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The Finalists in the 2010 Young Photographers Competition.
CLICK HERE to see the Winners of the shots Young Photographers Competition
Finalist
- Photographer: Alexey Bagmanyan
- Portfolio Title: Pair
- Email: apstapst@gmail.com
- Country: Russian Federation
- Website: http://www.myspace.com/apstapst
- College: Moscow State University of Printing Arts
- Sometimes I wonder, how can we get along all together.
How can it be?!
Funny mankind, honoured mankind, foolish mankind, evil mankind.
We are not trying enough.
But something is still holding us from the last step and the Rubicon still keeps its coolness.
It`s all about us. Pure voice.
I'm living in the striking time.
I wanna know this big blue world.
Now.
Can I shoot it all, before all my dreams become dragons and fly away?
- Photographer: Amanda R. Nagy
- Portfolio Title: Nocturnal Beings
- Email: mandars_22@yahoo.com
- Country: USA
- Website:
- College: Watkins College of Art and Design
- Photographer: Anna Maysyuk
- Portfolio Title: To See the Sea
- Email: any-may@yandex.ru
- Country: Russian Federation
- Website: www.russiantearoom.fr/html.php?lang=en&id=3
- College: St.Petersburg Academy of Arts
- This project is like an itinerary. Step by step I shot our journey to the sea, the people I faced with, the living conditions, emotions. It is a cultural cut shown by intimate impressions.
I haven’t been at the sea.
I always wanted to see the sea. To look how it is endlessly beautiful. How the sun, sinking in waves, becomes red as blood. I have heard much how devilishly great to watch out enormous burning ball, as it melts in the waves, and visible light blazes sometime at far. Blue-black nights and sky gem med with stars. Standing ashore and feeling salty smell of the wind that blows from the sea and drinking air to remember its taste.
Don’t pile it on. Never been at the sea?
No. Never.
We came off and went to see the sea, like it's left us to live several days. And that we have something to tell about in heaven. 
- Photographer: Ash Huynh
- Portfolio Title: Glimmervoid
- Email: a3huynh@ryerson.ca
- Country: Canada
- Website:
- College: Ryerson University
- Photographer: Cédric Raccio
- Portfolio Title: The Escape Plan
- Email: raccio.29@vtxnet.ch
- Country: Switzerland
- Website:
- College: ECAL Lausanne
- The year 2010 marks both the 120th anniversary of the birth of Frank Martin (b. 1890) and the 55th anniversary of the death of Arthur Honneger (d. 1955). Both celebrated Swiss composers spent many years of their lives abroad.
Honegger, whom one finds today portrayed upon the Swiss 20-franc note, was born in Le Havre and spent many years in Paris. Martin lived away from his native Geneva in Rome, Paris, Cologne and Amsterdam. The Escape Plan brings echoes of their works to fuse the vistas of Switzerland with of two of its most celebrated sons. From the cosmopolitan bustle or the flat plains of mountainless landscapes, not only the famous dream of such majestic splendour.
Honneger’s work Nicolas de Flüe tells of the life of Switzerland’s patron saint. He married, then lived as a hermit surrounded by the beauty of nature. Both Protestants and Catholics alike credit Nicolas with the permanent national unity of Switzerland. Martin’s compositions include six Ballades, which one could well imagine in this grandiose panoramic setting.
Many of the greatest works of their creativity evoke a mental escape from city lives abroad to Swiss legend and beauty.
Contrast is a strength and powerful silence a magnet to all who escape from the mundane to confront themselves with such hypnotising magnificence. 
- Photographer: Chang Kyun Kim
- Portfolio Title: Temples
- Email: step1414@gmail.com
- Country: USA
- Website: www.changkimphotography.com
- College: Parsons The New School for Design, New York
- My goal of this project was to describe American warehouse stores as temples with sacred and mystic appearance and at the same time as monstrous, dominant creatures in people’s life in America. This duality was the point that I became interested.
I think the warehouse stores in suburban areas in America can be interpreted as another kind of religious figure in a sense that the brand names and its mass merchandising system make people pursue something more, cheaper, faster with the massive marketing drive which is as powerful as religious persuasion and a lot of people become fanatical followers of the brands that bring the fantasy of easy buying.
To describe this, I have been using large format films with three to five minutes’ exposure to photograph well-known warehouse stores in suburban areas in New York and in New Jersey in the midnight. The reason I chose midnight was that I wanted to underscore the strong simplicity of straight lines and colors under the dark sky to convey the sacredness of temples as well as the uncanny dominance that rules the buying culture in the areas. 
