Hasselblad Foundation’s International Photobook Grant

The Hasselblad Foundation awards the Photobook Grant annually to support the production and publication of photographic book projects. The grant has been awarded since 2016; this is the first year it has been open to international applicants. The grants are intended for anyone working with photography—including photographers, artists, curators, researchers, and writers—whose projects are in development and active globally.

For 2025, the Foundation received 769 applications from 82 countries, with the most submissions from the USA, the UK, Germany, and Sweden.

This year’s jury comprised Jacob Birch (Spine Studio), Maryam Fanni (HDK-Valand), Andréas Hagström and Dragana Vujanovic Östlind (Hasselblad Foundation).

The Hasselblad Foundation awards two distinguished photographers SEK 100,000 each.

Paweł Starzec. Portrait by Martyna Wyrzykowska & Portrait Ting Bang Tsai. Photo: Alpha Hsu

Photobook Grant 2025

The Hasselblad Foundation is pleased to announce that Ting Bang Tsai (Taiwan) and Paweł Starzec (Poland) have been awarded this year’s Photobook Grants, receiving SEK 100,000 each for their compelling and innovative book projects.

The photobook holds a central place within the field of photography. Through the Photobook Grant, the Hasselblad Foundation seeks to contribute to developing new and significant works in the genre. This year’s selection is characterised by strong artistic integrity and powerful documentary expression. We are proud to support these two projects, each of which challenges the form and content of the medium in distinct ways.

From the book Glamorous Aunt JIN YUN © Ting Bang Tsai

Ting Bang Tsai – Glamorous Aunt JIN YUN

Glamorous Aunt JIN YUN presents an intimate collaboration between a 72-year-old woman and a young male photographer. With a delicate yet unflinching approach, the project explores themes such as beauty ideals, social norms, ageism, cultural imperialism and exhibitionism. The result is a mesmerising book with a uniquely conceived design, in which recent portraits are interwoven with older images – a portrait of Jin Yun whose confidence inspires both admiration and joy for life.

Ting Bang Tsai (b. 1999) has moved between Taiwan and Vietnam throughout his life. A self-taught photographer with a background in philosophy, art, and performance, he has already received international attention for his work. In 2024, he was awarded the First Book Award by the Aperture Foundation at Paris Photo and the Dummy Book Award at the Singapore International Photography Festival for his book Born from the Same Root.

Ting Bang Tsai on receiving the grant:

“Receiving the Hasselblad Foundation’s photobook grant is a huge honor — and honestly, a rare kind of international encouragement.
It feels like a moment where a small place like Taiwan, and artists from here, get to be seen and heard. This grant gave me the space to keep working on the book at my own pace, and eventually to publish it — to share it more widely. But it’s more than just funding — it’s a form of trust.
A belief that photobooks, as a slow and thoughtful way of seeing and documenting, still matter — and have real power.”

A bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric, a stone bridge in Visegrad, was used as a place of execution during the ethnic cleansing of the Drina Valley. The river carried the bodies further downstream, and during maintenance work on the nearby Perrurac dam, more than 300 were found. © Paweł Starzec

Paweł Starzec – Makeshift

How can cruelty and unbearable pain be concealed within the everyday? In carefully composed landscape photographs, we see apartment blocks, a school building, a sunlit slope, or a park where a funfair now stands. All are documented locations in Bosnia and Herzegovina where people were systematically tortured, raped, mutilated and executed during the Bosnian War. In the aftermath, as part of the nation-building process and an effort to erase the realities of war, these places regained their ordinary appearance and original functions. Polish photographer Paweł Starzec accompanies his images with written testimonies from victims. In this way, Makeshift documents a horrifying history that has been repeated all too often worldwide – but never captured with such precision and immediacy.

Paweł Starzec (b. 1992) is a documentary photographer, sociologist and educator in Poland. His work focuses on long-term projects that visualise complex social processes. He has received the Young Poland scholarship from the Polish Ministry of Culture, the PixHouse Talent of the Year Award, and the Spojrzenia Award. He also serves as Vice Dean of the Faculty of Design at SWPS University in Warsaw.

