Summary
- Bangladeshi photographer Pinu Rahman won the $200,000 Grand Prize at HIPA 2026.
- His photograph shows five family members sleeping in the ruins of their home in Dhaka.
- He used a DJI Mavic 3 Pro the morning after the November 2025 fire.
- The award was presented in Dubai on 10 November 2026.
A family sleeping among the burned remains of their home beneath the open sky in Dhaka has earned Bangladeshi photographer Pinu Rahman the $200,000 Grand Prize at HIPA 2026.
Rahman received the honour on 10 November 2026 at the 15th Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum International Photography Award ceremony, held at Dubai’s Museum of the Future. This year’s theme was “Family”.
The story behind “Under the Same Sky”
On 25 November 2025, a fire swept through Korail, a densely populated settlement in Dhaka. The flames spread through structures made of corrugated metal, bamboo and wood, destroying roughly 1,500 homes and leaving thousands displaced.
The following morning, on 26 November, Rahman photographed five members of a family sleeping within the surviving concrete walls of their home. Burned metal sheets, rubble and a handful of belongings surround them. He titled the photograph “Under the Same Sky”.
A documentary photograph made with a drone
Rahman used a DJI Mavic 3 Pro. The near-vertical viewpoint reveals the full outline of the destroyed home: five people sleeping inside the room, with heaps of fire-damaged material just beyond its walls. The geometry shows the scale of the destruction without losing sight of the people at its centre.
Here, aerial photography serves the story rather than spectacle. The distance allows viewers to see the family’s remaining shelter alongside the devastated surroundings, a relationship that would be much harder to convey from eye level.
The Grand Prize and the 15th edition
HIPA offers a total prize fund of $1 million, with its $200,000 Grand Prize the highest individual honour. This edition included Family, General, Portfolio (Story-Telling), Sports Photography and Dreams Through AI, among other award categories.
A year earlier, the HIPA 2025 Grand Prize went to Gianluca Gianferrari for his photograph of Mount Etna. This year’s winning image shifts the focus from the force of nature to one family’s daily struggle to survive.
What we think
This is one of those photographs that makes you stop before you even think about the equipment. First you see five people trying to rest in a home that effectively no longer exists. Then you begin to appreciate how deliberately the frame has been composed.
There is a clear photographic reason for using a drone. The surviving walls mark out a small space of shelter amid the devastation, while the burned corrugated metal outside provides essential context. From the ground, it might have been an affecting human scene. From above, the space itself becomes part of the story.
For anyone working in documentary photography, the image also raises a responsibility: when photographing people in vulnerable circumstances, their dignity and the context of their story matter far more than whether the picture was taken with expensive equipment.
