Hasselblad has announced the seven photographers who will carry the title of Hasselblad Master for 2026, closing out a competition cycle that drew more than 108,000 submissions from 160 countries and regions. The winners were drawn from a shortlist of 70 finalists across seven categories: Landscape, Architecture, Portrait, Art, Street, Wildlife, and the open-format Project//21, making this edition one of the most competitive in the program’s history.
Now regarded as one of photography’s most prestigious professional accolades, the Hasselblad Masters competition exists to spotlight technical command paired with a distinct point of view, bringing together both established names and photographers earlier in their careers. This year’s field was narrowed by the Hasselblad Masters Grand Jury, with public voting factored into the broader judging process before a single winner was named in each category.
Kalle Sanner, Executive Director of the Hasselblad Foundation and chair of the Grand Jury, noted that the strongest entries this year shared a particular quality: they did not simply document a subject but actively built meaning around it. The most successful images, he observed, worked on more than one register at once, immediately readable, yet not fully resolved on a first look, continuing to reveal themselves the longer a viewer stayed with them. What tied the eventual winners together, in his view, was a recognition that a photograph’s strength often lies less in what it shows outright than in what it leaves unsaid.
Each of the seven Masters will receive a 100-megapixel Hasselblad medium-format camera, two XCD lenses, and a EUR 5,000 creative fund. Beyond the hardware, they join a standing community of past Masters, will collaborate with Hasselblad on a future project, and will see their winning work published in the commemorative Hasselblad Masters book and across the brand’s global platforms.
Art: Yudha Kusuma Putera, Waste Colonialism (Sapi-Sapi Piyungan), Indonesia
Putera’s practice is built on close observation of everyday life, with a particular interest in the social frictions that sit just beneath the surface of ordinary scenes. His winning series extends a broader project on how wealthier nations offload waste onto developing economies, a pattern that repeats in miniature within cities themselves, where landfills are pushed to the margins and kept out of public view.
The images were made at the Piyungan landfill outside Yogyakarta, where the city’s refuse is sifted by scavengers and grazed by cattle, the animals’ presence slowly forming what amounts to a second hill of trash. Putera photographed the cows from behind, packed together, their bodies echoing the contours of the waste piled around them. The series stops short of pointing fingers, instead asking viewers to sit with the volume of what is discarded and consider where that trajectory leads.
Sanner praised the work for its deceptive simplicity, noting that although the images read as direct on first glance, they resist easy conclusions and generate a low hum of unease that holds a viewer’s attention, visually striking while staying intellectually unresolved.
Architecture: Kevin Boyle, DaySleeper | Movieland, Canada
Boyle’s photographic life was shaped by the wide horizons and tight social bonds of the Canadian prairies. A return home following his father’s death brought him face to face with shuttered gathering spaces, town halls, theatres, and other community fixtures left empty. That homecoming set him on a decade-long project documenting the abandoned architecture of small North American communities.
His winning series is built from photographic montages: individual sections of each structure are lit separately with handheld flashlights, then composited in post-production into a single luminous “portrait” of the building. The technique gives these vacated rooms an almost spectral glow, transforming them into emblems of the community life they once housed.
Sonia Jeunet of Magnum Photos pointed to the deliberate absence of people in the frame as the work’s engine, arguing that the emptiness pulls viewers back toward an imagined past when these rooms were filled with neighbors gathered for an evening’s entertainment, a prompt to reconsider the small venues that once anchored community life.
Portrait: Svetlana Jovanovic, Otherness, The Netherlands
Trained in psychology, Jovanovic approaches portraiture through a long-standing fascination with identity: how people experience the world, build a sense of self, and come to see themselves reflected in others’ eyes. Her aesthetic merges fine-art portraiture with a belief that concept and visual beauty are not separable, each sharpens the other.
The winning series, part of her ongoing project Otherness, turns to identical twins, examining the pull between a shared identity and an individual presence. The work centers on what distinguishes twins over time, the small, accumulating differences that let each person’s character surface from within a nominally shared image. Each sitting becomes a collaboration shaped jointly by the dynamic between the twins and Jovanovic’s own framing, asking viewers to consider how identity is formed both against and through another person.
RongRong of the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre highlighted the series’ precise handling of light and composition in service of mirroring and duality, noting that whether the frame holds two halves of one face or the closeness between two people, the work surfaces emotional nuance with restraint.