- Photographer: Christoph Balkow
- Portfolio Title: Piter!
- Email: faber_balkow@freenet.de
- Country: Germany
- Website:
- College: University of Applied Sciences Bielefeld
- Photographer: David Brezina
- Portfolio Title: Freedom
- Email: davidbrezina89@centrum.cz
- Country: Czech Republic
- Website: www.breznik-the-other.deviantart.com
- College: Institute of Creative Photography in Opava
- Photographer: David George
- Portfolio Title: Enclosures Badlands and Borders
- Email: david@davidgeorge.eu
- Country: UK
- Website: www.davidgeorge.eu
- College: Sir John Cass School of Art, Metropolitan University, Whitechapel, London
- These photographs examine the existence of the Sublime in the Western post-industrial landscape. They explore how these terrains posses a physical and intellectual exclusivity for a general observer and how they, owing to the nature of the industries that create and maintain them, have a built-in obsolescence; and I hope the production of these images has not only extended my own understanding of the evolution and topography of these landscapes,. In the foreseeable future most of these places will no longer exist in their present form, given shifts in global economies, changing labour forces, a ‘greener’ awareness in society and the emergence of new technologies in industry. This may be one of the few intentional records that documents not only their existence, but also the strange uniqueness of these disappearing environments.
These images have essentially grown out of a long interest in the representation of man-altered landscapes, especially those produced by the new topographic school in America, such as Edward Ruscha’s Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1962), the work of Henry Wessel and the Bechers, and subsequently the work of Joel Sternfeld and J. Bennet Fitts. Although my concerns for the landscape are different, I hope the images I have produced will have the same critical eye and sense of objectivity as these earlier works whilst containing other layers of meaning that are both personal, political and to a degree anthropological. In the tradition of the new topographic photographers, there is a sense in which this work could be viewed as a criticism of the industrial west and it’s destruction of the environment but ultimately the images are intended as a benign consideration of places that are ‘of their time’ and that time has now, effectively, run out. Ultimately, I see the work as a return to a ‘classic landscape’ containing not only elements of the sublime but also modern references relating to the decline of manufacturing and industry in the post-industrial west. 
- Photographer: Dijana Klaric
- Portfolio Title: Wordless Silence
- Email: d.batticuore@gmail.com
- Country: Croatia
- Website:
- College: Faculty of Economy, Marketing, Zagreb
- For me, photography represents a passion. The beauty of nature has always fascinated me and provoked my attempts at catching glimpses of it with my camera. On my travels I try to find undiscovered moments which can hardly be described with words. This is how I found ‘wordless silence’ in Northern Ireland and how Giant’s Causeway sublimated in my mind, in the eyes of a photographer, but also a traveller. Photography inspires me because I can combine it with different types of art expression so I usually join it with poetry. Often my works are poetical moments read from people’s faces, landscapes or everyday life motifs. These are exactly the things that drive me the most. I find unrestricted inspiration in travelling so the big part of my work consists of travelogue photography. My photographs are almost always photo stories and I believe we must look at the visual, but also read photography in the same time.
- Photographer: Elise Guillod
- Portfolio Title: Rituals
- Email: eguillod@hotmail.com
- Country: Switzerland
- Website: www.eliseguillod.ch
- College: ECAL Lausanne
- Photographer: Federico Beradi/David Favrod
- Portfolio Title: Mountain Faces
- Email: federico.berardi@hotmail.com; dfavrod@hotmail.com
- Country: Italy/Switzerland
- Website: www.alphamountain.ch
- College: ECAL Lausanne
- Photographer: Francis O'Riordan
- Portfolio Title: Black Valley
- Email: francisoriordan4@googlemail.com
- Country: Ireland
- Website: www.francisoriordan.com
- College: University of Wales, Newport
- The Black valley is situated between the MacGillycuddy Reeks and Killarney national park. In 1979 it was the last community in mainland Ireland to be connected to the national electrical grid. In this project I have tried to explore the dependence we have on the ‘artificial nature’ of technology. How it has changed human behavior to the point that the individuals have become lost in human creations. We find ourselves always being lured away from nature to the comfort of technology to make our existence seem ‘easier’. Which seems a false truth. We live in a world where human connection with each other and the world around us has become lost in this technology world. So this work is not about night photography but more about the light and how it represents our modern existence.
