Our annual awards are not just about honouring the best cameras, lenses, phones and accessories of the last 12 months, we also celebrate the people who’ve really made a difference to photography over the last year
Whether they are veteran photographers who’ve made a lifetime contribution to our favourite art form or up-and-coming names, they received awards from Amateur Photographer for a very good reason, as you will see below.
Lifetime Achievement Award: Barry Lewis
Our prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award this year goes to Barry Lewis. Born on 23 July 1948 in London, Barry is a distinguished British photographer and filmmaker whose career spans over five decades. His body of work encompasses editorial, documentary, and portrait photography, and he has garnered international acclaim for his compelling visual narratives.
Early life and education
Lewis loved science at school and won the BBC young scientist of the year in 1966 before studying chemistry at Leicester University. It was here, the day after watching the film Blow Up, he bought a camera. He served as the head of the chemistry department at a school in Leicestershire for two years. However his passion for photography led him to a pivotal career change. In 1974 he was awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Art (RCA), where he studied under Bill Brandt and completed a Master of Arts in Photography. This laid the foundation for his future endeavours.
Professional beginnings
Lewis’s talent was quickly recognised when, in 1976, he won the Vogue Award, leading to a position as a staff photographer at Vogue magazine. This role gave him a platform to hone his skills and establish his unique photographic style. In 1977 he received an arts council grant to photograph commuting in London, which was exhibited in the Museum of London. He quickly transitioned to freelance photography, embarking on international assignments for renowned publications such as Life and National Geographic.
Network Photographers
In 1981, Lewis along with seven other photojournalists co-founded Network Photographers, a partnership that grew out of a desire to work collectively on personal stories in a supportive environment. Their aim was to produce socially concerned work documenting the world around them and to retain control and ownership of their material.
It became a significant British agency until its closure in 2005, amassing an archive of over a million images. This platform allowed him to collaborate with like-minded professionals and engage in critical discussions about image-making. His work during this period covered international stories and contributed to over 20 books. Beyond still photography, Lewis expanded his creative horizons by directing more than 20 short documentaries, commercials, and art films. His multidisciplinary approach enriched his storytelling capabilities, allowing him to explore subjects from multiple perspectives.
Exhibitions and recognitions
Lewis’s work has been widely exhibited both in the UK and internationally. UK venues include the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of London, the Turner gallery, the Photographers’ Gallery and Oxford Museum of Modern Art. These exhibitions showcased his versatility and depth as a visual artist.
In 1991 he was honoured with the prestigious World Press Photo Oskar Barnack Award for his photo-essay on a polluted town of Romania after the revolution, highlighting his commitment to humanitarian photography.
Notable projects
His projects often delve into cultural and social themes, providing insightful commentaries on various aspects of human life. His work has been featured in esteemed publications, further cementing his reputation as a leading figure in documentary photography.
In 1991, in the dying days of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Lewis was commissioned by Geo magazine to visit the Gulag of Siberia. His book Gulag was subsequently published by Fistful of Books in 2024 to international acclaim.
Recent endeavours
In recent years, Lewis has continued to engage in self-generated projects, focusing on personal interests and contemporary issues. Works include explorations of London’s intersections, capturing the dynamic interplay of urban life. For over 30 years he has been documenting the cultural vibrancy of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
Barry on his Lifetime Achievement Award
In recognition of his outstanding contributions to photography and visual storytelling, Barry Lewis is a well deserving recipient of our Lifetime Achievement Award. Barry said, on receiving the award:
‘I was lucky to be in the 1960s generation where culture was supported, and grants were given which covered both living and university fees. This gave me and many of my contemporaries the confidence and support to develop a synergy between the arts and science and the possibility to change direction. I was an amateur photographer, enjoying the freedom and excitement of the magic of photography… the surprise of success or failure and learning from my mistakes.
‘The RCA was my first total immersion in photography; just six students, a good grant, two years to play with and Bill Brandt as my tutor… my dreams had come true! I became a working photographer in the mid-70s when there was a boom in magazines, books and newspapers, all offering paid work, travel and the chance to learn. In parallel there was an exciting dialogue within the photographic community… we believed we could change the world with photography.’
Power of Photography Award: Valery Poshtarov
Holding hands is an expression of closeness, unity and affection. So why, then, do so many men seem to have a problem holding their father’s hand?Photographer – and father of two boys – Valery Poshtarov has a theory. ‘It’s important for men to develop our independence and overcome our father’s influence,’ he suggests.
Inspired by the thought the bond between him and his two young sons might soon be broken, Poshtarov decided to photograph his father and grandfather holding hands. From there, the project has taken off and so far he has captured fathers and sons holding hands in Bulgaria, Georgia, Turkey, Armenia and the western Balkans.
Ultimately, Valery hopes that his pictures give people permission to express their togetherness, creating new social norms. He told us, ‘In a world that is already growing apart, holding hands becomes a silent prayer, a way to come together again.’
It’s a wonderful testament to the power of photography to show us something new and unexpected, which is why Valery is our deserving winner of this special AP Award.
