Tosetti Value Photography Award

The Tosetti Value Photography Award has been awarded to Ruth Beraha, presented by the gallery Ncontemporary, and also includes a special mention and the acquisition of an artwork by Gabriel Ribeiro, presented by the gallery Foco.

Supported by Tosetti Value – Il Family office since 2020, the prize is awarded to an artist whose photographic work is considered particularly significant in understanding the current historical, social and economic landscape. The prize consists of an award of 2,500 euros, the development of a project in dialogue with “Perspectives. The economy of images” and the acquisition of an artwork for the Corporate Collection of the Family office.

Jury: Walter Guadagnini, Artistic Director, Exposed Torino Photo Festival, Torino; Roberta Tenconi, Chief Curator, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milano; Alterazioni Video, Art Collective.

“The 2026 Tosetti Value Photography Award is awarded to Ruth Beraha (Milan, 1986), presented by Ncontemporary, for Is this a Library? (2026). This new video and audio work grows out of a broader investigation into football culture, group identity and the thin line between passion and violence. Beraha’s practice often begins with personal experience and uses it to examine social and collective dynamics, identity and forms of belonging, through a lens that is at once intimate and political. Is this a Library? is made up of short black-and-white shots, filmed with a fixed camera during matches of the English Women’s Super League. It extends the photographic image in time and sets it against sound: over the images play the chants of men’s football hooligans, recorded and re-edited by Beraha. In the gap between what we see, what we do not see and what we hear, the work brings to the surface the codes and tensions of gender, group identity and belonging. It turns the collective dimension of sport into a space for poetic and political reflection.

To mark the celebrations for the bicentenary of the birth of photography, the jury also chose to give a special mention to Gabriel Ribeiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1990) for Sun Maid II (2025). The work is presented by Lisbon’s Foco gallery in the Present Future section, and the mention recognises the playful, poetic sensibility with which the artist goes back to the very origins of the photographic medium. Through the prolonged action of sunlight, Ribeiro fixes an image onto a common household material: the polyurethane foam panels used for packaging or padding. In this way he returns photography to its most essential nature, an image produced by light and time that becomes the trace of a process acting on matter. In 1826 Joseph Niépce called his first experiment “heliography”, or sun writing. Ribeiro seems to have taken that old term literally and brought it into the present. He shows that alongside images generated by the latest technologies, there is still a poetic place for images made by human hands and by nature.

This year, therefore, the Tosetti Value Photography Award includes a double acquisition, and both winning works will join the Tosetti Value corporate collection.”