in his canon in other ways. “Some projects seem like it’s all about the photography,” Llorente says. “There’s so much about this project that’s not about the photography, it’s about them.”

Victor Llorente is a shortlisted artist for the 2026 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an international competition that spotlights new talent in contemporary photography.

Singha’s subjects are young women in Mumbai who’ve built small degrees of online fame for themselves: influencers, reality TV stars, aspiring actors. At first glance, Singha’s images resist easy categorization as photographs from India. Instead of an explicit “Indian-ness” tinged by poverty and a fading grandeur, we encounter intimate, urban interiors. In Gun on a tripod, a woman named Nandini speculates about dissolving her lip fillers while sprawled on a pink, Swarovski-stamped bedsheet, pointing a toy gun at her head. In Blue Light Therapy, aspiring actor Rhea lies corpse-like under an expensive LED light therapy device.

For audiences looking for a familiar visual shorthand of Indian culture, Singha offers something more unsettling. “I want my work to feel layered and complex—something that can’t be resolved quickly,” she says. “At the same time, I want it to be truthful to my reality, without bending to the expectations we have in India and abroad.” Shot primarily on 35mm film with direct flash, this series is not strictly local or international—instead, it reflects an India that lives within the friction between the two, shaped by the circulation of images across global media, and its ensuing culture of aspiration. 

Singha, who is from the North East Indian state of Manipur and currently lives in Mumbai, set out to become an illustrator, but switched to photography midway through her visual communication degree after seeing a book of Nobuyoshi Araki’s photographs of flowers. “The images were so sensual and charged. I had never seen photography in this light, or known that a photograph could make me feel this way,” she says. 

Today, she is morbidly curious about how beauty operates as a lived condition. She recalls her mother encountering a photograph of Kim Kardashian’s bloody face and becoming fascinated by the “vampire facial” it depicted and its promise of perfect skin, going so far as to seek out the procedure in Jorhat, a small town in northeast India. Kardashian’s 2013 photo was perhaps a reference for The Substance, a 2024 body-horror film about beauty and aging in which the protagonist injects herself with a mysterious drug to create a younger version of herself, with monstruous consequences: what once might have registered as grotesque now passes as routine. In Singha’s view, beauty, then, a spectacle none of us can look away from, spurred on by images that permeate through cultures and socioeconomic strata. 

In India, this dissemination is further refracted by the additional issues of class, caste, Bollywood, and the remnants of colonial influence. In What’s more romantic than DDLJ?, Jemima, an aspiring makeup artist from a conservative Muslim family, looks fearlessly into the camera through light-colored contact lenses as Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, one of Bollywood’s grandest romantic sagas, plays on the television in the background. While a picture of her dog-filter selfie is framed in their living room, Singha could only shoot Jemima without her father’s knowledge when he wasn’t home. 

Her work does not resolve these complexities, nor is it an obvious critique. “I don’t like to have a moral,” she says. “I didn’t want to give people a clear headline. I like staying in negotiation.” That negotiation extends to her own role. While she draws on her experience in fashion and documentary photography, this series can’t be neatly classed as either. She is firmly present in the images as well. “When you work on something like this, I don’t think you can hide yourself,” she says. “The subject is stepping into my world, but I am also putting my own desires and my own ideas of beauty into the image.”

The styling was developed through a close interplay between Singha, stylist Rupangi Grover, the girls, and their environments. Most of the clothes came from the subjects’ wardrobes. “We made sure to spend time with the girls just trying out clothes, playing dress up,” she says. With her background in fashion photography, Singha was interested in clothing beyond the context of a fashion shoot—how it could act as a window into the girls’ lives. Beauty imagery can often be sexualized, and so Grover and Singha challenged themselves to style their subjects in lace and lingerie while still keeping the images grounded in reality. 

Singha’s subjects are already practiced image makers. They spend hours photographing themselves. They know their angles and the spots that get the best light in their apartments, with some of them even directing Singha as she shot them.

So what do they gain by being photographed in this way?

“The subject doesn’t gain anything,” Singha says. “They lose.”

To be photographed by someone else inherently involves giving up some control. For the women, the outcomes were varied. Some were drawn to the prospect of working with a female photographer and the uncertainty of the process, which is different from brand-driven shoots. One subject told Singha she felt like a “baddie” afterward, more confident in her own image. Others were excited to share the images as “fresh content.” 

The irony persists. Despite being slowly and intentionally produced, Singha’s images return to the very systems that they scrutinize. But they succeed in showing the relation her subjects have to beauty for what it is: imperfect, irresistible, and often bizarre. As writer Jessica Delfino says about The Substance, “Beauty is our favorite fairy tale, and fairy tales work on all of us.”

Megha Singha is a shortlisted artist for the 2026 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an international competition that spotlights new talent in contemporary photography.

