Every year, the Lenscratch Student Prize gives us an opportunity to celebrate and support the next generation of photographic artists. Hundreds of artists shared their work with us– powerful creative voices that make us truly excited about the future. Before we begin the celebration of our 7 winners tomorrow, we wanted to shine a light on 25 photographers that you should have (and keep) on your radar. Congratulations to all!

We’d also like to extend an enormous thank you to our jurors: Aline Smithson, Daniel George, Linda Alterwitz, Kellye Eisworth, Vicente Cayula Aliaga, Alexa Dilworth, Kris Graves, Karen Haas, Yorgos Efthymiadis, Hamidah Glasgow,  Samantha Johnston, Alayna Pernell, Epiphany Knedler, Jeanine Michna Bales, Drew Leventhal, Jordan Tovin, Allie Tsubota, Raymond Thompson, Jr., Guanyu Xu, Shawn Bush, and Drew Nikonowicz.

---

 

Connor Archambault
Massachusetts College of Art & Design, BFA in Photography

The Loudest Conversation We’ve Ever Had

Questioning what it means to be father and son after years of estrangement, this project uses photography as a way to make amends and find common ground with my father. My dad and I hadn’t really spoken in years, and as I was becoming my own person I stopped relying on him. Honestly, I never really could. I had just gotten into a closeted relationship with a man and started college away from home. I didn’t call or text to see how he was doing, and he never did either; our relationship sort of fizzled out. I’ve stopped trying to dream up an idea of who my dad should be, and instead have come to acknowledge him for who he is.

Starting this body of work was the first time I’d been in my father’s home in five years. The camera became the way I could return to him. It gave structure to something that otherwise felt difficult to approach directly, and allowed me to be present without fully confronting him. Using an 8×10 large-format camera to create these images makes the photographic process that much more intimate. The notoriously slow process often has us standing together in a room or outside, just being, sharing space without needing to speak. It’s the loudest conversation we’ve ever had.

Follow Connor on Instagram: @con_tact.sheets

Jake Benzinger

Rhode Island School of Design, MFA in Photography

The Sun Danced That Day

I got a call from my brother last Thursday. The Baba Yaga was outside his window, staring at him from the yard; it’s been over a decade since he saw her last. It’s August now, and his first child, Aiden, was born a few weeks ago. As a protective ritual, he’s been sprinkling salt on every windowsill and placing selenite crystals atop every doorframe. Since having Aiden, he’s become much more fearful and vigilant in response to the occult activity that seems to haunt his life. I’m not sure what to make of the Baba Yaga, or of the demon that tried to possess him three years ago, but I believe in his stories and his perception of reality.

Through examining anecdotal experiences with the occult, alongside a practice of studying, chasing, and attempting to conjure phenomena and myth, I distort and play with the line in which belief wavers and bleeds between truth and fiction. Often conflated with folklore, myth is multifaceted and nuanced; it’s unintentionally present in how we recount our lives and is sometimes invisible, extending into how we understand the world and its inhabitants. It’s a participant in building our worldview, inherited both familially and culturally, defining what sits within and outside of our framework of reality. Considering the fluidity, intersection, and instability of memory, myth, and photography, The Sun Danced That Day reflects on how text and image ask for and negotiate with gestures of trust, belief, reverence, and empathy.

Follow Jake on Instagram: @jake_benzinger

Luiz Bicalho
City College of New York, Digital Interdisciplinary Art Practice

Harness From Here

Harness From Here is a diaristic project that exists where skin, symbol, and screen meet. Forming an unresolved interface, these works are interventions into a life where the visual language of democracy coexists with spectacles of societal control.

I subvert national iconography through redactions, flickering flags, and my own blood from diabetic lancets stained on currency and official documents, recording the visceral contract of survival between the dollar and me. The project uses a personal aesthetic, informal bulletin boards where meaning emerges through proximity rather than a hierarchical arrangement. Photographs of the military occupation of Washington, D.C. are compressed into souvenir keychains arranged as the stars in the American flag, rendering state force as a portable, mundane reality.

