The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation's Board of Trustees has appointed its 101st class of Fellows, and photographer Lara Shipley is among the 2026 honorees now being profiled by Lenscratch in a rolling series celebrating the cohort.

The photography platform announced that over the next month or two it will feature the work of many of the 2026 Guggenheim Fellows, framing the series as both a celebration of the award and an examination of the legacies and projects that earned each photographer the foundation's recognition.

Who is in the 2026 class?

The foundation's 101st appointment cycle places Shipley in a fellowship lineage that has long served as a mid-career benchmark in American photography. Lenscratch's series gives readers an early look at the bodies of work underpinning the honor. The feature on Shipley carries a single image credit, "AGE OF LONELINESS-02," indicating a named series by the photographer is at the center of the presentation.

What does the fellowship mean for the work?

The Guggenheim Fellowship remains one of the most consequential grants available to photographers working in the United States, providing unrestricted support that recipients typically direct toward long-form projects. For Shipley, the award arrives as Lenscratch surfaces the "Age of Loneliness" material — a title suggesting a sustained, thematically driven investigation rather than a scattering of single images.

By sequencing its fellow profiles across the coming weeks, Lenscratch effectively stages a rolling survey of where the fellowship class of 2026 — the 101st in the foundation's history — is directing its attention, with Shipley among the first photographers viewers can now see in that context.

Readers can expect further installments in the series through the fall, as the remaining 2026 Fellows come into view one body of work at a time.