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.

The photographs are a part of a project which I call "Still lifes". Spring 2020 I started the projekt and it is still ongoing. The overall goal with the photographs is composition, light and shadows, a whole gray scale and the material representation. I am photographing with a 4"x5" camera and black-and-white sheet film. The negatives are then digitized and the work continues digitally.

Born 1961 in Oldenburg, Tyskland -Moved to Sweden for studies at the School of Photography University of Gothenburg 1985-88 -Living in Linköping, Sweden -Decades of photographing as a amateur -Have partcipated in Group Exhibitions and two Separate Exhibitions in Sweden -Published photographs in a swedish photo magazine -Have received two scholarships from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee

Zibaya works with visual performance, experimental video work, experimental painting, sculptural, installation and photography. This also includes bodies and found objects to create contrast of realities.
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Khanya’s practice attempts to bring to light subjects often ignored, drawing on his personal relationship with themes of the discarded to create multidisciplinary works that challenge viewers to confront what is usually left unseen. 
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Through performance-based visual art, he invites people to see themselves reflected in what he terms “euphemisms of life.” By manipulating materials associated with the everyday violence of human behavior, he exposes these distortions, making visible the acts of those who perpetuate them.
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Khanya has a keen interest in people reforming their relationships with the mundane. His work reflects an ongoing fascination with the fluid, often unexamined ways in which people both shape and are shaped by systems. This dynamic fuels his drive to create in innovative ways, bringing to light the persistent, often unseen patterns that linger within the familiar.
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His previous group exhibitions include, The Portrait Show, Through The Lens Collective, Johannesburg, 2023; Got Junk GoldFingers, The Fourth Gallery, Cape Town, 2023; Post Fair Blues, The Fourth Gallery, Cape Town, 2023; The Wildest Most Beautiful Ugly, Too Tired Project, Digital, 2023, Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2025, Vela Projects and LagosPhoto Biennial, Nigeria, 2025. 

Khanya matriculated from Lakehaven Secondary in Durban, South Africa in 2014. He went on to study at City Varsity in Johannesburg for an Acting in Camera Certificate in 2015. He then went to the Market Theatre Laboratory, Johannesburg, for Acting, Writing, Directing between 2018 -2021. He has been in residence at Through The LensCollective, Johannesburg, 2023 - 2024, DAC on Dorp, 2024 and The 3rd Space Residency, 2025. 
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For his work, he has been recognised by the National Art Festival Student Theatre Awards for Best Actor(s) and Best Writer(s) Award, 2019; Where The Leaves Fall Magazine, London, Winner, 2023; Photo Tool 10:10, Photography Presentation Workshop, 2023 ; LagosPhoto Portfolio Review, 2023; CAP PRIZE 2024, Shortlisted; Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize,Top 8 Finalists 2024 and Void x Futures Photography 2025 shortlist.
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Zibaya’s experience in acting, directing and writing include, Vodacom World, Industrial Theatre Show, Kyalami, 2019; Le Journal, Market Theatre Laboratory,Johannesburg, 2019; Indulge Your Senses, Market Theatre Laboratory, Johannesburg, 2019; How to Crack a Coconut, Market Theatre Laboratory, Johannesburg, 2018; Babylon Beyond Borders, Market Theatre Laboratory, Johannesburg, 2018; Actors Looking for Directors, Market Theatre Laboratory, Johannesburg, 2018 ; Words Fail, Market Theatre Laboratory, Johannesburg, 2019.

