We are thrilled to announce the shortlisted photographers of the Form Photo Award 2026. This year, the standard of work is exceptionally high, reflecting the incredible talent and creativity of contemporary photographers from around the world. Each shortlisted artist brings a unique perspective, a fresh aesthetic, and thought-provoking ideas that challenge and inspire.

The Form Photo Award, supported by photobasel, Picter, and Form Magazine, is dedicated to discovering emerging voices in photography. It aims to foster global dialogue, intellectual exchange, and cross-cultural solidarity within the art community. Every submission represents a new vision, a story waiting to be shared, and the longlist is a testament to the vibrancy and diversity of contemporary photography today.

This year’s shortlist demonstrates just how extraordinary the field of contemporary photography has become, and we are proud to celebrate the vision, originality, and skill of all the artists included.

Made under the Peruvian sun, Animism is a series of lumen prints created across three Peruvian geographies: the Pacific coast, the Andean highlands, and the Amazon rainforest. Conceived as a collaboration between the elements and photographic paper, native medicinal plants are placed directly upon the paper in their environments. Rooted in Andean and Amazonian cosmologies that recognize that all plants possess a spirit, the images emerge through contact and exposure rather than photographic capture, as imprints shaped by light, water, temperature and time.

"Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them, and they with me." (Revelation 3:20)

In April 2022, I left Ukraine for France. As a refugee, I entered a culture foreign to me. Being welcomed required me to adapt, to speak a new language, to submit to rules: to lose parts of myself in order to be accepted. In this project, I explore my personal experience of hospitality, both given and received.

Hospitality, according to Jacques Derrida, has a dual aspect: ethical and political. It includes a power dynamic and an underlying violence. The host takes a risk: the guest, by their mere presence, imposes an otherness that can unsettle, or even transform, the host. To give one’s home is to risk no longer being at home. It is to allow oneself to be invaded, to be dispossessed. Show more

This body of work explores interiority and the solitariness of one's inner world. Each photograph is a meditation on the passage of time and the notion of what it is to be seen. The images address the contradiction between the need to be visible and the need to shut out the world and retreat.

I use myself as a model to express feelings of erasure, which are so often felt by older women. The narratives are intentionally ambiguous and open to interpretation. While my stories are personal, they touch on ideas and themes that are universal, such as identity, aging, and the dichotomy between our public and private personas. In these domestic portraits home can be seen as a safe haven or conversely as a place of confinement. Duality is a theme I address in my work- the dichotomy between one’s interior and exterior life, and the desire to be seen or to disappear. Show more

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Growing up in the South shaped my personal identity and was a catalyst for rejecting implied standards of womanhood from a young age to questioning the facets of identity I now embody as a mother. This series leads me to consider how instrumental nature versus nurture is in the developing roles of parent and child, the two fluctuating between the observer and the observed. The images allude to familial intimacy and the art historical and cultural influences that shape the context of motherhood, femininity, and women’s identity. When presented collectively, these depictions present visual narratives that attest to selfhood, uncertainty, and parallels that are threaded between the two figures. Extending past the snapshot, these images record the growth of the individual and the deepening intimate connection within the familial unit. The portraiture in this on-going series provides an outlet for empowerment, vulnerability, control of the gaze, and self-discovery. The choice of materials in my artistic practice grounds these works in the history of women’s craft and of the photographic medium. Photography serves as the foundation from which layers of meaning are imbued through the incorporation of symbolic materials, processes, and imagery. The physical interaction in the creation of each piece provides a ritual outlet and space to meditate on the connection between the artist and the artwork and how each piece embodies a facet of my identity.

This series of images refers to the challenging process of securing a home, a safe space in a European country of constantly rising rents and gentrification. It is a long-term process shaped as much by memory and emotions as by bricks and beams. Based on his childhood memories of his parents building their family home, as well as stories from relatives who lived through the difficult conditions of the post-dictatorship period in Greece, the photographer reflects on how home is less a fixed place and more a constantly changing negotiation. Several of the photographs borrow the explanatory style of a manual from a large furniture chain, with the difference that here the manual is broken. Instead of offering polished images of completion, the photographs focus on the in-between: unfinished rooms, corners filled with intentions, gestures of care and improvisation. The work embraces imperfection and reexamines what it means to inhabit, build, and belong.