- Photographer: Gabri Solera
- Portfolio Title: The Happening
- Email: besosyflores@hotmail.com
- Country: Spain
- Website: www.flickr.com/photos/besosyflores
- College: E.F.T.I.Madrid
- Photographer: Graeme Vaughan
- Portfolio Title: In Memoriam
- Email: graeme@photogas.com
- Country: UK
- Website: www.photogas.com
- College: Mid-Cheshire College
- ‘D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent’ [besides, it’s always other people who die] Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) epitaph
The work is a part of an ongoing exploration of places and how places come to have meaning for us. These images from cemeteries ask us to consider the Western place of burial. Who are these places for? And why do we have them? However, the combination of the view (looking to the heavens) and the viewing position (looking upwards from the grave), ask us to also consider ourselves and our own mortality. 
- Photographer: Hannah Huddy and James Thomson
- Portfolio Title: H1
- Email: grapplex@gmail.com
- Country: UK
- Website:
- College: University of Wales, Newport
- Between 1956 and 1962 thousands of young men on National Service duty were sent to Christmas Island in the South Pacific. Within a 30-mile radius of the Island, Hydrogen Bombs were hastily detonated with little regard for the health and safety of its occupants. Grouped in pens marked out by white tape, the servicemen were told to sit with their backs to the explosion.
With their hands pressed tightly over their eyes, the blinding flash illuminated the bones in their hands, an existential vision that has scarred their memory forever. Seventeen seconds after the burning light had faded, the men were instructed to stand up, turn around and face the bomb. As the blast forced past them the surrounding coconut trees were stripped of their produce.
We remain the only country not to have compensated our Veterans and their families for radiation induced illnesses, genetic defects in subsequent generations and deaths resulting from cancer. Successive governments continue to hide facts and evidence in the belief that soon there will be none of them left to make a stand 
- Photographer: Helena Segura-Torrella
- Portfolio Title: A Traves del Espejo
- Email: helenaseguratorrella@gmail.com
- Country: Spain
- Website: www.helenasegura-torrellafotografa.blogspot.com
- College: E.F.T.I.Madrid
- Photographer: Joanna Piotrowska
- Portfolio Title: Everything is White
- Email: joannalipiec@gmail.com
- Country: Poland
- Website:
- College: Academy of Fine art Cracow
- The region of Bieszczady mountains has been settled for hundreds years as its landscape has been shaped by the hands its habitants. In 1947 more than 140,000 people, especially those with Ukrainian nationality, have been replaced from southeastern Poland to its western area called regained territories. Such an operation was undertaken to help the Polish government tackle the Ukrainian insurgent army (UPA) which had been operating in southeast of Poland since 1944. Military activity of UPA has declined in early fifties. Some of Ukrainian guerillas forced their way to the western countries, rest of them has been killed. As a result of this so-called operation ‘Wisla’ the centuries old polish-Ukrainian community has completely been destroyed.
Nowadays, this perceived as a wild, untouched by the civilisation region every year during the spring reminds us dramatic course of history. Bounteous blossoming orchards located in many forgotten on today’s maps sites of villages are still the subtle scent of former human existence and life which had been blooming there.
My approach to this issue is indispensable connected with a loss of innocence of nature as well as with a dichotomy of beauty and evil. Although all of the places which I am presenting have own fulfilled with violence history, today we can perceive them as quiet, almost idyllic space. What strikes me the most is a contrast between undisturbed silence of the landscape with the year-to-year wakening of blossoming and the scene of deadly battles and horrific tragedy which has taken place there.
I am not aiming to tell about individual lots of people nor showing what is happening with those places in direct manner. I am interested if there is any versatility – something which goes beyond historical facts. Blossoming gardens – the houses which are not existing any more in the scenery where all remains are wind-blown – they are a kind of manifesto, poetical traces of life and rebirth. 
- Photographer: Joanna Pyra
- Portfolio Title: Perception
- Email: joannapyra@gmail.com
- Country: Poland
- Website: www.samkitsch.deviantart.com
- College: Academy of Fine Arts, Cracow
- In my project Perception I want to pose the questions about the nature of a work of art, the viewer and the relation between the two. The project consists of three images in which the roles of the viewer and the subject of viewing are changing.
Image 1: The photograph shows an empty interior of an art gallery. There is no one in view. This does not mean, however, that there is no viewer. The viewer is implied rather than shown directly, for there is always someone looking at the photo (does an image exist when no one sees it?). And then there is the discreet but watchful eye of a video camera in the corner of the room.
Image 2: A naked human figure appears. The figure plays a double role: it is simultaneously viewing and being viewed.
