Form Photo Award Winners

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FORM PHOTO AWARD
2025 WINNERS

5 winners of this year’s annual competition, dedicated to contemporary photography on an open topic! The winning work will be showcased in a powerful exhibition during Miami Art Week at Scope Art Fair

Photo © Nicolas Reinhart

We are thrilled to announce the winners of the Form Photo Award 2025. This year, the standard of work is exceptionally high, reflecting the incredible talent and creativity of contemporary photographers from around the world. Each longlisted artist brings a unique perspective, a fresh aesthetic, and thought-provoking ideas that challenge and inspire.
The Form Photo Award, supported by Scope Miami Beach 2025, Picter, Photo Basel, and Form Magazine, is dedicated to discovering emerging voices in photography. It aims to foster global dialogue, intellectual exchange, and cross-cultural solidarity within the art community. Every submission represents a new vision, a story waiting to be shared, and the longlist is a testament to the vibrancy and diversity of contemporary photography today.

The top five winners will have their projects exhibited at the SCOPE Art Fair in December 2025, during Miami Art Week, where they will be seen by over 80,000 visitors.

Form Photo Award 2025 Winners

Lena Sazhenkova
Halimotu Shokunbi

Nicolas Reinhart
Zana Briski

Iryna Vozniak

Lena Sazhenkova
Halimotu Shokunbi
Nicolas Reinhart
Zana Briski
Iryna Vozniak

Lena Sazhenkova

This project explores ephemeral, incidental objects that have lost their functional purpose — street debris, packaging fragments, and other remnants of everyday life. Through photography and scanning, I transform these fragile traces of the everyday into abstract, sculptural forms, exploring themes of connection, temporal space, and the sense of belonging. Due to frequent relocations, I can no longer accumulate physical objects — things that once became familiar "artifacts" of my past. By preserving them in digital form, I began creating a temporary archive: a personal collection assembled not for practicality, but as a way of searching for meaning, establishing a connection with a new place, and regaining a sense of belonging. These fragments become a language through which I engage with the space I now inhabit.

Lena Sazhenkova is a visual artist and photographer currently based in Limassol, Cyprus. Her practice explores themes of memory, adaptation, and belonging through everyday objects and their metaphorical potential. Her work focuses on the mutability of perception and the search for new meaning in seemingly incidental things. Through photography and experimental processes, she treats space as a site of elusive stability and personal narrative.

Halimotu Shokunbi

If I Were a Woman is a visual narrative that merges photography, poetry, and film to explore and reclaim womanhood from the inside out. Told in five symbolic chapters—Innocence, Beauty, Submission, Desire, and Power—the story confronts the roles women are expected to perform, and reimagines them through a lens of strength, autonomy, and truth. The photo series, paired with a spoken-word short film, brings these themes to life with striking imagery and raw language. Each frame captures a version of womanhood imposed by societal norms—silent, flawless, desirable, obedient—and then shatters it. As the visuals unfold, the voice grows louder, fiercer, reclaiming every label, every scar, every stereotype. This is not just about what it looks like to be a woman, it’s about what it feels like to take that definition back. If I Were a Woman is a declaration. A disruption. A reclamation of the body, the voice, and the narrative.

Halimotu Sadia Shokunbi is a first-generation American model, photographer, creative producer, and storyteller born in Houston, Texas, to Nigerian parents and now based in New York. Her practice centers on documenting culture, community, and identity, grounded in the belief that photography is a form of cultural preservation.
She is the co-founder of TwoSixEight Studios, a creative agency dedicated to creating intentional spaces for immigrant and first-generation artists through collaborative projects, community events, and visual campaigns. In addition to photography, she works as an assistant director, producer, and published model, with features in campaigns for Tom Ford, Dior, and Bobbi Brown.
In 2024, she toured with Afrobeats star Rema to document his homecoming in Benin, debuted Double Identities—her first self-portrait series commissioned by Nike NYC and MONAD.

Nicolas Reinhart

Official documents suggest that this material was collected to prevent making the same mistakes in the future, while handwritten notes by technicians foreshadow a fascination with the poetic quality of these mistakes. Parts of this collection remain in the archive of the former film factory, hitherto unseen. Failed Film is centered around fundamental questions about photographic failure, archives and their function and use in contemporary art practice. A core interest of the project is the examination of Wolfen’s "failed film" in regard to its visual potential. Using actual film material from the archive, the artist creates analog chromogenic and silver gelatin prints as physical interpretations of these mistakes.

Nicolas Reinhart is an artist based in Halle (Saale), Germany. He studied Photography at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst / Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and graduated with a diploma in Fine Arts in 2025. A central aspect of his artistic practice is the investigation of the photographic medium and its traces. His work has been shown and awarded internationally, he is a winner of the international competition Restart by the Lithuanian Photographers Association, he received an Honorable Mention at the Vintage Photo Festival (2022) and was a finalist in the international BarTur Photo Student Award (2022), the Felix Schoeller Photo Award "Best Work by an Emerging Photographer" (2023) and the Carte Blanche programme by Paris Photo (2024). In 2022, he was named one of the New Talents by the Photographic Exploration Project. He presented his first institutional solo show "Pouring Tears & Pucker Grains: A History of Photographic Failure" at Prospekto Galerija in Vilnius, Lithuania (2023/2024) with the support of an exhibition grant by ifa — Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen. Previous group exhibitions, among others at Alvesta konsthall (SWE), Heidelberger Kunstverein (DE), PORT25 — Space for Contemporary Art (DE), Pinakothek der Moderne (DE), 254Forest, Brussels (BEL) the Helsinki Darkroom Festival at The Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki (FIN). Publications and artist features include F-Stop Magazine, maybe. magazine for analog photography and PHOTONEWS.

