The Photo Review: Best in Show 2026
This exhibition presents the work of the prizewinners of the 2026 International Photography Competition, organized annually by The Photo Review, a critical journal of national scope and international readership. This year’s Photo Review International Photography Competition is juried by Dr. Sarah Kennel, the inaugural Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center for Works on Paper at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts —one of the country’s leading photography scholars. Now in its 41st year, the annual competition, first held in 1985, attracts submissions from established and aspiring photographers. Prizewinning works have been acquired by Woodmere, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Haverford College.
About the Photo Review
Since 1976, The Photo Review has covered photography events throughout the country and serves as a central resource for the Mid-Atlantic region. With incisive reviews, exciting portfolios, lively interviews, and the latest in books and exhibitions, the journal has earned a reputation as one of the best serious photography publications being produced today. Writers— including A.D. Coleman, Stephen Perloff, Shelley Rice, Peter Hay Halpert, Barbara L. Michaels, Jean Dykstra, and Mark Power — have examined subjects as varied as the posthumous publication of work by Diane Arbus, women in photography, the growth of digital media, the historical movement from Pictorialism into Modernism, and much more. In his ongoing series “The Censorship Diaries,” Editor Stephen Perloff was at the forefront in covering the controversy over funding for the NEA and censorship of the arts. Articles have been reprinted in such publications as Afterimage, To, Photography in New York, and American Photo.
Editor Stephen Perloff, a respected writer, educator and photographer, has been interviewed for The New York Times, The Toronto Globe & Mail, The Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Photo District News, and the New York Observer. He has received two critic’s fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Colin Ford Award for Curatorship from the Royal Photographic Society.
About the juror
Dr. Sarah Kennel is a specialist in the history of photography who has curated, published, and presented widely on subjects ranging from nineteenth-century French photography and historic photographic processes to European modernism and understudied women photographers.
Her recent projects include A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845; Willie Anne Wright: Artist and Alchemist; Underexposed: Women Artists from the High Museum of Art; and Olivia Parker: Order of Imagination. She has also written on the relationship between painting and photography in nineteenth-century France and completed her dissertation on the intersection of dance and the visual arts in the early twentieth century.
Dr. Kennel has previously held curatorial positions at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA; and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
