Color Awards 2026 name five photographers before November book

By Olivia Hart

The Color Awards 2026 has named Eric Jude first-place winner, Brian Cassey second and Michele Zousmer third; Kanghee Kim and Serena Serena Perez received two honourable mentions.

The Color Awards describes itself as “an international competition celebrating creativity, originality, and excellence in color photography.” It says this year’s selection brings together photographic talent through diverse perspectives and distinctive approaches to visual expression, but it names no subject, location or series for the winning photographs.

The announcement also promises a forthcoming volume, Color – The Best Photographs, for November, describing it as “a lasting platform for discovering and celebrating” photographers whose creativity and individual vision shaped this edition.

What did the jury judge?

An international jury of experienced professionals selected the winning and finalist photographs. The announcement says the panel’s diverse backgrounds and expertise supported a rigorous and thoughtful evaluation, but it names neither the jurors nor the number of people on the panel.

Each entry was assessed against four criteria:

• Technical quality
• Visual impact
• Compositional excellence
• Artistic originality

That sequence moves from execution to effect and then to authorship, giving the competition a compact curatorial framework rather than a purely technical test. It is a sensible structure on paper. The unanswered question is weighting: the announcement does not say whether technical excellence could outweigh a weaker concept, or how close decisions were settled.

This framework places craft in service of the photograph, which is where craft belongs. Technical quality and composition provide the means; visual impact and originality determine whether those means produce a memorable work. The 2026 edition therefore asks its jury to consider control and surprise, though no winning image appears in the announcement to test that proposition.

What do the placements establish?

The hierarchy is explicit: one first-place prize, one second-place prize and one third-place prize sit above two honourable mentions. Eric Jude leads the announced list, rather than sharing a single undifferentiated “winner” title with four other photographers.

The announcement also includes sections labelled “Best Images” and “Finalist Images,” indicating a selected body presented alongside the five named placements. It supplies no image count, additional finalist names, picture titles or series details for either section, however, so the breadth and shape of the selection remain unavailable.

That matters because the awards present colour photography as a field of creative distinction. With no photographs or reproductions in the announcement, the jury’s claims about impact, composition and originality arrive without visible evidence. It is a ledger rather than a show.

What arrives in November?

All awarded and selected works will appear in the forthcoming publication Color – The Best Photographs, scheduled for release in November. The announcement presents it as a carefully curated volume and an exceptional collection of contemporary colour photography, pairing each artist’s work with the artist’s name and contact information.

It calls the book more than a record of the competition and promises to preserve the jury’s choices while extending their practical life beyond the awards announcement. That is a substantial institutional claim: the volume becomes the competition’s longer-term legacy, not merely its result sheet.

The publication details, however, are no more complete than the photograph details. The source gives no publisher, format, extent, price, distribution plan or precise date beyond November, and it does not state whether the five placed photographers will receive separate portfolios or appear within a single sequence. Those omissions matter to the claim of a lasting platform.

The inclusion of names and contact information does suggest an intended use beyond passive appreciation. Readers should be able to identify the photographers and make contact; that is the practical proposition of a platform, however modestly phrased. Whether the book makes those connections usable cannot be judged before it exists.

Can the selection speak for itself yet?

Not fully. The 2026 announcement establishes an international jury, four criteria, five recipients and a November publication plan, but reproduces no winning or finalist photograph and quotes no juror or winner. A text-only account reports the result; it cannot show whether impact and composition arrived together, or whether originality registered as more than an adjective.

That restraint is especially noticeable because the awards centre on colour photography, where the photograph itself remains the decisive object. The headings “Best Images” and “Finalist Images” promise pictures, while the accompanying text supplies names and institutional mechanics. The gap is not fatal, but it leaves the most persuasive material outside the announcement.

In art-historical terms, the distinction is between record and history. The announcement indexes judgements; the book is intended to become the object carrying images, names and contacts into the future. The promise of a “lasting platform” shifts the institutional weight from the jury’s score sheet to the publication itself.

The next test comes in November, when Color – The Best Photographs has to turn the jury’s rankings and wider selected works into a visible, durable argument for contemporary colour photography.