Ukrainian photographer Denys Didkivskyi has been shortlisted for the Abbey Road Music Photography Awards in two categories at once — Portrait and Emerging Photographer of the Year. According to him, such a combination has never happened among the award finalists.
Only 15 works in each category were selected for the final stage of the competition. The names of the finalists will be announced in August, and the awards ceremony is scheduled for September 24, 2026, in London.
The Abbey Road Music Photography Awards are one of the main professional awards for music photographers in the world. The name refers to the legendary London studio where The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Oasis, Adele and Lady Gaga recorded. Today, Abbey Road is no longer just a recording studio, but an entire creative ecosystem that shapes the musical and visual context of our time.
In the Portrait category, Didkivskyi submitted a series of photos with singer Alina Pash. The photographer met the artist in 2023 at the Orange Warsaw Festival, and shot the competition shots in November 2025 in Los Angeles for Unison Magazine.
For the Emerging Photographer of the Year category — a kind of analog of the “Best New Artist” at the Grammys — the photographer collected a concert series from performances by Doechii, FKA twigs, Kendrick Lamar, Charli XCX, and Loreen. In each frame, he looked for something different: Doechii’s gaze, Loreen’s futuristic aesthetic, Lamar’s silhouette, Charli XCX’s vulnerable image at the end of the Brat era, the plasticity of FKA twigs’ performance.
