From marine life after dark to modern mythology: 1839 Awards winners revealed

Nov 06, 2026 - 20:14

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From marine life after dark to modern mythology: 1839 Awards winners revealed

Explore highlights from the 2026 contest, which recognized professional and non-professional photographers across 41 categories.

Blanket octopus with iridescent, sail-like membranes trailing behind a golden, rounded head against a dark background.

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.

The 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

Two translucent, diamond-shaped fish with long, flowing fin filaments swimming against a black background.

Artist: 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

Large curved headpiece and layered gold necklaces worn on a train platform with blurred figures in motion.

Artist: 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

White egret with wings spread hunting fish jumping out of turbulent water.

Artist: 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

Artist: Leah Barad

IG handle: @leahbphotos

Entry title: Morning on the Lake

Entry description: A young boy paddles his first canoe

Professional – Storytelling

A large platter of rice and meat served with side dishes and smartphones on a patterned rug.

Artist: 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

A boat piled high with black trash bags and plastic jugs floating on turquoise water with a distant city skyline in the background.

Artist: 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

A hand resting on the long, curved horn of a white cow within a large herd of cattle at sunrise.

Artist: 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

Microscopic view of irregular crystalline patterns in shades of blue, yellow, and orange.

Artist: 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

A raven perched on a snowy ridge overlooking a glacier featuring deep blue ice and dark meltwater channels.

Artist: 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

Scattered remnants of a picnic on a textured mat, featuring avocado halves, bread slices, a cucumber slice, and several small bowls and containers.

Artist: 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

A surfer rides a very large, cresting wave.

Artist: Natalya Pyrogova

IG handle: N/A

Entry title: Half second before

Entry description: Half second before the incident and rescue

Professional – Animals

Multi-story brick building with dogs wearing colorful accessories in every window and standing on the sidewalk near the entrance.

Artist: 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

A high-rise apartment building featuring a large rectangular opening in its center that frames a view of a beach, trees, and the ocean.

Artist: 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

Abstract surface texture with grey, white, and red streaks alongside patches of corroded orange and metallic blue material.

Artist: 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

Colorful blue-throated bee-eater in flight, holding a dark insect in its beak.

Artist: 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

A red baseball cap and face covering are worn at a wooden table topped with piles of fresh fish at a harbor.

Artist: 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

Two individuals in a wooden structure surrounded by hanging and floor-piled corn cobs, with one individual tending to a small fire in a metal basin.

Artist: 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

A jacket, cap, and rubber boots worn while walking through a trash-filled landscape near a fire.

Artist: 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)

A large group of individuals in robes looking upward with expressions of awe.

Artist: 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)

A figure in a curled position sitting on basalt rock columns, in black and white.

Artist: 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)

White horses galloping through shallow water, creating splashes in the air.

Artist: Marketa Zvelebil

IG handle: N/A

Entry title: Galloping through the Sea

Entry description: N/A

Non-Professional – Architecture

White and gray building facade featuring a large white letter F on a dark triangular accent, a vertical column of small square windows, and a small, rounded ornamental tree in the foreground.

Artist: 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

Aerial view of a flock of birds flying over a dark body of water with a swirling, pale-colored current.

Artist: 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.

About the Author: Abby Ferguson holds an MFA in photography and blends a fine-art background with extensive editorial and commercial experience. She built and led an in-house imaging program for a large vacation rental company and has served as an associate editor at Popular Photography. She also teaches at a local community college and serves on its Photographic Technology Program Advisory Board, sharing her knowledge and enthusiasm for the medium.

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