/ 2026 / Portraiture / Culture

• Prize
  Honorable Mention
• Photographer
  Ali Greplova, Czech Republic
• Date of Photograph
  2007
• Website
  https://aligreplova.photo
• Instagram
  https://www.instagram.com/aligreplova/

Lalibela is not a museum. The priests who walk these corridors today follow the same rituals their ancestors performed eight centuries ago. The candles, the manuscripts, the chanting at dawn — nothing has been preserved. It simply never stopped. I first came to Lalibela in 2007. I kept returning because I couldn't find another place on earth where faith exists so physically — carved into solid rock, held in aging hands, passed to children standing in the shadows of stone pillars. These photographs are not documentation of a tradition. They are portraits of something alive.

For over thirty years I have documented a vanishing Africa — its faith, its faces, its wild. I first arrived in 1990, by boat, and have returned ever since — not as a traveller, but to the same people, the same land, to hold on to what is disappearing. The liturgy of Lalibela: rituals unchanged for centuries. The Himba and San, whose identity the world is slowly dissolving. The African wild, where space and silence run out. Since 2009 I have recorded Tanzania's Tingatinga and Makonde artists — many now gone. I do not photograph what a thing is. I photograph what it means.

Awards Jury Prize — Report Photo 2026, Brno, Czech Republic (jury: Nick Ut, Ringo Chiu — both Pulitzer Prize; Kathleen Gerber, Keith Skelton, Armando Arorizo)

Nominee — reFocus Awards Black & White Photo Contest 2026, People (Non-Professional)