Trust Me is a series of staged photographic fables exploring how invisible pressures shape intimacy, behavior, and perception. Working across China, France, and the United States, Nyo Jinyong Lian constructs semi-fictional environments in which controlled gestures, mirrored actions, and suspended movements reveal trust as something negotiated rather than given. Domestic objects and everyday routines become sites of tension and quiet entrapment — a head obscured, a body held in place, an action interrupted mid-gesture — exposing how social expectations are internalized as restraint, vigilance, or fatigue. Drawing on the uncanny and the absurd, the images feel both familiar and subtly disorienting, transforming ordinary situations into psychological traps. Rather than documenting reality, Trust Me treats photography as a tool for detection, tracing how belief, fear, and authority operate beneath the surface of daily life. The series forms a portrait of contemporary anxiety while questioning whether photography can still reveal what lies beyond visibility.

I have journeyed from the south of Argentina to Greenland's ice sheet in search of landscapes with a particular mood and beauty, unspoiled landscapes, almost surreal. They resemble places that have never been inhabited, solitary, where the immensity reveals itself, and where I have lived experiences of intimate connection with this isolated nature, almost like a private sanctuary. It was on a return trip to Iceland that I was overwhelmed by the changes that had taken place since my first visit in 2015. I noticed with sadness how people failed to stick to regulations, not respecting boundaries, and it had started to show in the landscape. This exact moment marked my urgency to inspire change. I sensed that simply showing beautiful scenery was not enough. I wanted to find a way of conveying both beauty and decay at the same time. I wanted my work to remind people of their impact on the planet and encourage reflection on what we stand to lose due to climate change. Through this series, I invite viewers to reflect on our fragile yet resilient relationship with the land. While we shape nature, it, in turn, shapes us. My intention is to spark awareness of this interdependence, encouraging a deeper recognition of our essential alliance with the environment. Once crumpled, my print will always bear its marks, our Earth will retain our actions too. Nature is revealing its delicate balance in ways we cannot ignore. The consequences of our relationship with nature transform our world, physically, economically, and socially. In the aftermath of destruction, ecosystems regenerate, and life finds a way to restore balance and heal. Through conscious action, care, and renewed respect, we can begin to rebuild our relationship with the Earth. How can we foster a future led by harmony, a journey towards restoration that we forge by our actions today?

Inspired by the ephemeral yet long-lasting qualities of different materials, as well as the transformation from the tangible to the immaterial, I collect and repurpose diverse resources as the foundation for my work. I photograph both industrial and domestic waste, digitize my watercolour paintings, and then explore the pigments, textures, colors, and volumes before continuing the process using computer software. In this way, existing materials and data are continuously recycled and transformed, becoming a new digital “medium” with which I can paint. The final pieces are printed on Fine Art Pigment paper with vibrant, soft hues that evoke the tactile quality of pastels - as a reminder of the real pigments that once existed, now reimagined. The works in this series are part of my ongoing project, Mnemonic. The term originates from Ancient Greek and refers to a tool or device that aids memory. The concept behind Mnemonic is to translate and transform material, gestural and sensory phenomena into visual imagery - evoking a space where memory is not only recalled, but actively reconfigured and reimagined. By blending photography and painting, handmade and digital, traditional and contemporary, I aim to foster a humane dialogue with technological practices. I wish to create images that are not bound to a specific place or time but instead invite the viewer into a timeless space, offering contemplation and a sense of empowerment.

Between 1980 and 2000, southern Switzerland—especially Ticino—saw an unusually high number of unexplained sightings linked to UFOs (now UAPs). By the mid-’90s, with just 300,000 inhabitants, Ticino hosted three ufology centers collecting over 700 reports of encounters. A decade earlier, the Swiss Confederation had launched a secret study with the army and air force: dossier 248-CH. Recently declassified, it admits many cases remain unexplained. Today, only CUSI remains active, along with sky-watching groups like the Orion Brotherhood in Losone, who believe the story has only just begun. 248-CH is a photographic journey into the mystery of UFOs (UAPs), tracing their presence across the skies and landscapes of Southern Switzerland.

Made under the Peruvian sun, Animism is a series of lumen prints created across three Peruvian geographies: the Pacific coast, the Andean highlands, and the Amazon rainforest. Conceived as a collaboration between the elements and photographic paper, native medicinal plants are placed directly upon the paper in their environments. Rooted in Andean and Amazonian cosmologies that recognize that all plants possess a spirit, the images emerge through contact and exposure rather than photographic capture, as imprints shaped by light, water, temperature and time.

