Form. together with photo basel announce the
5 winners of the Form Photo Award x 2026!
This year, the standard of work was exceptionally high, reflecting the incredible talent and creativity of contemporary photographers from around the world.
The top five winners will have their projects exhibited at photo basel 2026 in June during Art Basel Week 2026.
form.photography/award


The first winner among the five is Bharat Sikka @bharatsikkastudio “Ripples in the Pond”

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 1980s. These references function not simply as nostalgia, 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 metaphorical surfaces that refract 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 ruptures, ripples, blurs, and distortions that function as aesthetic metaphors for temporal disturbance and spatial instability.


The second winner among the five is Valentin Fougeray @valentinfougeray

Valentin Fougeray is a photographer and artist based in Paris. After initial training in architecture, he studied photography at Gobelins, where he refined an approach attentive to space, composition, and material and visual experimentation.

His practice explores a visual language in which color serves as vocabulary. Between abstraction and sensation, his images favor evocation over description: they do not seek to document reality, but to bring forth an inner experience. Forms, surfaces, blurs, and apparitions are composed like thresholds, allowing impressions to surface rather than certainties.

Freed from narrative and documentary codes, Valentin Fougeray conceives photography as a poetic, sculptural, and sensory space. The absence of a stable subject opens onto a field of free and intimate appropriation, where viewers project their own recollections. His compositions question what endures and what fades; memory, disappearance, and remembrance; and propose an intuitive, drifting presence that is deeply human.
In June 2026, photo basel welcomes 42 international exhibitors from a record-breaking 17 countries, showcasing more than 500 photographic positions by over 170 artists.

Among the galleries making their debut this year are: Galleria Davide di Maggio (Milan), Perve (Lisbon), Ambidexter Gallery (Istanbul), Gallery Scena (Tokyo) Gutknecht Gallery (Geneva), Gaze-Off (Lugano), O Art Project (Lima) & TLC (Mexico).

Find the full list of exhibitors here

The third winner among the five is Krista Svalbonas @kristasvalbonas “Echoes of Resistance”

“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.”


The fourth winner among the five is Foteini Zaglara @foteinizaglara

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.

The fifth and final winner among the five is Victoria Ruiz @vic.toriaruiz “We Knew the World in Fragments of Color”

“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.