© Adèle Le Bras
Winners 2026 Louis Roederer Fondation Discovery Award
13/07/2026 – Arles
Committed alongside the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles for nearly 10 years, the Louis Roederer Foundation wholeheartedly shares the festival’s commitment to supporting photography and those involved in the field. The Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award symbolises this shared commitment.
The jury for the 2026 Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award chose Magali Paulin as the winner, whilst the audience awarded the Public Award to Mallory Lowe Mpoka.
The two winning artists explore the ways in which places, archives, images, and narratives endure across time. Their works examine what remains, what changes, and what risks being lost, revealing photography’s unique ability to bring to light what has long been buried or forgotten. Through memory, transmission, and reinterpretation of reality, their works demonstrate, each in its own way, the power of images to deepen our understanding of the world.
© François Deladerrière
Magali Paulin, Jury Award winner
Magali Paulin presented by Doubledummy (Arles, France) receives the Jury Award, which consists of a grant of 15,000 euros and the acquisition of a work that will become part of the Rencontres d’Arles collection.
Magali Paulin (born in 1986) is a visual artist who graduated from the ENSP Arles in 2011. Of Martinican descent, for several years, she has developed work centered on Caribbean island territories such as Martinique and Guadeloupe. She conceives her art practice as an extended personal process of repair and reflection on identity. Her work poetically addresses notions of trace, coloniality, memory and resilience.
In her exhibition Matter, phantoms, Magali Paulin photographs structures being reclaimed by time, in a former colonial garden overgrown with vegetation in the Bois de Vincennes in Paris. Her images expose persistent traces and the histories embedded in these places.
© Odeon Davis
Mallory Lowe Mpoka, Public Award winner
Mallory Lowe Mpoka presented by Occurence (Montreal, Canada) receives the 2026 Public Award, which consists of a grant of 5,000 euros through an acquisition to be added to the Rencontres d’Arles collection.
Mallory Lowe Mpoka (born in 1996), who lives in Montreal, Canada, is a Belgian-Cameroonian multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the connections between identity, memory and territory.
In her exhibition Cosmologies of the heiresses, photographs, textiles and family archives come together in a body of work where embroidery and beads transform the images, bringing out fragments of Cameroonian history long kept out of view.
Alongside the Public Award as part of the Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award, Mallory Lowe Mpoka was also awarded the Prix de la Photo Madame Figaro devoted to emerging female photographers.
The award-winning photographs and finalists, Charlotte Yonga, Souleymane Bachir Diaw, Phan Quang, Amira Lamti, Jordan Beal, Mallory Lowe Mpoka and Magali Paulin, will be presented until October 4, 2026 at Espace Monoprix in Arles.
© Chiara Santarelli
Once again this year, the seven projects selected are considered as a single exhibition, conceived from selection to hanging by the curator, Nadine Hounkpatin who sought to explore the role of the image in the construction of reality, and therefore of truth.
The seven artists of the 2026 Discovery Award offered me flashes and sparks of insight by opening up interstices. . Their visual narratives, rooted in multiple cultural, historical and intimate contexts, poetically animate the body, the archive, gesture and ritual. Their works reveal layers, zones of resistance and that which persists, collectively reminding us that photographic truth is definitely not to be found but to be patiently crafted through the friction of situated, constructed narratives, with acute attention to silence.