The work further probes the tension between presence and digital distance. 3D meshes of loved ones and ASCII-processed data highlight how intimacy is harvested by systems that do not perceive us as individuals. Motifs of chains and alligators suggest a bond of danger and endurance, illustrating how queer intimacy persists within environments of surveillance and doctrine.

In my diary, love is not an escape from structure but the friction generated by living in it. Harness From Here explores the point of contact where symbols falter and bodies register their marks on societal systems. Within the limits of unstable political, religious, and technological regimes, I search for fleeting moments of beauty and tenderness to define the boundaries of my contemporary existence.

Follow Luiz on Instagram: @luizf_mb

I Love You. I Miss You. Have A Good Day.

Joseph Bui
University of Houston, MFA in Photography

My work as a photographer is guided by a search—for connection, for clarity, for the feeling of home. Through portraiture and documentary approaches, I use photography to explore the spaces between longing and belonging, presence and absence. As a Vietnamese-American artist, I am drawn to stories that sit at the intersection of identity, memory, and intimacy. My practice often blends personal narrative with the lives of others, using listening and observation as ways of building trust and understanding. Whether photographing my family or the queer community, I approach each project as a dialogue—a way to process what feels unresolved and to give shape to love, distance, and care. Photography, for me, is both an act of witnessing and a means of connection.

Follow Joseph on Instagram: @jbui.photo

Emma Collins
Falmouth University, MA in Photography

The Snail and the Mannequin

I made these photographs in my house. I know what they feel like – strange, uncomfortable, occasionally funny, sometimes beautiful. But I didn’t know where they came from. Making them helped me understand something I have never known how to put into words. I’m still not sure I can/know.I kept making. Rearranging things. Bringing the outside in, taking the inside out. Staging scenes that looked wrong but felt right. Each image a question rather than an answer – about belonging, about the body, about what it means to inhabit a space, a relationship, a life, and never quite feel at home in it.The home is where the questions show most clearly. It promises everything – comfort, stability, rootedness – and yet sometimes it is also the place that first teaches you to hold back. To stay just close enough, and no closer. To be drawn toward something and pull away from it simultaneously – that tension is the engine of this work.

Standing slightly outside of things, never fully settling, gives you a particular kind of sight. You notice what others take for granted. The ordinary looks different from that angle – uncanny, absurd, more fragile, more alive.

This work doesn’t resolve anything. It was never meant to. These contradictions are not a problem to be solved – they are a condition, a way of moving through the world. The images circle them, return to them, hold them open. They made something visible that I didn’t know how to say.

Follow Emma on Instagram: @its.emma.collins

Sammie Correa
University of Iowa, MFA

Private Revelations

This project began before and after my grandmother’s passing. Her mental health took a stark decline from Alzheimer’s and Dementia the year I moved to Iowa. She was slowly existing in a forced state of liminality. And for those two years, fragments of her traumatic life surfaced loosely, unevenly, through oral narrative and hidden objects throughout her apartment. During this time, I spent time in grotto like caves across the midwest that resembled the ones I grew up activating.

I come from a family where faith was often performed publicly, but lived elsewhere—through grottos, healing gestures, superstitions, and domestic rituals. These practices operated outside institutional religion, yet carried their own systems of belief, care, and protection. They continue to inform how I think about spirituality as something embedded in the body, in material, in repetition, in abundance. This work is rooted in the space in between what Arnold van Gennep defines as liminality, a threshold between separation and return and what Bjørn Thomassen expands on as a lived condition, extended, unresolved, and shaped by instability. Liminality in my work is not just a rite of passage but a duration of processing and grieving.

By building installations from photographs, objects, and fragmented archives, I extend the conditions of processing by attempting to create a third space of materializing liminality as a physical threshold. It asks what it means to stay with grief, to sit inside its textures, rather than move past it.

