Announcing the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize Shortlist 

Founded in 2006, the annual Aperture Portfolio Prize aims to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography—identifying contemporary trends in the field and highlighting artists whose work deserves greater recognition. This year, over one thousand artists submitted entries from sixty-five countries, representing a broad and exciting range of styles in photography today.

Aperture invited a jury of cross-disciplinary creatives to judge the 2025 prize: Noelle Flores Théard, senior digital photo-editor, The New Yorker; Lucy Gallun, curator, Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography, MoMA; Zack Hatfield, managing editor, Aperture magazine; and Mark Armijo McKnight, artist and 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize winner.

“We were drawn to how these five photographers approach expansive stories—whether of political upheaval, war, climate breakdown, or grief—with an intimate attention to the poetics of everyday life,” says Hatfield. “I was especially struck by how these artists manage to locate beauty even within experiences of deep uncertainty, and to do so without sacrificing formal inventiveness or conceptual depth.”

The shortlisted artists for the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize are:

Sara Abbaspour counters conventional media portrayals of Iran by conjuring a poetic portrait of a society amid a wavering political landscape. Her series floating ocean considers both inner and exterior worlds in states of transition.

Alana Perino’s Pictures of Birds constructs a mesmeric evocation of familial memory and mortality. Photographing in their parents’ home in Longboat Key, Florida, Perino tells a story of preservation as an act of representation and remembrance.

Emma Ressel arranges taxidermized animals in still life tableaux to consider the precarity of damaged ecosystems. Glass Eyes Stare Back contends with the space between life and death, nature and artifice, exploring humanity’s destructive desire to possess the natural world.

Hashem Shakeri bears witness to daily life in Afghanistan as the country adapts to the return of the Taliban. Staring into the Abyss acts as both a testament to the irrepressible spirit of the country’s women and marginalized groups, and a vivid call to action.

Daria Svertilova offers a generational, quietly searing portrait of present-day Ukraine. Her series Irreversibly Altered invokes a feeling of absence and displacement through dreamlike photographs of what has been left behind.

These photographers join the ranks of illustrious winners and shortlisted artists for the Portfolio Prize in past years, including Felipe Romero Beltrán, Dannielle Bowman, Alejandro Cartagena, Jessica Chou, River Claure, Eli Durst, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Janna Ireland, Abhishek Khedekar, Natalie Krick, Daniel Jack Lyons, Vân-Nhi Nguyễn, Drew Nikonowicz, Sarah Palmer, Avion Pearce, RaMell Ross, Bryan Schutmaat, Donavon Smallwood, Laila Stevens, Ka-Man Tse, and Guanyu Xu.

Selections of work by the five shortlisted artists will be presented at the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD), April 23–27, with an opening reception on Wednesday, April 23.

The 2025 Portfolio Prize winner, to be announced on May 13, 2025, will be published in the Summer issue of Aperture magazine, receive a $5,000 cash prize and a $1,000 gift card to shop for gear at MPB.com, and have a presentation organized by Aperture in New York City. The four shortlisted artists will each receive a $1,000 cash prize and an editorial feature on Aperture.org.

Production for the presentation on view at AIPAD in 2025 is made possible by Laumont Editions.