Patricia D. Richards Legacy Award 2026: The Under-35 Special Prize at URBAN Photo Awards
The Patricia D. Richards Legacy Award, the special prize for Under-35 photographers entering the Projects & Portfolios section, returns for its third consecutive edition at URBAN Photo Awards. The award reaffirms its commitment to supporting emerging voices and keeping alive the memory of a figure who made a profound contribution to contemporary photography.
The prize was established in 2024 in honour of Patricia D. Richards (1951–2022), an American photographer and educator who made the camera an instrument of social inquiry and understanding. For over forty years, Patricia turned her lens toward the transformations of American society, with particular attention to communities often left out of the dominant narrative.
Her series on migrant workers and the civil rights movement are now held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.
An Opportunity for Under-35 Talents
By entering URBAN Photo Awards, photographers have the chance to exhibit at Trieste Photo Days, one of Europe’s most prominent international photography festivals, and to be part of a group exhibition alongside other selected artists.
The Projects & Portfolios section is open to any cohesive body of work built around a unifying thread: photo series, reportage, thematic portfolios, storyboards, or any project that tells a story across multiple images.
All Under-35 photographers entering this section are automatically considered for the Award, with no additional registration required.
Previous Winners
In its first two editions, the Patricia D. Richards Legacy Award has already found two photographers whose work embodies its spirit.
Ekaterina Frolova
The inaugural edition recognised the talent of Ekaterina Frolova, whose project Young Cuba stood out for the depth of her gaze and the sensitivity with which she portrays people and the world around them.
The recognition opened a real path of growth: mentored by Denis Curti, Ekaterina developed a new project, Border Stories, presented as a solo exhibition at Trieste Photo Days 2025 and published by Exhibit Around APS.
The volume brings together portraits, interiors and urban landscapes with first-person accounts of memory, identity and everyday border crossings, composing an invisible cartography of emotions that traces physical, mental and political boundaries.
Nicolas Brunetti
In 2025, the Award went to Italian documentary photographer Nicolas Brunetti for Inshallah, a project developed between July 2023 and April 2025 in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the northern coast of Africa.
Rather than dwelling on hardship, the work seeks out light in the dreams and resilience of young people living in that space of suspension, both physical and mental.
For Nicolas too, the prize opened concrete doors: in addition to the exhibition at Trieste Photo Days and the publication of his work, he has embarked on a paid artistic residency as part of the Cultura in Cantiere project. During the residency, mentored by Andrea Rossato, he will develop an original photographic project within the offices and active construction sites of Edilimpianti Trieste S.r.l., exploring industrial processes and urban transformation as cultural practice.
Patricia D. Richards: A Life in Photography
Patricia was born in Oakland, California, and grew up in Seattle, Washington. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre from the University of Washington, a Master’s in Education from the University of Southern California, and a Master of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University.
In 1991 she was awarded a photography fellowship by the Mid-America Arts Alliance/National Endowment for the Arts. She taught photography at Tarrant County College in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, taking many of her students, often on their first trip outside Texas, on study programmes in Europe, South America and Cuba.
Her work is held in major museum collections worldwide, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution. It has been exhibited internationally and featured at the Trieste Photo Days festival.
The Award is made possible through the generous support of Patricia D. Richards’ family and friends.
To learn more about Patricia’s work, visit
www.patriciadrichards.com