Follow Sammie on Instagram: @sammie.correa

Santanu Dey
International Center of Photography, Documentary Practice

Brackish Tears

Brackish Tears is a docu-fictional project exploring the lasting impact of the 1947 Partition on Bengal-region through personal and intergenerational narratives. It reflects on displacement, refugee struggles, identity and memory, examining how colonialism, nationalism and communal divisions continue to shape the lives of lower-class Bengali refugee communities across generations.

After the Partition, millions of Hindus migrated to India from East-Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Mostly low-caste, were forcibly sent to the inhospitable area of Dandakaranya. When the Left-Front came to power in 1978, having promised migrants would be brought back and settled in Bengal. That promise was quickly reversed after the election wins, but thousands fled to protected reserve forest land on Marichjhapi island in the Sundarbans, West-Bengal. In response, the State Government surrounded the island with police boats to economically isolate them. On 13 May 1979, Marichjhapi was set ablaze, villagers were persecuted and bodies were reportedly dumped into the Raimangal river. By 16 May, the government declared the island “refugee free”.

Brackish Tears examines the Marichjhapi massacre and traces the structure of violence linked with migration back to the Mahabharata, an ancient Hindu epic. Where, the upper-caste Pandavas, aided by Lord-Krishna and Fire-God, burn the Khandava-forest, displacing indigenous Nagas and Mayas to build their kingdom’s capital, Indraprastha.We still see religion being used to terrorize and justify wars across the globe. Through my photographs, I try to bring these moments together, using archives and mythological performances to lay bare the discursive tropes through which ethnic superiority and violence get legitimised.

Follow Santanu on Instagram: @shantonu_dey_

Sophia Eaton
University of Missouri, Digital Storytelling

The Victims of School Children

When people ask about my project I tell them it is about bugs and people who pin bugs. I do not grab them by the shoulders and shake them and yell that our condition is to surpass everything given, I do not explain that we are in the midst of a mass extinction. I do not tell them that a language dies every two weeks but the oldest living tree has been alive since before the invention of writing. I don’t say time moves faster at altitude than at sea level and that the top of a mountain ages quicker than its base. I don’t tell them cicadas count in prime numbers and I do not tell them there are beetles that navigate by the Milky Way, and even though every single one of these thoughts goes off at once, all I do is show them a picture and they go wow thats cool and we both move on with our day

To document the documentarian is its own kind of argument — that the looking matters, and so does the one who looks. That to give your life to the overlooked is not to miss the world. It is to find it.

Follow Sophia on Instagram: @so.phobia

Chevalier Fustec
ENSP ARLES, Masters

Swift & Swallow

In 2022, within the span of ten days, I lost two of the women who were closest to me. This double event opened a period of unprecedented intensity and confusion.

One of them had asked me to scatter her ashes in every place that would make me think of her. Those ashes travelled in photographic film canisters—the very canisters containing the film used to photograph those places. They travelled in analogue film canisters whose own chemical composition depends upon a long extractive chain: animal gelatin and silver salts. Gradually, these losses permeated everything I encountered and everything I did. The ashes became silver salts, and I began to stage images within other images, to fragment negatives, alter them, and make photographs even in places where I would never have scattered ashes, yet which nonetheless seemed inhabited by one of these two people.

Beyond my personal history, these losses opened something else: a particular state in which reality begins to signal itself. A bird, a weather pattern, an hour of the day become things that can be read and appear meaningful, while at the same time remaining nothing at all. The Surrealists called this la vie étrange—the strange life—that state in which chance, dreams, and reality become porous. Nadja and Artaud are perhaps those who surrendered themselves most completely to it, suspended between a reading of the world as a field of signs and the possibility of a total absence of meaning.

Through both the making of images and their subsequent transformation and staging, this work traces a passage through, and an inquiry into, this condition. It engages an intimate archaeology of the photographic medium: seeking, within the very matter of the image—its layers, alterations, and resistances—the sediment of what has disappeared, the point of interpolation between ashes and silver salts.

