The Royal Photographic Society's International Photography Exhibition has been running since 1854. That's longer than the Eiffel Tower has existed, longer than the internal combustion engine, longer than the telephone. In 172 years, it's seen photography move from wet collodion glass plates to AI-assisted compositing... and it's still finding new work worth showing.
This year's 167th edition has drawn over 10,000 images from 5,233 photographers across 41 countries. From that pile, a panel of five judges has selected 318 photographers for the shortlist.
The themes running through the selection are familiar ones: identity, the environment, relationships, and global culture. But the images that cut through aren't the ones that tick thematic boxes. They're the ones where the photographer made a decision nobody else would have made, or waited for a moment nobody else would have waited for. Here are four that stopped me in my tracks. To discover all shortlisted images, visit the RPS website.
Article continues belowA Tasmanian morning that earns its drama
Mist threading through eucalyptus, golden grasses catching early light, a fallen tree providing foreground interest… If Chris Round had shot and edited this landscape from Koonya, Tasmania differently, it could have been ended up a garish screensaver. Instead, thankfully, he restrained himself.
There's no HDR pumping, no saturated sky, no heavy-handed dodge and burn pulling your eye to a predetermined conclusion. The tonal palette is deliberately subdued, which makes the scene feel genuinely atmospheric rather than performed. That fallen tree isn't centred or compositionally tidy. It's just there, the way fallen trees actually are.
Round studied at Canterbury College of Art and Sydney College of Art, and his advertising background, Grand Prix at Cannes included, shows in the clearest possible way: he knows exactly when to stop.
The haircut that ended a year of Falstaff
Frederic Aranda's nine-frame grid documenting actor Ian McKellen's post-Falstaff haircut is the most narrative image on the shortlist, and also the most formally inventive. McKellen had let his hair and beard grow for nearly a year to play John Falstaff in the West End production of Shakespeare's Henry IV.
In June 2024, an on-stage accident cut his run short. He waited until the production closed, then Aranda photographed the haircut that marked his return to himself.
The grid format does something a single portrait couldn't. It turns a haircut into a transformation sequence, a visual biography compressed into a single frame. The lighting is studio-clean, the dark background giving each panel the weight of a formal portrait. But McKellen's expressions across the nine frames, from patient to amused to finally delighted, carry genuine emotional content.
This isn't a celebrity photo opportunity. It's a document of someone being released from a character they'd lived inside for a year.
Gold, sequinned, and certain of themselves
Swedish photographer Meredith Andrews' image of four young majorettes at the Bermuda Day parade is a portrait that knows exactly what it's doing. The girls, in gold and white sequinned uniforms with towering headdresses, stand against a plain wall. They're looking in different directions, not posed at the camera, which is precisely why it works.
Andrews, who's shown at the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize twice, understands that the best portraits happen when subjects forget you're there. The girl on the far left is watchful. The one in the centre, glasses catching the light, is somewhere else entirely. There's a hierarchy of confidence and self-consciousness in this group that plays out entirely through body language. The costumes are spectacular but they don't overwhelm the individuals wearing them. That's the balance.
A chimp in a painted jungle, and everything that says about us
Zed Nelson's photograph of a chimpanzee in a Shanghai zoo enclosure, sitting before a painted tropical mural, is already one of the most discussed images of the past year. His project, The Anthropocene Illusion, won Nelson the Sony World Photography Awards 2025's top prize, beating 419,820 entries - and is now on show in London (until May 4).
It's not hard to see why. The mural behind the chimp depicts the forest habitat it should be living in, lush, vast, painterly, while the animal itself perches on a concrete pyramid, looking out at us.
The irony is so complete it barely needs explaining. But Nelson, who developed the project over six years across four continents, earns the image rather than stumbling onto it. The framing is precise, the light is honest, and the chimp's posture, neither performing nor retreating, gives the photograph its dignity. It's a picture about what we've done. And we can't look away from it.
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