Recipients of the 2026 ZEKE Awards
SDN is proud to announce the First Place and Honorable Mention winners of the 2026 ZEKE Awards.
ZEKE Award for Documentary Photography
SDN awards one photographer the ZEKE Award for Documentary Photography to recognize their success in documentary photography and visual storytelling with an emphasis on themes that affect the global community.
ZEKE Award for Systemic Change
SDN is partnering again with the Foundation for Systemic Change for the fifth year. SDN awards one photographer the ZEKE Award for Systemic Change to recognize their outstanding visual stories documenting systemic changes leading to sustainable solutions to important issues affecting the world today.
The awardees will appear in the Spring 2026 issue of ZEKE Magazine and in exhibitions to be announced later in the Spring.
First Place: ZEKE Award for Systemic Change
Ginevra Bonina
Out For Blood
India
A young Muslim woman walks through the alleys of Baghori village. Despite coming from a relatively comfortable economic background, her life, and that of her relatives and friends, is deeply affected by the taboos and stigma surrounding menstruation. Sitarganj, Uttarakhand, India, November 2025. Photograph by Ginevra Bonina.
Menstruation is a physiological process, but despite being universal– influencing psycho-physical well-being, reproductive health, education, work, and spiritual life– it remains surrounded by taboos and stigma rooted in mythology, religion, medicine, and culture. These prejudices have tangible consequences, turning periods into an invisible, underestimated issue.
Out for Blood documents the most extreme consequences of this reality in India: period poverty, defined as limited access to safe menstrual products, adequate sanitation, and education.
Of approximately 355 million women of reproductive age, only 45% are aware of menstruation before menarche (first menstrual period). Many still rely on cloths– a non-hygienic practice risking infections. 24% of girls drop out of school after menarche due to inadequate sanitation.
Through voices from Hindu, Muslim, and Adivasi communities, the project documents lives and environments while addressing inequality, violence, taboos, sustainability, and healthcare access. This is not solely a public health issue but a human rights concern, as menstruation functions as a tool of control over women's bodies.
The project aims to foster awareness and self-determination, reclaiming the body as a site of struggle, resistance, and liberation.
Ginevra Bonina is an Italian documentary photographer, writer, and producer. Born in Catania, Sicily, she holds a Master’s degree in Languages, Economics, and Institutions of Asia and North Africa from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (2017). In 2024, she completed a Masterclass in Photo and Video Journalism with the Italian news magazine InsideOver and joined the Canon Student Development Program. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, since 2019, Ginevra works as a freelance photographer and video-maker, balancing commercial assignments with personal, long-term projects focused on women’s and minority rights, feminist issues, and spirituality. Her practice combines a documentary approach with a poetic and symbolic visual language, often informed by anthropology and storytelling.
First Place: ZEKE Award for Documentary Photography
Ebrahim Alipoor
Bullets Have No Borders
Iran
One of the countless arduous crossing paths that the Kolbars have to take while carrying items weighing more than 50 kilograms for long distances. These passages are one of the main causes of the deaths Kolbars endure. Kolbars usually leave late at night for the border to make a crossing early in the morning. Kurdistan, Iran, June 2019. Photo by Ebrahim Alipoor.
Bullets Have No Borders is a long-term documentary project about Kurdish Kolbars– border porters who carry goods across the Iran-Iraq mountains to support their families. In regions shaped by chronic unemployment, political pressure, and marginalization, Kolbari is often the only available source of income.
The project follows men and teenagers on night journeys through snow, fog, minefields, and militarized border zones, where they face armed patrols, falls, hypothermia, arrest, and death. Beyond the crossings, the work looks at waiting families, injured bodies, mourning, and the persistence of daily life under constant risk.
Photographed over nearly a decade with close access and long-term trust, the images reveal how an invisible economy operates through fear and endurance. At the same time, they show dignity, solidarity, and responsibility as forces that sustain individuals and communities.
Bullets Have No Borders asks how survival becomes criminalized– and what it means when borders value goods more than human lives.
