©Diana Sosnowska, Installation View 2026, Total Internal Reflection, Contemporary Art Museum (CAM), University of South Florida, Tampa, FL

It is with pleasure that the jurors announce Diana Sosnowska as the 2025 Lenscratch Student Prize 3rd Place Winner. Sosnowska was selected for her project, Total Internal Reflection, and recently received an MFA from the University of South Florida. The 3rd Place Winner receives a $750 Cash Award, a feature on Lenscratch, a mini exhibition on the Curated Fridge, and a Lenscratch T-shirt and Tote.

It is a time of conspiracy and paranoia, of mysticism and surveillance, of creation and destruction. In a world swirling with half-truths, too much truths, and nothing but the truths, how we communicate, or fail to communicate, with images is more important than ever. Diana Sosnowska’s project, Total Internal Reflection, grapples with these tangled histories of remote viewing, image transmission, and image generation. What makes an image true? Where do images get created, at a foundational level? In her multi part series, Sosnowska utilises various forms of collage, image creation, sculpture, and archival research to peel back the layers of obfuscation that cloud the U.S. government’s psychic and remote viewing experiments during Project Stargate in the mid-20th century.

In many ways, Sosnowska’s work reminds me of Evidence, the legendary photobook by Mike Mandel and the late Larry Sultan. Both use archival images extensively. But where Sosnowska goes further is her interest in the technologies that are used to transmit and generate images via computer and even, some say, through psychic powers. Sosnowska pulls paragraphs from Project Stargate archives: descriptions of people or places targeted by CIA remote viewers. She then feeds these prompts into an AI image generator, which spits back the images and the information that the CIA so desperately wanted all those years ago. In addition, Sosnowska transmits images via radio waves, in the hope that they might find their way, through physics or psychics, into somebody’s mind’s eye.

When jurying this year’s student prize submissions, I found myself drawn to Diana’s images on multiple levels. Visually they are mysterious, even conspiratorial. They refuse to show us the entirety of what we want to see. They also show a great level of maturity. These are images made by somebody confident in their practice, confident in experimentation, and confident that all the great unknowns will provide us with, if not answers, at least further lines of inquiry. So it was to my great joy that I got to sit down with Diana to talk with her about her project and congratulate her on placing 3rd in this year’s Lenscratch Student Prize.

Diana Sosnowska is a Polish-Italian visual artist working between the US and Italy. She holds an MFA from the University of South Florida and a BA in Photography from Robert Gordon University (UK). She attended the 2026 Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.

Her research-based practice investigates how institutional regimes and systems of knowledge record, construct, and circulate meaning. Drawing on institutional, governmental, and vernacular archives, she combines photography, archival material, and sculptural interventions to examine the relationship between evidence and belief, documentation and speculation. She is particularly interested in the traces, images, and objects produced at the limits of knowledge.

Her work has been exhibited in juried group shows at The Bridge and Tunnel Gallery (New York, NY), Le Stanze della Fotografia (Venice, Italy), Galerie Joseph (Paris, France). She has had two solo shows at Studies in Photography (Edinburgh, UK), and the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts (Tampa, FL). She is a recipient of the British Journal of Photography’s Female in Focus award (2022) and the SPE Student Award for Innovations in Imaging (2026).

©Diana Sosnowska, The Lorenz System, 2025 Archival Inkjet Print dimensions 30 x 24 inches

Drew Leventhal: Hi Diana, first off thanks so much for talking with me and congratulations on being part of the Student Prize this year! Your project, Total Internal Reflection, really caught my eye and I wanted to talk to you about the work. Lets start by jumping into one little phrase in your artist statement. You write that the Project Stargate archives you are working with help you, “navigate a crucial moment when the Institution attempted to legitimize the uncertain.” In my mind this is exactly what photography does. It’s an institution that legitimizes or brings form to these moments of doubt things that maybe could never have happened or never could have appeared to happen, but here they are in our pictures. Can you talk a little bit about why that phrase was important to you?

Diana Sosnowska: Hi Drew, so wonderful to talk with you. I think I’ve always been fascinated by photography as a tool. My earliest photographic interest was Victorian-era spirit photography. The way people discovered this magical device that could reveal things beyond the limits of human perception. Photography allowed us to see incredibly small things, like organisms and microscopic structures, as well as incredibly distant things, like stars and planets. And amidst that, I love how the lens was also directed towards spirits or psychic phenomena. So I loved that how photography was used in the Stargate Project archive actually has a very deep-rooted history, right to the birth of photography.

