The Royal Photographic Society Awards are the world’s longest-running photography prize, and the fantastic 2025 winners have been unveiled. The recipients exemplify significant talent and contribution across the art and science of photography.
The Royal Photographic Society Awards began 147 years ago. Although photography itself has changed dramatically over that time, the awards have always been focused on celebrating photography as an art form. This year’s winners reflect new and emerging talent alongside notable contributions by longtime professionals. The Royal Photographic Society notes the 2025 winners’ work “is a testament to the power of photography to inspire, uplift, incite change and bring about personal, social, and cultural wellbeing.”
The RPS Awards celebrate photography across three primary pillars: The art, the science, and the knowledge and understanding of photography and the moving image.
RPS Award Centenary Medal — Susan Derges
The RPS’s “most prestigious honor,” the RPS Centenary Medal, has been awarded to photographer Susan Derges this year. The photographer, based in Devon, U.K., creates fascinating photographic artwork in nature without a traditional camera or lens. Derges is among the most influential and pioneering camera-less photographers of her generation.
Derges, born in 1955, studied painting in London and Berlin in the 1970s, which paved the way for her later photographic explorations. She began experimenting with camera-less photography shortly thereafter, doing fascinating work with photosensitive materials and natural processes, including sound and light.
The RPS notes that Derges’ photographic work explores humanity’s relationship to the natural world, often by bringing natural phenomena to life in the photographic medium in new and exciting ways. For example, Derges has exposed the physical movement of rivers and oceans onto photosensitive materials at night using moonlight, carefully composing plants and other natural matter in front of photosensitive paper, and then exposing it to light, and exposing photosensitive materials to sound waves, letting the frequencies create the final prints.
Throughout her lengthy career, during which her work has been awarded and exhibited many, many times worldwide, Derges has always maintained a strong, physical connection to nature through photography. Her work pushes the boundaries of what photography is and how people relate to nature itself.
RPS Award for Achievement in the Art of Photography — Omar Victor Diop
Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop got his start in landscape photography before moving into fine art portraiture and fashion photography, where he has become a very prominent and acclaimed artist.
His work has been widely exhibited worldwide, including at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, where the photographer spends much of his time, the Brooklyn Museum in the U.S., and the Musée de la Photographie de Saint-Louis in Senegal.
Diop’s work is vivid, imaginative, creative, and visually striking. His artwork extends beyond photography, as he’s also a writer, fashion designer, and textile artist.
© Omar Victor Diop
RPS Award for Achievement in the Art of Photography (Under 30 Years) — Tami Aftab
English-Pakistani photographer Tami Aftab earned the RPS Award for Achievement in the Art of Photography for photographers under 30. Aftab’s work explores concepts of family, identity, and play, and is celebrated for its ability to approach sensitive topics with warmth and lightness.
Aftab got her start in photography working on a personal project with her father, who suffers from short-term memory loss. Aftab and her dad dealt with the very challenging topic through humorous staged portraits. This series informed Aftab’s debut photography book, The Rice is on the Hob, which was photographed in Lahore. The book explored food, heritage, and how memory relates to family.
Aftab’s photography crosses numerous genre boundaries, encompassing fashion, portraiture, lifestyle, and more. Aftab’s vibrant, playful style has attracted many major clients, including Adidas, Apple, Burberry, and more. Her work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, ICA, The Photographer’s Gallery, and more.
The RPS Award for Environmental Responsibility — Ragnar Guðni Axelsson
For more than four decades, Ragnar Guðni Axelsson has photographed the people, animals, and landscapes in remote Arctic regions, among the harshest and most unforgiving places on Earth.
Axelsson’s incredible black-and-white photos capture the Arctic in exquisite detail, showcasing how people thrive at the very edge of civilization.
Throughout his 40-plus years of photographic work, Axelsson has documented how climate change and environmental shifts have impacted the people, animals, and places of the Arctic, effectively capturing how the relationships between humans and nature have been profoundly altered in the Arctic.
Axelsson is currently working on a three-year project documenting people’s lives across all eight Arctic countries.
RPS Award for Editorial or Documentary Photography — Raghu Rai
Civil engineer-turned-photographer Raghu Rai has been working as a photojournalist since the mid-1960s. He has been chief photographer for The Statesman, worked for The Times in London, and joined Magnum Photos in the 1970s, an organization Rai remains a part of today.
Rai’s photo essays and work have appeared in leading publications worldwide for decades, and Rai has published more than 60 photography books on different themes in India.
In 2012, Raghu Rai and his son, Nitin Rai, founded the Raghu Rai Center for Photography, which shares Rai’s 50 years of photographic expertise with the next generations of photographers.
RPS Award for Photojournalism — Amak Mahmoodian
Multidisciplinary artist and educator Amak Mahmoodian is this year’s recipient of the RPS Award for Photojournalism. She started her career as a research-based photographer in Iran in 2003 and moved to the United Kingdom in 2010, unable to return to her homeland.
Mahmoodian’s work often intersects between conceptual photography and documentary work, and routinely includes text, video, drawings, and sound alongside photographs.
RPS Progress Medal in the Science of Photography — David Malin
In 1957, when he was just 15 years old, David Malin began his working life. He was interested in chemistry and science, so he started working at a lab in Manchester, U.K., making pesticides. Rachel Caron’s influential 1962 book, Silent Spring, put an end to this particular brand of chemistry. Malin then moved to pigments and dyes, where he used specialized photographic methods to learn more about them. It is here that Malin began developing his own unique photographic processes and creating images of chemicals for the sake of art.
Malin progressed up the ranks but eventually hit a wall due to his lack of high-level formal education. Malin began searching for new opportunities and found an advertisement for a scientific photographer in an issue of Nature. The job was to operate a telescope in the Australian Outback. Malin took the job and moved his family to Australia.
Malin’s enterprising spirit and scientific acumen were soon on full display as he invented ways to amplify data on astronomical photographic plates, revealing that the smudges were, in fact, distant galaxies. One of these galaxies was named “Malin-1” and remains the largest known spiral galaxy.
Malin developed additional methods to recover faint data and devised a technique for creating true-color astronomical images, a significant breakthrough that spurred a surge in scientific research and publications.
When chemical photography gave way to digital, Malin retired and began traveling the world.
More From the Royal Photographic Society Awards 2025
There are many more recipients in the Royal Photographic Society Awards 2025, including for achievements in the art of the moving image, contributions to the science and art of photography, scientific imaging, imaging science, photography education, and more. The complete list of all award winners and this year’s class of RPS Honorary Fellows is available on the Royal Photographic Society’s website.
Image credits: Royal Photographic Society. Individual photographers are credited in the captions.
