FIRST PRIZE – VLADIMIR KARAMAZOV

“A stunning portrait of a young man. He appears exhausted, vulnerable to the harsh world around him.” – KEVIN COOLEY

Photographer statement – “Hotel under the stars.”

SECOND PRIZE – JASON KLASSI

“The beauty of this incredible animal portrait is only outmatched by the patience required to make it.” – KEVIN COOLEY

Photographer statement – “Bobcat sees the light above the night lights of Los Angeles. A California bobcat (Lynx Rufus) walks into the light above Los Angeles and Santa Monica Bay. Living on the urban fringe of a large metropolis, this bobcat thrives along the backyards of million dollar mansions and busy hiking trails. Bobcats in the Santa Monica Mountains are surrounded by the bustling 405 and 101 Freeways in Los Angeles. Fortunately, the world’s largest wildlife crossing, The Wallis Annenburg Wildlife Crossing, is now being built and may ensure this bobcat and other large mammal’s survival.”

ALEXANDER SELEZNYOV

“A gorgeous landscape that plays with texture and scale, describing the immensity of this natural landscape by the thin, golden thread of road that traces its way across it. As night remains set in in one corner of the frame, day begins to break diagonally opposite – that liminal time between night and day where our environment can often take on a ghostly quality, here emphasized by the clouds that soften the crater’s edge. It’s a very well-constructed scene that transports you to a place and communicates a feeling. A slightly more abstract version, with the road in the foreground cut out of frame would also be interesting to see.” – LIFE FRAMER

Photographer statement – “Echoes of Ancient Waterfalls – A very rare weather phenomenon, where clouds slide over the Ramon Crater. This photo was taken at sunrise in Mitzpe Ramon, Israel.”

MATT CHMIELARCZYK

“This image, striking in its abrupt framing and off-kilter execution, captures a curious moment from an Imperial Court System event in Colorado. We witness an embrace between king and queen – an exchange lost in the noise, over the shoulder of who? A partygoer? A bodyguard? A vicar? It inspired me to read up on this movement – one of the oldest and largest LGBT organizations in the world that runs Gala Balls to raise money for good causes, matching pleasure with purpose. It’s an eccentric world and Matt captures some of the brashness, the drama and fun in his bold execution.” – LIFE FRAMER

Photographer statement – From the series Deus Salve Regina (God Save the Queen). “The United Court of the Pikes Peak Empire is a small faction of the Imperial Court System that represents the Colorado Springs region. The ICS is a non-profit international organization, started in San Francisco in 1965, that adopts the titles of a regal court system as they create community steeped in fundraising and advocacy for groups in need. Coronations and other events create opportunities to raise money through drag shows, and other community-based events. With as many as 86 chapters in North America, some court systems donate in excess of a million dollars to their local charities on an annual basis.”

UGO RICCIARDI

“Like staring up at the under-lights of a floating spaceship, Ugo creates something of stark aesthetic beauty, where scale, method of execution and literal meaning are unclear. What results is a striking marrying of natural and artificial worlds – a strange phenomenon of his own creation, like a mechanically-fabricated solar eclipse. Light painting can often be a little trite, but Ugo utilizes it to great, otherworldly abstract effect.” – LIFE FRAMER

Photographer statement – From the series Nightscapes. “This photographic series is based on the mysticism of places both architectonic and natural. It represents a connection with the human being and its most ancestral history. Light wraps these monuments and natural elements to help the observer to look at these places with a new visual and emotional perception. Light is an essential part of the monuments and the natural environments represented in my photos, and it becomes part of the landscape itself. Even if light hasn’t a specific shape, it highlights the spirituality of that place for the viewer. The shine path turns around the subject to connect the reality to some supernatural dimension, and it relates the real-life with an otherworldly universe.”

JALAL ABUTHINA

“Framed centrally and dressed entirely in white, this enigmatic figure is bathed in artificial light. If only they’d look up they’d see this impossibly bright portal to another dimension, away from the drab concrete environment they inhabit. It’s unclear whether Jalal has created this installation themself, or perhaps shot an advertising screen with a slow enough shutter speed to render its display pure white, but either way it’s an arresting shot that muses on boredom, the ordinary wonders of our urban environments, and in its title “Screensaver”, perhaps the ways in which the digital word increasingly pervades our lives.” – LIFE FRAMER

ALES KRIVEC

“There’s something almost hypnotic about this night-time landscape entitled “Flowers in the Night”. Framing interest in the foreground and background – these impossibly pink flowers offset by the towering mountains that give way to a star-filled sky – Ales creates something that feels hyperreal, like a frame from a dream, the viewer wandering alone through a magical place. It’s brilliantly done.” – LIFE FRAMER

MAXIMILIAN GOTTWALD

“Resting under this imposing flyover as the city races around them, Maximilian documents night life for these two young men – drenched in artificial light from streetlights, passing cars, and their own phone screens. They sit and wait, for friends perhaps or work more likely, oblivious to the noise and motion around them. It’s a compelling document of today’s immense and chaotic urban world, where each individual is a tiny component of a sometimes overwhelming mass.” – LIFE FRAMER

