Saltwater, gold leaf and 19th-century chemistry: the world's longest-running photography exhibition is back, and it's more technically adventurous than ever

Four children in homemade superhero costumes with box-like masked heads and trailing fringes stand on rubble in a roofless brick ruin overgrown with plants. — (Image credit: Thomas Mandl)

More than 5,200 photographers entered. Just 48 made the cut. That's a success rate of less than one per cent. Which makes getting a place in the Royal Photographic Society's International Photography Exhibition feel more like getting into an Ivy League university than entering a photography content.

But IPE167, which opens at London's Saatchi Gallery on August 7 and runs until September 11, is far more than a competition. Now in its 167th consecutive year, it's the world's longest-running photography exhibition, and it's as vital as ever.

The 113 selected prints span everything from 19th-century wet-plate collodion processes to motion picture film and thermal imaging, and the themes running through the work are anything but comfortable.

Female perspectives

The two award recipients this year are both women whose work tackles the female experience head-on, but in very different registers.

Marcy Palmer, a US-based artist, receives the IPE Award for Seeds of Strength and Resilience, a series that uses botanical photography to explore the history and contested future of reproductive rights.

The plants she photographs, printed on delicate Japanese Kozo paper and highlighted with gold leaf, are historical herbal abortifacients; plants women have used for centuries when other options were unavailable to them. The gold leaf carries a double meaning: hope, and a reference to kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken objects with gold to make the repair part of the beauty.

A dense wreath-like arrangement of trailing leaves and stems forms an oval against black, threaded with lines and spots of gold. — Pennyroyal has been used to induce abortion for hundreds of years, but is lethal in the wrong dose. From the series *Seeds of Strength and Resilience* (Image credit: Marcy Palmer)

A wet-plate collodion tintype portrait of an older white-haired woman, her weathered face rendered in deep tones with the characteristic texture and dark border of the nineteenth-century process. — Jane, third generation Uravan resident, 5” x7” Wet Plate Collodion tintype, 2025 (Image credit: Abbey Hepner)

An extreme close-up of fine white hair, shot so tight it reads almost as abstract texture — Stand Still, from the series *The Stars That Don’t Look Back* (Image credit: Léa Chen)

The Under 30s Award goes to Léa Chen, a Taiwanese artist currently based in London, for The Stars That Don't Look Back. This series weaves together family archive photos, historical events and Taiwanese literature to document the private memories shared by three generations of women navigating colonial trauma and everyday life.

The images range from a close-up of white hair, shot so tight it becomes almost abstract, to a grainy, spotted black-and-white snapshot of women playing outdoors: fragile, precious, irreplaceable. Chen's ambition is to help viewers find inner peace in the safety net women have woven through history.

Worlds of water

Beyond these two winners, the range of photographic approaches on display is quite staggering. Take Abbey Hepner's portrait of Jane, a third-generation resident of the erased Colorado uranium town of Uravan, made using wet-plate collodion. That's a process more commonly associated with the 1850s, and brilliantly, the plates were washed with water from the river that still flows through the buried town.

That approach is subtly echoed by Siân Cann, a visually impaired photographer, who created her Retinopathy Forest series by decaying Polaroid photographs in saltwater and post-surgical eye drops. The resulting images mirror the visual disturbances of her own condition.

A bare winter tree silhouetted against a pale sky, the Polaroid image decayed and blistered with bubbles, cracks and dark organic matter at its edges. — The Retinopathy Forest (Image credit: Siân Cann)

A bearded man peers over the top of an inflated blue latex body suit that engulfs his torso, standing on a wooden floor in a domestic interior. — Tom in his inflatable (and inflated) latext body suit, Hackney (Image credit: Robert Coxwell)

Over a hundred swimmers in swimwear stand in rows across the empty tiled floor of a grand Victorian public baths, looking towards the camera. — Made in 2014 at Moseley Road Baths, Birmingham, *Swimmers* portrays more than 100 swimmers standing together against the threatened closure of the Grade II* listed Edwardian public baths. (Image credit: Attilio Fiumarella)

Elsewhere, Attilio Fiumarella's Swimmers gathers more than 100 people in the drained pool of Birmingham's Grade II*-listed Moseley Road Baths to protest its threatened closure. And Thomas Mandl's 5 Superheroes depicts kids displaced from eastern Ukraine, wearing homemade superhero costumes, standing in the rubble of a roofless ruin during a project trip with NGO ArtHelps. The costumes are improvised and the setting is bleak, but the impulse behind the image, that growing up amid war requires a particular kind of heroism, lands with real force.

Why this matters

In an era when everyone with a phone thinks they're a photographer, and images are produced and discarded at a near-incomprehensible rate, a show that selects 113 prints from more than 5,200 submissions, anonymously, with a panel that argues about what matters, is doing something worthwhile. IPE167 is a reminder that photography isn't just documentation. Done well, it's one of the sharpest languages we have for saying what needs to be said.

Last year's show at Saatchi Gallery attracted over 65,000 visitors, and this edition returns to the same venue, so the work will reach a larger audience than most art photography ever does. After London, the exhibition will tour to Taunton Museum (October 2026 to January 2027) and the Royal Geographical Society (April 2027).

RPS International Photography Exhibition 167 is at Saatchi Gallery, London, 7 August – 11 September 2026. Free entry. Details at rps.org.

Tom May is a freelance writer and editor specializing in art, photography, design and travel. He has been editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. He has also worked for a wide range of mainstream titles including The Sun, Radio Times, NME, T3, Heat, Company and Bella.