Image 3: The figure is now lying on the floor, it is passive, unseeing. The figure becomes a work of art in itself. Nakedness, a decorative pose and closed eyes emphasise the figure's artificial and artistic character. 
- Photographer: João Sa e Sousa
- Portfolio Title: Finem Respice (Consider the End)
- Email: saesousa@gmail.com
- Country: Portugal, based UK
- Website: www.agallery.co.uk/gallery.php?pg=1&cat=13852
- College: Swansea Metropolitan University
- My working practice explores abstract imagery by experimenting with the conventional photographic process. The images deal with abstract representations of identity and hyper real representations of time and space using a contemporary aesthetics.
The series Finem Respice is a blurred depiction of remote locations and the dualism between natural and constructed environments, or between the urban landscape and the traditional rural backdrop that is connected to notions of otherness and to the use of space to create tensions between opposing realities. 
- Photographer: Johanne Lian Olsen
- Portfolio Title: Lolita
- Email: johanne_lian_olsen@hotmail.com
- Country: Norway and Wales
- Website: www.lianolsen.com
- College: Swansea Metropolitan University
- ‘Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!’ Vladimir Nabokov
This is a performative piece of work where a provoking book was transformed into another shape and in this way one of the characters, Lolita’s destiny isn't captured between the covers any longer, but is set free. The origami birds are folded out of the actual sheets of the book and rise to the sky with help from dark balloons. 
- Photographer: Jonas Tetzlaff
- Portfolio Title: Closer
- Email: jonas.tetzlaff@gmail.com
- Country: Sweden
- Website:
- College: Nordens Fotoskola
- I began the project as an attempt to document someone who is extremely close to me. This is my most complicated relationship up to date by far. A destructive period in many ways. As days passed I kept asking myself what and who I were photographing, and the answer never showed up. I changed cameras, tried a variety of techniques and angles until one night when I just let go.
I let my emotions lead the way without a clue to where I and the pictures where going. When I sat down with my prints afterwards, the selection was easier than ever before, however, it took some time before I was able to understand and really feel where this was going on a deeper level. The result was not a document describing a person close to me, but the relationship between us and the feelings I let go far beyond my control and any means of understanding.
I’m very glad I initiated this project, although it hurts from time to time. I think it will help me understand a lot about myself and the people I keep close around me. Especially the extreme emotions I often dive into without any thoughts about the future. This is what it’s all about. The questions these pictures have forced me to think about. How can you function and stay true to yourself in a relationship with the most extreme feelings? What does loving and lying change around you? What happens when you put someone on a pedestal or give up parts of yourself and applying your strongest emotions on another person in your life? If you let yourself project these emotions, let them become ideas of great things, regardless of how it will be returned, where will that put you? The social game that we all are included in, whether we like it or not, influence our everyday life and is ready to dictate us unless we take control over our emotions. 
- Photographer: Kate Bangay
- Portfolio Title: Underthings
- Email: k_bangay@homtail.com
- Country: Canada
- Website:
- College: Ryerson University
- Photographer: Katja Zagar
- Portfolio Title: Homage à Rick Deckard Art
- Email: katja.zagar19@gmail.com
- Country: Slovenia
- Website: www.foto-katja.com
- College: Famul Stuart School of Applied Arts Ljubljana,
- Photographer: Katja Zerko
- Portfolio Title: Reflections
- Email: katja.zerko@gmail.com
- Country: Slovenia
- Website:
- College: Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana
- Photographer: Kristina E. Knipe
- Portfolio Title: A Ritual of Power and Preservation (Mary gets her nails done and invokes a half-remembered feeling)
- Email: kek297@nyu.edu
- Country: USA
- Website:
- College: Tisch School of the Arts
- Photographer: Marco Algovia
- Portfolio Title: Ordinary Sublime
- Email: marco@marcoalgovia.com
- Country: Spain
- Website: www.marcoalgovia.com
- College: E.F.T.I.Madrid
- Photographer: Maria Kapajeva
- Portfolio Title: Call Me Early
- Email: kapajeva@yahoo.com
- Country: Estonia, based UK
- Website: www.mariakapajeva.com
- College: University for the Creative Arts
- Throughout our busy days we forget to enjoy the simple things and to note how beautiful and special the people we live, sleep and spend our time are. Capturing the first moment of the morning of people with whom I have spent the night, I try to freeze their human beauty without any social, cultural or political masks.
