Hasselblad Names Seven New Masters in Its 2026 Photography Competition

Seven photographers have been named Hasselblad Masters for 2026, chosen out of 70 finalists that the competition pulled from a pool exceeding 108,000 submissions sent in from 160 countries and regions. The seven categories this year were Landscape, Architecture, Portrait, Art, Street, Wildlife, and Project//21, with one winner in each.

Hasselblad runs the Masters as a deliberately high-bar contest that puts working professionals and newer talent in direct competition. A Grand Jury handled the evaluation, factoring in public votes along the way, and ultimately picked winners on the basis of concept, originality, creativity, and technical command.

Grand Jury Chair Kalle Sanner, who serves as Executive Director at the Hasselblad Foundation, summed up the throughline across the field. "What this year's Hasselblad Masters submissions demonstrated, with rare consistency, is that the most compelling photography does not simply record, it constructs. Across categories, the strongest work operated on more than one level simultaneously: legible on first encounter, yet resistant to easy interpretation. These are images that require attention, that continue to unfold the longer you stay with them. What unites the winners is a shared understanding that photography's real power lies not in what it shows, but in what it withholds, reframes, and quietly insists upon."

The prize package is substantial: a Hasselblad 100-megapixel medium format camera, a pair of XCD lenses, and a 5,000-euro creative fund. Winners also collaborate with Hasselblad on a project and see their work run in the commemorative Masters book and across the brand's platforms. Here is who took home the title.

Architecture: Kevin Boyle, DaySleeper | Movieland, Canada

Boyle is a prairie kid, and the project that won him the category is, in part, a response to grief. When his father died and he came back to the area he was raised in, he found the social infrastructure of those towns, the halls and theaters where people used to gather, locked up and rotting. He has spent more than a decade since photographing that disappearing architecture across small communities in the United States and Canada.

Technically, the series is a composite. Boyle paints each building section by section with handheld flashlights across multiple frames, then stitches them in post to produce a single image that seems lit from within. The result reads less like documentation than reanimation: derelict buildings rendered as glowing monuments to the communal life they once housed.

"The composition, and the fact that the images are empty of people, triggers our imaginations, taking us back to a time when these buildings would have thrived with the community meeting for evening entertainment. By making this series, the photographer invites us to consider the myriad of small venues that make up the social fabric of small communities," said Sonia Jeunet, Photography Consultant and Education at Magnum Photos.

Art: Yudha Kusuma Putera, Waste Colonialism (Sapi-Sapi Piyungan), Indonesia

Putera works in the territory where human systems collide with the natural world, and his winning project drags one of those collisions into the open. It looks at the economics of trash, specifically how richer countries ship their waste somewhere cheaper to deal with, and how that same calculus plays out within a single city when landfills get banished to the edges where nobody has to look at them.

The site is Piyungan, the landfill serving Yogyakarta, where workers comb through the refuse and cattle graze on it, the whole mass rising over time into a kind of artificial hill. Putera's frames crowd the cows together from behind until their bodies and the garbage heaps become hard to tell apart. He has been clear that the goal isn't accusation. It's getting people to actually reckon with the volume of what gets thrown out and what kind of future that leaves behind.

"On the surface, the images appear direct and unambiguous, and yet they consistently resist easy reading, generating a sense of visual uncertainty that keeps the viewer engaged and questioning. The images do not announce themselves loudly, but reward sustained attention with a slow-building sense of strangeness that is both intellectually stimulating and visually striking," said Kalle Sanner, Executive Director at the Hasselblad Foundation.

Landscape: Rohan Reilly, Ephemeral Visions, Ireland

Reilly trained as a composer, and he photographs landscape the way someone writes minimalist music, reducing a scene to a few elements and holding them. Long exposures flatten water and sky into something glassy, and he leans on empty space and washed-out color to keep the work in a register closer to meditation than to record-keeping. None of it happens fast. He scouts weather, comes back across seasons, and waits out conditions that can't be forced.

The winning frames were made along the River Po in Italy, where a line of poplars planted as flood defenses ended up standing in dead-still water under flat, even light. A piece of working infrastructure turns dreamlike in his hands, the trees mirrored cleanly in the water with everything held in a kind of suspended quiet.

"A forest of poplar trees could be a monotonous subject. But these photographs are hypnotic objects of meditation, creating something expansive through repetition and ostensible sameness," said Zack Hatfield, Managing Editor at Aperture Magazine.