Born in South Africa in 1993 to a Dutch father and South African mother, Van Wyk moved with her family to the Netherlands at age six, escaping the oppressive determinations of race and class that apartheid imposed on people of color. Developing an interest in photography as a teenager, she decided to study art at the University of the Arts Utrecht, where she would develop her project Die lewe is nie reg vir my nie (This is not the right life for me) (2016–ongoing) as her undergraduate thesis. From the start, her photographic interest was rooted in her family history and heritage. For This is not the right life for me, Van Wyk returned to the community that she had been born into, photographing residents and interviewing them about their experiences with gang culture post-apartheid. Based in research and conversation, Van Wyk’s collaborative, deliberate portraits seek to correct negative stereotypes about a home she never knew.

Yet, as her confidence with the medium grew, she realized the documentary ethos of her undergraduate program was slowly becoming misaligned with the way she wanted to make work. “Gang culture became this theme that I could research and understand what was happening to my community on a macro level,” Van Wyk says. “Slowly, as I also grew as a person, I wanted to think about the micro level—an intimate family project. I was growing throughout the years of building a practice and understanding who I was, but senses of belonging were the core threads through everything that I was doing.”

The imposed insularity of the pandemic provided both time and space to make that goal a reality, and she began Mixedness is my Mythology as a means to visualize the coming together of her South African and Dutch identities. The traditional Dutch farm where she grew up, historically understood as a white space, provided the perfect backdrop for staging portraits of herself, her brothers, and her parents. A particular portrait of her brother, Alexander, standing in front of a white brick wall, his hair waved, adorned with a thin, gold chain and wearing their grandfather’s old overalls and traditional Dutch clogs, was when things began to truly click. “If you have this idea of how a Dutch farm is supposed to look like, this is very much not it. But this is our lived identity, a coming together of these two cultures,” she says.

Working in analogue black and white was a conscious choice for Van Wyk, informed by her studies for her master’s in visual anthropology. In her university research, she was taken by the historical, anthropological portraits of people of color she would uncover. “I started seeing myself in these people, in their portraits and in their image, but the stories that were accompanying the archives were so inhumane,” she says. “It was very much not how I want to use the medium, but it was beneficial to understand how photography was used, in order to be able to counter that.”

The emotional register of Van Wyk’s portraits fluctuates between tender and celebratory but maintains a determined sense of defiance throughout. Props, gestures, and garments serve as symbols of cultural cross-pollination—these interferant references convey the true in-betweenness of experience, pulling not only from their African and Dutch roots but also from global Black diasporic culture. “I don’t feel represented by this white notion of identity,” she says. “I don’t feel represented by Blackness either. So then, what does it mean to be me, in this in-between? In this gray space?” Mixedness is my Mythology is a proposition, a reflection of Van Wyk’s questioning, and, ultimately, a space for healing.

Farren van Wyk is a shortlisted artist for the 2026 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an international competition that spotlights new talent in contemporary photography.

The winner will be announced during The Photography Show presented by the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD), at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, on Thursday, April 23, at 3:00 p.m. (EDT). A presentation of selected works by the shortlisted artists will be on view at The Photography Show, April 22–26, in the Photobook + Partners section of the fair, signaling the mutual commitment between AIPAD and Aperture to supporting the next generation of artists.

“As we celebrate the twentieth year of the Aperture Portfolio Prize, we proudly reflect upon the significance of recognizing artists at pivotal moments in their careers. Aperture has long been at the vanguard of identifying and publishing new voices in photography, and the Portfolio Prize has introduced audiences to artists who have gone on to make some of the most compelling contributions to the medium today,” said Sarah Meister, Executive Director, Aperture. “This year’s shortlist continues that legacy—the work of these five artists reflects the urgency, imagination, and global reach of contemporary photography.”

The shortlisted artists for the 2026 Aperture Portfolio Prize are:

Olivia Crumm constructs a world that oscillates between the surreal and the everyday to process grief, loss, and family history. Her series Wake grapples with the reverberations caused by mourning—and what remains in its aftermath.

Victor Llorente’s Folklore follows Los Andulleros de Santiago, a Dominican carnival group dedicated to preserving Dominican traditions in the US, documenting events and parades that illustrate their enduring commitment to keeping their culture alive.

Megha Singha questions current beauty standards and documents women’s lives increasingly shaped by them. I Love My Friends But They’re Killing Me analyzes the globalization of beauty culture and the ways it interacts with India’s layered system of self-representation.

Aaryan Sinha explores the ways photography has been used to reinforce colonial narratives in India. Namaste or Whatever surfaces the tension between cultural authenticity and Western expectations, and fosters a nuanced understanding of Indian identity.

Farren van Wyk explores the historical connection between South Africa and the Netherlands. Through photographs that reclaim and redefine what it means to be a person of color, Mixedness is my Mythology reflects on ideas of migration, ethnicity, colonialism, and apartheid.