Photographer statement – From the series Asian Dusk – The Empire of Light. “I document cityscapes and impressions of Asian metropolises. The fast economic, political and demographic growth in Asia is rapidly changing these urban landscapes. Condensation transforms them into dystopias. The excessive use of artificial light, the light pollution, even sometimes makes the night look like day. Especially this impressive interaction of natural light and artificial light in twilight and night shots fascinates me very much. I try to get a certain order from the urban landscapes, which never come to rest, through the composition of light, color, surface and lines. The human element is often implied in my pictures, but the human being is not visible. This also underlines the anonymity that prevails in large cities. Visiting an Asian city is an overwhelming experience that engages all of the senses. In search of a suitable location, I let myself be driven by the smells and noises of the urban jungle, with the intention of transforming the hectic and chaos into an aesthetic calm and balance.”

SHAWN FENDER
 

“Shawn creates an exquisite environmental portrait of mother and grandson at twilight – one that’s at once peaceful and charged with quiet drama. As the woman looks outwards, lantern in hand, the young boy’s attention is drawn inwards to the warmth and comfort of indoors. The end of a long and tiring day perhaps, the barbecue and deckchairs like relics of what was. It’s a lovely image that transcends a family portrait.” – LIFE FRAMER

Photographer statement – “A portrait of my mom in up in the mountains with her youngest grandson.”

JASPER GOODALL
 

“”…the power of the imagination that is invoked when our vision is robbed by the dark of the nocturnal hours” is a beautifully poetic way of describing the strange feelings and perspectives that can emerge at night. Jasper’s artistic, elegantly realized forest scene is charged with anticipation and intrigue. The forest becomes a stage, but for what..?” – LIFE FRAMER

Photographer statement – From the series Images of the Afterlife. “This series is inspired by Gustave Doré’s illustrations of Dante’s Inferno from Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy. Doré’s illustrations were engravings and thus limited to black and white. He utilises unnatural lighting to create pools of illumination to pick out the subjects. The illustrations are set in a gloom (of the afterlife) and so the lighting is arriving from a strange unnatural source as if lit on a stage set. The resulting atmosphere is something that I hope is reflected in these photographs. These images are about the loneliness of the night, the unknown nature of death and unconsciousness, and the power of the imagination that is invoked when our vision is robbed by the dark of the nocturnal hours.”

SABINE AGOSTINI
 

“Shot on the empty streets of Lebanon under the glow of orange and pink neon, with cracked concrete and a spaghetti of electricity cables contrasting with the sleek lines of this vintage car, this is no doubt an atmospheric image. And with that silhouetted hand, picked out against the artificial light, it has an air of mystery too. What are we witnessing? Something innocent? Something illicit? Is Sabine’s presence known? The title “No one can hear you” is intriguing – a comment on the anonymity, or not, of the urban space.” – LIFE FRAMER

KRISTOF VADINO
 

“Sleep is of course a fundamental part of life at night, and so it’s interesting to see it represented in Kevin’s selection. Kristof provides no context to what we’re seeing framed in a documentary style – men asleep in cramped quarters – and so we’re left to wonder… is it part of a religious ceremony, the wake of a humanitarian crisis? There’s a peacefulness, a sense of safety to the scene that contrasts with what may well be very difficult circumstances.” – LIFE FRAMER

MILTIADIS IGGLEZOS

“Cooley himself has spent many nights capturing the light trails of passing aircraft, and so it’s interesting that a shot of the same theme captures his eye. There is an undeniable beauty to this scene, simply titled “Plane Over the Sea” – in its vastness, stillness and sharp execution. The way the arc of the plane is reflected as a straight line in the ocean, the way the light bleeds at its edges and then gives way to absolute darkness. It’s an aesthetic treat, but not without some emotional resonance too, calling on ideas of borders, and of staying and leaving, or perhaps being left behind.” – LIFE FRAMER

ABHI ANCHLIYA

“Under a crescent moon, the content of this widescreen image slowly reveals itself – a man and dog scavenging on a landfill, high above the sprawl of Delhi. With the carefully centered framing, the city lights glimmering in the background and the mounds of trash picked out in red light, there’s a strange beauty to an image that speaks to an ugly truth – of how we trash our environment through overconsumption, and allow some of our own to get to a point of desperation to have to live off it.” – LIFE FRAMER

Photographer statement – From the series Humans of the Red Planet. “From one of the biggest landfills in New Delhi, also knows as the Garbage Mountain. It stands at a height of 200 feet. Trash from New Delhi is brought in day and night. The trucks drive up the garbage hill, dump the trash and leave for the next round. This landfill site has already crossed its capacity of holding waste in the year 2002. The waste pickers jump in as soon as the trash is dumped and in front of the bulldozer to grab recyclables, metals and salvageable before the trash is pushed down the mountain. It is a an extremely dangerous activity. Many people and kids have been crushed by the bulldozer and lost their lives. It’s an ongoing tragedy most people in Delhi are pleasantly unaware of.”

