The 2026 Women Photograph Grantees

Women Photograph is thrilled to announce the recipients of our 2026 grants: the three Women Photograph + Leica Grants of $10,000 have been awarded to Fatma Fahmy, Caroline Gutman, and Yixi Tian. We received over 1,200 applications from women and nonbinary photographers around the world — thank you so much to everyone who sent in proposals! Congratulations to the photographers selected — you can read more about their projects and connect with their work below.

Thank you to this year's grant sponsor, Leica USA, and to our judges, Laura Boushnak, Adriana García, Paloma Shutes, C. Rose Smith, and Cengiz Yar.

Women Photograph + Leica Project Grants

Fatma Fahmy

Egypt | fatmafahmy.com | @fatmah.fahmy | she/her

When Absence Takes Hold is a long-term visual project that explores how the environmental degradation of Lake Qarun in Egypt has reshaped the lives of women in nearby fishing communities. After the construction of Egypt’s High Dam severed the lake’s connection to the Nile, rising salinity, untreated sewage, agricultural runoff, and climate change further transformed the water, causing fish populations to disappear and the shoreline to recede. The project examines how this ecological collapse reshapes women’s relationships with family, body, memory, and place. Through an ecofeminist lens, When Absence Takes Hold retells this story from women’s perspectives, exploring the broken ties between people and place, and between body and nature.

Caroline Gutman

USA | carolinegutman.com | @carolinegutman | she/her

The Invisible Force is an ongoing documentary project that looks at the mystique of nuclear fission and its long-term environmental and social consequences. This chapter focuses on the nuclear mythology surrounding Richland, Washington, which housed Hanford Site workers during the Manhattan Project. Hanford provided plutonium used in the U.S. atomic bomb that killed approximately 100,000 people in Nagasaki, Japan in 1945. Through portraiture and documentary photography, The Invisible Force looks at how the rapid expansion of Richland, displacement of the Yakama Nation, and decades-long environmental degradation challenge the town’s pervasive pro-nuclear narrative.

Yixi Tian

China + Netherlands | tianyixi.com | @tc2h4 | she/her

Veiled by Cloud and Mist follows Miao medicine practitioners, who remain an essential source of care in the mountainous villages of Qiandongnan, Guizhou, China. Guided by her mother, who has long practiced among these healers, Yixi Tian has spent years living, learning, and documenting alongside them. Through her photographs and the healers' own words, she captures a world where healing relies on intimate trust and a shared bond with the environment. She has come to see the crises quietly threatening this way of life, including the disappearance of wild herbs, a break in generational transmission, and the ongoing limits of formal licensing. Her work stays with those who carry this knowledge as they continue to practice, adapt, and hold their world together.

Finalists

Notes from the Judges:

“Judges were struck by When Absence Takes Hold, Fatma Fahmy's ecofeminist look at how Lake Qarun's slow ecological collapse is playing out in the bodies and daily lives of the women who depend on it. Fahmy pairs a clear-eyed diagnosis of what's killing the lake, cut off from the Nile by the High Dam, then poisoned by salinity, sewage and runoff, with an intimate, multi-format approach spanning photography, sound and video. The fact that she's already spent real time in these fishing communities gives the project a groundedness the jury found compelling. What has the panel most excited is watching Fahmy dig further into her real question: what memory and grief look like when they're carried in the body, long after a place is gone.”

“Caroline Gutman’s project, The Invisible Force, resonated with jurors for its thoughtful approach on a subject wedged between the past and present. Her focus and eye for detail shine a light on our collective histories and global war-making, asking us to consider the long-term impact of nuclear ambitions in the U.S. and abroad—at a moment when global conflicts have reached their highest levels since World War II.”

In Veiled by Cloud and Mist, Yixi Tian chronicles Miao herbal healing traditions in the mountains of Guizhou, China. The judges were struck by her long-term commitment to documenting the relationships between environment, practitioners, and patients in a thoughtful and intimate way. In addition to recording the lives of individual healers, she asks us to consider themes surrounding medical accessibility, practitioner liability, and growing environmental pressures in this richly layered storytelling.