We are thrilled to announce the winners of the Form Photo Award x photobasel 2026. 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 top five winners will have their projects exhibited at the photobasel in June 2026, during Art Basel Week, where they will be seen by thouthands of visitors.

The Form Photo Award, supported by photobasel, Picter, 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 winner represents a new vision.

We Knew the World in Fragments of Color reflects on Victoria Ruiz’s experience of being born in Venezuela during political turmoil and leaving her native country for the United States at a young age. Utilising handcrafted full-body suits — drawing from Latin American cultural symbolism, spirituality, and a strong chromatic language — the artist stages a sequence of photographs in which the subjects convey meaning against a coloured backdrop. Across this series, she represents successive stages of Venezuela’s recent reality, each carrying its distinct historical and emotional weight. Meanwhile, through performative self-representation, her internal world unfolds as one shaped by fragmentation and tension resulting from displacement. The work traces her attempt to reconstruct the scattered fragments of her passage across geographies and states of being, shaped by nostalgia and by the persistent scrutiny placed upon migrant identity — particularly that of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States. Meaning is embedded through richly layered symbols, from floral choices and costume details to a palette alive with colour and shadow. Dreamlike imagery unfolds through the perspective of a child suspended between worlds, capturing the quiet shifts of hope and uncertainty that accompany the experience of immigration; a perspective in which everything feels familiar and strange at once. In this sense, memory is reimagined as fractured yet luminous: like shards of tinted glass refracting identity, resilience, and faith. The work is a meditation on fragmentation as a condition of migration that does not seek coherence but rather embraces multiplicity, suggesting that belonging is not recovered but continually assembled. Through a kaleidoscope of memory, displacement, and spirituality, Ruiz reflects on how life between worlds reshapes perception, and colour itself becomes a language of survival and belonging.

Valentin Fougeray subverts photography’s relationship with time by showing not the object of memory, but its failure. Working with the impossible nature of remembrance, his series captures blurred, trembling forms, as if the lens had failed to seize a memory and grasped only the space left by its disappearance. These fields of color resemble black holes generated by failing memory. Far from romanticizing oblivion, the work interrogates the precise moment a memory vanishes, overturning photography’s historical role as an inventory of beings and things. Here, stillness gives way to a frenzied pursuit of what is already gone. For Valentin, photography is not a receptacle but an evocation. The subject is absent; absence itself becomes the image. This indistinction allows emotional appropriation: abstract in appearance, the images evoke familiar sensations or landscapes; childhood beaches, first celebrations, ocean depths, sunlit calanques, salt and sand on skin. Materiality plays a central role in enabling this experience. The act of tearing is essential to the work. Visually, it echoes geological forms; fractures, cliffs, chasms; mobilizing a collective memory of territory. Yet these familiar spaces are haunted by forgetting, confronting us with what we may have lost. Open to the white of the paper, the tear symbolizes memory’s fragility while revealing the work’s making: scars, sutures, tape. This visible bricolage suggests the strategies we deploy to resist oblivion. Through symbolic destruction, each photograph becomes unique and retains its aura. The exposed paper invites touch, engaging the body’s memory rather than the eye alone. The tearing concentrates time into a single gesture, recalling photography’s anchoring in the instant; where the image appears or disappears forever. This brief moment confronts our usual conception of memory as long-term, revealing instead the discreet instant in which we cease to remember. What survives the tear is what escapes oblivion.

An ongoing collection comprised of self-portraits since 2018. Each anthropocentric photograph states a story, revealing the different aspects of the individual’s personality and subjective identity. The idea of the project coincides with the syntactic oddity of Rimbaud 's famous phrase "Je est un autre" - I is another, as through introspection we manage to "objectify" ourselves by experiencing our "being" as something detached from us. The process of placing the self in the story and identity of another personality ("persona") is fascinating and at the same time revealing, as each personality acquires its own entity, without necessarily being identified with elements of the artist's own personality. The intense presence of the directorial element combined with the use of creative props, make up, and vintage clothing enhance the narration and dramatic perspective of the images.

Foteini Zaglara is a {self-}portrait photographer born in 1995 in Athens, Greece. She studied at the University of Ioannina, in the Department of Early Childhood Education.Her work explores themes of fantasy and surrealism, using photography as a storytelling medium to delve into emotions, identity, and social issues. She has received recognition in numerous international photography competitions and was included in the 30 Under 30 Women Photographers list, and her work has been exhibited worldwide.