Since 2006, the Aperture Portfolio Prize has published and presented an exciting range of artists whose work has pushed the medium forward. This year’s shortlisted photographers join the ranks of illustrious winners and shortlisted artists over the past two decades, including Sara Abbaspour, Felipe Romero Beltrán, Dannielle Bowman, Alejandro Cartagena, River Claure, Eli Durst, Lisa Elmaleh, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Natalie Krick, Jarod Lew, Akshay Mahajan, Mark McKnight, Zora J Murff, Gloria Oyarzábal, Avion Pearce, Alana Perino, Max Pinckers, RaMell Ross, Pacifico Silano, Donavon Smallwood, Ka-Man Tse, and many more.

The 2026 Portfolio Prize winner will have their work published in Aperture magazine, and receive a $5,000 cash prize and $1,000 gift card for MPB.com. The remaining shortlisted artists will each receive a $1,000 cash prize and recognition in an editorial feature on Aperture.org.

The 2026 Aperture Portfolio Prize is supported by MPB. Production for the presentation on view at AIPAD courtesy WhiteWall.

Click here to enter the 2026 Aperture Portfolio Prize, open through January 9, 2026.

Sara Abbaspour
2025 Shortlist: Sara Abbaspour, Emma Ressel, Hashem Shakeri, Daria Svertilova; Winner: Alana Perino

When Sara Abbaspour returned to Iran after working in the United States, she found a new way of photographing her home country. Everything seems quiet and calm in her series Floating Ocean (2019–24), yet quiet and calm are not words immediately associated with contemporary Iran, which, in 2022, saw one of the largest political uprisings in the country since the 1979 revolution. Focusing on intimate, layered moments in everyday life, Abbaspour creates portraits of subjects who embody a future still being written. She holds an MFA in photography from Yale University of Art, and she is currently an assistant professor of photography at the University of New Mexico. Six of Abbaspour’s photographs are now part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

River Claure
2024 Shortlist: River Claure, Janna Ireland, Abhishek Khedekar, Lalia Stevens; Winner: Avion Pearce

In the Bolivian Andes, River Claure stages portraits that playfully reckon with colonial history, community, and the constructed nature of reality. For his series Mita (2022–24), Claure photographed throughout Llallagua, Uncia, and Catavia—all former mining communities—in an exploration of the shifting dynamics between landscape and self. Born in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where he is currently based, Claure studied graphic design and visual communication at Universidad Mayor de San Simón before pursuing a master’s degree in contemporary photography at the Centro Internacional de Fotografía y Cine, in Madrid. Claure has been the recipient of the PhotoVogue Grant (2021), Magnum Foundation Fellowship (2023), and the EXPOSED Grant for Contemporary Photography (2025), and his work has been exhibited in a range of solo and group exhibitions internationally, including the 2024 Venice Biennale. 

Samantha Box
2023 Shortlist: Samantha Box, Brian Lau, Akshay Mahajan, Ziyu Wang; Winner: Van-Nhi Nguyen 

Caribbean Dreams: Constructions is the fruition of Samantha Box’s lifelong preoccupations with what it means to create diaspora in the United States—and to be created by diaspora. In One Kind of Story (2020), she draws upon images of her grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-aunt while centering herself in a pixelated self-portrait modeled after a photograph by Felix Morin, a studio photographer who worked in Trinidad in the late nineteenth century. An inset photograph in Navel (2022) depicts a strike in the 1930s by sugarcane cutters in St. Kitts, an act, she says, of “self-emancipation” undertaken by the descendants of enslaved Africans. All of these layers in Box’s work offer a riposte to questions immigrants are frequently asked about their origins. Where are you originally from? And where were you from before that? Box was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2023, and has since participated in group exhibitions at The Bronx Museum, BAXTER ST, and Empty Set Project Space. Her inaugural solo exhibition in Washington, DC, Samantha Box: Confluences, was on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2025.

Akshay Mahajan
2023 Shortlist: Samantha Box, Brian Lau, Akshay Mahajan, Ziyu Wang; Winner: Van-Nhi Nguyen 

The city of Mumbai—once Bombay—has long suffered an identity crisis. Before Bollywood and the Bombay Stock Exchange, the rise of cotton mills and Gothic facades, and the fall of the Raj, the territory was a gift, a seventeenth-century dowry from the Portuguese to the British. This rather bureaucratic maneuver set the stage for Mumbai’s many evolutions. With each mutation, a grand narrative was developed and preserved with great care. But for those willing to look closely, the city is full of cracks. It may not come as a surprise, then, that the protagonist of Akshay Mahajan’s ongoing series To die is to be turned to gold is on a citywide search. Recalling an old urban legend, the title underscores the city’s image as a place of extremes. For Mahajan, the series is an experiment with historical continuity and memory. He understands his debt to Mumbai’s past, but can also intuit its failures and contradictions. Mahajan was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2023, won the Nera Di Verzasca Prize in 2024, and was selected as one of the twenty artists for Foam Talent 2024–25. His work has been exhibited at the 13th Bamako Encounters, Bamako, Mali (2023); Encontros da Imagem, Braga, Portugal (2023); and Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai (2025). 