Paweł Starzec on receiving the grant:

“The Hasselblad Foundation grant is absolutely crucial to the completion of a project I have been working on for almost eight years.. This year marks thirty years since the Dayton Accords, which stopped the war, the traces of which this series focuses on – I think it is a good moment to sum up attempts to tell about places and events related to this conflict that are lesser known to the general public. This seems doubly important to me also in light of the current political situation in the region, and the cruelty of history repeating itself over and over.”

Photo Book Scholarships 2024
Three scholarships will be awarded in the amounts of 50,000, 30,000, and 20,000 Swedish kronor.

The 50,000 SEK Scholarship is Awarded to Signe Fuglesteg Luksengard for the Book Project dia’fragma

The book dia’fragma is an exciting exploration of the physical experiences of photography in book form. The starting point is centered on the themes of change, memory, and breath.

Signe Fuglesteg Luksengards

Luksengard explains:
I explore whether photography can capture that which is invisible to the eye, such as the sensation of inhaling, holding one’s breath, and exhaling again. The feeling of holding onto someone and then letting go. The diaphragm is the muscle where the psychological influences the physical, where holding oneself up and holding one’s breath can trigger bodily responses and tension. This book is created so that readers can ‘breathe with it’ and moving from a state of being compressed to one of unfolding.

Signe Fuglesteg Luksengard’s intimate, detailed, and often abstract depictions of plants, liquids, skin, textiles, or light are presented as thin, loose sheets in various sizes.

Ur serien dia’fragma

Rather than adhering to strict chronology, readers are encouraged to rearrange the images and create their own personal interpretation of the material. This approach enhances the artist’s ambition to explore memories and how we recall them: things blend, shift, and fade.

Flipping through this book is like participating in a choreographed dance, where the combination of tactile qualities and photographic storytelling creates a physical experience that is both personal and universal. It is an engaging examination of the book as a form, where thoughtful design is integral to the reading experience.

The 30,000 SEK Scholarship is Awarded to Simon Mlangeni-Berg for the Book To the Best Father in the World

To the Best Father in the World by Simon Mlangeni-Berg is a 13-year-long project and the result of multiple attempts to articulate, in book form, the complex story of a son’s painful relationship with his father.

Simon Mlangeni-Berg

Mlangeni-Berg’s father passed away in 2008, after an escalating addiction had taken over his life. Three years later, the photographer made his first attempt. It became a small documenting book focused on his father’s home, with all of his belongings and memories. However, the book “wasn’t good enough,” and with these words, readers gain a hint of the relationship between father and son. Years later, he tried again.

The book was almost ready for publication before doubt took over. In the winter of 2022, a third version of the book was created, this time full of notes and collages.

© Simon Mlangeni-Berg – Världens bästa pappa

Though it was printed, it was never shared. All of these attempts were documented and now form the foundation of To the Best Father in the World.

The book is like a Russian doll, filled with doubt, self-destructiveness, grief, and longing, where different versions, analyses, and perspectives on the story are openly presented. Within the many books that comprise this singular book, readers encounter different versions of the author, as well as different fathers. A central question the book revolves around is whether stories like this can ever be fully told and whether true satisfaction with artistic work is ever possible.

The 20,000 SEK Scholarship is Awarded to Mårten Lange for the Book The Palace

In The Palace, Mårten Lange explores architecture’s role as a container of memories, emotions, and shared concepts.

Mårten Lange

The book takes its starting point from the concept of the memory palace—a technique developed before the invention of printing to memorize large quantities of information. Lange has created a visual labyrinth within the palace, where each photograph functions as a portal to different time periods and emotional states.

The structure and layout of the book reinforce the sensation of a labyrinth, inviting readers to navigate through a complex network of architectural elements. Each photograph is a chosen fragment from ancient and medieval environments. These images evoke childhood memories of dark basements and mysterious attic spaces while the architectural elements—doors, windows, and staircases—carry their own meanings.

Ur serien The Palace © Mårten Lange

The interplay between architecture as both a place and a remnant of a bygone time, the memory palace as an embodied book, and photography as a bridge to how humans experience their surroundings make Lange’s book a labyrinth that is well worth getting lost in.

