Four years of documenting the stories behind the seams

For four years, Textile Exchange has been running a photography competition in partnership with Magnum Photos. The annual competition invites emerging visual storytellers to explore the narratives that unfold when fibers and materials are cultivated, created, spun, woven, sewn, loved, and cherished – gaining cultural and emotional significance through the journey.

THEME

Exploring the connections behind clothes

Our 2025 competition called on photographers to explore the way we transform textiles, and how textiles in turn transform us.

Clothing and textiles connect us intrinsically to our planet and its many ecosystems, cultures, and communities. The materials used to make them come from farms, forests, or even oil from the earth – passing through many pairs of hands, transformed each time before they become the final product that we buy.

IMAGE: PIERRE GIRARDIN
BACKGROUND

Placing textiles at the center of the story 

In partnership with Magnum Photos, our annual photography competition invites photographers to document the people, places, culture, and nature behind the finished products.

The initiative hopes to reframe the way we relate to their social, cultural, and environmental implications. It is about altering our attitude towards these everyday items, all while providing a springboard for emerging talent to embrace a more human approach to visual storytelling.

IMAGE: KIN COEDEL
How it works

What the winners recieve and how they're selected

The jurors

Competition winners are selected by a panel, consisting of experts from a range of disciplines. The 2025 jurors included Claire Bergkamp (CEO, Textile Exchange), Sonia Jeunet (Education Director, Magnum Photos), Lorenzo Meloni (Magnum Photographer), Sabiha Çimen (Magnum Photographer), Olya Kuryshchuk (Founder and Editor-in-Chief of 1 Granary), Aditi Mayer (Activist and Storyteller), and Jenny Walton (Artist and Writer, Jenny Sais Quoi).

The prizes

The prizes are intended to enrich the winners’ creative development and career progression. This year, the overall winner received a commission for Textile Exchange to the value of $10,000 to document a story about materials and their origins, as well as a mentorship with a leading talent from Magnum’s network of photographers and support from the Magnum Photos Education team. One runner-up also received a commission to the value of $7,000 for Textile Exchange.

 

Magazine and exhibition

Each year, the winning entries are published in our annual printed magazine, Unwoven, as well as showcased in an original exhibition at the Textile Exchange Conference. Held annually, the event brings over 1,300 brands, retailers, and suppliers together to ensure that fashion, textiles, and apparel are produced in a way that supports our planet, its ecosystems, its landscapes, and its communities.

2025 WINNER

Pierre Girardin

Based in Marseille, France, Pierre Girardin is particularly drawn to the craftsmanship, ancestral knowledge, and evolving traditions that represent the deep relationship between communities and their environments. His winning entry follows the wool ecosystem in Morocco, from its nomadic producers to the talented craftspeople transforming the fiber. He starts with shepherds and livestock breeders in the Siroua region, documenting how climate change has led to water shortages and a lack of grazing land. His lens captures both the challenges of survival and the resilience of local cooperatives working to revive wool in traditional crafts.

This takes him to a small village in Morocco’s Anti-Atlas region, inhabited mostly by women. It is known for weaving woolen veils and painting them using henna as a natural dye. While these women have historically been rendered invisible by craft merchants, Girardin shines a light on the weavers and the mastery they have over their craft.

2025 Runner Up

Cecília Bueno

Hailing from Brazil, Bueno is a photographer and filmmaker whose work connects gesture, land, and time into visual narratives. Her winning photo series documents communities of agroecological farmers in the Borborema Plateau in the semi-arid highlands of Paraíba, Brazil. The project follows the full cycle of organic cotton, from the sowing of ancestral seeds to the harvest, when the fields fill with what they call “white gold.”

Agroecological farmers aim to restore balance to ecosystems while honoring traditional knowledge, through ancestral practices such as spinning, weaving and harvesting. By centering the narrative on those who grow cotton and their deep ties to the land, Bueno set out to shift the gaze from the final product in the fashion chain to the human, ecological, and emotional paths that precede it.

2024 winner

Alejandra Orosco

Last year, the third edition of our annual competition saw 356 photographers from 64 countries submit over 6,000 photographs exploring how textiles transform people, places, cultures, and nature.

Overall winner Alejandra Orosco shares the story of the women seeking to bring back natural indigo to the town of Chinchero, Peru.

Based in Cusco, Peru, Orosco’s work explores identity, colonization, and untold stories, encouraging viewers to appreciate distant realities while finding common ground with their own. Her winning project, Sueño en Azul (A Dream in Blue), documents the possible impact of climate change and colonization on Andean textile culture, focusing on the indigo blue plant.

Used in the traditional textiles of the pre-Inca town of Chinchero, indigo has since disappeared from the country. Orosco’s work follows the journey of a group of Indigenous women working to revive its cultivation amid economic and environmental pressures, seeking to reconnect with their heritage by growing the plant on their land once again.

IMAGE: ALEJANDRA OROSCO
2024 runner up

Priyadarshini Ravichandran

2024 competition runner-up Priyadarshini Ravichandran’s entry highlighted the disappearance of Indigenous desi cotton varieties in the village of Wardha, India.

Born in Tamil Nadu, India, Ravichandran is a documentary photographer and artist whose work focuses on women, their lives, and the land. Her project “Wardha” documents the Indian village of the same name that holds historical significance as Mahatma Gandhi’s adopted home. Here, Gandhi envisioned a decentralized future, promoting hand-spun Indigenous desi cotton to uplift farmers and households.

However, today Wardha reflects the harsh realities of industrialization and corporate farming, with chemical-intensive cotton monoculture leading to health issues and escalating farmer debt. Through her lens, Ravichandran uncovers the remnants of Gandhi’s vision, exploring the enduring connection between the people and their land.

IMAGE: Priyadarshini Ravichandran
CONTACT

Get in touch

If you have any questions about the competition, please contact us at communications@textileexchange.org.