Joshua YeheNara won the 2026 Exposure One Awards on Ilford Delta 100, shot through a studio camera that weighs 45 pounds and sits on a stand weighing roughly 350.
The Exposure One Awards accept black and white work only, which makes the winner worth a look here. This year’s International Photographer of the Year is Joshua YeheNara, a New York City photographer who restores antique cameras and works in wet plate collodion and large format. He won with a series called Zen-Organic Photography for the Digital Age.
The camera is older than almost everyone reading this
It’s a Deardorff studio camera, an 11×14 model also called the S11, built by L.F. Deardorff and Sons in Chicago. The company made large format cameras from 1923 into the late 1980s, and the studio models were built between the 1930s and the 1980s. YeheNara’s is about 95 years old.
“The camera itself weighs 45 pounds, while its original studio stand weighs approximately 350 pounds,” he told Digital Camera World.
He owns three of them
YeheNara says fewer than 350 Deardorff studio cameras were ever built. He has three of them. He found the first on Facebook Marketplace and bought it from a collector in Massachusetts for $4,500.
Deardorffs were built modular, with an interchangeable back holding the film, so one body can shoot several sizes. Two of his have been converted to panoramic formats, 8×20 and 11×28, with backs made for him by the previous owner. He says he’s the only photographer known to own both.
What he shot it on
The winning frames were made on Ilford Delta 100 in a 10×14 inch back. One note for anyone trying to pin the format down. The awards site lists the series as 8×10, and a gallery listing for the first print describes it the same way, so it isn’t clear from the published accounts whether 8×10 refers to the negative or to the finished print.
No digital anywhere in it
The series shows rocks and other objects apparently floating in midair. YeheNara says he built specialized equipment and worked out techniques of his own to get the effect, with no fishing line, no clamps, no green screen and no digital editing. The awards site says no Photoshop or Lightroom touched the work.
That contrast is the interesting part. Digital cameras keep adding ways to imitate what the darkroom used to do, and Ricoh just put a solarized effect into the GR IV Monochrome. YeheNara went the other direction and did the difficult thing in front of the lens instead.
The rest of the field
Ed Healy took International Discovery of the Year, which is the amateur title, with After the Blizzard, made in Buffalo after the Christmas Eve blizzard of 2022. Cristina Ford won the professional aerial category with Written in Water, and Scarlett Freund won professional event with L.A. Pride 03. You can see the winners on the Exposure One Awards site.
There’s no gear lesson in this. Almost nobody is going to go out and find a 45 pound camera and a stand that outweighs a refrigerator. But a camera that takes that much effort to set up asks a question before every frame, which is whether this one is worth the trouble. The rest of us answer that question a few hundred times a day without noticing that we’re answering it at all.
The camera pictured above is an 8×10 Deardorff studio camera from the Missouri Historical Society collection rather than YeheNara’s 11×14.