André Boto, Jerónimo Heitor Coelho and Cláudia Oliveira Earn Honourable Mentions at London's World Food Photography Awards 2026 — Eggs, Morcelas and Grilled Milho Carry Three Portuguese Frames Into the 27-Category Finals

Three Portuguese photographers — André Boto, Jerónimo Heitor Coelho and Cláudia Oliveira — collected honourable mentions at the World Food Photography Awards 2026, the global juried competition whose Tuesday night ceremony at London's Mall Galleries selected winners across 27 categories from nearly nine thousand entries submitted by photographers in more than 50 countries. The announcement was made by Italian chef Gennaro Contaldo, with juror Jamie Oliver on the panel. The 203-frame finalists exhibition runs free at the Mall Galleries through Sunday.

The Three Portuguese Frames

André Boto's mention came in the MPB Award for Innovation category, with a composition the jury described as a 'lunar landscape' of craters formed by flour, two egg yolks set against the field 'full of brilliance, organic presence and colour'. Boto is no newcomer to this stage — he won the same Innovation category in 2025 with a different egg-centred frame, which makes the 2026 mention the second consecutive year his ovo-and-flour visual language has registered with the London panel.

Jerónimo Heitor Coelho earned a mention in the Philip Harben Award for Food in Action category, with a frame capturing women in aprons preparing morcelas (Portuguese blood sausage) around a stained communal bowl. The composition reads at first glance like an old painting — the jurors noted the artisanal, collective quality of the moment, which sits squarely inside the category's brief of food labour caught mid-process rather than plated.

Cláudia Oliveira's frame stays in the same female-and-ingredient register but moves the setting to rural Santiago, where three women prepare and sell milho grelhado (grilled corn) at an improvised roadside structure. The image's recognition rounds out a Portuguese trio that — unusually for a London-judged competition — leans hard on traditional Portuguese culinary labour rather than on the plated-restaurant aesthetic that dominates much of the field.

The Overall Winner and the Prize Sheet

The Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year 2026 went to British photographer Jo Kearney for A Woman Eats in the Canteen of the Soviet-era Sanatorium, capturing a woman serving tea at the table inside the Khoja Obi Garm popular sanatorium in the Tajikistan mountains. The headline prize: £5,000 (around €5,800). The full finalists gallery — Portuguese mentions included — is published on the World Food Photography Awards website.

What This Means for Portuguese Food and Visual Culture

• Repeat recognition for Boto: Two consecutive Innovation-category mentions for a Portuguese photographer working with the egg-and-flour vocabulary cements a recognisable Portuguese voice on a stage dominated by UK, US and East Asian entries.
• The artisanal-labour register: Both the Heitor Coelho and Oliveira frames trade on a quieter Portuguese tradition — collective, female-led, regional — that rarely surfaces in the gastro-tourism imagery the country exports. The London panel's appetite for it is a signal worth noting for any visual project documenting Portuguese rural food production.
• Practical: The Mall Galleries exhibition runs free through Sunday in London. For expats with a London trip on this week's calendar, it is the only physical place where all three Portuguese frames hang together.
• Cultural read: Portugal's culinary visibility on the international circuit has historically leaned on the chef-and-restaurant axis. Three photography mentions in one year, all rooted in non-restaurant settings, broadens the surface area of how Portuguese food is being seen abroad.

The World Food Photography Awards have run since 2011 and operate as one of the most-watched annual benchmarks for food imagery globally. The Portuguese trio's honourable mentions sit alongside finalists from Britain, the United States, Japan, Mexico, India and 45 other countries — a competitive set that makes three flags in a single edition a meaningful Portuguese result.