The project itself was born from a documentary that I watched about Heaven’s Gate, a 20th-century American UFO cult. I moved to the U.S. for graduate school, and ever since I moved here, I’ve been feeling that the cult culture here is very strong. I became very fascinated by that and by how truth and belief are formed in different ways. With Heaven’s Gate, I was really interested in the images that were circulated and the website they created, which I started looking into. That led me to think about how specific images can create a truth for a specific kind of group of people.

©Diana Sosnowska, The Moon Bearing Tree, 2025 Archival Inkjet Print dimensions 30 x 24 inches

DRL: There are two things that I wanted to pull at there. First is the American sense of conspiracy hidden truths that you’re interrogating. It’s just everywhere in the culture right now. Everyone is searching for the “real” truth, whatever it may be. You are coming from an outsider perspective who has moved to the U.S. somewhat recently, why do you think we are so obsessed with conspiracies and hidden truths?

DS: I was born in Poland and then raised in Italy, and then I lived in Scotland, and now I’m in the U.S.. So I lived through different frameworks of how truth is circulated, generated and accepted. And for me here in the U.S., I think the individualistic nature of the population has something to do with it. I feel like people find it liberating, to research for themselves, but today with AI images, it’s a quest for us to discern the truth from the fake image. Photography is also entering a new kind of tension between the “real” photograph and the artificial photograph, and that uncertainty is something that feels both fascinating and frightening to me.

©Diana Sosnowska, Hella Hammid’s Back, 2025 Archival Inkjet Print dimensions 30 x 24 inches

DRL: I think the individualistic part of it is important. There’s always been a huge distrust in America of institutions and controlling powers. That’s kind of how this country got started. But now people have the ability through AI, through the internet, through just their own research to find their own facts and their own truths. And photographs play a huge part of that. I’m glad you brought up AI because in your project there’s three acts. Is that right? Can you talk about the three acts and how they’re different? One of them involves AI, one of them involves radios, and one of them involves research.

DS: With AI, what I’ve been trying to do is emulate the relationship in Project Stargate between the remote viewer and the CIA agent, where there’s a direct kind of conversation with questions and answers being given back and forth. This is similar to the relationship we have with AI, where we demand things and we have developed a very specific language for those demands. The CIA agent would ask questions to the remote viewer, demanding specific information that they thought they could access.

And so I found myself in a similar relationship with Firefly, the AI software I was using. What interested me about Firefly was the 750-character prompt limit. I began selecting roughly 150 words from the Project Stargate archives, specific sentences where a remote viewer described a moment, a device, or a person they were attempting to perceive. I would take those descriptions and feed them into Firefly, and the software would generate an image from that text. In a way, the AI occupies a similar position to the remote viewer: it produces a vision of a target based on a written description. The final image exists behind the prompt transcript and behind the document, so the source is never fully revealed. The image becomes another layer of interpretation between the original experience and what we are able to see.

©Diana Sosnowska, SESSION DCC-221, 2025 Archival Inkjet Print dimensions 24 x 18 inches

DRL: This is where I get excited about the use of AI and photography. In my own practice I am kind of a Luddite, I am very old school. But I really do believe that there’s incredible things to explore with AI and photography. What I get excited about with AI and photography is when people like yourself are investigating the process of how AI works, getting under the hood of the program and relating it to other experiences. I’m much more interested when people like Trevor Paglen or others like yourself are using AI like a tool that works in certain ways. How does it work and why does it work?

Can you talk about the other two parts of your project, the radio portion and the research portion?

DS: Yeah, the radio part was fun because somehow I started getting really fascinated with the early ways we transmitted images. Before the internet, images could be sent through radio signals using technologies like SSTV. This was also one of the ways early NASA space programs communicated and transmitted images. So the idea here was to again explore how the CIA’s remote viewers gained access to their images. I was interested in searching for possible rational frameworks around that process, ways of thinking about how information might travel, be received, and eventually become an image.

I started getting really interested in theories of entanglement and quantum physics, the idea that two particles can remain correlated even when they’re separated by incredibly vast distances. For me, SSTV became a way of thinking through that idea. Rather than illustrating quantum entanglement, it offered an analogy: two points in space connected through transmission, with a transmitter at one end and a receiver at the other. In my work, the transmitter becomes the source of the image, while the receiver stands in for the psychic receiving it. I’m also interested in what happens as the image degrades through repeated transmissions, and what it means when it eventually becomes illegible.

©Diana Sosnowska, Operation 8914-I, 2026 Archival Inkjet Print dimensions 24 x 18 inches

DRL: It sounds like you’re seeing photography as a form of remote viewing where you as a photographer see one thing and then that gets transmitted to a viewer through prints on the wall, through video, through radio waves, etc… That other person, I’m just imagining somebody in a gallery looking at a print on a wall and that’s a form of remote viewing, right? You’re seeing something from very, very far away, temporally and spatially.

