2025: A Year in Review at Shutter Hub

Blog

Over the past year we’ve worked hard to make Shutter Hub more accessible than ever. Our community has grown stronger, and we’ve created the greatest number of opportunities in Shutter Hub history.

Here are a few milestones from 2025 that we’d love to look back on with you…

A New Chapter

2025 was a year of important, meaningful change. To celebrate a decade of Shutter Hub, we completely relaunched our platform as a membership-free, open, and inclusive resource for photographers worldwide.

There was no doubt in our minds that this was the right thing to do and the natural next step, but we didn’t know how people would respond. Your response was incredible! We received so much support from our existing community (thank you!) and welcomed hundreds of new community members over the subsequent months. We were even recognised at the IT Awards as Photography Platform of the Year!

We’re proud to have created a space where we can enable creative and conscientious photographers to come together and support each other and their work.

Exhibitions That Defined Our Year

We began the year with our large-scale OPEN exhibition. The Shutter Hub OPEN 2025 brought more than 100 international photographers into one expansive exhibition at Cambridge University. With four floors of imagery, the show represented a broad spectrum of creative expression – personal, political, documentary, experimental, and everything in between.

The OPEN embodies what we’re all about: openness, inclusivity, and the very best photography. The public determines the ‘Best in Show’ winner, shifting emphasis toward collective response, reflecting our belief that photography thrives through shared engagement.

The accompanying Book & Zine Fair extended the experience from walls to pages. Artists, publishers, and visitors came together to explore printed formats, demonstrating the relevance of physical publishing within contemporary photographic culture.

Come and visit the Shutter Hub OPEN 2026 at the private view and explore the Shutter Hub Pop-Up Photobook Library in January 2026!

This year’s YEARBOOK Awards reached a new level of international engagement, too. Featuring work from more than 170 photographers across the world, the exhibition continued to build on the success of previous editions, and the Awards offered the best collection of prizes we’ve seen yet (if we do say so ourselves!) from incredible organisations including Alamy, Der Greif, Magnum Photos, FORMAT, and Newspaper Club.

YEARBOOK is a platform for photographers at every stage of their career. The breadth and quality of the work included – from conceptual photography to portraiture, documentary, architecture, and fine art – speaks to the diversity of the global photographic community and demonstrates how valuable accessible opportunities are in the creative industries are.

Explore this year’s YEARBOOK Awards exhibition here.

A Year of Books: Shutter Hub Editions

What was 2025 like for Shutter Hub Editions? It was a year where new voices and new stories found their place in our collection of beautiful photobooks. We welcomed To The Sea, Home, and our first solo photobook, The Leopard Print Portraits by Gemma Taylor, into the collection, with each book carrying its diverse themes that explored the vast creativity possible through photography. We also welcomed the next instalment of the AUTO PHOTO series, AUTO PHOTO 04, which you can get here!

Work also began on three upcoming titles too – Do You Like Love?, and the inaugural books for two new series, The Colour Library: Blue and The City Series: Cambridge (you can still submit your work here!). We’re looking forward to sharing them all with you soon!

AUTO PHOTO Awards: Our Biggest Year Yet

The AUTO PHOTO Awards continued to gather momentum this year, with the 2025 edition bringing together a remarkable number of incredible submissions from around the world, with photographers exploring everything from the elegance of design to the grit of the racetrack.

As with previous years, the awards did more than celebrate great photography, they created opportunities and community, giving AUTO PHOTO photographers the visibility and support they need to go further in their creative journey.

AUTO PHOTO Awards Top 100 at Silverstone Festival 2025 © Chris Nicholson

Camera Amnesty Projects: Second-Hand Cameras Getting A Second Chance

Camera Amnesty is now one of the core ways we express our commitment to accessibility, social value, environmental awareness, and long-term industry change.

This year we connected with organisations, educational groups and individuals to distribute cameras and resources where they would have the greatest impact. We provided over 60 cameras (plus accessories) to groups and individuals across the UK and around the world – from bulk donations to new community photography workshops and providing equipment for those entering further education, the donations we’ve received have made a huge difference to the lives of so many.

Looking Ahead at 2026

We’re excited for the year to come, and looking forward to bringing new opportunities for exhibiting, publishing, and recognising photography from around the world to our community.

Our goals remain clear: to support photographers, elevate diverse voices, champion important stories and causes, and deliver a platform that reflect the very best of photographic culture.

Thank you to everyone who has made 2025 the year it’s been – our community, our friends, our partners. You’ve helped shape a year defined by creativity, ambition, and meaningful exchange.

The work continues, and we look forward to making more good things happen with good people.

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