Hero of Photography Award: Paul Ryan
Our Hero of Photography award shines a light on people using photography to do great things for the benefit of others. The winner this year is Paul Ryan, who came up with the brilliant idea of using cameras and photography to help homeless people help themselves.
Paul co-founded the MyLondon initiative in 2013 with a simple idea: distribute Fujifilm single-use film cameras to 100 homeless people, who were given seven days to photograph London. The best of these photographs were published in a calendar which the participants sold around the capital, giving them an income. This became an annual event that not only continues in London, but has become an international phenomenon.
AP first became aware of this project when our late news editor, Chris Cheesman, volunteered as a judge on the 2015 MyLondon project and wrote an article in AP about it. The article went viral and was picked up by more than 200 media outlets around the world.
Fujifilm has supported the project since year one, as have volunteers from the Royal Photographic Society, who’ve run workshops and mentoring sessions. An annual exhibition is held to mark the launch of every calendar, which the vendors sell in London’s Spitalfields Market and in recent years, Elizabeth line tube stations. Since 2013 MyLondon has paid out over £300,000 to people affected by homelessness in London alone!
MyLondon proved so successful that Paul was asked to help set-up similar initiatives in other cities around the world, so in 2023 he set up the MyWorld charity with a goal of helping homeless in more cities. As of this year’s Paul’s amazing initiative has spread to Toronto, New Orleans, Sydney, Budapest, Sao Paulo and Mumbai. You can find out more information here. We can’t think of a more deserving recipient of our Hero of Photography this year, so well done to Paul and his colleagues at MyWorld.
Emerging Photographer of the Year Award, in association with Canon: Ethan Parker
A graduate with a Commercial Photography degree from Arts University Bournemouth, Ethan Parker has shown himself to be a promising documentary photographer.
He first started taking photos in 2017, often using it as an ‘escape’ from his maths and physics A-Level studies at sixth form. He likes to document scenes that involve people, primarily candid, unconstructed scenes.
Hailing from London, he finds the city to be his biggest inspiration – he told us, ‘There’s so much going on, so many characters and fleeting moments that go unseen by so many. The place feels like a busy colourful playground, and as a photographer, I feel a duty to explore these human moments and capture them.’
You can really see the talent of this young photographer when looking through his portfolio of images, and he clearly has an eye for a dramatic and photogenic scene. With confidence – and probably just a bit of good luck – we can see big things in his future.
Content Creator of the Year Award, in association with Fujifilm: Thomas Heaton
This year’s Content Creator of the Year award was put to a public vote in our Readers’ Choice Awards. We asked our audience to name their favourite creators on any platform and we received over 1,000 votes in this category. More than 100 creators were nominated – and Thomas Heaton, an accomplished landscape photographer and YouTuber from the North East of England, is our winner!
Thomas’s YouTube channel, which he started in 2014, is a celebration of landscape photography and being in the great outdoors, sometimes in his camper van, and sometimes in a tent. From the freezing conditions of the Arctic to storm chasing in the USA, Thomas takes his viewers on a journey as he shows us how he takes his photos, vlog-style behind-the- scenes footage and experiences with photography gear.
Thomas started out with a full-time job as a video technician at an events company, travelling around Europe creating corporate videos before going freelance as a photographer and videographer. He started his photography career shooting film in 2000, and since he bought his first DSLR in 2006, has shot both film and digital.
Find out more about Thomas’s work by visiting his online platforms below.
YouTube: @ThomasHeatonPhoto
Website: thomasheaton.co.uk
Instagram: @heatonthomas
Picture of the Year Award: Trump shooting by Evan Vucci
We often talk about the power of photography as though it is some divine force for good and truth, that has the capacity to liberate the people of the world. It can be, of course, but that’s just one side of the matter. Photography can be used to reveal facts and to raise issues just as much as it can be used to convince us of things that aren’t true – or at least, aren’t quite as they seem.
What any of us think personally of Donald Trump is irrelevant to our appreciation of this astonishing picture taken by the Associated Press chief photographer Evan Vucci. It’s got a definitive narrative, like a country song about heroism, patriotism, survival, injustice, triumph, inner power and resurrection.
Photographically, the composition is fantastic, and the colours are so bright, bold and eye-catching that any picture editor would consider it a gift.
You can’t help but wonder how many Americans saw this picture and thought – yep, he’s the man for me. It could be the shot that turned an election, and therefore, there’s little else that could be considered for our Picture of the Year 2024 award.
Photojournalism Award: Samar Abu Elouf
Samar Abu Elouf has many awards for her incredible reportage – but there can be few photojournalists who are more deserving than this Palestinian photographer.
Abu Elouf’s career has been one of skill, stubbornness and defiance. When aged 26 and a mother of three (now of four), she was agitated by her situation. After dabbling in writing, public relations and accounting, it was photography that she found most fulfilling, taking pictures on her phone. She wasn’t supported by her former husband or either of their families, but she educated herself in the medium, with her first assignment covering the 2012 Palestinian conflict with Israel, before going on to cover the 2014 50-day war in Gaza.