Ebrahim Alipoor is a Kurdish-Iranian photographer focusing on long-term documentary and visual storytelling around borders,identity, and social realities in the Middle East. Alipoor is a self-taught photographer, but over the past years, has used every opportunity to continue learning, including participation in the VII Mentor Program and other educational experiences. Alipoor has received several awards, including World Press Photo, POY Asia, the Canon Grand Prize, and the Allard Prize.
Honorable Mentions for Documentary Photography are awarded to:
Arin Yoon
To Be At War
United States
Self-portrait at a B&B in between duty stations. Leavenworth, KS, July 9, 2014. Photo by Arin Yoon.
Coverage of wars since the turn of the 21st century has usually been by media outside of the military community, often leaving out first-person narratives of war. Thirteen years ago, I married a service member. I have lived the moments leading up to war and the aftermath of war firsthand. To understand my new life as a military spouse living on a military base, I began photographing my new community, exploring my role in the military structure. These photographs soon evolved into a documentary project about how military families live, including my own experiences as a spouse and mom.
The visual representation of the military family experience is often reduced to a single image of the service member’s return home. An embrace. A tearful reunion. These images, however, do not capture the long preparation for deployments, training exercises that can be fatal, and spouses (95% women) who raise children alone, often cut off from critical support systems.
What is the cost of war? What does it mean to be at war? This project began as a means for me to answer these questions for myself.
Carol Guzy
ICE- Broken Families
United States
Distraught young girls cling to their father, Luis, a migrant from Ecuador, as he is detained by ICE after his immigration court hearing at the Jacob Javits Federal Building in New York, NY, on August 26, 2025. Traumatized children are caught in the crossfire of U.S. President Trump’s controversial immigration reform policies amid a mass deportation effort. Photo by Carol Guzy.
Masked ICE agents detain migrants after immigration court hearings during Trump’s controversial mass deportation effort in Manhattan on July 16, 2025. After an arduous journey seeking asylum, these are the final steps to a new destiny. ‘Take me, not him – they will kill him!’ screamed Monica as she was violently thrown to the floor. Desperate daughters futilely hold on to their father’s shirt. A woman is led in shackles. In a tender moment of humanity, a security guard weeps viewing the despair of a mother and child. Sometimes it is the quiet moments that resonate most profoundly in the collective conscience of a nation.
Children are traumatized, caught in the crossfire. ‘Why are you taking away my father from me? He is the only one I have,’ wept Scarlett, 10. She makes drawings of Jesus protecting her Papa. Anita and her two girls struggle, one of many broken families. Ashley celebrated her 3rd birthday as her Daddy languished in detention. They hold onto fragile hope, awaiting an uncertain future.
There is a vast political divide. Some protest. Others applaud. Daily, detentions continue.
Supratim Bhattacharjee
Black Diamond and Tears
India
In Chhattisgarh’s Surguja district, vast stretches of forest face a new wave of destruction as coal mining expands deeper into the Hasdeo-Arand region. In August 2025, the State Forest Department recommended diverting 1,742.60 hectares of dense forest for the Kente Extension coal block, a decision that could lead to the loss of nearly 450,000 trees. Photograph by Supratim Bhattacharjee.
Forested belts in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Odisha are being rapidly cleared as open-cast coal mining expands into tribal regions. These five states contain over 70 percent of India’s coal reserves. From 2015 to 2023, nearly 1.2 million hectares of forest were diverted for mining and industry, with another 90,000 hectares under review in 2024. A 13 percent rise in coal output in 2023–24 has further intensified pressure on land and ecosystems.
This expansion is dismantling biodiversity corridors and weakening vital carbon sinks, undermining India’s 2070 net-zero ambitions and increasing regional heatwave risks. Tribal communities bear the highest cost. Families dependent on forests for food, medicine, and livelihoods are displaced with inadequate rehabilitation, driving poverty, malnutrition, debt, and school dropouts.
Jharia in Jharkhand exemplifies this crisis. Once forested, it is now scarred by open pits and burning coal seams. Toxic gases saturate the air, poverty is widespread, and children face hazardous labor, illness, and disrupted education—revealing the long-term human and ecological cost of coal dependence.
Rory Grubb
Somewhere Else
Georgia
A bus nearing the Russian border on the treacherous Military Road, along which many exiles have fled to safety in recent years. An ancient route linking Russia with the Caucasus, it has been used by invaders and traders through the ages. Photograph by Rory Grubb.
