The French photographer Sophie Ristelhueber is the 2025 Hasselblad Award laureate – the world’s most prestigious photography prize.

She is the 45th recipient of the award and is celebrated with a major solo exhibition at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg.

An artistic practice of traces, memory, and conflict

For more than forty years, Ristelhueber has explored the traces of war, conflict, and trauma in photographic series combining political precision and poetic sensitivity. She avoids the sensational, yet her images carry a strong emotional intensity.

Places such as Lebanon, Kuwait, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and the West Bank have often been at the centre of her work. At the same time, her art turns inward – to the personal – as in the images from her childhood home, where fragments of family history are rendered with the same attentiveness as the politically charged landscapes.

Ristelhueber’s focus on traces, marks, and subtle remains extends to photographs of buildings, furniture, and bodies. Trenches, bomb craters, and roadblocks appear as wounds in the landscape, while scars and stitches on newly operated bodies become signs of human vulnerability. Worn carpets and wallpaper carry fragments of memory. Even though people rarely appear in her photographs, their presence and actions are always palpable.

The Exhibition

This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Scandinavia and presents eleven key works – from her early breakthrough Beirut, photographs (1984) and the acclaimed Fait (1992), to her most recent series What the Fuck! (2024).

The Hasselblad Award

The Hasselblad Award, established by Erna and Victor Hasselblad and presented annually since 1980, consists of 2 million Swedish kronor, a gold medal, and a Hasselblad camera. Sophie Ristelhueber is the 45th laureate.

The 2025 jury included John Fleetwood, Shoair Mavlian, Anna Planas, Raquel Villar-Pérez, Francesco Zanot, and Karolina Ziębińska-Lewandowska.