The ZIPA Story: Episode 1

ZIPA 2025: The Self-doubt Phase

There’s a kind of silence that happens when someone trusts you with a dream you never saw and hands you a responsibility too big for your hands. Not the comfortable kind but the one that shrouds your mind with clouds of uncertainties with no direction forward. You try to avoid the conversation but it comes every time you talk to that person. That’s what happened the day Ali Zolghadri said we should start our own international photography award platform.

I remember sitting with this thought, turning it over, waiting for it to start making sense to me. It didn’t. All I had was a personal blog and the ambition to start a sensible photography magazine. That was it. No industry connections. No standing in the award circuit. No list of awards or exhibitions to back my own credentials. Not even a friend-of-a-friend who could vouch for my credibility.

I think a lot of people who eventually do something meaningful spend a private, unglamorous season right here — in that uncomfortable gap between a noble idea and any tangible evidence that they can really pull it off at at least give an honest attempt to it. I certainly did. I wasn’t scared of hard work. I was scared of not being able to bring it to the scale such a global award plarform deserved. Scared that how will I do this without any connections, sponsorship or entry fees. Scared that will I be able to give it the time and care it demands, after whatever is left of my day as full-time corporate lawyer and father of twin toddlers.

What got me through that particular kind of fear wasn’t confidence. It was Ali, refusing to let go of an idea I’d already half-buried in my own head. He didn’t argue me out of the doubt — I don’t think that’s really possible, in the moment. He just kept showing up with belief, over and over, patiently, the way you keep knocking on a door you’re fairly sure is locked, until one day it just… isn’t. I said yes not because I stopped doubting myself, but because his belief in me had started to overpower my own fear, at least for that one moment. And sometimes one moment is all you need to change the whole direction of a life.

Saying yes turned out to be the easy part. What came after was harder and lonelier than I expected. ZIPA wasn’t launching into a quiet corner where I could fail privately and try again unnoticed. It was launching in the same breath as Creative Zyne, my dream photography magazine — another fragile, impossible thing I was building simultaneoulsy, with no safety net underneath either of us. Two ideas, both unproven, both intended to bring a fresh wave of change, both about to be tested in public, at the same time, funded by nothing but whatever I could set aside from my salary and however tiny hours I could steal from my sleep and responsibilities at home.

The part that still humbles me, even now, is the jury. Building a credible jury panel is not at all easy. The reputation of the judges defines the sincerity and calibre of an award platform. Plus, why would any renowned judge with international repute, put their prestige on line for an award platform which has barely taken its first baby steps and has no backing of a big name or brand in the indutry?

Given my nil connections in the award circuit, I had almost no one to reach out. Ali was the one who walked into that emptiness and did what I couldn’t: he brought in Zuzana, Jozef, and Pavel — three names I would never have found on my own, three people trusting a total stranger’s word that this thing was worth their time. My own contribution to that panel was a single name, Remon, pulled in through whatever thin, hopeful thread I still had left to pull. Four judges. And then Ali — having already carried half the weight of building this jury by himself — quietly stepped in as the fifth, filling the exact gap my own limitations had left behind. I remember feeling grateful and small at the same time. Grateful someone believed in this enough to keep giving. Small, because I couldn’t yet give as much back.

Even with the panel finally in place, I didn’t feel like we’d made it. If anything, the fear just changed shape. It stopped being “can we even start this” and became something quieter and more persistent: will this matter enough for there to be a second time? I didn’t have an answer, and I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for one. I gave ZIPA whatever tiny momemnts were left over after the magazine work was done — evenings, gaps, the in-between moments most people spend with family. Somewhere underneath it, I think I was also trying to outrun the doubt by simply refusing to give up on something I had consciously taken up.

Then something happened that I still can’t fully explain, rationally. People started sending in their work. Not a trickle of polite, obligatory entries — over 300 submissions from 30 countries, across five categories, from photographers who owed a brand-new, unproven award absolutely nothing, but chose to trust it anyway. I read that number for the first time and just sat with it for a while, not quite able to fold it into how small I’d felt a few months earlier.

And here’s the detail that still catches people off guard when I tell this story: all of that happened before we even had a dedicated website. For the entire run-up to ZIPA 2025, the award existed as a promise on our magazine page, a small circle of judges, and whatever trust those participants were willing to extend. We didn’t get a site live until just days before the ZIPA 2025 results announcement — built at the very last possible hour, the way you finally hang a front door on a house people have already quietly agreed to live in. I designed the website myself, because a web designer’s fee was never the money I could afford to spend. I keep coming back to that detail because it says something true about the whole first year: almost none of it was built the “right” way, the way an award with real backing and concrete strategy would have been built. It was built the only way two people with more belief than resources could build it — improvising, stretching thin, showing up anyway.

Maybe those who submitted their images saw something in it I couldn’t see in myself yet. But here’s the question I haven’t answered yet, and it’s the one people ask me most: why bother? There were already dozens of photography awards out there — established ones, with real cash prizes, red-carpet ceremonies, names that opened doors. Why put myself through all of this doubt, all this scraping-by, to build one more?

The truth is, that question doesn’t have a comfortable answer. It has a personal one. And it starts long before Ali ever said a word to me — back when I was just another photographer hitting “submit” on someone else’s award, and waiting, and hoping, and mostly, not hearing back. That’s where Episode 2 picks up. Because before ZIPA was something we built, it was something we needed — and we don’t think we’ve ever told anyone why.

In the Episode 2 of ZIPA Story, we reveal why we created ZIPA at the first place – the vision, philosophy and all that followed. To be continued…

Here are some of our favorite winning images from ZIPA 2025!