Women Photograph, a non-profit launched in 2017 to amplify the voices of women and non-binary visual journalists, has announced three recipients of its 2026 grants. Grants of $10,000 have been awarded to Fatma Fahmy, Caroline Gutman and Yixi Tian. This year’s grants were sponsored by Leica USA.
Yixi Tian’s Veiled by Cloud and Mist
Yixi Tian’s project, 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 practised 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.
Yixi Tian has come to see the crises quietly threatening the Miao medicine practitioners’ 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.
Fatma Fahmy’s When Absence Takes Hold
Fatma Fahmy’s 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.
Judges were struck by the project, an 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. One caption from the project reads: “The sardine, the only fish remaining is just like us. It searches for a place to rest, but the sea refuses to embrace it. Both of us are adrift and lost.”
Caroline Gutman’s The Invisible Force
Caroline Gutman’s The Invisible Force is an ongoing documentary project that explores 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 workers during the Manhattan Project. Hanford provided plutonium used in the US atomic bomb that killed about thousands of people in Nagasaki in 1945.
Through portraiture and documentary photography, the project 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. The project resonated with jurors “for its thoughtful approach on a subject wedged between the past and present”. They said: “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 US and abroad – at a moment when global conflicts have reached their highest levels since World War II.”