Photo Book Scholarships 2023

The 50 000 SEK scholarship

La Petite Ceinture (violet) – Paris par arrondissement – Jeu de L’oie

By Jessika Thörnqvist & Kim Ramberghaug (born 1975, resident in Rackstad, and born 1973, resident in Trondheim)

This photo book is a captivating and innovative visual novel, whose three chapters explore areas of Paris from the perspective of formal limitations and regulations. A disused circular railway line dating from 1898 forms the starting point for the introductory chapter La Petite Ceinture [The little belt] (Violet). The line was originally drawn on a map in the colour lilac. Jessika Thörnqvist and Kim Ramberghaug located and photographed those parts of the railway that are still possible to access, both above and below ground. In the second chapter, the authors follow and photograph an outward-winding spiral pattern in the city. The shape is drawn from an unfinished detective novel by the Danish poet Inger Christsensen. Anagrams of the name of the arrondissements have been used to position characters on a map of Paris. In their final series – Jeu de L’oie [The Goose Game] – the photographers instead follow an inward-winding spiral they identified on a map of Paris found by one of the protagonists in the Jacques Rivette film Le pont du nord.

The book forms part of a series of works in which Thörnqvist and Ramberghaug – under the publishing name of Lightnin’Howlin’Screamin’ – examine a number of places using similar methods. The approach has links to the situationists’ theories of psycho-geography, which is a method of examining cities by playfully allowing oneself to “drift around”. In the practical hands of Thörnqvist and Ramberghaug, however, the approach expands to become an examination of what the aspects of formal restriction and limitation can add.

In their publication, Thörnqvist and Ramberghaug have created strong, suggestive narratives that are not averse to encompassing an abstract image idiom that obliges the reader to remain in the picture. The results can lead thoughts in the direction of experimental film or ambient music in their way of promoting emotions of voyages of discovery over tangible or fictive places, the unconscious or our own inner selves.

The 30,000 SEK scholarship

Peter Freuchen’s Private Servant on the 5 Thule. Exp. by Lars Dyrendom (born. 1981, resident in Gothenburg)

Lars Dyrendom’s original artist’s book focuses on the role of photography and the archive in the colonial relationship between Greenland and Denmark from a conceptual perspective.

The book comprises two series of photographs from the private archive of the Danish explorer Peter Freuchen. One of the series comprises reverse sides of photographs, while the other presents the front side of the same landscape photos. The photographed reverse sides, with their notes and catalogue references, reveal colonial structures. Places, names of items and identities of the subjects of the photographs are not mentioned unless the people in question are Danish.

In other words, the Inuit people and the Greenlandic items have been anonymised.

In the book, the fold-out pages with landscape images are printed on the reverse side – or perhaps more accurately, the inside, as these pages are bound such that they can be folded out to form a circle that provides a 360-degree horizon. The paper is thin, which means that the photos of landscapes and the photos of the reverse sides intermingle.

The book is part of a major project that focuses on Danish archive collections, put together by Danes who have had various relationships with Greenland. The project centres on the nuances of the “common” narratives, and attempts in this way to challenge the historical basis that maintains Denmark’s colonial relationship with Greenland.

The 20,000 SEK scholarship

Eyes of Sliver by Lotta Antonsson (born in 1963, resident in Falkenberg)

This book showcases several of the themes that have long held prominent positions in Lotta Antonsson’s art – suggestion, symbolism, tactility and blackness – in a seamless, insightful manner.

The photos in the book stem from the analogy between photography and silver, and are taken from Antonsson’s extensive collection of her own and other photographers’ pictures. The work focuses on a number of black/white negatives of women’s hands in close up; hands holding things, wearing jewellery, concealing the face or the eyes. Antonsson writes: “What the hand is doing or outlining seems to create deep memory tracks in our consciousness – and this is what I am aiming to represent through aesthetically seductive photographs and collages.”

In short, there is something lurking beneath the surface. The project highlights the contradictory – almost alchemistic – aspect of silver, which is often associated with light jewellery, but which, in the world of photography, is instead a precondition for conjuring up darkness.

