The Hasselblad Foundation has announced that Sophie Ristelhueber is the 2025 Hasselblad Award laureate, the world’s largest photography award, consisting of SEK 2,000,000, (£150k+) a gold medal, and a Hasselblad camera.
The laureate is honoured with a solo exhibition at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg from 11 October 2025 until 18 January 2026, along with a series of events during Hasselblad Award Week, including: a seminar in collaboration with the County Administrative Board of Västra Götaland and a concert with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra on 9 October; an opening reception, book launch, and formal award ceremony on 10 October in Gothenburg; and an artist talk at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm on 15 October.
Citation
The Hasselblad Foundation’s citation regarding the Hasselblad Award laureate 2025, Sophie Ristelhueber:
A precise, consistent, and unique body of work exploring landscapes and territories – both public and private – defines the artistic career of French artist Sophie Ristelhueber spanning forty-five years. Through her series, created in war-torn regions, she challenged the field of journalistic photography, developing her own visual language. The traces and scars of violence – on land, the human body, and architecture – are central to her powerful, tightly cropped images, most notably in her acclaimed series focusing on the Middle East and the Balkans. Ristelhueber’s large-scale photographs are often presented in unconventional ways and combined with video and sound in site-specific installations.
“As you know, one does not die from being unloved, but from being unbelieved, an old friend of mine used to say when we were talking about the artist’s condition. What is at stake is that we put everything on the line, inventing new patterns without knowing if they will ever resonate. And this is why, for me as an artist, this prestigious award holds such a deep significance.”
Sophie Ristelhueber
“We are deeply honoured to celebrate Sophie Ristelhueber as the 45th recipient of the Hasselblad Award. Her photographs remain constantly relevant, and I hope her work can offer us new insights into the world we live in. It is incredibly exciting that the Hasselblad Foundation will present her collected works to a wider audience in Scandinavia for the first time.”
Kalle Sanner, CEO of the Hasselblad Foundation
The Hasselblad Award Jury 2025
The jury which submitted its proposal to the Hasselblad Foundation’s Board of Directors this year consisted of:
John Fleetwood Jury Chair Director of Photo:, South Africa, Co-Head of Photography, Royal Academy of Art, the Hague, Netherlands
Shoair Mavlian Director, Photographers’ Gallery, United Kingdom
Anna Planas Artistic Director, Paris Photo, France
Raquel Villar-Pérez Independent researcher, writer, and curator. PhD candidate at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Francesco Zanot Independent curator, Italy
Karolina Zi?bi?ska-Lewandowska Director, Museum of Warsaw, Polan
About the artist
Lebanon, Kuwait, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and the West Bank – places marked by conflict often make up the core of Sophie Ristelhueber’s work. Avoiding the sensational, she instead captures an emotional intensity in the silent, enduring traces of human presence and activity. A recurring theme in her artistic practice is humanity’s perpetual cycle of creation and destruction, followed by renewal. The photographs in her series are meticulously selected fragments of a larger narrative, where the viewer is invited to create the story.
Sophie Ristelhueber was born in 1949 in Paris, where she still lives and works. She studied literature at the Sorbonne, focusing on the literary movement le nouveau roman – the new novel – which challenged traditional narrative structures through fragmented storytelling and an emphasis on detail. These principles have influenced Ristelhueber’s photographic practice, where she highlights traces and details rather than depicting the actual event. Her literary background is also evident in her acclaimed publications. Ristelhueber’s artist books are often small in format, incorporating text fragments as an integral part of the visual narrative. She has personally designed and published many of her books in limited editions, which have all since become sought-after collectors’ items.
Ristelhueber’s work has been exhibited in numerous international institutions, including MoMA (New York, US), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, US), Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, US), The Power Plant (Toronto, CA), Tate Modern (London, GB), Imperial War Museum (London, GB). She has participated in biennials of Johannesburg, São Paulo, Triennial of Etchigo- Tsumari, and the photo festival Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles. Some of her notable solo exhibitions in Paris include Centre Pompidou, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Musée Zadkine, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Musée Rodin and Institut Giacometti. Her most recent exhibition, with the thought-provoking title What the Fuck!, was shown at Galerie Poggi in Paris, 2025.
The exhibition at the Hasselblad Center will be the laureate’s first solo exhibition in Scandinavia, on view from 11th October 2025–18th January 2026.
For the fourth consecutive year, the Hasselblad Foundation is collaborating with the Gothenburg-based camera company Hasselblad, which honours this year’s award recipient by including a new camera as part of the award.
The Hasselblad Foundation was established in 1979 by Erna and Victor Hasselblad’s will after they sold the Hasselblad camera company. The foundation’s purpose is to promote scientific education and research in photography and the natural sciences. The annual, international Hasselblad Award has been presented since 1980 and is the world’s biggest award in photography. The foundation holds a photography collection focusing on Hasselblad Award winners and Nordic photographers. The Hasselblad Center is the foundation’s exhibition space in the Gothenburg Museum of Art. Stipends for photographic advancement are awarded annually, and the foundation itself is engaged in academic and artistic research through the publication of books, symposiums, and collaborations with Swedish and international universities. hasselbladfoundation.org