"A Myth in the Making" examines UFO sightings as an expression of a fundamental tension between human existence and the incomprehensible vastness of the universe. Faced with its immense scale, it is just as hard to imagine that we are alone in it as the possibility of extraterrestrial life itself. In the absence of clear evidence, UFO sightings take shape through perception, imagination, and cultural narratives. They become projection surfaces for a deeper question: how do we understand our own existence in a universe that is far beyond our grasp? The images we create of the unknown do not exist on their own. They emerge through a network of personal experiences, media images, and shared cultural ideas. Within this interplay, our ideas of the cosmos are formed, revealing less about what is out there and more about our need for meaning, orientation, and belonging. The work also refers to ideas by C. G. Jung, who in the 1950s described UFO sightings as expressions of collective psychological processes. Especially in times of uncertainty, such projections become more visible, reflecting a shared attempt to make sense of forces greater than ourselves. Statistics show that during times of crises, UFO sightings around the world seem to increase. Let alone in Germany the number of UFO sightings nearly doubled from 2022 to 2023. The photographs in "A Myth in the Making" move between documentary and fiction. They explore how our understanding of the cosmos is not simply discovered, but shaped through perception, memory, and present experience. UFO myths appear as part of an ongoing process: an attempt to situate human existence within an overwhelming and largely unknowable universe.

Anika Spereiter (*1990 in East Germany) is an analogue photographer based in Berlin. After receiving her degree in Media Informatics at University of Applied Sciences Harz in 2016, she studied photography at Ostkreuz School for Photography in Berlin and finished her studies in 2022 in the graduation class of Ute Mahler and Linn Schröder. Anika’s artistic approach is rooted in her interest in psychology and perception. She likes to explore the boundaries between truth and illusion, and so she often combines documentary and fiction within her photographic narratives. Memory, identity and discomfort often play a central role in her work. In 2022 she self-published her first photo book "A Myth in the Making". Together with photographer Tim Bruns and photo historian Annekathrin Müller, Anika co-founded Fotoskopia, an exhibition project dedicated to bring contemporary photography to life in rural areas where it has had little presence to date, thereby enabling cultural participation. Besides her photographic practice Anika works as an animator and motion graphics artist.

From 2019 to 2021 I have sought intensive contact with people who collects curious things. Those whose motif at first glance may seem a bit bizarre or enraptured. In doing so, I deliberately focused on the collected objects, because if you look through the eyes of the collector, with his innocence on the images, what was just declared nonsensical, strange, worthless, even disgusting or foolish, suddenly becomes clear, familiar, beautiful and fascinating. The motivations and stories behind the collection drove me to photograph this work. Driven by a hair fetish, Regine von Chossy from Munich collects hair, for example, and exhibits it in her own hair museum with dated and signed hair donations. The photographer Karl-Ludwig Lange collects bricks because the stamps on them give him information about the local history of his surroundings, and the taxidermist Navena Widulin from Berlin collects gallstones, continuing a tradition of the Berlin Medical History Museum of the Charite. Collecting is as old as mankind itself; it would not have survived without collecting. Objects have always been selected and accumulated, whether for use or mere contemplation, and information has always been collected, for exchange and as a basis for forthcoming decisions. But it is in an age where information is gathered to increase capital that I would like to turn, in a departure from this trend, to those collections that seek to represent the supposedly useless.

When it comes to question about how the volcanos work, practically everything is a mystery. Signals may appear before the eruption, but it is never certain it will occur. It is almost impossible to determine the time when the eruption starts and the moment when magma becomes unstable or predict the intensity of eruption. Volcanoes symbolize the duality of destructive force and the new beginning. Spanish Canary Island ,la Palma, only exists because of volcanic eruption built this land long time ago, forming the archipelago known as the Canary Islands. In 2021, during 85 days the volcano Cumbre Vieja on La Palma has been active. The eruption was the longest in the history of the island and the most destructive of last century in Europe. The volcano, which has been declared extinct, came into light changing the island and people’s lives irreversibly at the same time demonstrating man’s powerlessness against element. Fascinated by this natural phenomenon but also interested in the relationship of the island’s inhabitants with the environment and the volcano itself, I traveled to la Palma in 2022 twice. During my trips, I experienced how extremely close and inseparable is relationship of human and nature and at the same time how fragile is the environment shaped and managed by man. What I found unique was also the approach to life of the local habitants of the island and their great humility towards the volcano. Even in such a difficult situation I heard from them: „You know it is a great tragedy, but volcano was first here, gave us a land for a living, later we came, we have to remember it and respect it” (...) „Living here on a volcanic island is a love hate relationship"

