Bob Jeffrey, the chief executive of the International Centre of Photography (ICP), says such is the “enduring power” of an image that it commands an “ability to shine a light on the world around us and our shared humanity.”

The ICP is the world’s leading institution dedicated to photography and visual culture. Since 1985, it has held the Infinity Awards that have recognised major contributions and emerging talent in the fields of photojournalism, art, fashion photography and publishing. Among the winners this year was Lebohang Kganye, who was a recipient of the Contemporary Photography and New Media award.

Kganye is a visual artist and photographer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Although primarily a photographer, her interest in the materiality of photography is ongoing and explored in myriad ways through her use of the sculptural, performative, theatrical, and the moving image.

Kganye’s work has explored themes of personal history and ancestry whilst resonating with the history of South Africa and apartheid, specifically by incorporating the archival and performative into a practice that centres storytelling and memory as it plays out in the familial experience. Renee Harbers Liddell and Stefano Tonchi, the 2025 Infinity Awards co-chairs, who are also ICP Trustees, were impressed with not just what Kganye’s innovative work does but also where it goes. It was noted that she pushes photography into sculpture, performance, theatre, literature, montage, collage, and animation. They were impressed with how she managed to revisit images from her family archive, reworking and dialoguing with them with deeper ancestry and the legacies of apartheid in her native South Africa.

Avant-gardism

Kganye is part of the new generation of photography students who have come out of the Market Photo Workshop (MPW) in Johannesburg. Founded in 1989 by David Goldblatt, an internationally renowned documentary photographer, the MPW has reflected upon South African political struggles and sociocultural changes since its creation. The MPW’s training helped Kganye develop projects where the past intersects with the present, hoping for a different future. Drawing on double exposures, life-sized photos, cutouts, and the use of 3D space, she managed to, per the judging panel, create encounters “rooted in reality but are also fragmentary and dream-like.”

In so doing, “memory and history mingle[d] with contemporary issues” and she also manages to make “the past come back to life.” The creative voice she has managed to carve out in contemporary photographic art and visual culture is the kind that the MPW envisions. In her book titled The Market Photo Workshop in South Africa and the 'Born Free' Generation: Remaking Histories, Julie Bonzon, the author, says of the MPW: “Its foundation parallels a moment in time when photography was considered a ‘truth telling’ genre and an essential source of documents deployed against the apartheid regime.”

Bonzon adds that her book “reflects on the evolution of the MPW in the post-apartheid era and explores how its new generation of students engages the photographic tradition of this institution and the revolutionary times that accompanied its creation to question their present moment.” ICP described Kganye as an “innovative mixed media artist” who is “rooted in her own sense of place and time while making work that resonates with audiences worldwide.” Kganye said: “I am deeply honoured to be named a recipient of the 2025 ICP Infinity Award for Contemporary Photography and New Media.

This recognition affirms the power of storytelling and the enduring role of photography in shaping how we remember, imagine, and re-create from archival reflection.” She added: “My practice has always been rooted in the personal and the historical, in the spaces where memory resists erasure and where the archive becomes a living, breathing voice. This acknowledgment inspires me to continue to create with intention and purpose.” Besides Kganye, ICP honoured half a dozen other photographers at the 41st Annual Infinity Awards Gala.

These were: Susan Meiselas, winner of Lifetime Achievement award; Jack Davison, winner of Editorial and Commercial Photography award; the trio of Samar Abu Elouf, Nanna Heitmann and Ziv Koren, winner of the Documentary Practice and Photojournalism award; and Aldo Fallai, winner of the Special Recognition award. The work of Davison (b.1990, Essex, United Kingdom) depicts the human figure, architecture, animals, objects, landscapes and townscapes; yet his subject is always photography itself. Uncovering the surreal and the sensual in everyday life, Davison's use of chiaroscuro, framing and exposure as instruments of abstraction draws on the history of photography.

Elouf was born and raised in the Gaza Strip, Palestine. A self-taught photojournalist, she has worked in Gaza since 2010, documenting daily life, news and the profound effects of conflict on her country. In 2023, Samar chronicled one of the deadliest military campaigns in modern history for The New York Times: Israel’s strikes on and subsequent invasion of Gaza in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attacks. Like many Palestinian journalists working in Gaza, Samar was simultaneously enduring a war while also documenting it. She won numerous awards for her powerful images. She previously worked with Reuters, NZZ Swiss Magazine, Middle East Eye, among others.

Fallai honoured

Born in Florence in 1943, Fallai lives and works in his native city and in Milan. With a diploma from the Istituto d’Arte in Florence, where he teaches, he opened a graphic design studio with photographer Mario Strippini and began to approach photography himself. In the mid-1970s he met Giorgio Armani, who was making his debut as a designer at the beginning of the global affirmation of Made in Italy, to which Fallai’s photography contributed significantly. His first assignment from Armani marked the start of a collaboration that continued for almost 30 years. Heitmann is a German documentary photographer and a full member of Magnum Photos.

She is one of the few Western photographers covering Russia as it wages Europe’s biggest war of conquest since World War II, documenting both its devastation and the stark dissonance between the war’s horrors and Moscow’s glorified, distorted narratives. Heitmann’s earlier work explores themes of human resilience and environmental crises, including the impact of climate change in Siberia (As Frozen Lands Burn) and the Congo Basin’s peatlands (Beneath The Trees). Heitmann is a regular contributor to The New York Times and has been published in National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time and M Le Magazine du Monde.

Her visual journalism has earned numerous accolades, including the Olivier Rebbot Award for her coverage of Russia’s Covid crisis and a World Press Photo Award for her series on wildfires. Koren has been a professional photojournalist for more than 30 years. Today, Koren works for the daily “Yedioth Ahronoth,” represents “Polaris Images” photo agency in Israel, serves as an ambassador for “Can-son” fine art paper, for “Think-Tank Photo,” as an advisor for “Canon Israel” and is working on personal projects worldwide. Koren’s photojournalism and documentary projects focus mainly on humanitarian issues in Israel and around the world such as natural disasters, conflicts, wars and pandemics.

Meiselas is a documentary photographer based in New York. She is the author of Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), Pandora’s Box (2001), Encounters with the Dani (2003), Prince Street Girls (2016), A Room of Their Own (2017), Tar Beach (2020) and Carnival Strippers Revisited (2022). Meiselas is well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Her photographs are included in North American and international collections. In 1992, Meiselas was made a MacArthur Fellow and received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). She has been the President of the Magnum Foundation since 2007, with a mission to expand diversity and creativity in documentary photography.