Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize 2026: MPB Photography Award Finalists Announced

With the Photography Award judging complete, we are thrilled to share the 25 MPB Photography Award Finalists of this year’s Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize! Our sincere thanks major sponsor MPB, and to this year’s Jury Panel, including esteemed creative photographer Franz Szony for giving his time and expertise to this year’s judging process.

We received entries from both analogue and digital photographers working across various photographic styles. Using cutting edge camera, lens, housing, and lighting equipment, each photographer has shared their exceptional creative vision in unique ways. Brands and resources used include: Adobe Lightroom, Beautydishes, Broncolor, Canon, Elinchrom, Fujifilm, Fujinon, Godox, Hasselblad, Ikelite, Intrepid, iPro Max, Kamlan, Kentmere, Kiev 60, Kodak, Laowa, Leica, Lencarta, Lensbaby, Light, Logiciels Lightroom, Lomography, Lumecube, Lumix, Mamiya, Mitakon Zhongyi Speedmaster, Speedlight, Nanlite Pavotube, Nikkor, Nikon, Octaboxes, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, PhaseOne, Polaroid, Polaroid Lab, Profoto, R.A. Goldmann, Ricoh GR III, Samyang, Sekor, Sigma, Schneider Kreuznach, Softbox, Sony, Tamron, Volna-3, Westcott, wetplates, Wista, Yashica LM, and ZEISS lenses. We also had the use of cyanotype equipment, and even Astrography telescopes and a geodesic dome!

The Prizes

MPB Photography Award

The MPB Photography Award 1st prize winner will receive:

• $3,000 USD cash generously donated by MPB. Founded in 2011, MPB is the leading reseller of used digital cameras and lenses in the U.S. MPB changes the game by giving you the best prices and the most convenient way to buy, sell and trade used camera gear. With a circular business model, MPB extends the life and creative potential of camera gear by recirculating over half a million cameras and lenses a year.
• 20×30 Epic Print + $250 Lab Credit (worth USD$672) by Bay Photo, the trusted partner for Photographers, Artists and Creatives since 1976. The Epic Print includes optional Frame and choice of display options.
• FocusPoint™ 30L RollTop backpack, generously donated by Think Tank. Founded in 2005 out of a desire to help photographers, Think Tank designs and creates sophisticated travel gear for the world’s venturing observers.
• USD$250 worth of printing credit on C-Type Papers, generously donated by Spectrum. Established for nearly three decades, Spectrum is an imaging lab specialising in high quality fine art and photographic printing, mounting and exhibition services working with professional photographers and artists, art galleries, and museums the world over. Please note that prints will need to be 750mm or under on the shortest side, and shipping outside of the UK is not included. Any duties incurred are to be covered by the recipient. Credit applies to Studio printing only and must be used within one year of receipt.
• A beautiful, specially commissioned glass art award trophy.
• The opportunity to exhibit in the prestigious Beautiful Bizarre Magazine exhibition at Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco, USA, alongside 100+ of the world’s best contemporary representational artists.
• Exposure to a successful commercial gallery’s collector base with the opportunity to sell their work.
• 3 month social media advertising package (Beautiful Bizarre Magazine: 2 million+ followers across all social media platforms).
• Winning artwork printed in the December 2026 issue of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, as part of the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize editorial.
• Exclusive in-depth interview published on the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine websites + shared across Beautiful Bizarre Magazine social media.
• Profile listing [including artwork gallery] on the Beautiful Bizarre Artist Directory for 12 months. The go-to platform for artists, curators and collectors to discover exceptional artists and explore their work.
• A year’s worth of inspiration – a print subscription to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

2nd prize winner will receive:

• $1,000 USD generously donated by MPB. Founded in 2011, MPB is the leading reseller of used digital cameras and lenses in the U.S. MPB changes the game by giving you the best prices and the most convenient way to buy, sell and trade used camera gear. With a circular business model, MPB extends the life and creative potential of camera gear by recirculating over half a million cameras and lenses a year.
• 16×24 Epic Print + $200 Lab Credit (worth USD$532) by Bay Photo, the trusted partner for Photographers, Artists and Creatives since 1976. The Epic Print includes optional Frame and choice of display options.
• The opportunity to exhibit in the prestigious Beautiful Bizarre Magazine exhibition at Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco, USA, alongside 100+ of the world’s best contemporary representational artists.
• Exposure to a successful commercial gallery’s collector base with the opportunity to sell their work.
• Exclusive in-depth interview published on the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine websites + shared across Beautiful Bizarre Magazine social media.
• Profile listing [including artwork gallery] on the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Artist Directory for 12 months. The go-to platform for artists, curators and collectors to discover exceptional artists and explore their work.
• A year’s worth of inspiration – a print subscription to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

3rd prize winner will receive:

• $500 USD generously donated by MPB. Founded in 2011, MPB is the leading reseller of used digital cameras and lenses in the U.S. MPB changes the game by giving you the best prices and the most convenient way to buy, sell and trade used camera gear. With a circular business model, MPB extends the life and creative potential of camera gear by recirculating over half a million cameras and lenses a year.
• 12×18 Epic Print + $150 Lab Credit (worth USD$389) by Bay Photo, the trusted partner for Photographers, Artists and Creatives since 1976. The Epic Print includes optional Frame and choice of display options.
• The opportunity to exhibit in the prestigious Beautiful Bizarre Magazine exhibition at Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco, USA, alongside 100+ of the world’s best contemporary representational artists.
• Exposure to a successful commercial gallery’s collector base with the opportunity to sell their work.
• Exclusive in-depth interview published on the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine websites + shared across Beautiful Bizarre Magazine social media.
• Profile listing [including artwork gallery] on the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine Artist Directory for 12 months. The go-to platform for artists, curators and collectors to discover exceptional artists and explore their work.
• A year’s worth of inspiration – a print subscription to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

The Winners in each Award category and the Grand Prize Award Winner will be invited to participate in the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine curated exhibition ‘Glimmer’ at Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco, CA, United States later this year, alongside 100+ of the world’s best contemporary representational artists!

A glimmer is the exact opposite of a trigger. Glimmers are small, everyday moments that make you feel joy, happiness, peace, or gratitude – which can help cue your nervous system to feel safe or calm. [The term was coined by Deb Dana.]

From the 200 Finalists across all Award categories, the Jury Panel will select the Grand Prize Award Winner.

The Grand Prize Award Winner of the 2026 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize will receive:

• $10,000 USD cash, donated by our Platinum sponsors Catherine K. Gyllerstrom, Bearwolf Books, INPRNT, RAYMAR, 33PA and MPB.
• A beautiful, specially commissioned glass art award trophy.
• The opportunity to exhibit in the prestigious Beautiful Bizarre Magazine exhibition at Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco, USA, alongside 100+ of the world’s best contemporary representational artists.
• Exposure to a successful commercial gallery’s collector base with the opportunity to sell their work.
• 10 page in-depth interview editorial published in Beautiful Bizarre Magazine December 2026 issue.
• Winning artwork printed in the December 2026 issue of Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, as part of the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize editorial.
• Exclusive in-depth interview published on the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine websites + shared across Beautiful Bizarre Magazine social media.
• Profile listing [including artwork gallery] on the Beautiful Bizarre Artist Directory for 12 months. The go-to platform for artists, curators and collectors to discover exceptional artists and explore their work.
• 12 month social media advertising package (Beautiful Bizarre Magazine: 2 million+ followers across all social media platforms).
• A year’s worth of inspiration – a print subscription to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine.

Art & Fable Puzzle Company People’s Choice Award

The Art & Fable Puzzle Company People’s Choice Award Winner will be selected by popular vote from the 200 Finalists. The Art & Fable Puzzle Company People’s Choice Award Winner will receive $1,000 USD cash, generously donated by Art & Fable Puzzle Company.

Voting will open on 2 September [AEDT, Australian Eastern Daylight Time]. To ensure you don’t miss your chance to vote, please join our email mailing list here.

Additionally, the Art & Fable Puzzle Company People’s Choice Award Winner will enjoy a year’s worth of social media advertising through the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine to ensure they are able to connect with the right audience, raise their profile, and of course to grow their social media following. They will also enjoy a Profile listing [including artwork gallery] on the Beautiful Bizarre Artist Directory for 12 months, a 12 month Beautiful Bizarre Magazine print subscription, and an in-depth interview published on the Beautiful Bizarre Magazine and Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize websites, giving readers an insight into their vision and practice!

In addition, each sponsor will choose one outstanding work from their award category to receive an Honourable Mention. Stay tuned to learn more!

The INPRNT Digital Art Award, 33PA Drawing Award, Catherine K. Gyllerstrom Imaginative Realism Award, and RAYMAR Painting Award Finalists will be announced later this week. See the BearWolf Books Emerging Artist Finalists here, and the Sculpture Award Finalists here.

So without further ado we are proud to announce the MPB Photography Award Finalists of the 2026 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize…

MPB Photography Finalists

2026 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize

Her long braids surrounded her like the pathways of a maze, symbolizing memories, choices, and the layered nature of the heart. Bathed in red light, the portrait evokes intimacy, desire, strength, and emotional tension, suggesting that the journey inward is rarely straightforward.

Inspired by art-toys, cinema and pop-culture, this artwork presents a playful action-figure character suspended between fantasy and danger. The colour palette of Bubba, the soft textures with the spray painted guns creates a tension between innocence and aggression. Balancing innocence, humour, and danger, the piece explores how colour, costume, and exaggerated personas can shape identity, emotion, and self-expression.