Kinga Wrona - Polish documentary photographer living in Krakow (south of Poland). In her latest and ongoing works she explores the relationship between human and nature in aspect of climate change, natural disaster or environmental degradation. She is an artist selected as finalist of Paris Photo Carte Blanche in 2024 and nominated to FUTURES in 2023 by Fotofestiwal in Lodz. In 2026 she has been choosen as one of the winners of Female in Focus by British Journal of Phptography. Her works have been exhibited, among others, during: Festival Circulacion (S) 2023 Paris (France);Outside the walls,Paris Metro Stations,France,2023, Head ON Festival 2024 (Sydney, Australia), Kranj Foto Festival 2024 (Kranj, Solvenia) Daegu Photo Biennale, 2023 (South Korea); "A sense of place", Bpart Gallery 2023, Berlin (Germany);Galeria Centrala (Poznan, Poland). Her project 85 has been projected during festival Paysages Mouvant 2025 at Jeu de Paume Paris and during Les Recontres d' Arles 2024 at Fondation Manuel Ortiz as a part of Der Grief Magazine selection. She has published among others in New York Post, Revue EPIC, Polka magazine (online), PUBLICO, Przekroj, The Calvert Journal and National Geographic Polska.

My work is concerned with questions about the (extended) portrait in times of social-media-selfies, constant surveillance in contrast to the right to privacy.. I investigate technology and social use of portrait photography through the use of different analogue and digital cameras, but also through manual and digital post production. Proposal: „autres“ (french: others) The proposed project, “autres” uses portrait photographs of “others”: I ask people to sit in a photo studio and have their portrait taken. I also tell them to bring different outfits for the purpose of variation. Their pose, sitting direction and the lighting setting are the same in different places (so far Austria, Germany, but also along residencies and academic conferences in Finland and France). Later, after editing the raw material, I start retouching a selection digitally through automated algorithms. The focus lies on personal identifiers, such as head, skin and hair. The software offers automated replacements of these areas. (NO genearative AI!) I do set some definitions, which result in varying versions offered by the supposedly intelligent software. The results are sculptural, crippled, beheaded and weird figures. The model remains anonymous, but their poses, taste and choice of clothes and their individual physique refer to their gender, social class, and age. Fundamental functions of photographic representation remain. While I avoid depiction and identification, I also liberate and

Even though it is the desire for things that are destroying the planet we tend to form a strong attachment to all sorts of objects. This ambivalence is what I want to explore by making a collection of memento mori from my own debris of useless stuff. Things are the opposite of nature. While nature stands for what is real and what is good, things represent that which is fake, immoral, and unnatural. This is even more true when we know that it is our accumulation of and desire for things that are destroying the planet. So why do we still form such strong attachments to things, even to the useless, ugly, or mass-produced objects? With a medium format digital camera, I photograph the stuff that always create disorder, are stored away, or give you a bad conscience with their constant reminder of over-consumption, poor design, uselessness, and transience. The project will ultimately consist of about 30 images of objects, of which many are photographed against various backdrops, in the form of prints from my own photo archive and photographs of textiles as well as images from my collection of vintage photo books. The images in the project will have many different visual expressions, as the subject (i.e., the backdrop + the object) directs the visual language in each individual image. What is common among the images, however, is an investigation of the nature of photography as a creator of illusions and false spaces. Last, The Moral of Matter also investigate how the spectator, not only read a picture, but also are able to feel a photograph with their eyes. At least that is my goal with these pictures.

“Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street... Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks.” ― Wassily Kandinsky With this work I created a poetics of the house, of dead objects, historical memories and feelings connected to them. I transformed old fabrics, clothes, doilies and threads, combining them with found ancient photos. Flea market boxes are full of wedding photos, portraits of mothers and brides, daughters, women devoted to domestic life, and, on the other side, soldiers, marines, professionals in their uniforms. Traveling back in time, both with the concept and with the materials used, I imagined photographic objects full of local tradition, from which an uncomfortable contrast emerges: sewing needles, fabrics, broken glass and other household objects create wounds, fractures, tears, they show a subtle cruelty hidden behind feminine grace: a forced, imposed grace which has the flavour of imprisonment. Graceful and familiar things, such as flowers, embroidery, perfumes, preserve a history that is not made of pure beauty, they rather tell about what beauty is for us and how we have decided to impose it, with violence. This work is an invitation to remember where we come from, who we were, what we have achieved, what we risk to lose. Our rights are the result of a hard and long conquest and we must commit ourselves to keeping them and improving them. The work includes around 100 original pieces in different materials and sizes.