Felipe Romero Beltrán
2022 Shortlist: Juan Brenner, Margo Ovcharenko, Adrien Selbert, Allie Tsubota; Winner: Felipe Romero Beltrán

Since 2020, Felipe Romero Beltrán, who has lived and studied in Latin America, the Middle East, and Europe, has created a series of images and related videos titled Dialect, through which he delves into the routines, memories, and experiences of a group of young immigrants who crossed into Spain from Morocco as minors and are living in a refuge center, awaiting the normalization of their legal status. In the years since winning the Portfolio Prize, Romero Beltrán has published two photobooks: Dialect (Loose Joints, 2023), which was shortlisted for the 2023 Aperture–Paris Photo PhotoBook Awards, and Bravo (Loose Joints, 2025), which was shortlisted for the Les Rencontres d’Arles 2025 Author Book Award. His work has also been presented in solo exhibitions at Foam in Amsterdam, where he won the Paul Huf Award; La Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2025); MAPFRE Foundation in Madrid and Barcelona (2025); and Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes, France (2025).

Jarod Lew
2021 Shortlist: William Camargo, Chance DeVille, Jarod Lew, Anouchka Renaud-Eck; Winner: Donavon Smallwood

In 2012, Jarod Lew discovered that his mother had been engaged to Vincent Chin, the Chinese American draftsman murdered in 1982 by two Detroit autoworkers days before his wedding to Lew’s mother, a turning point in the history of Asian American civil rights. Lew’s shortlisted series Please Take Off Your Shoes, set in his hometown of Detroit—the geographical backdrop to Chin’s life and murder—takes an intimate but emboldened look at what remains in Chin’s legacy and the long history of survival and erasure in displacement. Lew expanded on this work with his ongoing series In Between You and Your Shadow, commissioned as part of Aperture and FUJIFILM’s Creating Stories for Tomorrow, and published in Aperture’s summer 2023 issue, “Being & Becoming: Asian in America.” Since then, Lew has participated in exhibitions at Pace Gallery in Hong Kong; the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2025, he presented his first solo museum exhibition, Strange You Never Knew, at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Dannielle Bowman
2020 Shortlist: Jessica Chou, Daniel Jack Lyons, Lindley Warren Mickunas, Gloria Oyarzabal; Winner: Dannielle Bowman

Dannielle Bowman makes excellent use of the pleasures of photographic space, described in elongated tonal gradations of black, white, and maximum grays balanced against compositions etched sharply by California-noir shadows—Robert Adams meets Maya Deren in the Los Angeles suburbs. There are multiple entry points into her series What Had Happened (2020–ongoing). These elements lure the viewer to linger within the work. Aside from the surplus of visual gratification, the images simmer with the tension of a story mostly withheld. On one level, these pictures are about the neighborhoods in and around the artist’s family home in Los Angeles. On another, Bowman’s work describes the passage of time and memories of home—or more precisely, the homes one makes on leaving old ones. Bowman was awarded the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2020, and has since received a Light Work Residency, contributed to publications such as The New York Times, the Atlantic, and Vanity Fair, and her work has been shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Gloria Oyarzábal
2020 Shortlist: Jessica Chou, Daniel Jack Lyons, Lindley Warren Mickunas, Gloria Oyarzabal; Winner: Dannielle Bowman

For her Lagos-based series WOMAN GO NO’GREE (2019), the Spanish artist Gloria Oyarzábal created a curriculum for herself of Nigerian feminist theory, homing in on canonical gender scholarship, yet she doesn’t claim to speak for Nigerians or to make a statement about feminism in broad strokes. Instead, she considers the project and the research from which it sprung to be an exercise in decolonizing her own gaze, and for that reason, she welcomes debate that her work might prompt. Oyarzábal’s book of the same series, Woman Go No’Gree (Editorial RM, 2020), was awarded the Images Vevey Book Award in 2019, and Paris Photo–Aperture’s PhotoBook of the Year Prize in 2020. Most recently, she won the third edition of the KBr Photo Award for her project Appunti per un’Orestíade africana_una democracia en fatiga II, an award that recognizes the project’s contribution as postcolonial research and reflection on African countries.

Zora J Murff
2019 Shortlist: Teresa Eng, Jack Latham, Zora J Murff, Guanyu Xu; Winner: Mark McKnight

Through his mix of emotionally resonant portraits, vacant landscapes, and fraught archival materials, Zora J Murff investigates stories about incarceration and redlining in the context of an American narrative of violence perpetrated against African American citizens. Murff’s books  include LOST, Omaha (KGP Books, 2018), At No Point In Between (Dais Books, 2019), and True Colors (or, Affirmations in a Crisis) (Aperture, 2022), which constructs a manual for coming to terms with the historical and contemporary realities of America’s divisive structures of privilege and caste. His work was featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography exhibition in 2020, and was presented at the 2021 Rencontres d’Arles, France, as part of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award.