Zana Briski

By preserving them in digital form, I began creating a temporary archive: a personal collection assembled not for practicality, but as a way of searching for meaning, establishing a connection with a new place, and regaining a sense of belonging. These fragments become a language through which I engage with the space I now inhabit.

Zana Briski is an Academy Award-winning director and photographic artist who is enraptured by the Earth and her creatures. She spent 10 years on her project in the brothels of Kolkata where she photographed, filmed and taught photography to the children of prostitutes. Her film BORN INTO BROTHELS, won an Academy Award, an Emmy and 33 other awards. She received fellowships from the Open Society Institute, the Alicia Patterson Foundation, a World Press Photo Foundation First Prize, the Howard Chapnick Grant and the Lucie Humanitarian Award. Zana founded Kids with Cameras, a non-profit teaching photography to marginalized children around the world. Zana’s current project, REVERENCE, is an exhibit of large-scale photographic artworks of insects, a film and music, housed in a traveling museum. REVERENCE will travel to city parks around the world, challenging our deeply held fear of otherness and encouraging us to find a harmonious way to live with other species on Earth. Since 2015, Zana has collaborated with animals in the wild to make unique life-sized photograms — photographic prints made without a camera. This has never been achieved before in the history of the photographic process. Her project, Night Wild — Photograms of Animals Made in the Wild, will premiere at The Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 2028.

Iryna Vozniak

Art on Paper: The Body of Form explores the material, conceptual, and emotional possibilities of paper. In this series, paper becomes sculptural: folded, bent, and layered into forms that act like architectural fragments, photographed as final works. The intuitive process captures movement and traces of thought, blurring the line between sculpture and photography. Beyond the material, the series reflects potential—hidden at first, revealed gradually through attention, focus, and interaction with both paper and self.

Iryna Vozniak is a Kyiv-based photographer and visual artist. She studied at the Kyiv School of Photography. Her work explores architectural forms, spatial dynamics, and the transformation of simple materials into visual expressions, blending abstraction with structure. Vozniak has won international awards—including the International Photo Awards, Prix de la Photographie Paris, and Tokyo International Foto Awards—and exhibited in Kyiv, Paris, Amsterdam, Budapest, Glasgow, and Athens. Her work has also been featured in Fresh Eyes 2024 Volume II.

Form Photo Award 2025 Jury

Darius Himes

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International Head of Photographs at Christie's Darius Himes oversees a global team in three locations producing auctions, exhibitions and catalogues as International Head of Photographs at Christie's. Prior to joining Christie’s in Fall 2014, Himes was director of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco from 2011–2014. In 2007 he co-founded Radius Books, a non-profit publisher of books on photography and the visual arts. While working with artists such as John McCracken and Lee Friedlander, he is most proud of publishing first monographs for over a dozen emerging artists.
Hayley Smith

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Director of SCOPE Art Show and Sotheby’s Institute of Art alumna, leads the premier platform for international emerging contemporary art and multi-disciplinary creative programming. Hayley Smith is a prominent figure in the contemporary art world, best known for her role as the Director of SCOPE Art Show, a leading global platform for emerging contemporary art. Under her leadership, SCOPE has continued to expand its reach, showcasing a diverse array of artists and galleries from around the world. Her work emphasizes inclusivity, innovation, and the support of emerging talent
Sven Eisenhut-Hug

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Co-Founder and Founding Co-Director of Art Salon Zürich, and the Director and Co-Founder of photo basel GmbH—Switzerland's first international art fair dedicated exclusively to photography. Held annually during Art Basel week, photo basel features approximately 40 international galleries showcasing a wide range of photographic practices and artists. Under Eisenhut-Hug’s leadership, the fair has successfully expanded to Berlin and Miami, becoming a pivotal event on the international art calendar. Widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in photography
Virginia Damtsa

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Co- founded iconic gallery Riflemaker, counts Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran and Michael Seresin, cinematographer of Harry Potter, amongst her collectors. Annie Lennox has also been a long-standing enthusiast of the gallery’s representation of visionary powerful artists. Virginia Damtsa is also working with musician Peter Gabriel on a collaboration of art and music for his new i/o album, which features works by prominent artists such as Ai Weiwei, Nick Cave, Cornelia Parker, Olafur Eliasson, Annette Messager, Tim Shaw, David Spriggs, and others.
Dimitri Bogachuk

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Founder of Form. Gallery / Publishing / Magazine - co-founder of Photo Kyiv Fair, artist and curator he graduated from the National Academy of Culture and Arts in Kyiv, where he majored in art expertise. Numerous of photography educational programs he share his experience to audience and create a powerful base and ecosystem for young talented wave of young photographers - some of them now established photographers exhibited in galleries, museums, fairs around the world, including Fotografiska and Center Pompidou, Paris.