CORRADO PICCOLI
 

“Shot with a slow shutter speed so that night becomes half-light, this lovely image captures the buzz of night life in a European beach town. As some sit and chat, and the last few enjoy some time in the water, we’re transported to the relaxed atmosphere of an endless summer evening.” – LIFE FRAMER

Photographer statement – “Summer night at Boccadasse, Genova”

ELITSA MITOVA
 

“A wonderfully atmospheric and meditative scene, with the glow of a diffused moon painting the forest in pale blue light. Elitsa talks of night-time journeys made in search of inspiration, and the quiet here, the space for thought, is palpable.” – LIFE FRAMER

Photographer statement – “I often embark on journeys in search of inspiration. They are all diverse and lead to curious outcomes and destinations. They hold a moments of my life; a pieces of personal delight and inspiration. Nightfall – Indiana, USA – Image of the woods around my house. It was quite foggy bright, and beautiful night. And the howling of the coyotes made it kind of spooky. Genuinely enjoyed the scenery.”

MITSUKO TANIGUCHI
 

“The bright light of a single rectangular window cuts through the muted, gloomy geometry of this empty Japanese suburb. It draws on ideas of our inner lives, of what happens behind the curtain – of our need for private space and the importance of the home. We will never know what lies within, but there’s a feeling of safety and comfort. That this image was taken in a tsunami-affected area of Japan, where many homes were ravaged, adds a real pertinence.” – LIFE FRAMER

Photographer statement – From the series Equivalent. “In the past, Alfred Stieglitz took a series of photographs of clouds floating in the sky and created a work called “Equivalent”. It was a philosophical photographic expression about what is equivalent. In contrast, I wonder if the existence of each individual living on Earth today is “equivalent”. After World War II, many people in Japan enjoyed an “ordinary” life in a mass society, but due to huge disasters, economic crises and pandemics, some people lost their “ordinary” life. Disparities are also on the rise. Is there a difference in the weight of human life and existence? The lights in the windows of buildings give us a sense of warmth and the presence of people there. These works were taken in the tsunami-affected areas of the Tohoku region and the Kanto region.”

ARNAU LECINA

“This is a striking image of an alien, industrial and seemingly unforgiving landscape. It looks completely unfit for humans to inhabit, let alone with such little safety protocol, protective equipment and rudimentary tools as used by this worker carving sulfur out of the rocks at night. It’s a sad and damning picture of the informal supply chains that govern our creation of bleach, fertilizer, and other products that make the modern world go round, and of the desperate choices many have to make to carve out a life for themselves and their families.” – LIFE FRAMER

Photographer statement – “This picture was taken in the Kawah Ijen volcano in Indonesia. This volcano has a sulfur mine in the crater where al the locals go every night until the sun raises to get as much sulfur as they can get. They can only work at night because during the day is too hot to be there. All the smoke comes from the sulfur and it’s really hard to breathe down there. That’s why I value this picture a lot because it represents how hard they have to work to get some money for their families.”

STEPHEN BROOKBANK
 

“A fantastic portrait of “Tom at Roosevelt Avenue, Hamilton, Ontario”, Tom’s street, and Tom himself dwarfed by this huge factory and electricity pylon. The juxtaposition of quaint, characterful suburbia and clinical industry side-by-side is compelling.” – LIFE FRAMER

VINCENT JENDLY
 

“Images don’t come much more subtle than this, and a screen is perhaps not the best medium through which to view it. But its power is in its stark, unrelenting emptiness – only broken by the faint glow of a very distant light. Vincent eloquently describes the spectrum of emotions that water can conjure, and some of that is captured in how one feels about this image – thrilling, peaceful, or terrifying.” – LIFE FRAMER

Photographer statement – From the series Lux In Tenebris: An Intimate Immersion at Sea. “When I was five, I narrowly avoided drowning. I’m almost dead. When you drown, you quickly experience this definitive moment known to all those who have come close to death : the vision is veiled, you give up and you pass out in darkness. Years later, I tamed the water, to the point of dedicating an unreasonable amount of time to it and, often passing for an original, to like being there when everyone feared it : in the dark waters of the night. For long minutes, I floated calmly on my back, staring at the darkness, which I challenged, listening to my breaths; in this water that had almost killed me, I never died. Neither she nor the night could have me. I felt alive, more than at any other time of the day. I’ve been doing this for years.

A series of singular chances led me on a first cargo ship, and I followed the journeys. Strange parentheses, intervals with no known marks, often uncomfortable, sometimes dangerous. It is at night that the contrary is total : in the deepest dark, when the weather is cloudy and the ship completely extinguished, nothing distinguishes it from the water. The sea becomes invisible and even more abyssal. Sailors don’t like the night; it feels like there’s no air. Light at sea is like life in nothingness. When indefinite gleams showed me the horizon, I immediately saw those bright seconds, when I opened my eyes after my drowning, and those watching over me in the light. Thrilled by this feeling, and wanting to challenge the water in large format, I made five trips. The result is a series of photographs and videos that take the viewer on an unprecedented maritime journey.”