Philip Cheung
2018 Shortlist: Fabiola Cedillo, Philip Cheung, Dylan Hausthor & P. Guilmoth, Eduardo L Rivera; Winner: Ka-Man Tse

In his series The Thing About Remembering, Philip Cheung documents daily life on the Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan. Working between 2008 to 2014, Cheung photographed the landscape and subculture of the base, being careful to avoid the common tropes of war photography. Cheung narrows in on administrative duties of those managing combat operations and infrastructures in surreal portraits that often appear almost frozen in lethargy. By highlighting the banality of these tasks, people, and objects, Cheung reminds us of the ways conflict has become a routine to our daily lives. Cheung’s photographs have been shown across North America and Europe, including the SFO Museum in San Francisco, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, and the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv. In 2022, Cheung received the Leica Fotografie International & BarTur Photo Award for Photojournalist of the Year for his series Russian invasion of Ukraine. Cheung is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, and his work has been featured in Harper’s, the British Journal of Photography, The Washington Post, and Time.

Ka-Man Tse
2018 Shortlist: Fabiola Cedillo, Philip Cheung, Dylan Hausthor & P. Guilmoth, Eduardo L Rivera; Winner: Ka-Man Tse

In her series narrow distances, Ka-Man Tse focuses on the intersection of Asian and Pacific Islander and LGBTQ communities, carefully composing images that suggest oblique narratives. Her protagonists appear in quiet episodes of introspection. A young woman leans contemplatively over the railing of a curved bridge. Two men embrace in a moment of connection contrasted against an imposing Hong Kong skyline spiked with vertiginous towers. A gender-nonconforming person regards themself in a mirror that doubles their likeness, suggesting that we all contain many selves. Tse holds an MFA in photography from Yale University of Art, and her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Tate Modern, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. She is currently an Associate Professor of Photography at Parsons the New School for Design.

Natalie Krick
2017 Shortlist: Emmanuelle Andrianjafy, Nancy Floyd, Kris Graves, Balarama Heller; Winner: Natalie Krick

Natalie Krick’s series Natural Deceptions, made in collaboration with her mother and sister, explores the temptations and degradations that can be found across the spectrum of physical and inner self. The images are colorful, witty, aggressively slick—they would feel equally at home as fashion campaigns or celebrity portraiture, save for their bite and personal edge. In 2017, Krick published her first monograph, NATURAL DECEPTIONS, which features her winning series. Since then, she has gone on to publish the photobooks We are sorry that you applied this year (2025) and like a vampire with a rose in my teeth (2026), and had her work exhibited widely including at the Frye Museum, LACMA, and Silver Eye Center for Photography. Currently, Krick is a professor of interdisciplinary and visual arts at the University of Washington.

Eli Durst
2016 Shortlist: Bill Durgin, Sean Thomas Foulkes, RaMell Ross; Winner: Eli Durst

In 2011, Eli Durst began volunteering at an immigrant detention center in Austin, Texas, where he assembled identification portraits for asylum applicants. Many of the people he met were from Eritrea, and spoke with longing and nostalgia for their home country. Four years later, Durst traveled to Asmara and spent fifteen days photographing the city in atmospheric, silvery duotone. Conjuring the city in its present tense, Durst’s brief study of Asmara reflects the moods and motions of a singular urban landscape. Since winning the Portfolio Prize in 2016, Durst has authored three monographs: The Community (2020), The Four Pillars (2022), and, most recently, The Children’s Melody (2025), which explores the significance of collective identity formation through images made in cotillion groups, dance practices, ROTC training, and school performances. A Guggenheim Fellow, Dust has contributed numerous photographic essays to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Der Spiegel, and Wallpaper. 

RaMell Ross
2016 Shortlist: Bill Durgin, Sean Thomas Foulkes, RaMell Ross; Winner: Eli Durst

The photographer, writer, and filmmaker RaMell Ross has created deeply moving chronicles of the American South. His series South County, AL (a Hale County) (2012–14), published in Aperture in 2018, and his breakthrough documentary film, Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), offer a poetic vision of Alabama’s Black Belt. As Salamishah Tillet writes in Aperture, “His images—both still and moving—travel between the highly intimate and the breathtakingly panoramic in order to offer up an experience as dynamic and sweeping as contemporary Southern life itself.” Hale County won a Peabody Award in 2020, and was nominated at both the 91st Academy Awards for Best Documentary and Emmy Awards for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking. Last year, Ross’s film Nickel Boys, adapted from the acclaimed Colson Whitehead novel, was nominated for Best Picture at the 97th Academy Awards. Ross holds degrees in Sociology and English from Georgetown University, and is an associate professor at Brown University. His works are held in various collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia; and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Lisa Elmaleh
2015 Shortlist: Lisa Elmaleh, Heikki Kaski, Laurence Rasti; Winner: Drew Nikonowicz