After my grandmother’s death, the apartment where I spent much of my childhood was declared unsafe. The possibility of its disappearance changed how I perceive domestic space. While traveling across the post-Soviet landscape, I entered abandoned houses and apartments that remained partially furnished. Clothing, toys, and the detached back panel of a piano were still there. In their muted palettes and worn surfaces, I recognized echoes of my grandmother’s home — spaces shaped by the same post-Soviet material culture. Moving through these rooms, I searched among the debris for objects that resonated with that earlier interior. The process resembled a childhood game — collecting “treasures” and building sandcastles. Using only what I found on site, I assembled temporary constructions from furniture, textiles, fragments and dust, or photographed arrangements that had already formed within the rooms. Through these interventions, I examine how domestic interiors shaped by a shared material culture echo across distance and time, holding traces of other lives while reflecting a possible future of the apartment where I grew up.

"First, space was made, everything needs a boundary. A wooden table and an immense fabric. I remember walking through winter mornings, lost in the mist, a deep silence pierced by sounds of unseen creatures. Wings flapping, branches snapping beneath the weight of a shifting body, a cry, a song, all swallowed by whiteness, by water, by cold. I never forgot the warmth I felt when, one day at last, the sun broke through the whiteness and, like a dense object, struck my skin. My body, now many. Child and Animal, eyes shut, the taste of salt at the corner of my mouth, and the silence. An ancient land, of stones and fossils. Carved by the river. How important it was, the encounter with that handprint on the cave wall. An encounter through image, a negative, the imprint of absence left by a hand in the depths of Earth’s time. Twenty-five thousand years, he, too, was here. The hollow of the ear, and the black bellows of the camera. Caves of the world, of the body, of objects. In the dark, I found them." Felipe Russo, 2025. All photographs were taking between 2021 and 2023 in the Aveyron Valley, France. "Lugar dito" is a series of 42 photographs. Analog 10x12cm black and white negative. Developed and printed by the artist.

The land waits patiently, impartial as it observes a callous sprawl. I’m settled here now, without the congregation of my ancestors. My fossilized heritage appears jumbled from where I stand, but traces left behind by clumsy cousins litter the landscape. These traces—clues half buried—lie waiting to be unearthed, yet the story they tell depends on what’s desired. What myth do I construct from the few vestiges I find? What organism do I shape from a tailbone and a claw? The land interjects, sighs, and groans, as in a fairy tale, while I surveil and dig. It reminds me, its voice moist: “You come from me, after all… You’re just suffering from a particularly diabolical case of amnesia.” A lingering thought, feebly expressed as a feeling, croaks in the back of my throat, ducking into my stomach when prodded. I nod passively in agreement, gaze outstretched—always looking, rarely seeing. As the soil gurgles, snow begins to fall, and the youthful trees surrounding me assemble into two glistening flanks, kneeling one by one in royal veneration. I turn around to see to whom they’re bowing, but the snowflakes—dinner plates at this point—shroud the frosty sovereign. I blurt, childishly, as I come to my senses: “No, you are!”—instantly ashamed of my sudden insolence. Gently, the whispers of that heavenly flock patter my eardrums, and I’m reminded of what I came here for; though in a few breaths the rustle of a tree branch and the flapping of a flag will drown them out.

This series envisions young children as contemporary society's superheroes. Superheroes have long occupied a central position in American popular culture. Society turns to superhero narratives in times of unrest as a source of hope. In the superhero narrative, right and wrong are clearly defined, and right will ultimately triumph. From generation to generation, the qualities those heroes embody have changed to reflect the best type of leader believed to confront the challenges of the moment. In this critical moment, with crises seeming to close in from every side, it can be hard to imagine any combination of qualities adequate to the task. Children's tendency to play superhero has a slightly different significance. They imagine themselves as safe, strong, and in control. The more out of control reality, the more intense the need to believe that control is possible. I have watched my own children grow from childhood innocence into jaded young adulthood. I both miss their youthful embrace of the world, and admire the determination with which they now try to change it. In this work, I transform images of my children when they were younger into superheroes. I have placed them in landscapes that foreshadow a desolate urban future. I have given them brightly colored capes, a celebration of the beauty of the confidence with which, unfazed by the desolation around them, they believe that anything is possible. For many adults, the world now feels out of control to a degree we have never experienced before. This work explores the idea that children, with their ability to continue to hope and dream, to use their imaginations to embrace the world and possibility, are the superheroes society needs to grapple with the challenges in front of us. But it also depicts a mother's concern for her children. There is an underlying impotence to their efforts to play at power. In their vulnerability and helplessness, they embody the anxiety of a society on the brink, struggling to believe in the future, unable to confront true accountability for its actions.