In the 18th century Immanuel Kant wrote about beauty and sublime contending that that beauty ‘is connected with the form of the object’, having ‘boundaries’, while the sublime "is to be found in a formless object’, represented by a ‘boundlessness’. Waking them up with the click of my camera, I am trying to break up all boundaries built by society and to get the uniqueness of each human being. Moreover this project is very personal because of selection the people and their portraits is my way to record the impact they have had on me.
Coming from a background growing up with mixed cultures and living in another is the main force that moves me to discover the world and its people. At the same time photography as a medium is an unploughed field which I am cultivating with passion and hope for a bountiful harvest. Exploration through photography is the way that I work and revel in every new idea. 
- Photographer: Marie Louise van der Steenstraten
- Portfolio Title: The Beauty in Loss
- Email: surfbreaktravel@hotmail.com
- Country: The Netherslands
- Website: www.marylouphotography.com
- College: Royal Academy of Art KABK
- Photographer: Masud Alam Liton
- Portfolio Title: Requiem for Freedom
- Email: liton911@yahoo.com
- Country: Bangladesh
- Website: http://www.lightstalkers.org/masud__alam_liton
- College: Pathshala: The South Asian Media Academy
- For a human being, freedom is always a relative term. We all have the freedom to think as we please, but can we always express what we think? We are free to fly through air using planes and dive in the oceans using underwater equipment but we can never take off on our wings like birds or breath underwater like the fish.
For the sex workers of Dauladia Ghat, Rajbari, Bangladesh, freedom is a dichotomy. Their profession has freed the sex workers from the ordeals of poverty by demanding they give up freedom over their bodies. They are condemned to be free from average norms and restrictions because sex workers are not free to live in conventional society.
This dichotomy pervades every corner of the lives of the sex workers: They feel independent because they are earning money. But they have to turn the money over to the madam or the ‘husband’. They feel happy because they have made new relationships, new sisters, and new families to share emotions. But they are stuck inside their adopted community. Within the boundary of their community, they are free to dress and behave as they please. But if they should step outside, they have to cover their hair. They are free to love and marry whom they want. But they feel betrayed by the husbands who marry them for their earnings. They are free to strive to reach the top rank of their profession, a madam ruling over her own house. But their self-determination can take them only so far: they are always subject to the licensing powers and the corrupt practices of the police. They are a devout community, free to perform their religious rituals. But they are denied the right to be buried in a proper graveyard. In short, their lives encompass the heights of paradise and the depths of hell.
Yet they have one freedom remaining to them that asks no price: they are free to dream. They dream they are birds that go wherever their imagination takes them. They dream they are living the lives of their fantasies. Their dreams are requiems for true freedom. 
- Photographer: Matthew Stevenson
- Portfolio Title: The Future Perfect
- Email: matt.stevenson@live.co.uk
- Country: UK
- Website: www.matt-stevenson.co.uk
- College: Nottingham Trent University
- The Future Perfect, a grammatical term used to describe an event that has not yet happened but is expected to occur in the future.
The majority of all photographs stem from the single desire to recognise and to boast, they represent a past event, a fleeting moment that the camera has the ability to record and therefore immortalise. The Future Perfect series looks at photography's role in social documentation and as a tool in social reform. The images appropriate a culture's vision, presenting the viewer with a number of scenarios that turn what is seen into a spectacle, therefore allowing the viewer to embody their own culture and recognise themselves within each scene.
The price tags remaining on items within the scenes emphasize a future of constantly changing codes of meaning, a future that can only be consumed and never owned. The scenarios address the viewpoint of the viewer and take into account what Jacques Lacan termed the 'Ego-Ideal', creating a fiction where the viewer is able to look at themselves as if from an ideal point and create an impossibly unified self. 
- Photographer: Natasha Godfrey
- Portfolio Title: Reflection
- Email: natashagodfrey@live.com
- Country: UK
- Website: www.natashagodfrey.co.uk
- College: University of Wales, Newport
- Photographer: Nele Gaudesaboos
- Portfolio Title: Ladakh
- Email: nelegaudesaboos@yahoo.com
- Country: Belgium
- Website:
- College: Academie Anderlecht
- This documentary shows daily life in a village in Ladakh, Northern India in April 2008. Lamayuru is a traditional Ladakhi village, with the oldest Buddhist monastery in Ladakh, surrounded by a surrealistic moonscape. Ladakh is situated in the Himalayas, also known as Little Tibet, with Tibetan Buddhism being very much alive in the monasteries and villages. Farmers are working in their fields, helped by their family, neighbours and dzo (a crossing between a yak and a cow). The extremely short summer in the Himalaya means hard work for the villagers, who live from farming and tourism. In winter time, when most parts of Ladakh become inaccessible because of snow, life slows down and people spend time with each other inside their houses.