History resonates in Lisa Elmaleh’s American Folk series. Using the mid-nineteenth-century tintype photographic process—slow, chemically dangerous, and incredibly cumbersome—she records an Appalachia that appears as an echo from the dawn of photography. Her photography is an elaborate romance, in which everything is conscious, arranged, and constructed, and photographer and sitters are all performers; rather than unwitting country folk left behind by time, they are all political actors, staking their identities and purpose in a defiant rejection of contemporary mores. Elmaleh’s work has been exhibited nationwide and recognized by the Aaron Siskind Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, and the Creator Labs Photo Fund, among others, and has been published by Harper’s, Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Times, NPR, and more. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024.

Max Pinckers
2014 Shortlist: Matt Eich, Davide Monteleone, Max Pinckers, Sadie Wechsler; Winner: Amy Elkins

Throughout his career, Max Pinckers has created theatrically staged photographs that question the boundaries of documentary and fiction. His 2019 shortlisted series, Will they Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty, draws from the visual culture of Bollywood to explore the real-life tensions of life in Mumbai focused on aspects of love and marriage. Pinckers has received multiple international awards, including the Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg in 2015 and Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2018. He has also produced numerous self-published photobooks, such as The Fourth Wall (2012), Lotus (2011–16), Red Ink (2018), Margins of Excess (2018), and State of Emergency (2024), which garnered the Rencontres d’Arles Special Mention, Photo-Text Book Award.

Pacifico Silano
2013 Shortlist: Clare Carter, Corey Escoto, Akihiko Miyoshi, Pacifico Silano, Eva Stenram; Winner: Bryan Schutmaat

Pacifico Silano’s project Male Fantasy Icon appropriates images of Al Parker, a gay porn star in the 1970s. The series ruminates on sexuality and the materiality of print in an obsessive manner that mimics the repetitive feeling of both fantasy and porn itself. The images, with their distinct vintage flavor, recall a time when sexuality was more carefree, before the AIDS epidemic that later took Parker’s life and that of a generation of his gay male peers. Silano fuses the fantasy of an earlier moment in the culture with a poignant recollection of what has been lost. His debut book, I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine (Loose Joints, 2021), was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards, and his work has been exhibited in both group and solo shows at the Bronx Museum, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Museum of Sex, and the Houston Center of Photography.

Alejandro Cartagena
2009 Shortlist: Keliy Anderson-Staley, Alejandro Cartagena, Maureen Drennan, Jason Hanasik, Mark Lyon; Winner: Alexander Gronsky

The photographs in Lost Rivers by Alejandro Cartagena, which are part of a larger body of work titled Suburbia Mexicana, interrogate the interdependence between humans and the environment in the face of urban expansion in Monterrey, Mexico. Lost Rivers provides explicit evidence of botched urban development and inadequate economic policy, even as the images reveal the beauty to be found within the spoiled landscapes. Formally, Cartagena’s photographs recall the monumental work of Minor White and Ansel Adams, while simultaneously reaching further back to the landscape paintings of the Hudson River School. Since being shortlisted for the Portfolio Prize in 2009, Cartagena has published over thirty photobooks, including the contemporary classic Carpoolers (2014), and pursued multiple forms of image making, from archival collages to AI models. His work has also been exhibited internationally, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where his mid-career survey, Ground Rules, opened in 2025.

LaToya Ruby Frazier
2006 Shortlist: Cara Barer, Michael Fisher, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Van Houtryve; Winner: Hiroshi Watanabe

One of the great portrayers of twenty-first-century postindustrial American life, LaToya Ruby Frazier has covered stories from the postindustrial decline of her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Frazier’s award-winning first photobook, The Notion of Family (Aperture, 2014), is an incisive exploration of the legacies of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied by Braddock. Collaboration is central to Frazier’s practice, reinforcing the idea of art and image making as transformative, and a means of resetting traditional power dynamics and narratives—both those of her family and of the community writ large. Throughout her career, Frazier has received various grants and awards, including a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2014 USA Weitz Fellowship, and 2015 MacArthur Fellowship. In 2024, her first major museum survey, Monuments of Solidarity, was presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; that year, Frazier was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People.

The 2026 Aperture Portfolio Prize is open through January 9, 2026.

The figures within this image—man, bird, angel—permeate Alana Perino’s Pictures of Birds (2017–24), an elegiac series of photographs that searches for meaning in memory and mortality.

