NASA photographers win top portrait honors for human spaceflight work

NASA’s strongest portrait work came from photographers who know how to make a hyper-controlled environment feel human. Three shooters at Johnson Space Center, David DeHoyos, Josh Valcarcel and Bill Stafford, took top honors in the portrait category of the 2025 NASA Imagery Experts Program Annual Awards, a reminder that the best spaceflight portraits are built on access, timing and trust as much as technique.

NASA said the awards ceremony was held April 20, 2026, in Las Vegas, and Johnson Space Center Director Vanessa Wyche praised the winners for work that represents “the collaboration, precision, and creativity” driving human space exploration forward. That is the real takeaway for photographers studying NASA’s playbook: these are not casual headshots. They are carefully staged, mission-adjacent portraits made in the middle of a working human spaceflight machine.

The agency’s photographers document the people and work at the center of that machine, from engineering tests and astronaut training to mission control operations. That broader remit shapes the look and feel of the portraits. NASA has long treated imagery as one of the main ways the public connects with human spaceflight, and its photographers have captured astronauts training, flying jets and celebrating in Mission Control. In other words, the portrait is never just a portrait. It is a doorway into the work.

DeHoyos won first place for a portrait of European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot during her official NASA portrait session at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The image fits the kind of controlled portrait environment NASA does better than almost anyone: a subject in a defined role, a clean mission context and a photographer who can make formal space still feel immediate. DeHoyos said the recognition fulfilled a lifelong ambition. Born in 1963, he grew up during the Apollo era, graduated from Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in 1981 and joined Johnson’s photography department in 1991 after spending a decade in photo labs.

Valcarcel took second place with a portrait of astronaut Jessica Meir with an EMU spacesuit during an official portrait session, a setup that practically writes its own visual lesson in storytelling. The suit is not just gear, it is context. Valcarcel has worked as a professional photographer and videographer for more than 20 years, and he has been a scientific photographer at Johnson since 2017 after earlier work at WIRED and in the U.S. Navy, where he served as a mass communication specialist.

Bill Stafford was also among the three Johnson photographers honored, underscoring how deeply portrait work runs through NASA Johnson’s visual identity. With America’s astronaut corps, Mission Control Center, the International Space Station, Orion and Gateway all tied to the center, these images do more than record faces. They make the human side of spaceflight legible, one carefully directed portrait at a time.