I Am Not Like Me. Beauty shapes the world we live in and has influenced how we see ourselves and others for as long as we’ve existed. 'I am not like me' explores the body as a stage for expression. It does not aim to condemn, but to understand what our appearances reveal about us: it’s not about judgment, being right or wrong, beautiful or not. It’s about the privilege of choice – the possibility of telling a story through one’s own body. It‘s about how people present themselves in moments when they feel most at ease, as if they’ve arrived in the version of themselves they want to live right now. 'I am not like me' is not a contradiction, but an embrace of transformation. It reminds us that identity is not fixed, but fluid, a process of becoming. The series captures how people shape identity through appearance, designing themselves using makeup, cosmetic procedures, fitness, or tattoos. Bodily modification can be a form of liberation, but also of painful conformity. In the moment of being photographed, those portrayed in this work made a conscious decision: to appear exactly as they want to be seen. Today, the pursuit of a “better self” is shaped by technology and capitalism. Bodies become curated, marketable products – always within societal frameworks, yet driven by personal intention. Beyond this, as a photographer, I participate in shaping the construction of beauty itself. Through composition, light, perspective, and my own female gaze, I do not merely capture identity; I actively construct and define what beauty is or can be. Who gets to define what is beautiful, and at what cost? How much of our appearance is truly self-determined, and how much is shaped by external ideals? This series highlights variety, transformation, performative staging of identities, and the beauty that lies within. It embraces scenarios as unpredictable terrains, imperfection, and emergence, where identity can shift, new narratives take shape, and the privilege of choosing to transform oneself is fully realized.

Lina Czerny (b. 1993) is a freelance photographer based in Berlin. She studied photography at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie (graduated October 2025) and previously earned a Master’s degree in Comparative Arts & Media Studies from VU Amsterdam. Her photographic work engages with social and documentary themes, often uncovering aesthetics and compositions in unexpected contexts. She carefully arranges and selects her subjects to create a distinct visual language. Her photobook I am not like me will be released end of October by Kerber.

Elephant in the Room invites us into a world suspended between two realities. In this body of work, artist Bharat Sikka engages in a critical and experimental dialogue with artificial intelligence, situating his long-standing photographic practice within the evolving terrain of machine perception and interpretation. Rooted in the complexity of contemporary India, the project draws from a personal archive spanning over three decades of the artist’s evolving engagement with the country’s layered identities, contradictions, and transformations. Using generative AI as an instrument for assessment and re-interpretation of his long-term photographic practice, Sikka creates a speculative narrative that oscillates between memory and invention, fact and hallucination. In Elephant in the Room, AI becomes both a mirror and a mediator, an external consciousness that intelligently reflects and uncannily distorts Sikka’s world. The result is a fragmented yet immersive portrait of India as seen through the tension in the ways in which technology absorbs, misreads, and reconstitutes cultural memory. While the narrative remains charged, hovering on the edge of the real and the artificial, Elephant in the Room also becomes a space of personal inquiry that gestures toward broader questions of authorship, representation, and the future of image-making.

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.

Echoes of Resistance explores the connection between the Baltic Partisan movement and the landscapes that served as sanctuary and symbol for its fighters. At its core is a personal search: my great-uncle joined the Partisan resistance in Latvia and was killed for his involvement, yet the details of his life and death remain unknown. His story, passed down in fragments, shapes my approach to these forests as sites of both history and unresolved memory. Although the Partisan movement shaped 20th-century Baltic history, few beyond the region know of it. After World War II, when the Soviet Union reoccupied the Baltics, tens of thousands retreated into the forests to wage a guerrilla war. Known as the “Forest Brothers,” they built bunkers, carried out sabotage missions, and relied on civilians who risked their lives to provide food and shelter. Despite overwhelming odds, brutal reprisals, and mass deportations, they fought for nearly a decade, determined to preserve national identity. For many, the forests were not only refuge but a living symbol of resistance. I use native plant pigments through the 19th-century photographic process of anthotypes to create these images. Colors derived from local flora embed the material of the landscape into each photograph, grounding the work in the environment itself. This process reflects the Partisans’ reliance on the land and positions nature as both witness and participant in their struggle. Through this integration of material and image, the work honors those who lived and died in hiding. Echoes of Resistance moves beyond documentation, inviting viewers to consider what remains when histories are fragmented or lost. These forests hold both presence and absence, carrying traces of lives that cannot be fully recovered. In engaging with them, the work reflects on memory, resistance, and the enduring impact of stories that continue to shape the present.