- Photographer: Nina Johnsen Hove
- Portfolio Title: Beyond
- Email: ninahove@gmail.com
- Country: Norway
- Website: www.ninahove.com
- College: Oslo Fotokunstskole
- Photographer: Özant Kamac?
- Portfolio Title: Pause
- Email: ozant.kamaci@gmail.com
- Country: Turkey, based United Arab Emirates & UK
- Website: www.ozant.com
- College: Central Saint Martins; University of the Arts London
- In ‘Pause’, the work depicts the juxtaposition of powerful machines which are symbols of advancement and technology against nature which is widely accepted as precious and untouched. The medium of photography provides a visual dichotomy of reality and illusion through the aesthetics of plane and tree and their spatial relationship. Planes behind trees as individual objects are familiar and common, but when combined and interrelated, the viewer moves to a new space to behold the unexpected.
- Photographer: Pascal Ancel
- Portfolio Title: Somnia
- Email: piancel@yahoo.co.uk
- Country: France, based UK
- Website:
- College: London College of Communication
- When the human face seems to hide so much, to recoil from the external gaze, to embalm itself in a plethora of personas, sleep it seems liberates this elusive surface, turning it thus in the repository of a being we ourselves only partially know. This face of sleep is to me a sublime panorama, a natural yet extra ordinary phenomenon, a wonder and a mystery. It has inspired in the past a need to fathom the space which lies beyond the serenity, the gentleness but also the austere, and the marble quality of the sleeping face. To paint sleep is to paint the motion of a cloud. But I do not aim to capture an instant of truth in this open field. I simply record a journey through a world which I may equate to the history of the psyche and to a certain extent the history of the human face as it has surfaced in art across millennia of cultural transformation from Mesopotamian sculpted heads to Chinese mythological masks; from poetic romantic evocations to cinematic introspection as in Bergman’s portrayals. And when we do not see this face, we imagine it
- Photographer: Petr Horký
- Portfolio Title: Death of Snow
- Email: horkyp@centrum.cz
- Country: Czech Republic
- Website: www.petrhorky.com
- College: University of Westminster
- Photographer: Petr Omelka
- Portfolio Title: Vicinities
- Email: petromelka@seznam.cz
- Country: Czech Republic
- Website:
- College: Institute of Creative Photography Opava
- Photographer: Rachael Rands
- Portfolio Title: Transitions
- Email: rachael.rands@alderfield.com
- Country: England
- Website: www.rachaelrands.com
- College: Central Saint Martins; University of the Arts London
- I’m a freelance photographer and designer based in South London, a graduate of the photography pathway of the MA in Communication Design course at Central Saint Martins. The impetus for Transitions was a desire to highlight the way advertising affects our public spaces. By setting the exposure time to be the same as the duration of the transition between two sliding adverts, I was able to create these ghostly, abstract surfaces. In my personal work, I often focus on the urban landscape at night because I like the way darkness filters out irrelevant details so that places become merely abstract things. I am interested in the disconnectedness we experience in these highly illuminated places which is at odds with the expansion of communications technologies.
- Photographer: Rosetta Pierra Whitehead
- Portfolio Title: Duality, Reality, Eternity, Autonomy, Mortality, Spirituality
- Email: rosettapierra@hotmail.com
- Country: UK
- Website: www.rosettawhiteheadphotography.co.uk
- College: Leeds College of Art and Design
- Rosetta Whitehead’s work employs long exposures to create a dreamy yet eerie aesthetic that defines her work. Captivated by the mysterious medium of holography, Rosetta plays with the aspect of three-dimensionality in her images creating an uncanny atmosphere reminiscent of the surrealists. Her intention is to move the observer to the uncanny and inspire feelings of wonder and mystery. Inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites and philosophy, her work explores themes of mortality reality dreams and the unconscious.
- Photographer: Rubén H. Bermúdez
- Portfolio Title: The Lovers of the Arctic Circle
- Email: info@rubenhbermudez.com
- Country: Spain, based Australia
- Website: www.rubenhbermudez.com
- College: E.F.T.I.Madrid
- My photography is transmitted in a reserved symmetry from the mind, sometimes to whispers or with closed eyes. Constructed from memory, from the wonderful chaos of knowledge, the recollections, dreams and desires, thus making the ephemeral and intangible destination .... in another reality.