Fractures is a long-term photographic project examining damaged yet functioning vehicles as material traces of urban life. Developed primarily during my years living in Los Angeles—a city structured around automobile dependency—the series explores how mobility, endurance, and adaptation become inscribed on the surfaces of everyday objects. Rather than treating these vehicles as evidence of accident or neglect, the project approaches them as accidental sculptures shaped by impact, repair, and continued use. Dented metal panels resemble shifting terrain, fractured surfaces read like cartographic lines, and exposed mechanical interiors evoke anatomical structures. Through close observation, a moment of rupture becomes suspended in stillness. Working at close range, the images move between abstraction and recognition. Surface, texture, and form dominate the frame, allowing damaged fragments to detach from their utilitarian origins. What initially appears as an abstract composition slowly resolves into a familiar object, shifting the viewer’s perception between material detail and urban context. Improvised repairs—tape matched to body panels, provisional coverings, visible seams—become quiet gestures of persistence. These interventions reveal how damage is absorbed into everyday life through small acts of maintenance and adaptation, echoing the quiet resilience that shapes human experience. The project unfolds through walking and repetition. Images emerge gradually through sustained proximity rather than predetermined narrative. This process allows the camera to linger on what remains after events: traces of impact, surfaces worn by time, and the subtle transformations produced by continued use. Fractures proposes an alternative cartography of the city—one mapped not through landmarks or skylines but through surfaces marked by endurance. Within these fragments, the ordinary shifts toward abstraction, and damage becomes a site of reflection on resilience embedded in the everyday urban landscape.

Remember Me as a Place is a long-term documentary project exploring migration, memory, and identity through the Venezuelan diaspora, including the artist’s own family. Born in Caracas to a Venezuelan father and Ecuadorean mother, she immigrated to the U.S. as a child and grew up undocumented in Florida. Since 2019, she has documented relatives and other Venezuelan migrants through portraits, landscapes, and archival materials, tracing hope, trauma, and resilience across generations. The work emphasizes dignity, cultural continuity, and the emotional weight of memory, reclaiming and preserving these stories for the future.

ictionary of Past and Present Self is a visual and material exploration of memory, identity, and the material traces that connect who we were with who we are. Through a hybrid practice that intertwines photography, organic materials, text, and sculptural objects, the series investigates how personal histories are embedded in the physical world: held in surfaces, surfaces altered, marks that accumulate, and the fragile relics of experience. Drawing on vintage photographs, personal ephemera, and natural elements, each work in the series functions like a lexical entry: a fragment, a clue, a resonance between past and present. Photographs are re‑woven with stitched threads, layered with organic matter, or embedded into objects that carry their own histories. Through these processes, the series collapses temporal distance, collapsing moments into one another to reveal patterns of persistence, transformation, and intensity. Rather than presenting memory as static or singular, Dictionary of Past and Present Self approaches it as a dynamic topology, an unbounded field in which identity is continually constructed, revised, and re‑occupied. The works gesture toward both loss and continuity, honouring the way images and materials can act as containers for emotion, association, and the subtle material echoes of lived experience. This series invites reflection on how we remember, how we inhabit the past in the present, and how images themselves can act as porous sites where inner worlds and outward forms intersect.

"In the Care of Light" is a series of ten diptychs came from encounters in nature shaped by quiet observation of inevitable change. I like to think about liminal spaces - thresholds where the human and natural worlds meet and where stillness and light are agents for change. Working with found objects, the human form and fleeting moments of light, I explore how life forms, erodes and reconfigures. Light moves through the images as a shared condition revealing what is easily overlooked. Rather than depicting nature as backdrop the work situates the human as entangled within evolving living systems, where transformation unfolds quietly and continuously, just beyond the limits of perception.