In Ripples in the Pond, the artist undertakes a nuanced exploration of Makharda, a peripheral township on the outskirts of Kolkata, West Bengal. Situated within a landscape marked by over twenty tranquil ponds, Makharda emerges not merely as a geographic locale but as a site of complex temporal and socio-cultural convergence. Through a process-based photographic inquiry, the artist renders visible the entanglements between memory, modernity, and the slow violence of infrastructural encroachment. The project is grounded in a personal act of return, both physical and affective, evoking the fictional sensibilities of 'Malgudi Days' an Indian tv series from the 80's, which serve here not simply as nostalgic reference, but as an aesthetic framework through which to understand the semi-rural imaginary. The ponds, recurrent throughout the body of work, function symbolically and formally as reflective agents, at once literal bodies of water and metaphoric surfaces that refract the tensions between past and present, fantasy and reality, the rural and the emergent urban. This duality is further accentuated in the artist’s methodological gesture: post-journey, the photographs are subjected to an extended process of scanning, not as a means of reproduction but as a conceptual device. The scanner becomes an apparatus of mediation, standing in for the pond itself, its beam echoing the slow scan of the eye across a reflective surface. By physically manipulating the photographic prints during the scanning process, the artist introduces visual rupture, ripples, blurs, and distortions, that function as aesthetic metaphors for temporal disturbance and spatial instability.

Bharat Sikka was born and raised in India, where he began his photographic practice before studying at the Parsons School of Design, NY. Sikka’s long-term photographic projects have centered on the cultural residues and societal transformations within India, rendered with the visual language and material forms of contemporary art photography. His work subtly speaks to India’s history and regionality (of Kashmir, in Where the Flowers Still Grow), premiered at Kochi Biennale 2017, the tide of globalization (Matter) exhibited at Unseen, and masculinity (Indian Men) first showed at Artist Space, NY 2003. For Unseen 2019, Sikka created an installation version of The Sapper - his detailed and layered portrayal of his father. Sikka brought together multiple vantage points; from the remote landscapes his father inhabits and maintains to subtle still-life observations of his habits and routines. His recent work Coming Through In Waves was exhibited at Paris Photo 2022. This project made inroads and small steps in his complex navigation of youth, gender, and sexuality and looks to preserve these independent voices through the medium of photography. Bharat’s and his father’s multi-layered photographic project "The Sapper” was exhibited at Post Books, Tokyo and the book was nominated for Paris photobook award 2023. Bharat Sikka resides in New Delhi, India, and continues his photographic practices.

This project, carried out in the spring and fall of 2025 along the U.S.-Mexico border,particularly in Arizona, aims to document the increasingly terrifying reality of the current administration's immigration policy. When fear prevails and people's survival depends on concealing their identity — including undocumented immigrants, naturalized citizens, and even American citizens — it's crucial to find a way to make them visible while preserving their anonymity. The challenge is to show without showing, by inventing a new form of portraiture that conceals the face. While collecting material evidence abandoned by migrants crossing the border in the Sonoran Desert — backpacks containing all their belongings, left behind when they meet up with "coyotes", traces of their journey, and evidence of the hardships these people endure — the composite image gradually took shape. These photomontages, documenting the link between the border wall, the objects used during the crossing, and the people encountered, reveal new characters: metamorphs, or metamorphosis. While ensuring the safety of those photographed, this concept conveys the necessity of camouflage and anonymity, and the transformations that the fear of disappearance — whether by arrest or abduction and internment in detention camps, or by death* — provokes in an entire population. The support of organizations and associations working in Arizona was invaluable in persuading people in grave danger — often hiding in their homes — to participate in this project. I would like to thank them all for placing exceptional trust in me. *As of January 2026, 4,449 migrants have died while crossing the Arizona Sonoran Desert. Many more haven't been found. For all of 2025, 113 migrants deaths were reported in Arizona alone. *The title of the serie is taken from a tattoo on the arm of one of the people photographed.

Scarlett Coten is a French photographer known for her exploration of themes of identity, gender, and intimacy through intimate portraits that challenge stereotypes and cultural expectations. Her artistic practice favors an immersive, documentary approach, enriched by a fictional dimension inspired by cinema, which bypasses the codes of the genre, notably through staging and precisely selecting natural settings. Coten uses a distinctive style, blending vivid colors and thoughtful compositions to create aesthetically captivating and deeply meaningful images. Her body of work reflects a profound connection between the artist and her subjects, inviting viewers to reflect on the complexities of identity and social dynamics. Drawing from her life experiences, as a woman in society and as an artist, the photographer takes a unique gaze on issues that are both personal and universal, such as art, power, the traditional divide between author and subject, the real and the imaginary. A winner of the 2024 Support for contemporary documentary photography from the Cnap, and of the Grande Commande 2022 from the Ministry of Culture, Coten has received prestigious honors, including the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2016, the Critical Mass TOP 50 in 2018, and Photography Now 21 from the CPW at Woodstock. Coten's impactful creations are showcased in French public collections and international exhibitions, establishing her as a luminary in the realm of contemporary photography.

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