- Photographer: Samantha Goddard
- Portfolio Title: Inhospitable Landscapes
- Email: sami_goddard@hotmail.co.uk
- Country: UK
- Website: www.samanthagoddard.co.uk
- College: University of Brighton
- These images describe fire damage to a number of different properties within the areas of Devon, Somerset and the South. Charred and tarnished by smoke, they act as a record of these tragic events.
Flames have transformed these familiar spaces into foreign ones, for these interiors are no longer defined by the decorative preferences of each occupant. Now uninhabitable, it is difficult to imagine any of these interiors with any kind of soul, or as someone’s home. Warped into a homogeneous black space, objects are turned to uniformed ash amongst an inhospitable landscape, taking on menacing, alien forms. Remnants of stud walls and other architectural details, normally hidden, are revealed; bizarre sculptures unveiled.
Few traces are left of the occupants. Almost everything has been erased, wiped away in a blitz of heat. Therefore I’ve had no option but to encounter these spaces as an outsider, for I’m unable to appreciate the sense of loss experienced by each occupant. I’ve never met the people who lived here, and apart from odd strands of evidence that remain I have no idea who they were. These images therefore reflect my own experience of each site, looking in wonder at the sublime beauty of destruction. I am constantly awestruck by the destructive power of fire beyond human control, in spite of all our modern technology.
Throughout the past year I have gained access to these sites by working alongside the Fire Investigation team, whose job it is to try and determine the cause of each incident. However, unlike other photographers I’ve worked alongside, these images do not offer a forensic or evidential approach to each scene; instead they attempt to investigate the absence of humanity, and illustrate the void that is a consequence of these small, individual tragedies 
- Photographer: Sandra Torralba
- Portfolio Title: The Downfall of the Dream
- Email: sandratorralba@gmail.com
- Country: Spain
- Website: www.sandratorralba.com
- College: E.F.T.I.Madrid
- The Downfall of the Dream started with the story of a dream: that of creating memories of a better life. Whilst in my fantasy world I was creating plain beautiful and optimistic images, my real life was not going that well. My grandparent's illness and the imminence of their death, enacted the threat of the loss of my own parents and the vivid despair and agonizing existentialism I was trying to avoid, finally sank in as I imagined a word without my parents and for my mother a word without hers.
Every dream has its downfall, for that it is the most simple rule: you dream to wake up, you wake up to life, you live to die.
The Downfall of the Dream represents the miscarriage of existence, the failure of the being. As the downfall evolves the main character begins to collapse and is transformed into a distorted version of itself, vilified, pathetic and alienated that hunts its beloved and craves what it can no longer get. 
- Photographer: Scott Caldwell
- Portfolio Title: A Romantic Narrative
- Email: s.caldwell@live.co.uk
- Country: UK
- Website: www.scaldwellphotography.co.uk
- College: Nottingham Trent university
- The project a ‘Romantic Narrative’ is made up of five large still-life prints, each of them influenced and based upon a family photograph or album. Two Still Lives are fictional constructions and are created on the influence of family photographs or albums I have found in charity stores. The remaining three contain objects which are true to the family albums they are based upon. The objects within these ‘fictional constructions’ were carefully chosen to create a narrative relevant to their influence (the influence being the family photograph or album) and had no prior relationship until they where forced to inhabit the same space. The intention is to emphasise photography’s ability to re-contextualise objects and to produce sublime relationships between objects which could be initially considered as quite mundane. ‘The very act of photographing something makes it special and indeed its significance and our understanding of it can change dramatically once it is turned into a subject’ Susan Bright (2005)
- Photographer: Sergey Sedov
- Portfolio Title: Wind Doesn't Care
- Email: cegob@mail.ru
- Country: Russian Federation
- Website:
- College: Y.A. Galperin Faculty of Press-Photographers, Saint-Petersburg
- St.Petersburg is a megalopolis. It seems sometimes, that the habitants of the city to live simultaneously, not taking notice of each other. Communist demonstrations can take place alongside people demanding something, and a festive masquerade with carefree participants. Their flags, ribbons and posters are blown about by the wind, which doesn't care about who you are. You're just an inhabitant of this city. Wind doesn't care what religion you are. He plays with a mantle of a Buddhist lama as well as with a Muslim hijab. Wind doesn't care. He lives in this city as you do. He doesn't hear you. Snatching umbrellas from people's hands when they need protection from the rain, he leaves a snowkiter alone on the Gulf of Finland, not filling his parachute with air.
