The Giles Barker Award is presented to any person connected with any aspect of cave photography in recognition of excellence or contributions to the field; it has a wide remit to allow consideration of many areas of image creation. The award has been running since 1993 in memory of Giles, a keen cave photographer who died while caving in Spain in 1992. Giles was a member of the Red Rose CPC and Morgannwg CC, which together fund the special trophy which beautifully crafted annually by Ceris Jones.

The 2025 award was presented to Bartek Biela at the Hidden Earth conference in September. Bartek’s creative imagery has visibly improved and become more prominent over the past few years – he has been taking cave photography at a serious level for around fifteen years and exhibiting the results over the past six, including some inspiring results from the sharp end of the 2024 Mulu expedition. In 2025 his imagery was chosen to represent Hidden Earth.

Bartek commented: ‘It is a great honour to receive the Giles Barker Award and it feels very special to be amongst the recipients, the ones I was always looking up to.’ Congratulations, Bartek, on receiving this 30th award in the series, which as usual is a fine trophy specially created by Ceris Jones that will be retained by Bartek in perpetuity.

More information and a list of previous winners can be found here.

Correspondent: Chris Howes