I used to take pictures of women I dated, but then we broke up and I couldn't take pictures anymore, so instead I started calling out to women in parks and around town and taking their pictures. The expressions and vibes that women show when being photographed by strangers are similar to the ones she showed when we broke up, so I wanted to photograph them.It was a way to heal myself.I've heard that painfully sad things contain something pure and beautiful. This photo book contains photos taken between 2006 and 2026. I started taking photos in Yoyogi Park, but then moved to Shibuya, Harajuku, Shinjuku, Ueno, Kichijoji, and Shimokitazawa, and photographed over 1,000 people. At first, I was looking for someone to take photos in place of my ex-girlfriend, but as I continued, I think I started going there to take photos for other reasons. I ask, "Can I take your picture?" but most of them refuse. Many people in Tokyo live lonely and difficult lives. I think there are many people who don't tell others, but live their lives in ways I can't even imagine. They go to work or school with anxiety. In order to be sure that they can live with peace of mind, they need to think about things and make decisions. That's why they don't want to be photographed by strangers. Sometimes they can walk around the city for a whole day and not be able to take a picture. Sometimes they can't take a picture for three days, a week, or a month. Even so, when I try to talk to them, they sometimes ask, "Are you sure you want me?" The woman is more surprised that she was chosen than why I take her picture. Maybe she doesn't realize how good she is, or maybe she doesn't have confidence. She doesn't even ask me why I take her picture. I wonder why. Maybe truly beautiful people are those who don't realize their own beauty.I read in a novel that "There is nothing more beautiful than pure emotion. There is nothing more powerful than something beautiful." I've also been told, "It's because you looked like you were having a hard time." I thought that selfless, altruistic behavior was noble and beautiful, and that it would look good in a photograph.They are not weak beings who lack confidence. They have come to seem very big and sublime existence to me.

"In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni" The palindromes Latin line, whose translation is ‘we wander around in the night and the fire consumes us’, recedes on itself, built letter by letter as a labyrinth, perfectly represents the form and content of ‘perdition’. The phrase certainly has very ancient roots, its attribution, even if there is no evidence, could date back to Sindonio Apollinare. The definition could be related both to moths, which, attracted by the light of a fire, end up killing themselves; or to torches, which are consumed by burning in the night. The Latin expression inspires my work and drives my photographic stream of consciousness. In this series the path becomes a metaphor of everyone’s journey: sometimes a hidden and broken path, hard to find, sometimes seems more like a labyrinth in which we wonder in constant search of our destiny.

“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them, and they with me.” (Revelation 3:20) In April 2022, I left Ukraine for France. As a refugee, I entered a culture foreign to me. Being welcomed required me to adapt, to speak a new language, to submit to rules: to lose parts of myself in order to be accepted. In this project, I explore my personal experience of hospitality, both given and received. Hospitality, according to Jacques Derrida, has a dual aspect: ethical and political. It includes a power dynamic and an underlying violence. The host takes a risk: the guest, by their mere presence, imposes an otherness that can unsettle, or even transform, the host. To give one’s home is to risk no longer being at home. It is to allow oneself to be invaded, to be dispossessed. And yet, hospitality holds the potential to transcend these tensions. It is an act of courage and faith, a gesture that dares to imagine unity despite all odds. Absolute hospitality—without doors or keys, without inside or outside, where the host becomes the guest of their guest — is a utopia incompatible with contemporary psychological necessities. Psychology highlights that boundaries are essential for preserving our integrity. And yet, welcoming the Other is to open those boundaries, even if just for a moment. So, how can we trust, despite everything, the Other who surpasses us? How can we let the Other in, knowing we may never understand? …I am here for you.

I am a collector. Ever since I can remember, I have been collecting everything, particularly my own things as a sort of memorial. Saving every single object is for me the first step of a possible collection: notebooks, cans, stuffed animals, receipts, batteries, or parts of myself like teeth, hair, and nails, just to mention some of them. To keep and catalog objects has always given me pleasure. It started with me collecting memories and things that I was emotionally attached to, and it developed into an obsession to pile up ordinary objects in series. The only complication I have is the space. Collecting requires a lot of physical and mental space, which led me to find ways to let things go. I have realized that, to be able to throw anything away, I first need to celebrate the detachment by taking pictures of it. The composition is the result of the entire process, the image is the purpose to achieve. By then, I convince myself that what I have collected will somehow survive, especially using films as they don't leave me empty-handed. The project Therapy is photography used as a remedy to an obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

When the war began, the question “How are we?” echoed across Ukraine and beyond. Over time, answering has grown unbearably difficult. The war in Ukraine is, in many ways, the first online war, where Ukrainians process thousands of images and texts daily. Most construct an imagined, multidimensional reality from fragmented reports, documentaries, and eyewitness accounts. These internal landscapes make it hard to connect with one’s own psyche, which operates in emergency mode under the weight of constant vigilance. The images in the artist’s collages, made with a 3D smartphone scanner (Polycam), reflect this complex, volumetric reality of Ukraine.