In the night, we wait for things to take shape, the same shape we know and that offers us security and tranquility. The mystery is revealed to us little by little. Too much light doesn’t always do things justice; they escape us, failing to fully capture our attention. Darkness is a relative condition, a state of deprivation, a chance to see things from a different perspective, at the very least.

As a street photographer, I love extreme weather. Although people often play the main roles in street photography, the surrounding nature plays a very important part in creating the atmosphere for the photos. This photo was taken through the wet and foggy glass in October 2023 in Helsinki, Finland. This day the rain transformed an ordinary moment into something far more ambiguous and emotional. Rather than documenting a person, the image explores themes of vulnerability, memory and perception. By obscuring reality, the weather becomes an active participant in the photograph, inviting viewers to project their own emotions and interpretations into the scene.

Not Yesterday, Not tomorrow. In the kiss of sunlight, I bloomed.

Project: There are two projects –Woman and Bodies is a series that was born after a seven year self portrait series about living with neurological disorder similar to Parkinson’s but yet undiagnosed even after thirteen years – and Containment Diaries. Tired of hiding the illness and it being dismissed as anxiety, nervous breakdown or simply fibromyalgia, Containment Diaries was a way of showing the world: this is really how I am when no one is looking. It was my public letter to the world. It was also a way to show women how to ‘be’ with themselves and their body at all stages of their lives. This is a project about the female body, about ownership, about censorship and gender. This is a project about issues that may not be on television in the evening but has been dominant in our society.

There is something deeply nostalgic about foraging for blackberries, the way they stain fingertips, the quiet ritual of gathering them into baskets. Blackberries and Pears celebrates the abundance of high summer: golden pears, David Austin roses grown in my garden, and the warm glow of sunflowers. The work begins in the garden, created as both sanctuary and studio, where fragrant flowers evoke nostalgia and awaken memory while providing a haven for bees, butterflies, and other pollinators. Inspired by the Dutch Masters and reimagined through a contemporary lens, the image explores our connection to nature, the changing seasons, and the enduring sense of belonging found in the simple act of gathering.

The Tide Walker is part of my attempt to repopulate the ocean with forgotten beings. I imagine them not as fantasy, but as echoes of a time when the sea was still regarded as sacred and inhabited by unseen presences. Through this series of underwater photographs, created while freediving in the sea of Bali, I hope to awaken wonder before reason, to remind us that what feels mysterious is often what we protect most fiercely. If we can believe, even for a moment, that the ocean is inhabited by more than ourselves, perhaps we can learn to approach it again with reverence instead of dominion.

Several ropes intertwine to form a distorted heart. Love may not be something pure or beautiful, but rather an unbreakable knot woven from obsession, contradiction, and pain. Even so, people continue to seek it, as though unable to resist its pull. This work portrays one possible shape of love.

Set against a backdrop of soft pinks, domestic kitsch, and religious iconography, Dad and Elvis is an intimate portrait of my father and a lamb. The photograph explores masculinity in Ireland, actively deconstructing traditional, rigid expectations of manhood. I wanted to capture this tender moment to explore who men are behind closed doors showing a vulnerability, softness, and resilience that are rarely permitted to coexist.

Identity is rarely something we discover. More often, it is something we assemble from expectations, memories, experiences, and the reflections of others. The constructed face in this photograph is intentionally imperfect, built from borrowed fragments that never fully become a whole. Hidden beneath it is the person we rarely allow the world to see. Through surreal portraiture, I explore the masks we create to belong, questioning where performance ends and authenticity begins.

These cameraless photographic works are the result of genuine collaboration with the landscape. They are literally constructed from light, earth and flesh. I have largely invented this process, which involves arranging blood, clay, sticks, leaves, seeds, resin, ochres, etc., with large or small cadavers, on light-sensitised paper. Exposed 24 to 36 hours, while the sun arches east to west, fibre papers produce surprising arrays of colour. This amalgam of sun printing and chemigram is further augmented by layering cliche-verre plates, coated with resists of wax or paint, scratched with wire to create lines. During the period of exposure I liberally draw on the prints using whatever is at hand, including blood and decomposition chemistry, photochemicals and ordinary ink/paint.

This photographic self-portrait was shot at −15°C on a frozen lake in my hometown. It is an attempt to return to childhood dreams and creativity.

Blood is Thicker than Water Distortion here becomes a way of thinking about chosen family; bonds built not through lineage but through affinity, care and shared change. The subjects are recognisable but unsettled, caught somewhere between familiarity and strangeness. The visual slippage feels true to how these relationships actually work, continually renegotiated and redefined. By dislodging the image from its expected form, I want to make visible something we often leave unspoken: that family, like a reflection, shifts depending on where you stand, and is shaped as much by imperfection and time as by love. These images are entirely handmade, capturing the pure real reflections of the subjects and their interactions with the surfaces.