Landscape: Rohan Reilly, Ephemeral Visions, Ireland
Reilly approaches image-making with a composer’s discipline, paring scenes down to texture, tone, and stillness. His long-exposure technique renders moving water and shifting sky as smooth, silk-like surfaces, while generous negative space and muted saturation give the work a meditative quality that pushes past straightforward documentation. Getting there requires patience: tracking weather patterns, returning to the same site across seasons, and waiting for conditions that can only be encountered, never staged.
The winning series centers on a line of poplar trees planted along Italy’s River Po (trees originally intended as flood barriers) now standing submerged in still water under soft, diffused light. A functional, working landscape is transformed into something closer to a dream image, allowing Reilly’s vision to fully take shape: nature reduced to its essentials, with time appearing to pause.
Zack Hatfield of Aperture observed that a row of poplars could easily have made for a flat subject, but that these photographs instead become near-hypnotic through repetition, building something expansive out of apparent sameness.
Project//21: Panitbhand Paribatra Na Ayudhya, Dwellers of the Night, Thailand
A young underwater photographer and diver from Thailand, Paribatra Na Ayudhya builds his work around a quiet, sustained attention to the ocean: its life, its vulnerability, and the ecosystems that keep it functioning, with the hope that what he frames will not slip from memory.
His winning series was shot in the waters off Anilao in the Philippines, where pelagic and larval marine creatures rise nightly from the depths to feed under cover of darkness. Working with slow shutter speeds to register the fluid motion of his subjects, and carefully selected colored lighting to bring out their form, he reveals a world rarely seen by most divers. A ribbon eel, lit with a diffused warm glow that suggests a sunset behind it, is framed almost as royalty of the night. Some of the creatures he photographs spend their entire lives adrift in open water, underscoring how fragile this pelagic ecosystem really is.
Alex Pollack of National Geographic described being drawn to the understated strangeness of these creatures, noting that against a black background they take on an otherworldly quality, and that the stripped-back presentation lets their natural oddness carry the image without distraction.
Street: Gosse Bouma, Morning Ritual, The Netherlands
Bouma’s photography is animated by a single, consistent aim: to carve out moments of stillness within a world that rarely stops moving. His visual signature sits at the meeting point of urban geometry and weather, pairing architecture’s hard edges against the softer, unpredictable textures of fog, rain, and light. Every frame is built to invite a pause, however brief, amid the noise of daily life.
His winning series, shot across the Netherlands, turns to the street market as its subject, a setting where people of every age and background cross paths, exchange a few words, and move on. In capturing these brief, unforced encounters, Bouma preserves a kind of everyday connection that feels increasingly scarce.
Aya Musa, Senior Curator at Foam, credited Bouma with a sharp command of atmosphere, scale, and timing, describing how the small lit market stalls set against vast blue urban space create images that read as both intimate and monumental, with color functioning structurally rather than decoratively, and mist, artificial light, and architecture cohering into a single visual world.
Wildlife: Alfred Minnaar, The Forest I Roam, South Africa
Minnaar’s process begins with observation and patience, prioritizing an understanding of a subject’s behavior and environment over simple documentation. More than a decade of fieldwork around the world has turned what began as a traveler’s curiosity into a conservation-driven practice, using fleeting deep-sea and wildlife moments to argue for the planet’s preservation.
His winning images, centered on a small goby living among coral, were built to unsettle a viewer’s sense of scale. Rather than isolating the fish as the sole subject, Minnaar uses it as a reference point within a much larger environment, letting the surrounding reef itself emerge as the real subject and inviting viewers to imagine the scene from the vantage point of one of its smallest residents.
Pollack noted the immediate pull of the palette’s vibrancy, along with the way the small fish are framed within their surroundings to produce a sense of scale that reads almost as landscape, a careful balance between fine detail and composition, with the micro subjects holding their own against a larger, semi-abstracted backdrop.
The Grand Jury
This year’s Hasselblad Masters Grand Jury comprised Kalle Sanner (Hasselblad Foundation), Alex Pollack (National Geographic), Aya Musa (Foam), Paul Lachenauer (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Rebecca Swift (Getty Images), RongRong (Three Shadows Photography Art Centre), Sonia Jeunet (Magnum Photos), and Zack Hatfield (Aperture).