The traditional photograph has both a subject and a background but, for artist Sophie Ristelhueber, the background often is the subject. Ristelhueber, a French artist known for her unconventional approach to war photography of scarred landscapes devoid of people, has been named the 2025 Hasselblad Award Laureate.
While Ristelhueber’s work is largely photography, the unconventional artist also uses sound, video, novel-like photo books and even the form of an exhibit itself as an artistic tool.
The Hasselblad Award is one of the largest prizes in photography, an award that, beyond the distinction, includes 2 million Swedish krona (roughly $197,609 / £153,338 / AU$299,624), a gold medal and a Hasselblad camera. Past recipients since the award’s start in 1980 includes Malick Sidibé, Cindy Sherman, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ansel Adams.
“I was at the same time very pleased of course, very honored, because I know this is the biggest prize in photography,” she said of learning of her selection, “but at the same time, I am not really a photographer. [Though] what I produce is 90% photography.”
ABOVE: Watch Ristelhueber discuss her Hasselblad Award
Ristelhueber is perhaps best known for her war photography, which unlike traditional war images is devoid of people. Instead, her work shows the scars left behind, like the road blockages and craters from suicide bombers in places from Lebanano to Iraq, over the course of a career that spans more than four decades.
What is simply the background of many conventional war images instead takes center stage in her work. The Hasselbald Foundation describes it as “an emotional intensity in the silent, enduring traces of human presence and activity.”
In an interview for the Hasselblad Award, she explained that, in the Eighties, she didn’t have a TV and she would “walk a little more and see what happened.” Her collection of the scars left behind in Beirut in the early part of that decade became one of her early photobooks, named after the city itself.
But Beirut doesn’t look like most photo books; instead it has the dimensions more typical of a novel than one meant to display photographs. The format is partly a nod to Ristelhueber’s early studies in literature and partly a statement. After studying literature, she was working in an editorial position when she couldn’t find the words for an assignment and picked up a camera to tell the story instead.
Turning the background into the subject and a non-traditional book format are not the only ways in which Ristelhueber colors outside traditional lines. The exhibit itself often becomes part of the artwork. In one, she printed a close-up detail of artwork that hung in her childhood home more than 13 feet high and arranged smaller images of landscapes in front of it.
In her latest solo exhibition in Paris, France, she abandoned her most iconic work on the floor, hanging only previously unseen images of animals in what the Galerie Poggi described as “a strong iconoclastic gesture that questions the relevance of art in our world ablaze and at war, literally undermining the very principle of exhibition.”
While Ristelhueber is perhaps best known for her work photographing scarred landscapes, she has also photographed actual scars on war victims in a Parisian hospital, a series called Every One. Her unusual approach of turning the background into the subject has also taken shape in images of homes photographed without people.
When Ristelhueber meets someone just starting out in photography, her advice is always the same: to trust in your project. “When I was doing Beirut, my husband always said it was a necessity so I don’t get crazy,” she said.
“I have to do it and then we’ll see what happens. Each time, it’s a little stone on the pathway, and when years come, you turn and you see yes, I’ve been doing something and it makes sense. But of course, when you start you will never have any assurance that it is going to make sense and so you have to trust yourself and your necessity.”
While Ristelhueber says her work is only 90% photography, the Hasselblad Award shows how much her work has resonated. “What is at stake is that we put everything on the line, inventing new patterns without knowing if they will ever resonate,” she said. “And this is why, for me as an artist, this prestigious award holds such a deep significance.”
As part of the award, Ristelhueber will have a solo exhibition at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg Art Museum, Sweden, beginning October 11 – her first solo exhibition in Scandinavia.
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