Susan Derges awarded the RPS Centenary Medal and RPS Honorary Fellowship 2025

We are delighted to announce that the Royal Photographic Society has awarded Susan Derges the RPS Centenary Medal and RPS Honorary Fellowship in recognition of an outstanding contribution to the art of photography or moving image.

An artist with whom we have shared the most rewarding twenty year collaboration—a relationship we continue to celebrate—Susan Derges’ career spans decades of exploration. She studied painting in London and Berlin in the 1970s, which informed her later wide-ranging approach to photographic image making, particularly her large-scale camera-less photograms of the shorelines and rivers of Devon and Dartmoor. In the early 1980s she lived and worked in Japan for six years, a formative period that influenced much of her image making and thinking, her creation of visual metaphors exploring the relationship between observer and observed; the self and nature; the imagined and the real. Her practice spans cameraless, lens-based, digital and reinvented photographic processes, informed by landscape, abstraction, and the physical and biological sciences. She is perhaps best known for her pioneering technique of immersing photographic paper directly into rivers or shorelines to capture the continuous movement of water, often working at night by the light of the moon and a hand-held torch.

She has undertaken residencies including the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, and Kingswood Forest, Ashford. She collaborated with Royal Museums Greenwich, exhibiting the Mortal Moon series at the Queen’s House in 2018, and worked with the Marine Biology Department at the University of Plymouth during the making of her series Tide Pools.

Her work has been included in numerous international exhibitions, including Shadows on the Wall: Cameraless Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Shadow Catchers at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Her works are held in major collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Brooklyn Museum; Art Institute of Chicago; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. She was previously awarded an RPS Honorary Fellowship in 2014.

For more information please visit the RPS website.