After four years of war in Ukraine, an overlooked side effect is the enormous displacement of people from Belarus and Russia, due to their countries' rapid shift to authoritarianism.
Large numbers of dissidents and oppositionists have ended up in exile in Georgia, as it is the quickest and easiest path to safety. However, they are not granted asylum or residence, so they must live in prolonged uncertainty. For most, returning home is not an option– some await prison sentences, while others simply can't imagine life in a closed regime. Over the last year, Georgia itself has been shifting towards authoritarian rule, adding further uncertainty and raising questions about whether it could become the next Belarus or Ukraine.
This project explores life in exile for Europeans who wish for the freedoms enjoyed across the EU, but who instead have been pushed out to the edge, to the so-called “balcony of Europe". How does one cope, make a community, and survive in a limbo state that is becoming less secure all the time?
Honorable Mention for Systemic Change is awarded to:
Taofeek Oyewole Lawal
The Mourning Tide: Reflections on the Coastal Waste Crisis
Ghana
James Town Beach is primarily inhabited by fishermen who venture out at midnight to catch fish and return at dawn to sell their catch. Most of the sellers are women who buy the fish at wholesale prices. The fishermen often encounter challenges due to the waste that occupies a large area of the beach. This beach is also part of the Gulf of Guinea and connects the largest lagoon in Ghana to the Korlegona Lagoon. Accra, Ghana. Photograph by Taofeek Oyewole Lawal.
Mourning Tide is a site-specific multi-media exhibition and social documentary project exposing the environmental and cultural toll of global textile waste on the Ghanaian coastline. At Kinshasa Beach, Accra, the work confronts the “Obroni Wawu” (dead white man’s clothes) phenomenon, where 15 million weekly garments turn the Gulf of Guinea into a fast-fashion graveyard.
The centerpiece features a traditional fishing net entangled with recovered shore waste. In place of price tags, oversized labels display degradation statistics and the Western brands fueling the crisis. This installation is paired with photographs of “chokers”—massive fabric knots clogging the seabed—and portraits of community members whose livelihoods are strangled by the Global North’s “disposable” culture. Finally, the exhibit presents the many creative solutions the community is employing to confront the problem.
A visual indictment and call for accountability, Mourning Tide forces a confrontation with the consequences of invisible supply chains by exhibiting waste on the very sands where it accumulates. It demands a shift from a linear economy toward a global responsibility that respects the sanctity of local environments and the dignity of the people of Accra.
Marijn Fidder
Inclusive Nation
Uganda
Ruth Araba (45) sits with her son, Emma, on her lap, who is severely malnourished, on the bed in the living room. A year ago, Emma was put on nutrition at a local hospital, but after a while, he was sent home to die. Ruth:” I do not have money to pay for the hospital bills, because I need to go to work and I can't leave my child alone." Ruth lives with her two sons in Bussede village in Uganda. Both of her sons suffer from Celebral Palsy due to a lack of oxygen during birth. Photo by Marijn Fidder.
Life can present many obstacles for people with disabilities. These challenges lead to social isolation, poverty, and a reduced quality of life. However, amid these obstacles, Uganda is gradually transforming to become more inclusive.
As of 2020, Uganda has one of the most progressive laws for people with disabilities in the world. This states, among other things, that discrimination against people with disabilities is prohibited. Children with disabilities have the right to education, and adults have the right to a job. This is very important because 80% of all people with disabilities in the world live in developing countries, such as Uganda.
While there is still much work to be done, the progress made thus far is a glimmer of hope for people with disabilities.
Jurors
Barbara Ayotte
Communications Director for Social Documentary Network and Senior Editor of ZEKE Magazine. Senior Director of Strategic Communications at GBH.
Greig Cranna
Professional photographer and the founder and director of BRIDGE, a photography gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Gail Fletcher
Photo Editor at The Guardian, US.
Sarah Leen
Former Director of Photography for National Geographic Magazine and Partners, and currently an independent photo editor.
Dewi Lewis
Owner and publisher, Dewi Lewis Publishing
Maggie Soladay
Senior Photography Editor at the Open Society Foundations in New York.
Founding Partner