DS: Another thing that fascinated me was that, during many remote viewing sessions, the CIA agent would ask the viewer to go back in time. They might say, “We’re looking at June 8, 1970,” even though the session itself was taking place in 1978. The remote viewer was asked to access a moment eight years in the past. In a way, I think photography asks us to do something similar. Every photograph is an encounter with another moment in time, asking us to bridge a temporal distance and imagine a past we can no longer directly access.

©Diana Sosnowska, Diana’s Spooky Spoon, 2026 Archival Inkjet Print dimensions 20 x 16 inches

DRL: I have two more questions. One is about the change in your work. I was looking at some of your older work, and this seems to be a bit of a shift from your previous projects. Can you talk about that visual language change, what you’re interested in now, what’s going on next?

DS: I think grad school significantly changed my work. When I started, I was really interested in making technically perfect images. My passion for photography was tied to that kind of perfection, producing carefully constructed tableau photographs. But the program at the University of South Florida is interdisciplinary. My cohort included sculptors, ceramic artists, and painters, and watching the way sculptors worked made me fascinated with building worlds rather than simply recording what was in front of the camera. One piece of advice that really stayed with me was to remove myself from the picture. You can still be in the photograph without physically appearing in it. As I stepped away from the front of the lens, I realized I could be present in the work in other ways. In this project, I’m present through the decisions I make about how reality is constructed, translated, and questioned.

©Diana Sosnowska, Levitating Chair, 2026 Archival Inkjet Print dimensions 20 x 16 inches

DRL: My last question was actually going to be about grad school because Lenscratch is a student prize. I wanted to hear a little bit more about your experience applying to grad school, why you thought that it would be helpful at that moment in your life and career? And then on the other end maybe you could talk a little bit about how grad school helped you, now that you’re recently graduated.

DS: I think for me, grad school was about falling in love with photography again and understanding why that’s my medium of choice.

©Diana Sosnowska, Many Moons, 2026 Archival Inkjet Print dimensions 20 x 16 inches

DRL: Did you choose an interdisciplinary program specifically?

DS: I wanted to bring more experimentation into my practice. During grad school, I started exploring sculpture, and now I’m working with sound and creating audio pieces. Working across different media gave me a new perspective on photography.

I decided to go to grad school because I wanted the time and space to pursue questions I couldn’t answer on my own. I had become increasingly interested in teaching photography, but I also wanted to challenge my own practice and see where it could go. Grad school wasn’t always part of my plan, but as my practice evolved, I realized I wanted two things: the opportunity to teach photography and the time to pursue the questions that had been building in my work. Teaching was something I genuinely wanted to do. I love the relationship you build with students. They constantly make you reevaluate your own relationship with photography through the questions they ask and the work they make. It keeps my understanding of the medium fresh, and I think I need that continual renewal. Grad school gave me the foundation to begin teaching while continuing to develop my own practice.

DRL: It really is, and it is so important to developing one’s vision. Diana thank you so much for your time and for opening up about your practice. Congratulations again and I can’t wait to see what you come up with next!

©Diana Sosnowska, Many Moons, 2026 Archival Inkjet Print dimensions 20 x 16 inches

©Diana Sosnowska, Gravity, 2025 Archival Inkjet Print dimensions 20 x 16 inches

©Diana Sosnowska, Magic Box, 2026 Archival Inkjet Print dimensions 16 x 12 inches

©Diana Sosnowska, The Dove Trick, 2026 Archival Inkjet Print dimensions 16 x 12 inches

©Diana Sosnowska, Visual Acuity Test #11, 2026 Archival Inkjet Print dimensions 14 x 11 inches

©Diana Sosnowska, Session DC-14, 2025 Archival Inkjet Print dimensions 24 x 30

Drew Leventhal (b. 1995) is a photographer from the United States. His practice is informed by his upbringing and training in anthropology. Through investigations of ritual, colonial history, and the delineations of landscape, Drew is interested in what it means to be human. Drew received a BFA in Anthropology from Vassar College and received an MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of
Design. He has shown work at galleries and museums across the United States. He has been a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, the Film Photo Award, and the PhMuseum Grant. Drew was a 2025 Critical Mass Top 50 artist, the 2022 Lenscratch Student Prize winner, and a 2016 National Geographic Young Explorer. He was most recently a 2025-2026 Fulbright scholar in Ireland.

Instagram: @drew_leventhal