Magnum Foundation Grantees shortlisted for Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards
Photo by Daniel Salemi / Aperture
Congratulations to Magnum Foundation grantees Heba Khalifa, Mahmoud Khattab, Soumya Sankar Bose and Jorge Panchoaga for making the Paris Photo-Aperture’s 2025 PhotoBook Awards shortlist.
The shortlisted books will be exhibited at Paris Photo, open to the public from November 13 through November 16, followed by an international tour, including in New York at Printed Matter, in January 2026, among other venues to be announced.
See more about our grantees and their books below.
Featured grantee Books:
Photo by Daniel Salemi / Aperture
Heba Khalifa
Tiger’s Eye
Self-published, Waziz Books, Cairo
Design by Nike Dieterich
Shortlisted for “First PhotoBook” category.
Heba Khalifa was an Arab Documentary Photography Program (ADPP) grantee in 2015. She was also an ADPP Alumni Fellow in 2024, where she developed the work that became Tiger’s Eye.
Tiger’s Eye is a book that combines photography and drawing, through collages, accompanied by personal writing to explore gender-related persecution through personal memory and public debates around sexual abuse. The title, which has a double meaning in Egyptian Arabic, was used by Khalifa to express the taboos surrounding women and the audacity with which she confronts them.
Photo by Daniel Salemi / Aperture
Soumya Sankar-Bose
A Discreet Exit Through Darkness & Things We Lost Last Night
Self-published / Red Turtle Photobook and Mandas, Kolkata, India
Design by Barnali Bose
Shortlisted for “PhotoBook of the Year” category.
Soumya Sankar-Bose was a grantee of Magnum Foundation’s Photography and Social Justice Fellowship, a recipient of the Migration & Religion Grant and the Agroecology Fund. He was also one of 12 grantees for our Heritage in Focus partnership with World Monuments Fund, for a project documenting Tiretta Bazaar, a historic Chinatown in Kolkata, India.
A Discreet Exit Through Darkness and Things We Lost Last Night are two interwoven narratives tracing the brief disappearance of Bose’s mother through two perspectives: Bose’s grandfather, who relentlessly searched for his missing daughter, and Bose’s mother, who returned with no recollection of the years she was gone.
Photo by Daniel Salemi / Aperture
Mahmoud Khattab
The Dog Sat Where We Parted
Self-published, Cairo
Design by Mahmoud Khattab
Shortlisted for “First PhotoBook” category.
Mahmoud Khattab was a 2023 Photography Expanded: Heat Fellow, where he developed his project There Was a Valley Here Once which traces the disappearing landscapes of Cairo, Egypt.
The Dog Sat Where We Parted follows Khattab’s time serving in the Egyptian military. Through photographs discreetly taken and journal entries, the work is an exploration of masculinity, solitude, and an inside look at military service in Egypt.
Photo by Daniel Salemi / Aperture
Jorge Panchoaga
Kalabongó
Editorial RM and Musuk Nolte, Barcelona
Design by Estudio Herrera
Shortlisted for “PhotoBook of the Year” category.
Jorge Panchoaga is a 2025 Counter Histories Fellow, where he is developing his project Erythroxylum. Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs 1961 — tracing the role of media representation and government campaigns in creating the stigmatization of the coca leaf plant and its traditional uses in Colombia.
Kalabongo explores the culture and historical significance of an African American slave community on the Colombian coast. All the images are nocturnal because, in the words of the author, “the night is an accomplice of the light of freedom”. The book is edited by Musuk Nolte, who is also a 2025 Counter Histories Fellow.