The book will be designed by Camillia Blomgren from the AOKI Design Agency, and will also include a text by art critic and psychoanalyst Sinziana Ravini.

The members of the jury for the photobook scholarships 2023:

Andréas Hagström, Hasselblad Foundation

Jenny Nordquist, Artistic Director of the Landskrona Foto Festival

Cecilia Sandblom, Hasselblad Foundation

Dragana Vujanovic Östlind, Hasselblad Foundation

Louise Wolthers, Hasselblad Foundation

Updated soon.

Photo Book Grants 2021

The 50 000  SEK grant:
Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt for the book On This Day

Authors: Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt och Thomas Sauvin
Publisher: B-B-B-Books and Beijing Silvermine
Design: Axel von Friesen & Michael Evidon

The artist duo Klara Källström and Thobias Fäldt’s book On This Day revolves around two archives. One consists of a collection of date-stamped everyday images from Beijing, China, taken between 1985 and 2005. The other archive is the American website onthisday.com, which maintains a daily register of interesting world events – seen from an American perspective. The artists have paired the date-stamped images with events of that day from the website. There is an interesting clash in the combination of the amateur photography archive from China and random events in the west. The book’s design will allude to archive aesthetics and we look forward to an innovative approach to the photo book genre.

The 30 000 SEK grant
Peo Olsson & Johan Willner for the book Heaps, Magic & Science

The project is an innovative, conceptual and visual investigation of an overlooked element in the landscape: the heap. The photographs draw attention to a formal repetition that is at the same time enigmatic and reflects something site-specific – the heap can be created by man or nature, and shaped by the environment, history, economy or politics. The book is like a concentrated exhibition with an innovative design. It consists of three parts, each of which consists of a large folded paper with photographs in a grid. The first is an archive of various found heaps. The next presents series of heaps as sculptural forms and the last shows sketches and investigations of the heap’s character. The purpose of the form is to communicate the materiality, spatiality and narrativity of the pile. The artists will develop the design in close collaboration with the publisher Praun & Guermouche.

The 20 000 SEK grant
Tine Bek Hansen for the boook The Vulgarity of Being Three-Dimensional

In this book project, Tine Bek Hansen tries to escape strict hierarchical structures through a series of aesthetic experiments. The book presents images of shapes that run over, flow, crumble and bulge out. An excess of uncontrolled forms that in the sculptural tradition have traditionally been dismissed as weak or possibly baroque. In all this is also inscribed the man and the human body – the fragile and absurd body. The project is an attempt to portray this on several levels: first in a physical spatial context through the creation of sculptural forms, then in representation through photographs of the sculptures, still lifes and other found forms, and finally through the book’s own form and texture. In this way, the book becomes as much a visual as well as a tactile examination.

The purpose of these grants is to support and contribute to the development of the photo book in the Nordic countries which is a vital part of photographic practice and research.

Photo Book Grants 2020

A grant of SEK 100,000 has been awarded to Eva Dahlman in collaboration with Björn Axel Johansson for the book Kvinnor bakom kameran 1845–1945 (Women Behind the Camera – working title).

Foto: Rosalie Sjöman, I ateljén, 1860-tal,
© Nordiska museet

The role of women in early photography has long been overlooked, despite the large number of women who were active photographers and have been an essential part of the field since the 1860s. This photohistorical book will be the first to cover the contributions of women photographers including portraiture, reportage, fashion, rural and amateur photography in Sweden 1845–1945. It is based on comprehensive research including biographical articles and previously unpublished pictures. This book will be an extremely important volume in the historiography of photography in Sweden. Planned release 2021.

A grant of SEK 50,000 has been awarded to Martin Magntorn for the book Daddy Cool.

© Martin Magntorn

Martin Magntorn’s moving and personal portrayal of his late father is part of a popular contemporary genre that focuses on subjective narratives of the family. This project takes an unexpected turn and presents a private representation in a generally applicable manner. It is just as much about the image of a parent as about the photographer’s father. His own portrait of his father is mixed with pictures from the family album and the flow of images is punctured by objective still lifes of the father’s belongings: his shoes, ties and razors. The narrative is not chronological, but associative, which reflects the nature of memory of a past time. Planned release 2020.

