Photography has always existed at the intersection of invention and imagination. Since its founding in 1853—at a moment when the medium itself was still finding its chemical and conceptual footing—the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) has served as a custodian of that fragile balance. The announcement of the RPS Photography Awards 2025, the world’s longest-running photography prize, feels less like an awards ceremony and more like a cartography of contemporary vision: a map of how photography now thinks, feels, and sees.

This year’s laureates span cameraless experimentation, self-reflexive portraiture, and the outer limits of astronomical observation. Together, they form a portrait of a medium that refuses to settle into a single definition.

A Medal Without a Camera: Susan Derges and the Poetics of Light

The RPS Centenary Medal, the Society’s most prestigious honor, has been awarded to Susan Derges for her outstanding contribution to the art of photography. Derges’ work challenges one of photography’s most persistent assumptions: that a camera is essential.

Working directly with light-sensitive materials, Derges creates images by placing natural elements—water, plants, river sediments—onto photographic paper and exposing them to light. The result is neither document nor abstraction, but something closer to an event. Her river photograms, in particular, read like visual fossils: precise imprints of flowing water captured at the threshold between movement and stillness.

Derges’ practice situates photography within the rhythms of the natural world. Rather than framing nature from a distance, she allows it to inscribe itself onto the image surface. In doing so, she reclaims photography as a tactile, almost ritualistic process—one that echoes its 19th-century origins while remaining unmistakably contemporary.

Staging Identity: Omar Victor Diop and the Politics of the Portrait

Awarded the RPS Award for Achievement in the Art of Photography, Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop embodies a radically different trajectory. Beginning his career in landscape photography, Diop later moved into fashion before arriving at the richly layered fine-art portraiture for which he is now known.

Diop frequently places himself at the center of his images, staging meticulously composed self-portraits that reference African history, global power structures, and the aesthetics of luxury imagery. His photographs are saturated with symbolism—props, costumes, and gestures operate as visual footnotes, guiding viewers through narratives of identity, migration, and representation.

By borrowing the visual language of fashion and editorial photography, Diop subverts it from within. The polished surface becomes a site of critique, where beauty and politics coexist in uneasy but compelling balance.

Beyond the Human Eye: David Malin and the Science of Seeing

If Derges turns photography inward and Diop turns it toward the self, David Malin pushes the medium outward—far beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Recipient of the RPS Progress Medal in the Science of Photography, Malin is celebrated for his pioneering techniques in astronomical imaging.

Malin’s innovations have enabled unprecedented levels of detail in photographs of deep space. His contributions are so significant that the Malin 1 galaxy, the largest known spiral galaxy, bears his name. These images are not merely scientific data; they are acts of translation, converting invisible wavelengths into colors and forms the human eye can comprehend.

In Malin’s work, photography becomes a bridge between empirical research and aesthetic wonder, reminding us that scientific imaging can carry profound emotional and philosophical weight.

Three Pillars, One Medium

Three Pillars, One Medium

The Royal Photographic Society structures its awards across three pillars:

• The Art of Photography and Moving Image
• The Science of Photography and Moving Image
• The Knowledge and Understanding of Photography and Moving Image

The 2025 recipients exemplify how porous these categories have become. Art borrows from science; science depends on visual culture; knowledge emerges from both.

As RPS President Simon Hill, CPhot HonFRPS, observed:

This year’s awardees reflect the extraordinary breadth of photography and moving image today; from those pushing artistic and scientific boundaries to those educating, publishing, and volunteering in ways that strengthen and sustain our community.

– As RPS President Simon Hill, CPhot HonFRPS, observed.

His words underscore a crucial truth: photography’s future lies not in specialization, but in dialogue.

Photography as a Living Language

From Susan Derges’ cameraless encounters with nature to Omar Victor Diop’s performative interrogations of identity, and David Malin’s cosmic revelations, the RPS Awards 2025 affirm photography as a living, evolving language. It speaks in silver salts and digital sensors, in staged tableaux and distant galaxies, in silence and spectacle alike.

The Royal Photographic Society continues its 170-year mission not by preserving photography in amber, but by recognizing those who stretch it—conceptually, technically, and ethically—into new forms of understanding. In doing so, it reminds us that photography is not merely about capturing the world, but about learning how to see it again.