Follow Chevalier on Instagram: @G.Chevalier_fustec

Yunjin Kim
Seoul Institute of the art, BA in Media Arts

Imaginarium

Unfamiliar movements become unstable when the body leans, and the more one tries to resist, the more precarious they become. Yet it is through the intersection of forces that a sense of balance begins to emerge. As forces push and flow between bodies, I come to realize that balance is not a static state, but a fluid process of constant negotiation.

Imaginarium begins at the moment when habitual ways of sensing are reimagined and rendered unfamiliar through new movements. I have focused on the lives of individuals shaped by social systems, viewing them through the lens of “barrier-free”—an approach aimed at breaking down barriers so that everyone can live on equal terms. The moments of people supporting and leaning on one another suggest that individuals within society are not meant to endure in isolation. Rather, they reveal how people can stand more firmly when connected through solidarity. This work explores the fluid nature of balance, inspired by personal experiences, and expresses it through visual language from my own unique perspective. As these newly formed sensations take shape as images and reach the viewer, I hope they inspire the imagination of another kind of balance within their own inner world.

Follow Yunjin on Instagram: @a2c000

Brandon Lewis
University of Alabama, Studio Art and African American Studies

5.5lbs

5.5 lbs is a visual exploration of life as a Black American navigating the complexities of a community scarred by extreme gun violence. Shot entirely in black and white, the absence of color serves to strip away distractions, focusing on the stark realities and raw emotions prevalent in this environment. This artistic choice emphasizes the visual weight of each scene, mirroring the heavy burden carried by those who live within it.

The series probes into the diverse aspects of this existence, from the constant threat of violence to the more nuanced challenges of self-harm, gender roles, and access to resources. Just as a camera captures and freezes a moment in time, a firearm can abruptly alter the course of life, highlighting a parallel between these two instruments of power and vulnerability. The work aims to unpack the emotional weight of fear, power, and the innocence of youth neighboring against a backdrop of systemic struggle.

Through carefully considered compositions and an intimate approach, 5.5 lbs seeks to visualize what survival looks like in this context. The ‘weight’ of the camera, like the weight of a firearm, becomes a metaphor for the choices, responsibilities, and consequences that define these experiences. Each photograph is an attempt to capture not just an image, but the profound and often unseen layers of resilience, struggle, and hope within a community grappling with profound challenges.

Follow Brandon on Instagram: @Lewgota.can0n

Jiayi Liang
Virginia Commonwealth University, MFA

In-Between Echoes

In-Between Echoes explores the liminal space between cultural memory and imagined reconstruction, where hybridity functions as a means of survival and resistance. Using photography, collage installation, and sculptural paper cutouts, I create faceless representations of my body to examine how patriarchal systems have objectified, silenced, and erased Asian women. The text within the photographs includes questions posed to Chinese women by U.S. consular officials enforcing the Page Act of 1875, which was designed to restrict the immigration of Chinese women under the suspicion of sex work. Interweaving Western landscape imagery with diasporic experience through constructed dioramas, repetitive gestures, lotus forms, horse imagery, and references to fetishized Chinese doll aesthetics, the work reflects the impact of colonial narratives, cultural projection, and generational trauma. By transferring my body onto these fragmented surfaces, I reclaim authorship over my image and challenge orientalist systems of visibility. Throughout the work, cutout eyes emerge as recurring forms of surveillance and resistance, interrupting passive viewing while reclaiming agency, care, and presence. The act of cutting becomes one of both violence and release: dismantling imposed narratives while rebuilding spaces of belonging.

