Weekly News Roundup
Weekly News from photography world.
The photography world lost one of its most courageous voices this week. The Sony World Photography Awards unveiled its 2026 Professional finalists. Zanele Muholi wins the Hasselblad Award. Catherine Opie opens at the National Portrait Gallery. And 2025 camera sales settled a debate that has been running in forums for years.
Paul Conroy, 1964 to 2026
The biggest story in photography this week has nothing to do with gear. Paul Conroy, one of the most respected war photographers of his generation, died of a heart attack on February 28. He was 61.
Conroy spent more than 25 years documenting conflicts across the Middle East, Africa, and Ukraine. He was in Homs in 2012 when the building he and his colleagues were working from was shelled by Syrian government forces. Marie Colvin and French photographer Rémi Ochlik were killed in the attack. Conroy survived, was smuggled out of Syria by local activists, and spent five months in hospital undergoing more than 20 operations. He went back to work.
As well as Syria, Conroy covered wars in Libya, Congo, and Afghanistan, and had recently been living in Ukraine, training journalists in battlefield first aid. He died while visiting family on a trip to the UK.
His death feels like the loss of one of the defining witnesses of an era of conflict. Those who worked alongside him describe a photographer who understood that bearing witness was a moral obligation, not a career choice. Amnesty International called him a courageous and compassionate storyteller.
His brother Alan said he found great pleasure in exposing wrongs. That is about as clear a statement of purpose as a photographer can leave behind.
The events in Homs were later told in the 2018 film A Private War, in which Jamie Dornan played Conroy. His memoir, Under the Wire, remains one of the most honest accounts ever written about what it actually means to photograph a war.
We do not write often about photojournalism in this space. But Conroy's death is a reminder of what photography, at its most serious, is for. Not aesthetics. Not gear. Bearing witness to what is happening in the world, and making sure people cannot look away.
Sony World Photography Awards 2026: The Professional Finalists Are In
The Sony World Photography Awards announced the 30 finalists and over 65 shortlisted photographers in the 2026 Professional competition. The overall Photographer of the Year will be announced at a ceremony in London on April 16, with selected works going on display at Somerset House from April 17 to May 5.
Across this year's competitions, over 430,000 images from more than 200 countries and territories were submitted. The Professional competition is the one worth paying attention to. Unlike the Open category, which rewards standout single images, the Professional division requires photographers to submit a cohesive series of five to ten images. It rewards sustained vision over a single strong frame.
A few of this year's finalists are worth knowing about. Will Burrard-Lucas from the UK was recognised in Wildlife and Nature for Crossing Point, a series made using a remote camera trap monitoring endangered black rhinoceroses in Kenya's Maasai Mara Reserve at night. Pablo Ramos from Mexico made the Creative shortlist with The Black Album, which transforms archival photographs of Mexico's disappeared into silhouettes, creating a haunting collective portrait of absence. Alexandre Bagdassarian from France documented eight months inside a juvenile prison in France. Citlali Fabian from Mexico collaborated with Indigenous activists and artists to document the stories of women in southern Mexico, blending photography with digital illustration.
The range of the work, and the seriousness of the subject matter across the finalists, is worth noting. The professional finalists offer a counterpoint to the Open winners, revealing how photographers are using image sequences to deepen storytelling beyond what a single photo can achieve.
You can see all of the finalists at worldphoto.org. The work is worth your time.
Zanele Muholi Wins the 2026 Hasselblad Award
The Hasselblad Foundation has named South African photographer Zanele Muholi the 2026 Hasselblad Award laureate, the world's largest photography award. Muholi receives SEK 2,000,000, over $217,000 at current exchange rates, a gold medal, a Hasselblad camera, and a solo exhibition at the Hasselblad Center at the Gothenburg Museum of Art in Sweden.
Muholi is one of the most significant documentary photographers working today. Their work centres on the lives of Black LGBTQIA+ people in South Africa, and spans more than two decades of committed, unflinching image making. The Hasselblad Award is the closest thing photography has to a lifetime achievement prize at the highest level. Previous laureates include Sebastião Salgado, Annie Leibovitz, and William Eggleston. Muholi belongs in that company.
For a community built around the idea that black and white photography is a discipline of seeing rather than a style, Muholi's work is worth knowing deeply. Much of it is shot in monochrome, not for aesthetic reasons, but because the tonal reduction focuses everything on the subject. The person in front of the camera. Their presence. Their dignity. That is what the work is about.
Catherine Opie Opens at the National Portrait Gallery, London
Catherine Opie's first major UK exhibition gathers photographic portraits from her 30 year career, dedicated to notions of queer culture, liberation and home. The show focuses on ideas of representation, visibility and identity, and runs at the National Portrait Gallery in London from March 5 until May 31, 2026.
Opie is one of the most important portrait photographers of the last three decades. Her work is frontal, deliberate, and completely unambiguous in its intent: to make visible people who have historically been rendered invisible, and to do so with the formal seriousness of the great painted portrait traditions. The Baroque reference is not accidental. These are monumental images of ordinary people, made with the conviction that their lives deserve exactly that scale of attention.
If you are anywhere near London before the end of May, this is not optional.
APS-C Outsold Full Frame Nearly Two to One in 2025
This one will not shock everyone, but the numbers put a definitive end to a conversation that has been running in photography forums for years.
In 2025, CIPA member companies including Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, and OM Digital Solutions shipped over 4.45 million interchangeable lens bodies with sensors smaller than 35mm. Full frame and larger accounted for roughly 2.54 million. The format dismissed for years as the starter sensor you graduate from outsold full frame by a ratio of roughly 1.75 to one.
This matters for the monochrome community in a specific way. APS-C cameras, particularly from Fujifilm, are among the strongest options available for black and white photography short of a dedicated monochrome sensor. The Fujifilm X-T5 is on our Camera Guide for exactly this reason. The market has spoken, and it turns out most photographers are not chasing full frame. They are chasing the right tool for how they actually work.
The numbers also put into context the significance of the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome, which we wrote about on the Camera Guide. A dedicated monochrome sensor in an APS-C compact, at a price point significantly below any Leica alternative, is well positioned for a market that has already decided APS-C is not a compromise.
OM System Drops the 50-200mm f/2.8 IS PRO
OM System has released the M.Zuiko 50-200mm f/2.8 IS PRO, described as the world's only constant f/2.8 zoom covering the 100 to 400mm equivalent range, the kind of lens that makes full frame shooters do math they do not enjoy.
This matters beyond the wildlife and sports photographers it is primarily aimed at. It is another piece of evidence in the case that Micro Four Thirds is not dying. It is maturing. The system offers lenses that simply do not exist in the same form anywhere else. A constant f/2.8 across the equivalent of 100 to 400mm in a package small enough to carry all day is not a compromise. It is a different set of priorities. And for black and white photographers working at longer focal lengths, isolating subjects, compressing backgrounds, hunting for geometry in a scene, that range at that aperture is genuinely interesting.
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