A grant of SEK 30,000 has been awarded to Salad Hilowle for the book Halima om de sina (Halima on Her Own People).

© Salad Hilowle

Salad Hilowle describes his book as “a poetical, fictional documentary that, through pictures and text, tells the story of ordinary people.” It is a family’s story, from Somalia to Sweden, told through photography, archive material and private pictures. It is an intimate portrayal, reminiscent of a diary, of people and places rarely seen in Swedish photobooks. Salad Hilowle also aims to reflect the multifaceted story in the book’s experimental design. Planned release 2022.

Photo Book Grants 2019

Albert Elias Grøndahl

Albert Elias Grøndahl has been awarded a grant of 50,000 kr for his project The City Behind the Forest. Grøndahl was born in 1985 in Denmark. He lives and works in Copenhagen.

Motivation

An exceptionally relevant document of an era close in time, yet soon forgotten. This is an innovative book that combines archival material from Aarhus psychiatric hospital with previous patients’ art and pictures of the hospital grounds, photographed by Grøndahl himself. The selection of portraits of the hospital’s patients has been chosen with great care and sensitivity. This type of medical archival photography is also interesting from a photo-historical perspective. The dummy has been thoroughly prepared with a convincing design. This is an important photo book of high quality, in both artistic and culture-historical terms. Grøndahls choice of materials testifies to the fact that this book has the potential to become a masterpiece.

Heikki Kaski

Heikki Kaski has been awarded a grant of 30,000 kr for his project with the working title Life, but how to live it. Kaski was born in 1987 in Finland. He lives and works in Sweden.

Motivation

Kaski works within an associative aesthetic tradition and portrays contemporary life with a poetically inflected social realism. Kaski fully masters the art of photographic storytelling and his use of editing and design shows photographic language to its best advantage. Brief accounts figure in the larger narrative flow in the form of diptychs, contrasts and unexpected details. His sense of rhythm, form and color makes it all the more important that this material is allowed to take shape in the form of a photo book.

Elisabeth Molin

Elisabeth Molin has been awarded a grant of 20,000 kr for her project with the working title COMFORT 7/32/00. Molin was born in 1985 in Denmark. She lives and works in Copenhagen.

Motivation

The first thing one is struck by is the brightness of Molin’s color scheme, but also a kind of restraint, a concentration in her sense for detail. Her photography tends toward the surreal and her fragmentary segments of the everyday assume an almost tactile quality. Her project concerns the encounter between biological and mechanical patterns and rhythms in an urban environment. The photographs are accompanied by short texts that relect upon human and mechanical gazes, the technology of sight: Eye as camera and camera as eye.

Jury 2019

Elsa Modin, Cecilia Sandblom, Sara Walker and Louise Wolthers, Hasselblad Foundation

Photo Book Grants 2018

Tova Mozard (SEK 50 000)

Alice Schoolcraft (SEK 30 000)

Annica Karlsson Rixon (SEK 20 000)

The Hasselblad Foundation Photo Book Grants 2017

Helga Härenstam – SEK 50 000

Cecilia Grönberg – SEK 30 000

Hendrik Zeitler – SEK 20 000

Skogsbärbranschen – Photo Book Grant 2016

In order to promote these grants and mark the significance of photography books already this summer, we have chosen to award photographer Johannes Samuelsson a grant of SEK 20,000 for his book project Skogsbärbranschen.

Skogsbärbranschen is based on Johannes Samuelsson’s photographs and started as a collaboration with two cultural geographers and researchers at Umeå University: Madeleine Eriksson and Aina Tollefsen. It is about the forest-berry industry in Norrland: about structural organisation, economic circumstances, changes in the countryside, migration and local and global relationships. The project is cross-disciplinary, highly relevant and very original.

Johannes Samuelsson

About Johannes Samuelsson

Johannes Samuelsson is a photographer and artist with a master’s degree from the Valand Academy at the University of Gothenburg. He lives and works in Umeå, Sweden. Johannes participated in the exhibition New Nordic Photography at the Hasselblad Center in 2011 and teaches at the Umeå School of Architecture at Umeå University.