Wolfgang Tillmans has been named the winner of this year's Henri Cartier-Bresson Lifetime Achievement Award, the honour announced to coincide with the opening of Paris Photo. The German photographer accepted the prize at the foundation's annual gala, surrounded by an installation that took its cue from Henri Cartier-Bresson's travelogue Les Europeens. Speaking in a video message, Tillmans said he was proud to join the lineage of what he called a fantastic award named after a fantastic photographer.

The award recognises a career that has kept photography at its centre even as Tillmans's practice has ranged across installation, sound and video. Born in Remscheid in 1968, he came to wide attention in the 1990s with unguarded, intimate pictures of young people and their subcultures, images that helped define the look of a generation. In 2000 he became the first photographer, and the first non-British artist, to win the Turner Prize. Major retrospectives have since followed at Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where his 2022 survey was titled To Look Without Fear.

His London gallerist Maureen Paley described him as an impressive artist, visionary and thinker, crediting the inventiveness he has brought to the medium over three decades. Tillmans is the third photographer to receive the lifetime award since it was created in 2024, following Sophie Calle and Susan Meiselas.

The same evening brought recognition for a younger artist. Manila-born Poklong Anading won the foundation's Latitudes programme, run with the Fondation d'entreprise Hermes and the International Center of Photography. Known for work addressing social, political and environmental questions, Anading will receive a grant to make a new body of work, which will be shown at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, the International Center of Photography in New York and in the Philippines.