“Can you keep a secret” is a long-term project focused on child sexual abuse. CSA has been running in my family trees since generations, poisoning many of its branches, including mine. My approach starts from recreating the places of trauma, inviting the subjects to engage physically with the space through cathartic, almost performative actions. Guided by maieutic conversations, these encounters transform in a visual framework that reflects each person's identity and develops a visual dimension between dream and reality; it also recalls the process our minds undergo, while recording/cancelling the trauma. The diary form, unfolds as an inner archive — a fragmented narrative of violated childhood, a memory shifting between denial and revelation. This project begins with me - with my will to seek for truth. But it opens immediately to a collective dimension. It becomes a global journey, a documentary investigation that weaves testimonies and places into a storytelling that doesn’t aim to explain, but to hold. A diary made of words, old pictures, drawings, recordings. A darkroom of sorts, where the act of revealing becomes one of care. I want to invent a space where the narrative of abuse is not reduced to victimhood but becomes a visual, political, and poetic process of elaboration. A way to regain our own memories and surroundings. A “cartography of silence and resistance,” highlighting how trauma transcends cultural and social boundaries. No matter how hard the mind tries to erase certain events, the body still remembers. Child sexual abuse is painfully spread: 20% of adult females and 10% of adult males recall an abusive incident within their safety perimeters. The pain, through the reveling power of truth, can be transformed in strength and enlightenment breaking the chain of silence. Survivors are precious witnesses for the whole society, a bridge toward healing for everyone directly and indirectly involved.

This body of work explores interiority and the solitariness of one’s inner world. Each photograph is a meditation on the passage of time and the notion of what it is to be seen. The images address the contradiction between the need to be visible and the need to shut out the world and retreat. I use myself as a model to express feelings of erasure, which are so often felt by older women. The narratives are intentionally ambiguous and open to interpretation. While my stories are personal, they touch on ideas and themes that are universal, such as identity, aging, and the dichotomy between our public and private personas. In these domestic portraits home can be seen as a safe haven or conversely as a place of confinement. Duality is a theme I address in my work- the dichotomy between one's interior and exterior life, and the desire to be seen or to disappear. The self portraits take place in an unspecified time and as such suggest enduring themes. Many images are inspired by 19th and 20th century realist painting. My work is also influenced by Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing, who use themselves as photographic models to explore constructions of women's identity, aging, and imposed gender roles. Making these photographs is an act of personal and social empowerment that hopefully speaks to the lives of many women.

Inspired by the ephemeral yet long-lasting qualities of different materials, as well as the transformation from the tangible to the immaterial, I collect and repurpose diverse resources as the foundation for my work. I photograph both industrial and domestic waste, digitize my watercolour paintings, and then explore the pigments, textures, colors, and volumes before continuing the process using computer software. In this way, existing materials and data are continuously recycled and transformed, becoming a new digital “medium” with which I can paint. The final pieces are printed on Fine Art Pigment paper with vibrant, soft hues that evoke the tactile quality of pastels - as a reminder of the real pigments that once existed, now reimagined. The works in this series are part of my ongoing project, Mnemonic. The term originates from Ancient Greek and refers to a tool or device that aids memory. The concept behind Mnemonic is to translate and transform material, gestural and sensory phenomena into visual imagery - evoking a space where memory is not only recalled, but actively reconfigured and reimagined. By blending photography and painting, handmade and digital, traditional and contemporary, I aim to foster a humane dialogue with technological practices. I wish to create images that are not bound to a specific place or time but instead invite the viewer into a timeless space, offering contemplation and a sense of empowerment.

“We come from nothing and vanish into nothing” . And yet, in between, we make so much noise. A lingering scent. A fading glimmer. A heartbeat lost to the wind. My camera set out to capture this existence on the edge of the precipice: the delicate tension between fading beauty and the urge to leave a mark. “Into Thin Air” tells the story of a group of circus artists who, despite hardship, continue to chase wonder and vitality — a final spark before the flame fades. Rooted in the nomadic essence of humanity, it reflects our drive to leave traces in our wake. We are bound to move through life, making noise as we pass, searching for meaning in a world that won’t stay still. Even as we lose hold of the familiar, we reach for something greater: memories of splendor, echoes of what once was, propelling us forward. “Into Thin Air” is not just a tribute to a circus on the edge of vanishing. It’s a reflection on life’s impermanence, our need to endure, and our desire to be seen and heard. Suspended between origin and disappearance, we flare — briefly, brightly — before we fade.

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