Between 2018-2019, Abu Elouf reported on the Gaza border protests for Middle Eastern Eye. Lacking protective gear but wanting to identify herself as media, not a protestor, she strapped a cooking pot to her head for a helmet and taped PRESS on to a blue plastic bag which she wore around her torso.
When Israel launched its war in Gaza after Hamas’ attack in Israel on 7 October 2023, Abu Elouf started to document the horror. She took pictures of corpses, all stacked on top of each other. She slept on hospital floors or in the back of her vehicle. She worked with an infected lung, during power cuts and blackouts.
She has been a freelancer for The New York Times since 2021, and her series Gaza Under Attack has won many plaudits, including the 2024 Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award.
Despite a vow to never leave Gaza, she reluctantly accepted help from The New York Times to evacuate with her children to Qatar, filling her days giving talks about the war, advocating for colleagues left behind, learning English and helping her children navigate an unfamiliar life. For both her tenacity and talent, Samar Abu Elouf is an exceptionally deserving recipient of this award.
Portraiture Award: Drew Gardner
The idea for Drew Gardener’s project, The Descendants, was sparked by the notion that it would be interesting to photograph real life relations of famous historical figures, rather than actors merely posing as them with no connection.
Later, he decided to focus on people who weren’t famous, and who history hadn’t remembered, concentrating on recreating portraits of Black American Civil War soldiers.
For the work, Drew considers and analyses the lighting in each portrait, doing his best to recreate the same – only with modern lighting techniques. Interestingly, the end results often show a startling resemblance to their forebears. Featured in publications around the world, this is a painstakingly and lovingly crafted project that’s hugely deserving of the Portraiture prize.
Nature and Environment Award: Harry Skeggs
There are, of course, many great nature and wildlife photographers in the world right now. But this year, we’d like to give special mention to Harry Skeggs, whose book Creation – Masterpieces from the Natural World showed off his talent.
Not only was each image in the book superbly shot, we got some accompanying text to describe more about the animals shown, the habitats in which they live, the preparations necessary for the journey and the photoshoot, as well as certain stylistic and artistic choices. In short, Harry is a photographer’s photographer – if you want to know not just why an image was created, but also how and when, then he’ll tell you everything you need to know.
Harry studied fine art at Cambridge, and that’s something that also shines through in his pictures – he is a deserving winner of our first Nature and Environment award.
Landscape Award: Liam Man
It can be hard to find new angles and approaches with landscape photography. A lot of the most picturesque places in the world have been photographed to death, and even if you rise at silly o’clock for amazing light, or are lucky enough to get photogenic weather, chances are, another photographer somewhere has bagged a similar shot.
That’s where the unconventional approach of Liam Man has paid dividends. Lighting his scenes using drones, the work stands out for all the right reasons. He calls his drones his ‘super abled’ assistants – they can ‘run’ further, faster and higher than he can, freeing him up to stay with the camera, adjusting settings on the fly. Liam is only 29, and is currently working on a project celebrating our frozen planet, with winter expeditions around the globe to push at the limits of what photography can be.
Book of the Year: Being There by Lee Shulman and Omar Victor Diop
£39, Textuel, 112 pages, hardback, ISBN: 9782845979444
In 2017, the award-winning filmmaker Lee Shulman founded what has become the largest collections of amateur photography in the world. The Anonymous Project features nearly a million Kodachrome slides, which consist mostly of American family photos taken in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. The subjects are unknown, but the situations immediately familiar.
This collaboration with the acclaimed Senegalese self-portraitist Omar Victor Diop is simply a work of genius. In Being There, Omar is cleverly inserted into a selection of situations as if he were part of the family. The presence of an African man into domestic situations in white, middle-class segregated America creates a series of absurd and often amusing scenes, made even more so by Omar’s interactions with the people in the photos.
But, beneath the surreality, Being There makes a serious contribution to the ongoing conversation around race, privilege and exclusion. The project took over a year to complete, and Lee and Omar told us that the response to it has been overwhelming. Omar wasn’t able to attend the AP Awards but Lee accepted for them both – we hope they enjoy adding this latest accolade to their list of achievements.
Exhibition of the Year Award: Letizia Battaglia, Life, Love and Death in Sicily at The Photographers’ Gallery
One of Italy’s most important social documentary photographers, Letizia Battaglia started tracking the brutal reality of life under the Mafia in the late 1960s – when the photographer herself was already in her 40s.
The results became some of the best-known records of what conditions were like in the 1970s and 1980s. Battaglia was also a civil rights activist, publisher, film director, politician, photo museum director and journalist.
This major retrospective, which took place at the ever-brilliant The Photographers’ Gallery (TPG) until this February, was the first of its kind in the UK. Intertwining her professional work with her personal life, it really showed how her sensitivity and humanity influenced her photography.
This extraordinary exhibition took up two floors at the gallery, and included some unusual ways to demonstrate pictures – such as hanging framed pictures from the ceiling, so that you could walk in among them.
A stunning tribute to a fascinating life and immense talent, this was easily one of the best exhibitions of last year – and it’ll be interesting to see how shows this year at The Photographers’ Gallery match up.
