Winners of SAFN’s Annual Anthropology Day Photo Contest!

David Beriss

It is time once again to reveal the winners of the 2026 SAFN Anthropology Day Photo Contest!

Our decisions this year were reached by a panel of SAFN’s officers, including Ryan Adams, Amanda Green, Shannon Caplan, and Noha Fikry, along with me, the FoodAnthropology editor. I very much appreciate the efficient work and helpful insights provided by this panel.

Photos were judged for

• the ethnographic nature of the pictures, overall.
• the contribution of the photo as insight into foodways.
• the extent to which the photos help us see the work and lives of people in food.
• the overall composition, originality, etc.

We received a record number of submissions this year. We are grateful to everyone who participated. There are clearly quite a few talented visual story tellers in SAFN. It was difficult to choose the best and I think everyone who sent in photos should be congratulated on their work.

Over the years we have been conducting this competition, the submissions have begun to lean more toward series of photos, sometimes telling a story, rather than individual photos. This has been an interesting development.

We will post work by the winners over the next few days, starting today with our first place winners. We had a tie for our overall winner, between Harleen Bal (UC Davis) and Nikhit Agrawal (UCLA). Caroline Stahley (USF) came in second and Carole Counihan (Millersville) took third place. The judges found them all visually interesting, ethnographically insightful, and intriguing to view. We hope you do as well. Congratulations to all the winners!

As noted, we had a tie for first place. Our first set of photos, below, are from Harleen Bal, a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at UC Davis. the photos were taken during her fieldwork with Punjabi diaspora workers and their families in California. Most, she notes, are “from the annual Nagar Kirtan that takes place in Yuba City and involves an immense scale of ‘informal’ preparation, labor, and logistics around feeding and food.” The judges thought this series was probably the most ethnographic collection submitted and noted that they could practically smell the scene.

Note that the photos below have been sized to fit this page. In most cases, if you click on the photo, you can see a larger version.