Portrait: Svetlana Jovanovic, Otherness, The Netherlands

A psychology background sits underneath everything Jovanovic shoots, and it shows in her preoccupation with identity, how a self gets assembled, and how much of that assembly happens in relation to other people. She refuses to separate the idea behind an image from how it looks, treating concept and beauty as two halves that only work together.

Her ongoing series Otherness trains that lens on identical twins, and on the strange gap between two people who share nearly everything yet remain distinct. What interests her are the small fractures, the places where one twin's particular character surfaces inside a frame the two of them appear to share equally. Each sitting is a three-way negotiation between the twins' own dynamic and Jovanovic's direction, which is part of what gives the portraits their charge.

"Through precise use of light and composition, this portrait series explores the themes of mirroring and duality. Whether capturing two sides of the same face or the closeness of two kindred souls, the images reveal subtle layers of emotion with quiet precision," said RongRong, Co-founder and Artistic Director at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre.

Project//21: Panitbhand Paribatra Na Ayudhya, Dwellers of the Night, Thailand

The youngest sensibility in the group belongs to Paribatra Na Ayudhya, a Thai diver and underwater shooter whose work is essentially an act of preservation, getting the ocean's most fragile residents on record before they slip away unnoticed.

For this series he dove the waters off Anilao in the Philippines during the nightly migration, when pelagic and larval creatures rise from deep water to feed in the dark. He pairs slow shutter speeds, which catch the drift and motion of his subjects, with deliberately colored lighting that pulls their anatomy out of the black. One frame backs a ribbon eel with a warm wash that reads as a tiny sunset. Many of these animals never touch the seafloor in their lives, which is exactly what makes the open-ocean ecosystem so easy to lose.

"I'm drawn to the quiet whimsy of these sea creatures. Set against black, the creatures feel almost otherworldly, strange, delicate, and entirely captivating. There's a simplicity to the presentation that allows their inherent oddness to shine, reminding us how unfamiliar and compelling the natural world can be when seen without distraction," said Alex Pollack, Director of Photography at National Geographic.

Street: Gosse Bouma, Morning Ritual, The Netherlands

Bouma is after stillness, which is an unusual thing to chase in street photography. His pictures live at the seam between built geometry and weather, the rigid lines of a city set against fog or rain or whatever the sky happens to be doing, and they're engineered to make a viewer slow down for a second.

For Morning Ritual he pointed that approach at Dutch street markets, those everyday spaces where strangers brush past each other, swap a sentence or two, and carry on. By catching those tiny, low-stakes interactions, Bouma holds onto a quality of communal life that is quietly evaporating from most cities.

"The photographer understands atmosphere, scale and timing. The small lit kiosks within the vast blue urban emptiness create images that feel both intimate and monumental. Here, genuine photographic tension emerges. The series uses colour structurally, not decoratively. Mist, artificial light and architecture form one coherent world," said Aya Musa, Senior Curator at Foam.

Wildlife: Alfred Minnaar, The Forest I Roam, South Africa

Minnaar leads with patience and watching, building an understanding of how an animal behaves and where it fits before he raises the camera. A decade-plus of shooting around the world has nudged his fine-art practice toward conservation, with the deep-sea and wildlife work increasingly functioning as an argument for protecting what's in front of the lens.

His winning images hinge on a single tiny goby tucked into coral, and the whole point is scale. Instead of making the fish the hero, Minnaar uses it as a measuring stick, letting the reef itself swell into the real subject and asking the viewer to picture that environment from the vantage of one of its smallest inhabitants.

"The vibrancy of the palette immediately draws you in, and the way the small fish are framed against their environments creates a sense of scale that almost reads as landscape. There's a nice balance here between detail and composition, with the micro subjects holding their own within a larger, almost abstracted environment," said Alex Pollack, Director of Photography at National Geographic.

The 2026 Grand Jury

This year's panel pulled from across the museum, gallery, and editorial worlds: Kalle Sanner of the Hasselblad Foundation, Alex Pollack of National Geographic, Aya Musa of Foam, Paul Lachenauer of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rebecca Swift of Getty Images, RongRong of the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Sonia Jeunet of Magnum Photos, and Zack Hatfield of Aperture Magazine. The winners' work will be featured in the commemorative Masters book alongside the Hasselblad medium format camera and XCD lenses each of them now carries into their next projects.