Follow Jiayi on Instagram: @sobbingscorpioo

Alaina Lurry
Maryland Institute College of Art, BFA in Photography

Colonial Spirits

Colonial Spirits addresses the intersections of Blackness and Black Womanhood through pageantry as a vehicle for exploration. This body of work is rooted in research. Reflecting on the history of enslavement’s human zoos, I drew parallels with pageantry. These zoos were public displays of people in their “natural” or “primitive” states, meant to emphasize the supposed inferiority of the exhibited people and present them as “savage.” While women in pageants are not subjected to chains or cages, a connection can be drawn from the impacts of misogyny, racism, and imposed Eurocentric beauty standards. By drawing on archival imagery and research, I channeled this breadth of knowledge and research into creating a monocure for thematic exploration.

The character I have embodied, Miss Amerikkka, is a Black woman dressed in an American flag bikini. She has voluminous, Dolly Parton-esque blonde hair and wears bold blue eyeshadow, red lipstick, thin blonde eyebrows, a sash, a tiara, and a pale, white D-cup breastplate. This tool is a connecting byline through this work, a central tool for reclamation. The breast plate is a trophy, a tool of repatriation calling back the autonomy of the figure’s body and selfhood. Through the projects Pennsylvania Avenue (Cook Out & Beach), Since Why is Difficult to Handle, One Must Seek Refuge in How, Amerikkkan Girls, Eye For an Eye, etc., Miss. Amerikkka symbolizes the appropriation of the Black body/space and seeks repossession. She is a mirror both reflecting, exposing, and counteracting the white gaze and its impact on the perception of Black Women in both media and everyday life.

Miss Amerikkka seeks reclamation over the Black body and space. She not only mocks Eurocentric beauty standards but invites us into spaces where Black people have been exploited, mistreated, ostracized, and alienated.

Follow Alaina on Instagram: @alainalurryphoto

Mehrdad Mirzaie
Arizona State University, MFA

Garden

Garden comprises thousands of amateur photographs sourced from digital archives and social media accounts, transferred onto glass. Many of these images are manipulated, stripped of names or any contextual information. They depict individuals who lost their lives, were forcibly disappeared, or arrested due to the socio-political conditions in Iran from the Islamic Revolution of February 1979 to the present. This archive/anti-archive—an archive being a collection of photographs from digital sources that attempt to document and preserve information about these individuals—includes personal photographs from family albums or moments of everyday life, with the photographers remaining unknown. It is an anti-archive because it lacks the conventional qualities of a functional archive—it cannot serve as a reliable source of information, as it is marked by missing data, gaps, and erasures.

Within Iranian culture, the idea of a garden is deeply tied to the concept of a cemetery—a resting place where life and death coexist, and where memory is simultaneously preserved and erased. It becomes a metaphor for both life (through its vibrant, cultivated nature) and death (through the resting bodies beneath the soil), reflecting the tension between presence and absence, remembrance and forgetting.

Garden is not merely a place; it is a condition—a state of being where time erodes remembrance and the past dissolves. It is a dwelling, both metaphorical and literal, where memories, histories, and identities fade into obscurity—whether through deliberate political erasure or the natural passage of time. constructing a space where forgetting occurs systematically—through violent suppression, loss, or transformation. It could represent historical amnesia, censorship, personal trauma, or even a place where forgotten things gather. It is both an archive and an anti-archive. Garden reflects upon the architecture of an oppressive political system, where forgetting is not passive but actively imposed.

Follow Mehrdad on Instagram: @mrdadmirzaie

Joshua Mokry
Texas Tech University, MFA in Photography

Underearth

A cave serves as a site of resistance. Defined by darkness, it resists our need to illuminate and make sense of it. My work highlights the struggle to comprehend the Earth, and the way that our presence and projections are intrusive, even violent, both below and across the surface.

Human influence on our environment has seeped below our awareness, and I engage with this influence through the complexities of sight and darkness. The light we bring into a cave shapes our perception, and as we illuminate the darkness, we impose our own will upon it. Our engagement with the world is always an act of negotiation, an attempt to bring order to chaos, even when the space resists it.

