The Last Sitting, by Lithuania-based photographer Alessio D’Addato, won 1st Place in Historic Architecture at the 2026 International Photography Awards.
The series was made at the Sanatorium Metallurgist in Tskaltubo, Georgia, built in the 1930s as a spa resort for Soviet workers and abandoned since the 1990s. Across its ballrooms, corridors and patient rooms, chairs remain — “not scattered but placed,” as D’Addato writes, “as if whoever sat in them simply stepped away.” The series follows those chairs through nine spaces.
Its power lies in that restraint. Instead of dramatising decay, D’Addato lets a single, ordinary object carry the weight of thirty years of absence. As he puts it: the building is deteriorating, the furniture is waiting, and both conditions have persisted for three decades.
More about the photographer: Alessio D'Addato, Creative Profile
Official award record: International Photography Awards winners
An empty chair is the most patient witness a building can have.
International Photography Awards, 2026 — 1st Place, Architecture: Historic
