Sooner or later, every salon photographer has this moment: you get an email that says "Congratulations — your image X has been awarded a Gold Medal at Salon Y." A rush of dopamine, a text to a friend, and then a quieter thought — "does this actually count for anything, or is it just a nice email?"
It's a fair question, and the honest answer is more nuanced than the culture around salon awards suggests. Here's what awards actually do and don't do for you, distinction by distinction.
For BPE crowns: honestly, no
Let's get the blunt truth out first. In the BPE crown scheme, every acceptance is worth exactly one point. A humble "accepted" in the Colour section counts the same as a Gold Medal at the same salon. The certificates the BPE Awards Officers issue for BPE1★ through BPE5★ are earned on total acceptances alone — awards are irrelevant to the arithmetic.
So if you're squarely focused on chasing crowns, the practical advice is: enter more salons, enter more sections, don't fret about whether any given acceptance was awarded. Your BPE1★ won't come faster because you racked up medals; it'll come faster because you entered another two salons.
But awards do matter — five ways
"No effect on point totals" is not the whole story. Awards matter through more indirect but real channels.
1. FIAP level applications treat some awards as level-critical
Once you're past AFIAP and EFIAP and climbing the level ladder (EFIAP Bronze → Platinum → Diamond d1 → d8), FIAP starts asking about how many awards your images have won. From EFIAP/d1 onward, the entire ladder is scored in awards rather than acceptances. Winning an award somewhere often means the image will be accepted in dozens of other salons too — and, at the Diamond tier, each award counts directly. See how FIAP distinctions really work for the specific numbers.
2. ABPE and FBPE panels are judged on portfolio quality
Past BPE5★, the ABPE (Associateship) and FBPE (Fellowship) applications aren't about counts — they're about a coherent portfolio of work judged by a panel. Awards are strong evidence that experienced judges have consistently rated an image highly. When you present a set of 10 photographs for ABPE consideration, "each image has won 3–5 medals internationally" is a much stronger presentation than "each image has been accepted 20 times." Both might be true — but the awards make the case tangibly.
3. Awards reveal your strongest work
If you can't tell which of your 40 competition-ready photographs is your strongest, ask the judges. Enter 30 salons over a year and watch which images win awards. Photographs that consistently place tell you something real about their competitive quality — and once you know your strongest 4–6 images, you can enter them everywhere and efficiently build acceptance counts (and, for FIAP, country coverage on your best work).
Exhibition Tracker's ranking algorithm explicitly weighs awarded images higher for exactly this reason — your Top Ranked Images list surfaces the photographs judges keep returning to.
4. Awards open doors outside the exhibition circuit
Photography publications, camera clubs, gallery curators, workshop organisers — none of them care about your point total, but a "FIAP Gold Medal at Al-Thani 2025" is a genuine credential when you're pitching a talk, submitting to a book, or applying to teach a workshop. If any part of your photography ambition extends beyond the salon circuit, awards are the currency the outside world understands.
5. Awards keep you motivated
This one is soft, but real. Chasing crowns is a long, grinding game — years of entry after entry. A well-timed medal from a respected salon can reignite a discouraged photographer's momentum. Don't underestimate the value of encouragement.
How to balance the two goals
If your target is squarely BPE crowns and nothing else, enter widely and don't worry about awards. If your target is FIAP letters or higher-tier distinctions, awards start to matter and you should be more selective about salons. For most photographers, the healthy answer is somewhere in the middle:
- Enter widely for volume. Cover your calendar with salons in as many countries as you can afford.
- Enter a smaller set of prestige salons for signal. A few big salons per year where an acceptance means something and an award means a lot.
- Track both. Log your acceptances and your awards so you can review the ratio annually. If you've had 60 acceptances and 0 awards in a year, you're getting volume but the jury isn't singling any of your work out — that's a signal to sharpen your editing.
The one anti-pattern to avoid
Do not chase awards at the expense of acceptances. Some photographers over-fit to "medal-friendly" processing — heavy compositing, dramatic lighting, over-saturated colours — because they've observed those photographs winning awards. It's a myth. Most awards go to well-crafted, honestly-executed images. Chasing a style you think will win rarely does; making your best work and putting it out consistently, does.
A short worked example
Consider two photographers, both aiming for BPE3★ (100 acceptances) plus EFIAP over three years.
- Photographer A enters 20 salons a year with a mixed portfolio of 20 images. Around 30% acceptance rate gives them ~120 acceptances a year across salons. Zero strategy about country coverage. Some incidental awards. Hits BPE3★ in year 1. Still stuck at 220 acceptances / 6 countries at year 3 — nowhere near EFIAP's 20-country minimum.
- Photographer B enters 15 salons a year, chosen for country diversity and a couple of prestige salons. Fewer acceptances (~90 a year) but spread across 18 countries by year 3, with 6 medal-winning "portfolio images". Hits BPE3★ in year 2 and EFIAP in year 3, and has a solid start on FIAP levels.
Same effort, wildly different distinctions. The difference: intentional salon selection, and a light awareness of which of their images were doing the medal-winning work.
The take-away
Awards don't move the BPE crown needle — but they move nearly everything else that photographers eventually care about. Track them, celebrate them, and use them as signal about your strongest images. Just don't reorganise your entire photography life to chase them.
That's the last post in the mini-series. Explore the other pieces from the blog index — and if you're not already tracking your entries properly, create a free Exhibition Tracker account and start today. You'll thank yourself when you're compiling your first distinction application.