One Breath draws on the childhood folklore that a wish will be granted if every dandelion seed is carried away in a single breath. I no longer remember who first shared this small ritual with me, only that it has remained since childhood and is now something I pass on to my own children. The photograph reflects on these quiet traditions that travel between generations: beliefs carried not through books or lessons, but through everyday moments of play, wonder and imagination. A simple dandelion becomes a vessel for hope, memory and the enduring power of stories passed from one hand to the next.

This artwork echoes Ancient Greek black-figure pottery and presents my modern interpretation of one of the oldest creatures in Greek mythology: the Siren. Coincidentally, Sirens were among the very first figures to appear on Greek pottery. Known for their beautiful yet deadly songs and their appetite for sailors’ flesh, these creatures have long occupied my imagination. My team and I wanted to portray the Siren as a primeval, feral creature, using only practical stage techniques and no digital editing—only live action—to underline its connection to the realm of ancient reality.

As a full-time emergency operating theatre nurse, Mark works in an environment defined by constant movement, split-second decisions, and competing demands. I was drawn to the contrast between the apparent chaos of his work and his remarkable ability to remain calm, present, and focused. His strikingly long hair became a visual metaphor – expressive, dynamic, and seemingly untamed. My intention was to create an image of Mark that at first glance, feels wild, messy, unpredictable and hectic, but also illustrated his profound ability to stay grounded, present and focused amidst it all.

Suite of Desire is created through a staged, surreal tableaux, a 13 year old navigates a familiar domestic interior, overwhelmed by spectacle – bejewelled foods, cult toys, oversized insects, and fantastical animals inhabit domestic spaces like unwelcome inheritances. The image presents a world saturated with objects: glittering, ornamental, and irresistibly abundant. Cakes lusciously melt, jewels encrust everyday items, & playful icons of childhood swell to monstrous scale. The child becomes both witness and participant, embodying the perspective of a generation within a culture of relentless consumption. We ask what it means to inherit such a world – one where beauty, desire, and excess blur together – and quietly question what remains when accumulation becomes our dominant legacy.

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“Did You Take My Love Away From Me?” is about realizing that someone is still beside you, but no longer loves you the way they once did. They have not disappeared, yet something between you has. It is the feeling of reaching for a person who is still close enough to touch, but already emotionally out of reach.

YĚ is the Chinese word for Wild, representing the untamed instinct that exists within every living being.

Ante Verbum, erat Ea (Before the Word, there was Her) reinterprets the Gospel phrase “In the beginning was the Word,” imagining a feminine presence that existed before language, history, and written stories. Lilium Animae (The Lily of the Soul) represents the first stage of this presence. Inspired by the Christian symbol of the white lily, the archetype explores purity not as innocence, but as an untouched inner essence. Gentle yet strong, vulnerable yet resilient, she reflects the quiet power of new beginnings. Through natural forms and symbolic details, the image celebrates femininity in its purest and most timeless form.

While rummaging though a local dollar store in Brooklyn New York , I found a cheap doll and a roll of twine all I needed was model, a murky over cast day sett right mood for a shot in my apartment with a neighbor lady. Shooting Type 55 Polaroid was the clear choice and as the black and white film lacks the mysterious magic, printing darker added even more of what I was looking for. Still unaware that it was a good shot left the negative laying around my darkroom, I ran all the film from the shoot and the clear winner was the left over Polaroid, as the chemicals drying added a depth and created the ambiance.

Every person carries an inner world that remains largely inaccessible to others. Thoughts, contradictions, memories and unrealized possibilities coexist beneath the surface, often unseen even by those closest to us. Through layered imagery, the work reflects the quiet complexity of human interiority, suggesting that what is visible is only a fragment of who we are.

A slow, creeping melancholy. Anxiety that tightens its grip. An inner chaos that grows almost deafening. Feelings that escape language, yet never expression. Sometimes, a single photograph can hold what words cannot bear. It can become a silent scream – suspended, existing, even if no one truly hears it. “Chaos Makes the Muse.” From inner disorder comes the urge to create – to transform emotional weight into vision. A visual expression of the soul, when everything else fails. From this inner chaos came the need – for both me and my friend Giulio – to create an image that could speak for us. In a time marked by emotional turmoil and inner unrest, we needed to make our state of mind visible. Photography became the language that words could not provide. This image is the result of that necessity.

The 2026 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize is proudly sponsored by:

PLATINUM SPONSORS

GOLD SPONSORS
      

SILVER SPONSORS

BRONZE SPONSORS

MEDIA PARTNERS

ACADEMIC PARTNERS

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