Through the cave, my studio, and the gallery, images move uncertainly between observation and construction, where the camera does not simply record the cave but rather participates in inventing it. In this invention, I shine a spotlight on our involvement in spaces that should remain hidden. Negotiating the darkness, I challenge our hierarchy and put us below the horizon line.

Follow Joshua on Instagram: @jamokry

Lauren Oliver
Rochester Institute of Technology, MFA in Photography

BodyRevolt

My practice engages the body as something unstable, intersectional, and historically overdetermined. I work through disgust, shame, desire, and the abject not as themes but as conditions that cling to the body—particularly the female body—and shape how it becomes visible or is forced into invisibility. I use my body as a site of testing—stretching, distorting, performing actions that hover between control and collapse. These gestures are not gentle; they take shape through friction, resistance, and the uneasy negotiation between how my body feels and how it is read.

Follow Lauren on Instagram: @lauren_noelle_oliver

Luke Rosing
Boston College, BA

Cartilage

My work, Cartilage, focuses on relationships revealed through play, physical closeness, and everyday conversation. Over the last year, I have been visiting two communities with my camera: Dorchester, Massachusetts, located near my college campus, and Santa Ana, California, near my childhood home. I became interested in photographing these places because such moments stood in contrast to my own upbringing.

Growing up, I was particularly detached from my siblings, extended family, and my neighbors. This absence of community left a desire for closeness and ultimately drove me to document these communities. I’ve continually found myself drawn to the rhythms of play between children. These imaginative games function as a performance of mutual trust and an instinctual connection to their surroundings. For me, the varying dynamics within these encounters reflect the closeness that I have imagined but never fully experienced.

The title Cartilage came from a story my Dad once told me about a surgery he performed. He described cartilage as resilient, malleable, and essential for growth. I see community in adolescence analogous to this: a connective tissue that allows movement, development, and emotional expansion. Photographing these moments is my attempt to grasp this idea of movement and growth while we’re young.

Through repeated visits to these neighborhoods, people have given me access to their daily lives, letting me photograph moments of intimacy between friends and family members. In these shared spaces and through subtle gestures, I continually observe how familial bonds form and tighten in an unspoken manner.

Follow Luke on Instagram: @lukerosing

Anastasia Sierra
Massachusetts College of Art and Design, MFA in Photography

The Witching Hour

I become a mother and stop sleeping through the night. Years go by, my child sleeps soundly in his bed but I still wake at every noise. My father comes to live with us and suddenly, I am a mother to everyone. As I drift off to sleep I can no longer tell my dreams from reality. In one nightmare my father tells me he’s only got two weeks to live. In another, I am late to pick up my son from school and never see him again. I am afraid of monsters, but I move towards them: we circle each other until I realize they are just as afraid of me as I am of them.

My images follow the logic of dreams, where we are trapped in a strange colorful world, playing an endless game of hide-and-seek in a labyrinth of love and fear, knowing there is no way to escape but to wake up.

This work meditates on the emotional landscape of motherhood and parent–child relationships, where tenderness, intimacy, and play entwine with guilt, frustration, and a constant sense of what could be lost.

Follow Anastasia on Instagram: @anastasiasierra

Diana Sosnowska
University of South Florida, MFA in Studio Art

Total Internal Reflection

My practice investigates how institutional regimes and scientific knowledge systems both record and construct knowledge. Through the digital and physical manipulation of institutional, governmental, and vernacular archives, staged photography, and sculptural interventions, I challenge dominant understandings of history and memory, exploring the spaces where truth and fiction converge. Heavily research-based, my approach involves manipulating images and photographic materials to explore and transcend the boundaries between documentation, storytelling, and perception.

What’s at stake in my work is reality itself, how it is produced through language, images, and systems that claim authority over what can be known. My work asks the viewer to confront how knowledge is framed, who controls it, and how interpretation shapes both personal and collective memory. I examine and question my own memories and beliefs, those inherited from my ancestors and those shaped through the communities and institutions I have navigated tirelessly throughout my life. Born in Poland, raised in Italy, and educated in the UK, I approach identity and history through the experience of cultural displacement and translation.