- Photographer: Silvia Noferi
- Portfolio Title: Hòtel Rèverie
- Email: silvia.noferi@libero.it
- Country: Italy
- Website: www.galleriadac.com; www.myspace.com/silvianoferi
- College: Fondazione Studio Marangoni,
- Hôtel Rêverie is a project inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s essay The Poetics of Reverie (1960). The French term ‘rêverie’ and the English ‘reverie’ are generally considered to mean ‘daydream’ or ‘daydreaming’, but for the French philosopher ‘rêverie’ is the phenomenon of wakefulness in which the Self eludes reality and wanders off free from any contingent influence. ‘What psychological freedom do we have other than the freedom to dream? Psychologically speaking, it is in reverie that we are free beings,’ writes the author. Life is guided by psychical détente, fantastical imaginings, and crazy reveries.
The work was made in the dusty, disjointed rooms of a hotel being renovated just on the edge of the centre of Florence. I put my models (improbable like the inhabitants of the dreams) against backgrounds of crumbling walls and peeling wallpaper, trying to level the line of demarcation between the real world and the imaginary one. My releases are an eye that opens from that border, and from that border a world opens wide itself on OTHER, in witch the sublime is at same time bizzaria and truth primigenia, platonic IDEA, where the detail is never revelated, and the immobility is the origin of every possible moviment. they are transitory visions that can be deciphered in different ways. The potential for interpretation is infinite, since this is inherent in the work of art and in the life of man. 
- Photographer: Simon Lammy
- Portfolio Title: Smoky London
- Email: simon@lammyphotography.co.uk
- Country: UK
- Website: www.lammyphotography.co.uk
- College: Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design
- I undertook a project concerning the intrinsic and extrinsic worth of the many static wonders that adorn the areas I inhabit, amongst the numerous dynamic entities of people extremely close to me, animal and mechanical contraptions whose dynamism in time, place and person, has been fashioned by these same areas that I frequent on a regular basis. I intend to name this project Mere Photography, Me & London, to extract a journey of photographic expression that is attainable, simple and easily communicable - simple, being the operative word.
- Photographer: Taylor Weidman
- Portfolio Title: World Views
- Email: taylor.weidman@gmail.com
- Country: USA
- Website: www.taylorweidman.com
- College: Syracuse University
- Photographer: Victor Yuliev
- Portfolio Title: Sleepers
- Email: iuliev@yandex.ru
- Country: Russian Federation
- Website:
- College: Y.A. Galperin Faculty of Press-Photographers, Saint-Petersburg
- Homelessness existed always and everywhere and St Petersburg today hasn’t become an exception. "Hobos "- it is usual name for untidily dressed, eternally drunk people, collecting bottles and go begging. Almost each citizen has experience of communication with these people at least once in his life. Rambling speech, disorientation in time, paranoiac reflections aloud - all these are the consequence of their hobo status. Only few of them manage to find a constant place to stay at night; they are looking for suitable attics, cellars in a city or even doorways of the houses to sleep there. To sleep directly in the city streets is extremely dangerous - unpredictable Petersburg weather, especially during the winter period, can fatally affect the health of the hobo. Besides, the majority of these people tell that they are frequently beaten by the companies of young men or police officers. Good sound sleep for them is impossible luxury. If they manage to sleep 6 or 7 hours, it’s a big luck for them, more often they can sleep only 3-4 hours.
Due to such regime and permanent drinking of the alcohol of very low quality they are in such condition. To sleep well is more important for human being than even food and water. Absence of sleep even during one night influences the attention and visual perception in a very negative way. And permanent shortage of sleep can cause psychic disorders.
During last several winters St Petersburg charitable organization "Doss house" places a large military tent in the city to host around 70 homeless people for overnight rest . Daily from 9 a.m. till 8 p.m. they can sleep there and receive hot supper and breakfast. 
- Photographer: Yin-lai Trinidad
- Portfolio Title: I Think I Should Remember
- Email: yinlaitrinidad@gmail.com
- Country: Domincan Republic, based Spain
- Website: www.yinlaitrinidad.com
- College: E.F.T.I.Madrid
- Time plays tricks on me. I feel for moments confused, like what I’m seeing happened a long time ago and I'm only recalling it; but for some strange reason, I don’t remember remembering it. I actually just feel like I'm not even really there... I’m just looking trough a window at things that are never coming back. And then I actually feel nostalgia for the current moment; I feel sad, because it’s already gone.
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