Perino, who was born in New York and raised by separated parents, finds home in many places. In 2020, they moved to live with their father, Joe, and stepmother, Letty, on the small Floridian island known as Longboat Key. Perino had begun to photograph their family in the Longboat Key condo a few years earlier, as they noticed Letty first experiencing symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s. By the time Perino relocated to Florida, Letty’s condition had worsened.

Alana Perino, Dad and Samuel, 2024

Alana Perino, Lori’s Shell, 2023

In these years, their sense of home was upended along with the “strange, unwritten contract of the family,” as Perino put it. Letty was younger than Joe, and ostensibly would have cared for him as he aged; now, new family roles formed in which Perino and their sister became caretakers of their stepmother. “The entire island became this eulogized space,” they said. “Everything began to represent her death.”

At night, Letty would speak aloud in the room Perino shared with her. “I realized, after many nights, that she was talking to the same people in the room,” Perino said. “She was talking to ghosts.” Pictures of Birds does not shy away from the idea that spirits dwell in this home, and in many ways, the photographs take comfort in their presence. Perino’s family on their father’s side is Catholic, though the photographer was raised Jewish; in the spiritual treatment of ancestral remembrance and protection, they find common ground among traditions. Outside Longboat Key’s Catholic church, Perino photographs the three wise men conjured as statues shrouded in plastic, an uncanny scene mediating the animate and inanimate.

Perino’s sense of home was upended along with the “strange, unwritten contract of the family.”

Letty died in 2021. Perino continued to photograph their father, sister, niece, and a few other family members until 2024, when their father sold the Longboat Key condo and moved away. The later photographs resonate with the loss and Letty’s continued presence in their lives. A portrait of Perino’s niece Madi floating in a pool recalls an earlier photograph of their father, though where his face turns toward the sky, Madi’s is obscured by her hair as she looks down into the water. In a self-portrait, Perino, eyes closed, lays on their back in a pit dug in the sand on a beach.

Alana Perino, Nina’s Afghan, 2020

Alana Perino, Madi on Stair Lift, 2020

Letty would repeatedly ask Perino as they photographed around the house, “Why don’t you take pictures of birds?” After all, that is what most people do on Longboat Key. Perino initially decided to photograph anything but the flamingos and egrets of Sarasota County. In time, they came to understand everything they photographed as birdlike, every portrait as a self-portrait. The mutability and fluidity of corporeal figures was never more apparent than in the countless seashells cast aside on the shore. Letty had collected shells for years; Perino viewed them as an extension of nonhuman ghosts, long discomfited by the removal and disruption of a creature’s life cycle. They eventually photographed the shells, too, and made excursions around the island to photograph a wider perspective: the ocean, statues, a shark living in an aquarium.

“This is when the project really began to expand from this notion of memorializing a really sad event for our family that was prolonged and changed the shape of all of our roles, to a kind of internalization of these realities, of our lived everyday experience with the dead and their presence in our home,” Perino said. “How all of these ecosystems—and this particular ecosystem within Longboat Key, the humidity, the scope of life—it highlights how interconnected all of the different species are and how reliant we are on the shells, the mangroves, the water, and even things like the aquarium to survive and to proceed from one generation to another.” Perino’s photographs rarely depict Letty, who resisted the camera’s presence. In one of her few appearances, only an out-of-focus glimpse of a hand at rest is visible in the foreground. The picture’s title, Nina’s Afghan (2020), refers to the shawl made by Perino’s grandmother and draped over the back of a chair. A painted portrait of their father and Letty hangs on the wall above the chair, their faces just out of the photograph’s frame. Nobody ever sat in that chair. Instead it stayed empty, an outsize and invisible presence filling it, a ghostly apparition just out of reach.

Alana Perino, Letty’s Shells, 2020

Alana Perino, Gulf of Mexico, 2022
Courtesy the artist

Alana Perino is the winner of the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize. A solo presentation of their work will be organized by Aperture in New York City.

This piece appears in Aperture No. 259, “Liberated Threads,” Summer 2025.

Abbaspour first experienced photography as a tool in her undergraduate program in urban planning and design in the city of Mashhad, in the northeast of Iran. It turned out she enjoyed photographing the city more than trying to plan it, and so she changed course. Her first photography degree at University of Tehran was theory heavy; seeking a practice-based education, she enrolled at the Yale School of Art in 2017.

In her first series, White (2015–16), Abbaspour’s training as an urban planner collides with practical constraints—it is illegal to take photographs in public spaces in Iran. In these images, she captured the remains of houses destroyed in the name of renewal in the pilgrimage city of Mashad. Unseen interior walls, once the site of private lives, become external walls, exposed to the city’s traffic. The municipality’s whitewash inadvertently turns the unsightly into the monumental. “I didn’t make portraits when I was in Iran. I thought I could work with the urban fabric metaphorically to talk about the ideas that I had,” Abbaspour says. The liminal state of these walls, pulled down but never rebuilt, provided her with the kind of poetics that many Iranian artists find useful in a country where direct statements can easily cause trouble with the authorities.