Throughout my life, I have borrowed accents, slang words, and other cultural artifacts to shape and conform my body and my identity, only to find out that there is a constant failure in language. Between the absurdity and the frustration of this failure, I make my work. I aim to create work that, just like language, always points to something beyond itself. Ultimately, my work exists within the tension between documentation and invention.

Follow Diana on Instagram: @dianasosnowska

Selma Suleiman
Illinois State University, BS in Photography and Graphic Design

Woven Roots

To be Palestinian
My existence was questioned before God created me
I was born into a land that claimed to be free
This land I speak of,
claims freedom at a cost
me, us, them
searching for the land where our blood runs deep
until the day we return, steady on two feet

To be Palestinian is to walk the earth with pride and preach the truth of your land
A land like Palestine, how can one explain the tears that rooted their feet
The land where children receive a death certificate before their first breath
The land where our martyrs nourish the soil and create life amongst our olive trees
But to be Palestinian is to hope, because hope is the strongest force

As a Palestinian artist who was born in America by force, I choose to use archival family photographs within my work. I use photos of the keffiyeh and the weaving style, tatreez, that Palestinians have passed through their families. Art is never a past or present, it’s for all times and will always be true to fact. It perseveres collective histories amongst families all over the world who have had to leave their homes. I weave together different memories of places that hold deep generational ties within my family, signifying our roots to the land.

But what is a dream when living under occupation,
Freedom is a dream,
Freedom we seek,
And free we will be

Because what is life without freedom?

Follow Selma on Instagram: @Selmasperspective

JW Toftness
Savannah College of Art and Design, MFA

An apology made for the matter of material in metaversal times (AMMMMT)

My preoject, An apology made for the matter of material in metaversal times (or, AMMMMT, for short), is a critical engagement with the illusory boundary between digital worlds and physical reality. Human relationships to technology have expanded and been exacerbated with the flood of digital devices and the hyperconnection between both people and things. This flood has created psychologically separated realities, even granting the digital realm its own ontologically separate state: real vs. digital; physical vs. virtual.

The works in AMMMMT employ a purposeful combination of virtual and visceral. The multiple installments of the project involve the transfiguration of abject sculptural objects, all constructed with papier-mâché. These sculptural pieces serve as critical links between process and concept. They are made using a paltry, pulpy material—papier-mâché—and these props then act in conjunction with, and counterpoint to, the advanced tools of digital imaging and photographic post-production.

The supposed physical/digital division is one of the core concerns of the AMMMMT project. It focuses on this illusory separation and the mutational powers it holds: the disenfranchisement of our own bodies, the desire to remake our world in digital form, and the attempt to manicure our physical world through the aesthetics of technology. This project interrogates its themes through philosophical and analogical lenses, and while these lenses may be types of abstractions, in this current moment, the distance between abstraction and physical reality is ever diminishing.

Follow JW on Instagram: @jwtoftness

Gabrielle Tyrie
University of Guelph, MFA

Looking for the Oldest Piece of Light

Looking for the Oldest Piece of Light combines new, historical, and experimental photographic processes to unlock astronomical connections. With John Herschel, the inventor of the cyanotype, as its central figure, the project goes on a journey to capture the most distant visible light. The work is divided into 4 main sections. The first is a series of historical imagery from various archives that I have appropriated and reframed as cyanotypes. Next is a set of landscape cyanotypes from the Torrence-Barnes Dark Sky Reserve, a site that I visited several times over the course of this project. Followed by the centrepiece of the work, a 35mm photograph of the Andromeda Galaxy, the most distant object in the night sky visible with the naked eye. The final section is a series of “celestographs,” which is inspired by an 19th trend where amateur astronomers would expose photographic plates at night to capture the stars. They were, in fact, making chemical reactions occur on these plates, but they appeared as if they were galactic scenes. I have created a series of “celestographs” by treating 4×5 film with cyanotype and various vinegars, soaps and turmeric.

