Hicham Benohoud's The Classroom has been awarded PhotoBook of the Year, the judges' top honor in a field that remains one of the most closely watched barometers of where the published photograph stands as an art form.

The prize confirms what the book's reception has suggested for some time: Benohoud's classroom pictures, made with schoolchildren as active participants rather than passive subjects, belong among the most consequential bodies of photographic work to emerge from North Africa in recent decades. The Moroccan photographer built the series inside an ordinary schoolroom, transforming a space of institutional order into a theater of surreal, staged tableaux — students wrapped, stacked, masked and posed against bare walls and chalkboards, their faces often obscured, their cooperation central to the pictures' strange authority.

The award matters because it recognizes the book, not merely the images. Benohoud's work has long circulated through exhibitions and print, and The Classroom as a physical object carries the sequence's logic: repetition, confrontation, the slow accumulation of gestures that turn a familiar room into something unsettling. Jurors for book prizes of this kind weigh sequence, printing, scale and design alongside the photographs themselves, and PhotoBook of the Year places The Classroom in the lineage of awarded titles that have reshaped how photographers think about the book form — from the documentary sequences of the postwar decades to the sculptural, artist-driven publications of the past twenty years.

The images themselves resist easy summary. Each tableau reads as a small performance of constraint and invention: bodies arranged against the geometry of desks and walls, ordinary school materials turned into props for scenarios that feel at once playful and faintly menacing. The chalkboard and the bare wall function as backdrops so neutral they throw the staged absurdity into relief. Nothing in the frame explains itself, and that withholding is the work's engine. Benohoud photographs power, discipline and imagination in the same breath, without editorializing on any of them.

The institutional context sharpens the prize's significance. Photography from Morocco and the wider Maghreb has moved steadily from regional biennials and specialized festivals into the collections and programmes of major international venues over the past two decades, and Benohoud has been central to that shift. A PhotoBook of the Year award consolidates that position. It directs new audiences toward a body of work made far from the industry's traditional centers, and it signals to publishers and institutions that the schoolroom series — already canonical to those who know it — warrants renewed attention in print, on walls and in teaching.

For Benohoud, the award arrives at a moment when his early series is being reassessed alongside the broader retrospective interest in staged and participatory photography of the 1990s and 2000s. The Classroom predates much of the contemporary fascination with constructed images involving non-professional subjects, and its methods — negotiation, direction, collaboration within a rigid institutional setting — look increasingly prescient.

What comes next is the familiar arc of a prizewinning book: renewed institutional demand, further editions, and the likelihood that the series will anchor exhibitions and acquisitions in the seasons ahead. For a work born in a single room, the horizon now extends well beyond it.