Abbaspour’s move to the US pushed her in a new direction and a new way of looking. “I was lost when I got to the US. I didn’t have any connection to the place. My English wasn’t very good at the time, so I made myself go out every day to photograph people. I started to enjoy the process of meeting and collaborating with them.” Through portraiture, she connected to her new country, and that newfound territory in turn changed the way she photographed Iran when she returned after almost six years.

She began Floating Ocean on her first visit back to Iran, but issues around her US visa stopped her from visiting again to finish the project until the summer of 2024. By this time, she had found a route away from the safety of the metaphor and was settled into the American tradition of portraiture. Influenced by the work of Judith Joy Ross, Mark Steinmetz, and Dawoud Bey, she blended her newfound confidence in photographing people up close with her idea to evade a specific geography. There is poetry here, but no conundrums. Her frames are occupied by individuals at ease with themselves in front of her camera.

The name of the series points to the vastness of Iran and how it and she have both changed so radically since she departed for the US. For returning expats these days, the most eye-catching change is the number of women who defy the compulsory Hijab rules, eradicating one of the easy visual markers of the country. In 2020, Iranians protested the Hijab rules after a young woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, was killed in the custody of the moral police who enforce them. Many young people were killed and maimed, and women still face punitive measures for refusal to comply.

Throughout the series, Abbaspour photographed her subjects without the mandatory cover. Without that signifier, the background is the only way to pin the geography. The subjects don’t give away many clues. The girls holding each other or the boys wrestling could be somewhere in the American Midwest. The woman washing her face with a hose could be in South America. Even where some material elements may point to the geography, it is very unspecific, the rooftop in Mashad where a young woman is leaning over the parapet could be any Middle Eastern country. Abbaspour directs our attention to the person in the frame and not their environment. To that end, she deliberately avoids color as she feels it provides too much documentary information.

Abbaspour’s use of black-and-white photography creates a sense of timeless, placeless landscape. As does her framing. Robert Capa’s famous assertion that if your photographs are not good enough, you are not close enough, takes new life in Abbaspour’s method of photographing Iran, where she proves that if you zoom in hard enough, you will discover the universal.

Sara Abbaspour is a shortlisted artist for the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.

“It was the darkest time of the year, and I was feeling deeply sad,” she told me. “In that moment, the archangel’s presence amidst the darkness felt deeply symbolic.” 

The image she took—Protector of Kyiv—anchors her series Irreversibly Altered, which documents the grief and emptiness of the war in Ukraine. The archangel is situated against a blue-black sky in full regalia, fighting off an unseen foe. 

When the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Svertilova was in Paris, finishing her master’s degree in photography and video at École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD). Ultimately, she decided to postpone her graduation, abandon that project, and respond to the present moment—her present moment. 

In the months following the invasion, Svertilova stayed in France, reading updates about the war during the day and dreaming about it at night. The tendency toward expressive images came from her own need to excise her nightmarish visions and the realization that many other talented photographers were documenting the war in a straightforward way. She had no interest in replicating their work when she went back to Ukraine.  

The characters and scenes in Irreversibly Altered hint at dispossession and pain, but never show it directly: an empty, red-tinged street a night, portraits of exhausted youths, a still life of dying flowers, shadowy figures floating around dimly lit interiors. While many photographers around her were documenting the war in Ukraine journalistically, Svertilova chose to channel the emotional dislocation around her into impressionistic images instead. 

Irreversibly Altered’s aesthetics are also rooted in Svertilova’s childhood training. Growing up, she took drawing classes and found inspiration in Renaissance paintings. She became interested in photography at age thirteen, experimenting with digital SLR cameras and an old Soviet Zenith camera inherited from her grandfather. She moved to Paris to become a working artist. 

“I didn’t come from an artistic family, and in Ukraine, art has never really been seen as a “real” profession—something you could do full-time.” 

Svertilova admits that while it pains her to see waning support for Ukraine abroad, she feels it’s natural to want to tune out of war, especially explicit images of war. More than ten years after the war started and with no end in sight, she is constantly asking: How can photographers speak about a war in a way that connects to people who are far from it? 

Irreversibly Altered offers answers. Rather than trying to capture a broader narrative, Svertilova focuses on her tight knit circle of friends and acquaintances: Artists working in freezing cold studios, former art curators and students who joined the army. They are all part of a lost generation who have undergone a dramatic transformation over the past three years. 

There were times when she felt like giving up, especially during constant power outages and living for days without heat and water during the dead of winter. She didn’t.  

“I realized that this work is about resistance—the resistance of Ukrainians who live through the war every day, and also my own, personal resistance,” she said. “This project taught me that you have to find strength and keep going, because in the end, the effort is worth it.” 

Daria Svertilova is a shortlisted artist for the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.