This project, which began as my undergraduate thesis, has continued into my master’s degree. During my master’s, my research is going to be towards developing more analog astrophotography and creating more celestographs. I intend to create large-scale immersive works that depict real and “imagined” night skies. My work questions what is real and what is construed, and how photography plays a role in that perception.

Follow Gabrielle on Instagram: @gabrielletyrie

Em Wall
Yale, MFA in Photography

Consider the Lilies

For a long time I did everything according to the book: I was obedient in a strict Mormon household, went on a Mormon mission, got married in the Mormon Temple, had four kids, and was a good Mormon wife. My beliefs started to splinter as I grappled with being queer and genderqueer, while being raised in a staunchly religious household. I continue to figure out my own morals outside the church and how to raise my kids without that belief system. This summer we went on a road trip to see church historical landmarks and places of familial importance. While the trip gave me some clarity, it also raised a lot of questions when my oldest son asked to be baptized. I’m trying to make room for my anger with religion and not pass it down to my kids the way Mormonism was dictated to me.

Follow Em on Instagram: @emwall

Jiayue Yu
Syracuse University, MFA

Worn Out Joy

Born in China in the mid-1990s, during a period of rapid economic growth following the country’s shift toward a market-oriented economy, I grew up amid promises that hard work would secure a better life, one of many narratives that sustain optimism in the face of uncertainty. My artistic practice is rooted in the gap between such promises and lived experience, exploring how collective aspirations evolve, linger, and haunt across different cultural and historical contexts.

Through photography, I trace how desire, uncertainty, and exhaustion become inscribed in ordinary materials, built environments, and everyday gestures and events. My recent work examines how a shared condition of exhaustion under contemporary capitalism—the accumulation of stress, alienation, and mental fatigue—is softened and regulated through calibrated forms of relief that leave its underlying causes intact. Central to this project are what I describe as “apparatuses of relief”: infrastructural features and visual interventions embedded in public and semi-public spaces that promise comfort, distraction, and temporary emotional release. Operating beneath the surface, these elements remain deeply integrated within the very urban environments that generate the pressures we continually attempt to escape.

Across my practice, I remain attentive to the accumulated weight of broader economic and political systems, and to how forms of agency might still emerge through adaptation, escapism, and endurance within moments of fatigue, estrangement, and instability.

Follow Jiayue on Instagram: @ok.jia

Anton Zdanovich
Academy of Documentary and Art Photography “Fotografika”, Certificate in Documentary and Art Photography

Numto

I am documenting Indigenous Khanty and Nenets communities near Lake Numto in Western Siberia — a space where history, myth, and everyday life coexist. According to local beliefs, this land belongs not only to humans but also to spirits.A hundred years ago, a violent confrontation took place here between Indigenous peoples and the Soviet state. In the late 1920s, reindeer herders were burdened with unbearable taxes, their herds confiscated. Children were taken to boarding schools to sever their connection to language and tradition. Shamans were persecuted and imprisoned. The conflict peaked near Lake Numto and ended in violence and arrests. For local people, this became a deep trauma passed through stories and fear. I see how this history still lives in their silence.

Today, direct violence has disappeared, but the rupture remains. I photograph herders whose herds are killed by wolves while state protection is absent. I listen to young people who no longer speak Khanty or Nenets — the languages survive only in older generations. I witness the oil industry transforming the land, disregarding its fragile ecology. I see men sent to war, where many are killed.

My project examines a community in a prolonged state of rupture — where historical violence has quieted but not disappeared. It no longer appears as catastrophe but as a slow depletion: of language, environment, bodies, and the future.

In Numto, silence is not empty. It is filled with what is not spoken: a disappearing language, injustice, fear, and a history of loss that has not ended. I am trying to listen to that silence.

Follow Anton on Instagram: @zdanovich_anton