Pot shot wins World Food Photography Awards 2026
SkimNews Take
The "Pot shot" win highlights how food photography increasingly values the narrative and human element of food production over just the final dish.
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- Pingyao Song won the Champagne Taittinger food for celebration category with "The Festival of Food Enthusiasts" — an aerial view of hundreds at a Zouchuan Hotpot brand gourmet festival in China, with the article's title indicating this "pot shot" took the overall top spot.
- Indigo Larmour (age 13-17) won the Jamie Oliver youth prize with "Chhath Puja Offerings" — devotees in West Bengal, India, standing in water holding food offerings to the sun god Surya during the predominantly women-led festival.
- Mithail Afrige Chowdhury won the World Food Programme food for life category with "The Open Air Hotel" — a Dhaka, Bangladesh restaurant owner who sells affordable meals to daily laborers at Gabtoli coal station.
- Balázs Lehóczki won the Philip Harben award for food in action with "Proven Recipe" — a portrait of his grandparents cooking together, a scene he'd planned to capture for six to seven years before his grandmother called him an artist upon seeing the print.
- Anne Mason-Hoerter won the Bimi prize with "Candied Pear" — a translucent image made by boiling thinly sliced pear in sugar water, drying the slices, and photographing them on a glass sheet with colored plastic and a table lamp, combined via Photoshop.
- Michela Balboni won the food for the family category with "The Final Touch" — young Asilbek touching bread straight from the family tandoor in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where the traditional non is round, dense, and marked with black sesame seeds.
- Maggie Jary won the on the phone category with "Chip n Ladies Day Out" — a spontaneous black-and-white capture of four women sharing chips at Beamish open-air museum, County Durham, UK, which Jary described as "the power of friendship."
Why it matters: With category winners drawn from at least eight countries and sponsored prizes from the World Food Programme, Jamie Oliver, Louis Jadot, and Champagne Taittinger, the awards show how commercial sponsors shape which food stories get amplified. The overall winner — a communal Chinese hotpot scene — and other top picks emphasize ritual, labor, and community over polished plated-product photography, signaling where the genre's center of gravity is moving.
