Joel Quayson’s winning work for Dior Beauty at Arles considers the theme ‘Face-to-Face’ – watch it here

‘Often, people forget that before he was a couturier, Christian Dior was a gallerist,’ points out Peter Philips, creative and image director of Dior Beauty, when we meet in the sleepy Provençal town of Arles, France, which has played host to an annual photo festival for more than five decades (see our Rencontres d’Arles 2025 review). Eight years ago, French maison Dior announced its sponsorship of a photography prize, the Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents, in partnership with Luma, the contemporary art foundation that altered the landscape of the sleepy French town with the opening of its Frank Gehry-designed tower in 2021.

‘Historically, every creative director of Dior has always had a connection to art, whether it’s working with artists or collecting them, so it was very much in sync with the DNA of the house,’ Philips adds, without pointing out the obvious: the house’s longstanding relationship to photography through campaigns, magazine editorials and historical news reports. ‘What Paris is for fashion designers, Arles is to photographers.’

Joel Quayson – "How Do You Feel" | Dior Young Talents Winner - YouTube

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Dior Beauty’s prize invited students from around the world to submit works interpreting the theme ‘Face-to-Face’. According to Philips, the prize has evolved over the years, with submissions reflecting the state of the world and the collective imagination of a younger generation. With the pandemic having coloured the subject matter for a few years – darker themes and fewer submissions due to the closures of schools – more recently, young photographers have begun exploring themes closer to home.

‘This time, I would say about 80 per cent of the artists were dealing with the idea of identity,’ explains Japanese photographer Yuriko Takagi, who chaired the jury, which includes Philips, Simon Baker and South African photographer Lebohang Kganye. ‘I find it surprising and interesting,’ Takagi continues. ‘I realised that so many young people have this identity problem, in different ways – some of them are exploring family, sexuality, nationality – and they are seeing themselves from the inside as well as the outside.’

Many of this year’s artists also explored alternative methods of creating imagery – often exploring videos, digital effects and artificial intelligence over the preferred method of film photography that has defined previous years. Shanghai-based Qianyi Bao created a video titled Chasing the Wind River, poetically documenting nomadic yak-herding communities in the south-east of the Tibetan plateau. Japanese photographer Momo Nakawa digitally created a psychedelic installation of layered prints, photographing them within a studio space and creating a video, chronicling her use of artificial intelligence. Also employing AI was Swiss photographer Aline Savioz, whose retro-futurist images of alien-like figures are achieved through meticulous world-building and AI background sets, exploring our relationships to robotics. Chicago-born Raine Roberts’s photo-video works took myriad forms, with abstract shapes and multifaceted flowers taking shape on Japanese washi paper and pieces of wood, tackling a theme of nature’s erosion that relates to the artist’s own stage-four cancer diagnosis.

This year’s winner, Joel Quayson, is a student at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, and his video work is a self-portrait that questions his own identity and ‘competing selves’. In his slowly paced film, he sits in silence, gazing into the viewer's eyes, occasionally changing, applying make-up, getting dressed, eventually stripping it all away. There is a sense of discomfort, directness, delicate movement and intimacy, as if he were sat in front of a mirror in complete privacy – a stark contrast to the genre of ‘get ready with me’ videos that exist on social media. Throughout the four minutes and 28 seconds, viewers are presented with a repeated question: ‘How do you feel?’ The work conveys Quayson’s complex sense of self, bejewelled queerness competing with the conformist expectations of his religious Ghanaian upbringing.

For Quayson, currently in his second year of art school, the video was a meditation on the different masks he must wear and the questioning of his own sense of self. His family are aware that he has won the prize but have still not seen his work – a fact that underscores the delicately conveyed sense of confusion and contrast within the video. ‘Even though it's me in that movie and it's me telling the story of how I feel, without speaking, there is also something I wanted other people to take away,’ Quayson explains. ‘I want people to ask themselves how they feel, who they are, what can make you feel better and why we choose to present ourselves in certain ways.’

‘Once I saw his work, I could never forget it,’ says Takagi of the jury’s unanimous decision. ‘It looks very simple and straightforward, but it's a bit mysterious. I couldn't forget his eyes, I couldn't forget the way he moves, his voice, and the way in which he was able to see himself objectively, while exploring his own interior thoughts and feelings, which ultimately, are somehow echoed in all our hearts, too.’

Joel Quayson will receive a €10,000 grant from the House of Dior. The video ‘How do you feel?’ will be exhibited at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, in early 2026. It will also be exhibited, alongside all the works by the ten finalists, including Raine Roberts, who was awarded a special mention, at Luma Arles, in the Lampisterie building from 5 July to 5 October 2025.

Also read: What to see at Rencontres d’Arles 2025