Krista Svalbonas holds a BFA in Photography and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies. Her work has been exhibited at various prestigious venues, including Paris Photo, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Spartanburg Art Museum in South Carolina, Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston, Klompching Gallery, and ISE Cultural Foundation in New York. Her work is featured in private collections as well as public institutions such as LACMA in Los Angeles, Cesis Art Museum in Latvia, the Gregg Museum of Art and Design in North Carolina, and Woodmere Art Museum and Temple University in Philadelphia. Svalbonas has received several awards, including the Center for Photographic Art Artist Grant (2022), Baumanis Creative Projects Grant (2020), Rhonda Wilson Award (2017), Puffin Foundation Grant (2016), and a Bemis Fellowship (2015). In 2022, Svalbonas had solo exhibitions of her series "Displacement" at the Copenhagen Photography Festival in Denmark, the Tallinn City Museum in Tallinn, Estonia, and the Museum of Textile and Industry in Augsburg, Germany. She currently serves as an associate professor of photography at St. Joseph’s University and resides and works in Philadelphia.

From darkness, light emerges. Since February 2022, Ukraine has been plunged into a brutal war that continues to devastate its cities and landscapes. Across the country, buildings stand gutted, roofs collapsed, walls torn open. Interiors once filled with everyday life are now exposed to the sky, their fragments scattered like the remains of interrupted lives. These ruins are not only traces of destruction. They carry the memory of what once existed there. Behind every shattered wall lies the imprint of human presence: families lived here, children played, ordinary lives unfolded within these spaces. This work approaches these places not as spectacles of ruin, but as sites of memory. What interests me is not death itself, but the lingering presence of life that once inhabited these walls — a quiet trace of intimacy, fragile yet persistent. Through the use of light, the photographs seek to reveal this tension between destruction and survival. Light threads its way through cracks and openings, illuminating fragments that still hold the echo of human presence. Each image becomes an act of witness: a way of saying this was. And within the light that crosses these fractures, another possibility emerges — the fragile promise that one day, life may return.

My name is Yves Lacroix, I am a photographer and I dream of cinema. I was born in France in 1972, but it was images that watched me grow up. Combining documentary and staged photography, my large format tableaux — where natural and artificial light always mix — are in color. They speak of the human condition, of the fractures of this world, using symbolism, analogy and sometimes irony. I photograph what disturbs, while searching for what is beautiful. As a child, I spent hours in front of the television, at my grandmother's side, captivated by the endless horizons of westerns and the universe of American series. From those moments frozen in cathode light was born, no doubt, my passion for images and that American imagination which has never left me. I had begun to think in images without yet knowing it. After studying law, I left that world in 1997 to become a photographer's assistant in Paris, then in New York. Years alongside Dominique Issermann, Patrick Demarchelier and Neil Kirk taught me the discipline of the studio and the demands of light. I then worked for the luxury industry — Yves Saint Laurent, Van Cleef & Arpels, Karl Lagerfeld. My work moves between cinema and reality, between the dreamlike and the documentary. A narrative, humanist universe, where light is the lead character and where places, sets and atmospheres carry as much soul as those who inhabit them.

This body of work explores the unstable relationship between the body, domestic space, and architectural environments, tracing how both physical and psychological boundaries are constructed, inhabited, and ultimately destabilised. Across photography, sculpture, and installation, Dudek develops a visual language in which interiors and bodies become interchangeable—spaces take on fleshy, visceral qualities, while the body itself is abstracted, fragmented, and reconfigured.
Through staged and observed environments, the work examines residues of presence—stains, organic traces, and material discharges—as markers of lived experience, trauma, and transformation. Bathrooms, housing blocks, and interior surfaces are rendered as liminal zones: sites of containment that simultaneously suggest rupture, alienation, and transition. These spaces, typically associated with intimacy and shelter, are reimagined as uncanny landscapes where absence becomes palpable and the boundaries between inside and outside begin to dissolve.
Central to the practice is an investigation of the body as both a physical limit and a psychological constraint. Skin operates as a recurring metaphor—at once protective and permeable—mirrored in the textures of walls, latex, concrete, and synthetic materials. The visual parallels drawn between architectural surfaces and human flesh evoke a sense of claustrophobia, suggesting bodies confined within systems, and systems that echo the vulnerabilities of the body itself.
Referencing ideas of distorted scale, containment, and expansion, the work reflects on the tension between growth and restriction—between the desire to exceed imposed limits and the forces that regulate and structure existence. Mass housing, domestic interiors, and bodily forms are all treated as sites where control, intimacy, and displacement intersect.
By exposing the fractures within both the body and the built environment, Dudek’s work questions notions of belonging, stability, and habitation. It positions the viewer within a suspended state—between presence and absence, interior and exterior, body and space—inviting a contemplation of how we inhabit not only physical structures, but also our own fragile, shifting selves.

