LENSCRATCH

The 2026 Center Awards: Personal Award: Ville Varumo by Aline SmithsonSeptember 14, 2026

©Ville Varumo, The Garden

Congratulations to Ville Varumo, for being selected for CENTER’s Personal Award recognizing her project, The Garden. The CENTER Awards recognize outstanding images, singular or part of a series. The Personal Award recognizes work engaging in the exploration and expression of the power of self-representation and/or underrepresented experiences. The Award includes a Group Exhibition at CENTER, Review Santa Fe participation, Publication in LENSCRATCH, Professional Development Seminars access, Inclusion in the printed Program Guide, and Inclusion in the CENTER Winners Gallery & Archive.

Juror: Marina Chao, Curator, Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) shares her thoughts on this selection:

It was an honor to review the moving and dedicated projects submitted to the Personal Award. I’m grateful to the participating artists for sharing their work.

Ville Varumo’s The Garden tells a deeply personal story about the ruptures in life that completely destabilize us. The arrival of a new baby and relocation to a different city make life feel strange, remote, and not quite one’s own. A veil of fear, suspicion, and doubt hangs over everyday encounters. I was impressed by how Varumo was able to make these feelings—both intimate and profoundly relatable—resonate palpably across their photographs while keeping their murkiness intact.

©Ville Varumo, The Garden

The Garden

A butter box becomes a construction plank, a construction plank becomes a house, a house becomes a gravestone. People, plants, and animals press against the frame, caught between stillness and escape. The gaze moves between public and private spaces, searching for meaning, form, and boundaries. Light fades to darkness, darkness returns to light.

“The Garden” is a personal and ongoing body of work made between 2022 and 2025. It traces life in a new city, the arrival of a child, and the pull between a former home and the present — the desire to escape, to fit in, to take root somewhere, while remaining unable or unwilling to fully do so.

The photographs are arranged in five sequences, each connecting to the next, and form part of a larger body of work taking the form of a book. It emerges from a recognition of our contemporary condition, the sensation of being spectral witnesses to our own lives as moments slip beyond our grasp.

In staying with the familiar, something shifts. The ordinary reveals itself as more than it first appeared. The photograph does not simply record. It transforms, quietly, both the one who made it and the one who looks.

MEDIUM
Photography, 100x140cm

©Ville Varumo, The Garden

Ville Varumo (b. 1986) is a Finnish self-taught photographer based in Copenhagen. Working in an experimental documentary mode, he photographs his everyday surroundings continuously, letting the act of shooting and editing shape his series. His work moves through modern urban life and its undercurrents of displacement, transformation, and domestic life, in an atmospheric register where the ordinary tips into something stranger. His debut project, The Garden, received the 2026 CENTER Personal Award (Santa Fe).

Instagram: @villevarumo