The Royal Photographic Society has announced its 2025 award recipients, and the lineup is nothing short of extraordinary. With these honorees, the RPS Awards spotlight creators who are shaping visual culture through both still and moving imagery.
"So much of the work from this era is playful, stylish and full of personality. Despite printing constraints, artists still found ways to create illustrations full of wit and charm," says Zara. "The cheerful optimism and embrace of character, combined with individuality and modernist values, led to impactful, vibrant designs that still resonate today. According to the illustrator, its influence may be much more far reaching than we think: "Even illustrators who've never seen these originals are working in traditions these artists established."
The tendency toward passive visual consumption is tied to 'commodity fetishism,' where society is dominated by both tangible and intangible things, culminating in a spectacle of images.
The present collection builds upon this recent body of scholarship. It embraces the expanded framework of visual and material culture studies to explore a spectrum of objects executed in a broad range of media.
A stripe is brisker, while a spot is giving whimsy. There’s some old-fashioned gender stereotyping mixed up in that, because stripes are worn by everyone, whereas spots are almost exclusively found in women's fashion.