“We come from nothing and vanish into nothing” . And yet, in between, we make so much noise. A lingering scent. A fading glimmer. A heartbeat lost to the wind. My camera set out to capture this existence on the edge of the precipice: the delicate tension between fading beauty and the urge to leave a mark. “Into Thin Air” tells the story of a group of circus artists who, despite hardship, continue to chase wonder and vitality — a final spark before the flame fades. Rooted in the nomadic essence of humanity, it reflects our drive to leave traces in our wake. We are bound to move through life, making noise as we pass, searching for meaning in a world that won’t stay still. Even as we lose hold of the familiar, we reach for something greater: memories of splendor, echoes of what once was, propelling us forward. “Into Thin Air” is not just a tribute to a circus on the edge of vanishing. It’s a reflection on life’s impermanence, our need to endure, and our desire to be seen and heard. Suspended between origin and disappearance, we flare — briefly, brightly — before we fade.

My photographic work weaves personal histories, memories, and emotions, blending portraiture and still life into a unified narrative. In my self-portrait series, I honor the strong, inspiring women who have shaped my life. Women in my family have always been strong figures, driven, hard workers, outspoken, inspiring, and pillars of the family. I became a photographer when most of the women I admired and grew up with were no longer in this world. This work balances past and present, desire and memories, creating a conversation between generations of women. In parallel, my still-life photography reflects my connection to the sensory world around me through the careful study of light, objects, and forms. It embraces memories of my childhood in Mexico that smell like long weekends in my grandparents' countryside home, searching for insects after sunset and chasing fireflies in the dark with my bare feet on the grass. Memories that smell like orange trees, wet grass, and that of a place that holds us [me and my family] in time for eternity. Together, these works celebrate time, place, and the bonds that hold us across generations.

Jasmine & Gasoline reimagines the cyclical pattern of descent and return in the myth of Persephone. This time, she breaks free. These images read as her notes from paradise, tracing her escape from emotional underworlds toward a deeper sense of being at home within herself. Photographed along coastlines and urban edges, the series portrays a charged reunion with the tender natural world. Water, light, and touch guide Persephone toward a self-defined way of being. A faint trace of pomegranate lingers, like the myth she outgrows. A beetle suggests the path of metamorphosis. A figure entering the sea marks the crossing into a self once cast aside. Moving fluidly between documentary observation, self-portraiture, and landscape, the photographs slip between clarity and abstraction, using focused details to reveal how identity loosens and reforms. The sea becomes both a site of arrival and transformation, a place where something long buried resurfaces. Rather than framing home as a fixed place, Jasmine & Gasoline imagines Persephone’s homecoming as finding a home within herself, beyond the cycles that once bound her. In this atmosphere, the camera becomes a site of reawakening, rehearsing a quiet utopia of rest, renewal, and internal bloom.

Ariana Zukowski is a Canadian visual artist working between the West Coast and Europe. Her practice creates photographic worlds where inner and outer landscapes blur, opening spaces to find home through imagined utopias. Blending photography, sound, and language, she builds lyrical layers shaped by gesture, abstraction, and memory. By embracing multiplicity, her work approaches personal myth as a collective mirror, remixing form and meaning through figures, cities, and natural environments. Within a naturalistic lens, these tender futures become places to rest, transform, and return to.

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