Hasselblad Award 2025
Beirut, 1984
Sophie Ristelhueber is the 2025 Hasselblad Award laureate. The ceremony was held on 10 October 2025 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Ristelhueber’s four-decade exploration of landscape, territory, and the traces of human conflict is on exhibit at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg from 11 October 2025 to 18 January 2026.
The jury consists of globally recognized photography experts and researchers appointed by the foundation’s board. They nominate 3–5 candidates, from whom the foundation’s board selects a laureate.
The 2025 Hasselblad Jury members were:
John Fleetwood (Jury Chair) – Director of Photo:, South Africa, Co-Head of Photography, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, Netherlands
Shoair Mavlian – Director, The Photographers’ Gallery, United Kingdom
Anna Planas – Artistic Director, Paris Photo, France
Raquel Villar-Pérez – Independent researcher, writer, and curator; PhD candidate, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Francesco Zanot – Independent curator, Italy
Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska – Director, Museum of Warsaw, Poland
Sophie Ristelhueber. ©Léa Crespi
Jury Chair John Fleetwood and presenter Parisa Amiri. ©Emma Botin
More about Sophie Ristelhueber, the Hasselblad Award laureate 2025:
Over forty-five years, Sophie Ristelhueber has developed a precise, consistent, and deeply original body of work exploring the marks of human presence on land, architecture, and the body. Working in regions marked by conflict—Lebanon, Kuwait, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and the West Bank—she has challenged the conventions of journalistic photography by developing her own visual language. Her large-scale photographs, often presented in unconventional formats and paired with video and sound, explore the aftermath of violence and the fragile boundaries between public and private territories.
Born in 1949 in Paris, where she continues to live and work, Ristelhueber studied literature at the Sorbonne, focusing on le nouveau roman—the New Novel—whose fragmented, non-linear narrative approach profoundly influenced her photographic practice. Rather than documenting events, she isolates their residual traces, inviting the viewer to reconstruct unseen stories from the surfaces of the world.
Her photographs are held in major public collections and have been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Tate Modern (London), and Centre Pompidou (Paris). She has participated in the Johannesburg, São Paulo, and Echigo-Tsumari biennials, and presented solo exhibitions at leading French institutions such as Jeu de Paume, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Musée Rodin, and Institut Giacometti. Her most recent exhibition, What the Fuck! (Galerie Poggi, Paris, 2025), continues her long-standing investigation into memory, rupture, and renewal.
“As you know, one does not die from being unloved, but from being unbelieved,” Ristelhueber recalls a friend saying 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.”
Posted 22 Oct ‘25