Andrea Bigiarini Joins the International Jury of the MIRA Mobile Prize 2026
Andrea Bigiarini Joins the International Jury of the MIRA Mobile Prize 2026
Andrea Bigiarini has been announced as a member of the international jury of the MIRA Mobile Prize 2026, one of the leading awards dedicated to contemporary mobile photography.
The MIRA Mobile Prize 2026 has announced the members of its new international jury. Being part of it is an important recognition for me, but above all, it is a responsibility.
Mobile photography has long moved beyond the stage in which it had to justify its own existence. It is no longer a technical curiosity. It is no longer the minor relative of “real” photography. It is no longer simply a matter of device. It is a language. And like every language, it can be used in a superficial or necessary way, in a decorative or radical way, in a predictable or surprising way.
Over the years, the MIRA Mobile Prize has become one of the places where this language has found attention, dialogue, and international visibility. Its strength does not lie only in awarding images, but in recognizing a photographic practice that belongs deeply to our time: immediate, democratic, intimate, unstable, and often closer to real life than many photographs carefully constructed to look important.
Being invited to join the jury means looking at images with care. It means searching not for the most obvious effect, but for the strongest vision. Not for the photograph that shouts the loudest, but for the one that stays with you. Not for the technically flawless and empty image, but for the one capable of opening a fracture, raising a question, shifting perception.
The international jury of the MIRA Mobile Prize 2026 brings together different experiences: artists, curators, photographers, and figures who have been working for years in the fields of mobile photography, street photography, visual research, and contemporary practices. This kind of exchange is valuable because mobile photography lives precisely there: in the space between immediacy and thought, between instinct and construction, between everyday technology and personal imagination.
For me, this invitation connects to a path that began many years ago, when mobile photography was still considered by many to be a marginal territory. In 2012, I founded The New Era Museum, the first museum dedicated to mobile photography, imagining it not as a simplified version of photography, but as a tool to improve, distort, question, and reinvent reality. Since then, through FIPA – Florence International Photography Awards, Impossible Humans, and other curatorial projects, I have continued to work around this idea: the image not as a passive document, but as an act of transformation.
Today, mobile photography is everywhere. Precisely for this reason, it has become more difficult to recognize what truly has a voice. Everyone can produce images. Few are able to build a gaze.
The role of a jury, at least as I understand it, is not to confirm dominant taste. It is to listen to what comes through the images. To understand when a photograph does not simply show something, but creates a presence. When it does not illustrate the world, but unsettles it. When it manages to be contemporary without chasing the fashion of the moment.
I am happy to share this experience with the other members of the MIRA Mobile Prize 2026 jury and to contribute, once again, to a prize that continues to give space to a living, accessible, and profoundly contemporary photographic form.
Mobile photography no longer needs to ask for permission.
Now it only has to show what it can see.