Charged with mystery: LensCultures most artistic images in pictures | Art and design

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‘Charged with mystery’: LensCulture’s most artistic images – in pictures

From communist cars to time-travelling children, the LensCulture Art photography awards 2022 features 39 artists pushing the boundaries of the medium

Main image: Fawn over it … Adolescence by Graziano Panfili. Photograph: Graziano Panfili

Thu 17 Feb 2022 02.00 EST Last modified on Wed 19 Oct 2022 10.06 EDT

  • Chukwudi Onwumere: Road Runners, 1st place, series

    ‘Street hawking is a common source of livelihood for many youths who are bent on working hard to eke out a living despite their circumstances. What drew my attention to them is the synchronisation in what they sell, the beautiful colour combinations in what they wear, and how they can roam in groups. I painted them in a different light by using colours and shadows to represent desire and hope for the future. They are the unseen beauty on my impossible streets.’ You can see more from the LensCulture Art photography award winners here

  • Mauro Corinti: Cose Certe (Certain Things), jurors’ pick

    Jim Casper, editor-in-chief of LensCulture: ‘Mauro Corinti’s meticulous photographs seduce me with their quality of light, with their enigmatic props and unlikely situations. Every bit of every photograph seems charged with a sense of mystery, waiting to be revealed’

  • Louis Gaillard: Octopus, finalist

    Gaillard’s image depicting the culinary preparation of an octopus at Chez Isolé, Montreuil

  • Keigo Nakamura: Not Lockdown in Tokyo City, 1st place, single image

    ‘An old gentleman walking in the morning mist who understands that, with social distance and basic hygiene, we don’t have to be afraid to go out’

  • Marina Eng: Sonya, 3rd place, single image

    ‘This photo of my 10-year-old daughter Sonya was inspired by the art of George Spencer Watson. It was a “time machine” experiment for us. We tried to imagine how a modern girl from the 21st century would feel in the shoes of her possible great-grandmother from 100 years ago’

  • Charlie Wetzel: Me and This Place, 2nd place, single image

    ‘Me and This Place is the first instalment of a lifelong photo essay that tracks my medical gender affirmation and ageing in the context of North Cascades National Park. As this essay grows, it will illuminate how one body and one piece of land morph over time’

  • Juliana Holck: In My Dreams, finalist

    ‘There are no moments on my own as a mother of three. I feel the urge of my kids to make eye contact all the time. I don’t want to, so I turn off. Suddenly, I’m immersed in my dreams. They are there, but they are also not. It is hard to know in which world I want to stay more: the unreal dreams, full of textures, suspended movement, crooked bodies and melancholic places; or the real life, with my kids staring piercingly at me, with this penetrating gaze that communicates, that make the viewer uncomfortable but, at the same time, eager to look back’

  • Shelbie Dimond: Somewhere Between Psychosis & Neurosis, finalist

    Shelbie began taking self-portraits when she was removed from high school due to her family’s religious beliefs (they are fourth-generation fundamentalist Jehovah’s Witnesses). She left in 2010 and was subsequently excommunicated by her family, friends and the only community she ever knew. It wasn’t until 2017 – when Shelbie was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and spent a month in a residential treatment centre – that she realised she had been photographing her illness and excommunication all along

  • Wei Chih Wang: 11/12 Underwater, finalist

    A free-diver spits out the air and dives, climbing on the underwater cliff with refracted light as the background, descending to almost 30 metres

  • Ruth Lauer Manenti: Excerpts, 2nd place, series

    ‘I live in a house that was built in 1940 in the Catskill Mountains. When we bought our house no one else wanted it. It doesn’t have a garage, a paved driveway, more than one bath or bedroom. I know that I will not live in this house for ever. The house will hopefully outlive me, but I wonder if a part of me will outlive the house. Somehow, with the passing of my parents, the need for a home I love feels more important. While creating this work, I had the sense that all the people in my life, still here or not, live with me in my house’

  • Bongani Tshabalala: Inner Journey, finalist

    ‘My personal experiences influenced me to create this work. I found myself plagued by an intense (unwarranted) fear and doubt over my longstanding sexual orientation as a man, a concept recently described as homosexual obsessive compulsive disorder (HOCD). I intentionally placed myself in the middle of the photograph to emphasise my presence. The lack of emotion depicts absence of hope and happiness, and an emotional disconnect from the rest of the world’

  • Tatiana Lopez: In Between Dreams the Forest Echoes the Song of the Burning Anaconda, 3rd place, series

    ‘Sapara people’s struggles have roots in the illegal extraction of fossil fuels. Women fear their ancestral knowledge disappears due to the problematic idea that concedes human identity as “outside” of nature. These cyanotypes were the result of my initial ethnographic research conducted with Sapara women in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and are part of a long-term project that explores body-territory relations. The blue represents the bodily waters. The red string highlights the ancestral lineage’

  • Patty Carroll: Anonymous Women – Domestic Demise, finalist

    ‘I create imaginary, humorous worlds in the studio (on a full-size “stage set”) that critique and satirise claustrophobic expectations of domestic perfection. All of the narrative still-life photographs are imagined interior spaces of rooms filled with deecor and objects, engulfing a lone figure of a woman, camouflaged, often with only bits of her visible. She is both a victim of her obsessions, activities and circumstances as well as the invisible creator of such; both satisfying and problematic, pathetic and humorous’

  • Takashi Nakazawa: Cap Clouds, Mt Fuji, finalist

    Sometimes mysterious clouds appear on Mount Fuji. The shape of the cloud varies from disk to cap to hair ... and sometimes it appears in the form of a dragon, snake or phoenix

  • Graziano Panfili: Adolescence, finalist

    ‘Adolescence represents the transition from childhood to adulthood. Many think it is the most beautiful age. Perhaps it is true, but it is full of doubts and many difficulties. It is always too small and never big enough. My photographic research on adolescence and pre-adolescence began with my son whom I follow in his doubts and in his choices, through the icon of the “young fawn”’

  • Horaţiu Sava: Dacia & Chauffeur, finalist

    ‘During the communist period in Romania, the Dacia 1300 was more or less the only car you could buy. My parents had several Dacias. With this series, I tried to revive the memories of a childhood utopian time, where the car didn’t matter – what mattered was where you drove it, which friends you visited. Twenty years after the fall of communism, this vehicle is still present on Romania’s roads. But it is no longer a sign of equality, but of inequality. It is the car of the poor. I wanted to show my respect and sympathy for these people’
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