From 300+ global submissions, 15 finalists emerged to claim prizes and exhibition space during Paris Photo week

The Art on Tezos Photography Prize has now announced its winners across five distinct categories, marking a significant moment for blockchain-based photography as the medium continues to push boundaries between traditional craft and experimental digital practice. The competition drew more than 300 submissions from photographers worldwide, all working within the Tezos ecosystem.

Five category winners each received 1,000 tez, while ten runners-up took home 500 tez from a total prize pool of 10,000 tez. All 15 finalists will present new work at ArtVerse Gallery (Le Marais Neighborhood) in Paris this November during Paris Photo week, where their pieces will be featured in a dedicated curation on objkt.

The winners represent a cross-section of photographic approaches spanning wildlife macro photography, experimental urban documentation, minimalist portraiture, photorealistic AI generation, and abstract experimentation.

All 15 finalists, view their works via objkt

The Winners

Nature: Arijit Mondal
Mondal’s winning image captures a damselfly in startling detail, the insect’s translucent wings and segmented body rendered against a deep teal background. The macro perspective transforms an ordinary moment into something otherworldly.

Urban: Srivatsan Sankaran
Sankaran took the urban category with a vibrant street scene pulsing with color and movement. “Participating in the Art on Tezos Photography Prize was an exhilarating experience that deepened my appreciation for the stories hidden in everyday urban life,” Sankaran said. “This contest means a lot to me, as it provides a platform to showcase creativity and connect with fellow photographers who share a passion for street and urban narratives.

Portraiture: Nari Mazari
Mazari’s winning portrait features a figure draped in blue fabric, face turned upward, hands positioned in a gesture of contemplation or prayer. The image’s moody lighting and minimal composition create an atmosphere of introspection.

Photorealistic AI: Marine Blehaut
Blehaut’s AI-generated work demonstrates the category’s embrace of fully synthetic imagery, presenting a classical interior scene that would be indistinguishable from traditional photography without context.

Experimental: Jakub Kłak
Jakub claimed the experimental category with an abstract composition of lines and spherical forms rendered in grayscale, pushing the boundaries of what constitutes photographic practice in the digital age.

“It’s given me the opportunity to share what I do with the world and witness my work being appreciated on a larger platform.”
Ololade Olawale

Works by Andriy Chagi, Dress n Draw, and JVDE. Credit: Courtesy of Art on Tezos

The Runners-Up

The competition’s ten runners-up span an equally diverse range of approaches. In the portraiture category, Ololade Olawale presented a striking image of a figure in red against stark white desert sand, while Andrii Chahin offered an intimate environmental portrait.

“The photography prize has been a true form of validation for me,” Olawale said. “It’s given me the opportunity to share what I do with the world and witness my work being appreciated on a larger platform.”

Nature category runners-up Mattia Celli and Varun H.B. explored different aspects of the natural world through dramatic black-and-white compositions and golden-hour landscapes respectively. In the urban category, Niloofar Nekookar and Mayudrops contributed works examining the built environment through layered compositions and archival techniques.

The photorealistic AI category saw runners-up JVDE and Danielle King pushing synthetic image generation in distinctly different directions. The experimental category’s runners-up, Dress n Draw and Ayaz Yildiz, both worked with abstract forms and unconventional approaches to photographic representation.

The Jury

The competition employed a two-stage judging process. An initial shortlist jury comprising 14 Tezos-native artists and curators narrowed the field before a five-member finalist jury made final selections.

The finalist jury brought significant institutional and critical weight: Boris Eldagsen, photographer and creative partner at OpenAI; Steven Sacks, founder and director of bitforms gallery; Alex Estorick, editor-in-chief of Right Click Save; Pita Arreola, Head of Programmes at arebyte gallery and co-founder of Off Site Project; and Kay Watson, head of arts technologies at Serpentine.

“It was an inspiring experience to serve as a jury member for the Tezos Photography Awards, witnessing a diverse and strong range of works that showed an incredible passion for photography — celebrating its past, challenging its present, and imagining its future,” Eldagsen said.

Estorick emphasized the competition’s role within the broader Tezos creative ecosystem: “The range and calibre of entries for this year’s Art on Tezos Photography Prize was indicative of the remarkable talent and global nature of the Tezos ecosystem. Having witnessed the flourishing of that community of artists since the early days of Hic Et Nunc, it’s extremely positive to see so many new names being celebrated and nourished.”

Five Categories, Five Approaches

The competition’s five categories reflect photography’s expanding definition in the blockchain era. The nature category embraced landscapes, wildlife, and macro photography. Portraiture covered traditional portraiture and environmental portraits. Urban focused on street photography and architectural documentation. The experimental category welcomed abstract imagery, glitch work, and analogue generative processes. The photorealistic AI category specifically targeted fully AI-generated imagery that mimics photographic aesthetics.

All categories except photorealistic AI accepted mixed-media and AI-enhanced work like inpainting and upscaling, provided the starting point was a photograph. This structure acknowledges the blurred lines between capture and generation while maintaining distinct spaces for different approaches.

Paris Photo Week Exhibition

The 15 finalists will be shown at ArtVerse Gallery for a one-day pop-up exhibition during Paris Photo week this November. ArtVerse, located in Paris’s Marais district and co-founded by The Sandbox’s Sebastien Borget and Arthur Madrid with director Grida, serves as a bridge between digital and physical art worlds under its “URL to IRL” philosophy.

Each finalist was asked to create a new work specifically for the exhibition, moving beyond their competition entries to present fresh material. These pieces will be minted on Tezos and can be viewed in a dedicated curation, connecting the physical exhibition with the blockchain’s permanent on-chain archive.

The timing during Paris Photo positions the Art on Tezos exhibition within one of the world’s most significant photography events, drawing attention from traditional photography collectors and institutions while introducing blockchain-native work to new audiences.

Tezos and Photography

The blockchain has cultivated a significant photography community since the early days of Hic Et Nunc, the pioneering NFT marketplace that launched in March 2021 and became a hub for experimental digital art before its closure later that year.

That legacy continues through platforms like Objkt and Teia, where photographers have found audiences and economic models outside traditional gallery systems. The Photography Prize extends this infrastructure with formal recognition, prize money, and physical exhibition opportunities that bridge on-chain practice with real-world validation.

The competition’s launch coincided with World Photography Day on August 19, with submissions closing September 12. The two-stage judging process ran through late September, with winners announced in early October.

For photographers working within blockchain ecosystems, competitions like the Art on Tezos Photography Prize offer something beyond validation: they create institutional frameworks that parallel traditional photography awards while maintaining the experimental spirit and economic possibilities that drew many artists to web3 platforms in the first place.

The November exhibition will test whether that balance holds, bringing 15 blockchain-native photographers into a physical space during one of the art world’s most traditional photography gatherings..