Announcing 38 Award-Winning Black & White Photographers!

There is a sense of mystery within these images that is created both by the scale and the limited context within the landscape. They are full of texture but devoid of color, leaving a great sense of unknown. The images in Caldera by Andrei Bortnikau pique my curiosity. There is certainly an implied narrative within each image as told by the photographer, and for me, it seems that each narrative takes further shape in what the viewer brings to it. The images might evoke a nostalgic memory or tell a new story to each person who encounters them.

In the realm of contemporary art, Jennifer Baron’s Frozen August stands out as a profound exploration of grief, a theme that is both deeply personal and universally resonant. This project gains its importance from its ability to articulate the ineffable aspects of human experience, notably the complex process of mourning. By channeling her bereavement into a visual form, Baron not only navigates her own path through sorrow but also extends a hand to those grappling with their own losses.

The societal value of such work lies in its capacity to foster empathy and communal healing. Art has long been a medium for processing collective grief—public memorials and war photography are testament to this—and Frozen August contributes to this tradition by providing a space for shared emotional experiences. Baron’s choice of combining various media, such as photography and sketches, allows for a multifaceted dialogue between the work and its audience, enabling a cathartic interaction that transcends the limitations of verbal communication.

Baron’s work captures the beauty inherent in the human condition, even at its most vulnerable. The stark contrasts of light and shadow in her images mirror the oscillating states of hope and despair that characterize mourning. The intimacy of the project is further heightened by its autobiographical nature, as it invites viewers into the artist’s inner sanctum, laying bare the scars of her heartache.

Historically, the project echoes the sentimentality and raw emotion found in the early 20th-century pictorialist photography, where the likes of Julia Margaret Cameron and Edward Steichen used soft focus and creative printing techniques to evoke mood and feeling. Like these pioneers, Baron employs abstraction and intimate detail to convey complex emotional states. While the visual style is distinct, her work also resonates with the contemporary candid and intimate narratives found in the photography of Sally Mann and Nan Goldin, who document their private lives to powerful, sometimes controversial effect.

Frozen August is a testament to the enduring power of art to articulate the depths of human emotion, commemorate our losses, and aid us in a journey towards acceptance and peace. The project is an important cultural artifact, not just because of its aesthetic quality but also because it invites us to connect more deeply to our own humanity.

I picked Russell Monk's work as my juror's pick because the images are evocative, mysterious, and surprising. The formality and careful composition in each frame blurs the line between documentary and fine art and makes me think of how many stories and myths are layered into each image.

The photographs of Igor Malijevský give me pause, and makes me stop to look a bit more carefully at how the war in Ukraine is disrupting everyday life for ordinary people in countless ways. It’s not sensational, it’s not shocking, but it’s real. It takes hold of the qualities that only black-and-white can give you, and it presents this view of people who quietly persevere and carry on in the face of adversity. In our age of always-on media, and the immediacy of smartphone reporting, these traditional images break through the clutter and remind us of the continuous, endless sacrifices required to get through day after day in Ukraine.

Serinah Williams’ work is a captivating exercise that seeks to reveals the effects of truth, power and rights. The works raise important questions about the often-silenced histories of communities like Williams’. What histories are lost? What geographies are changed? For me, this series confronts the continued repercussions of the legacies of colonial violences that still prevail and unfold today.

Imagination that springs out of the ordinary and mundane attracts me. In this series The Peak by Jingyu Wu this can be read as a goal. The images explore mankind’s omnipresent challenge to close the gap between man and nature. Aside from my own reading, the formal approach is unassuming, and the black and white images effectively present Jingyu’s ideas and observations about the nature that exists right in front of his eyes.

Form and content are inextricably intertwined in Nicola Ókin Frioli’s powerful photographs of the struggle of indigenous Amazonians in Ecuador to protect their land, water, and way of life from further destruction by extractive industries. Each exquisitely structured composition, each choice of warm or cool black-and-white tonalities, conveys an emotional aspect of the narrative: conflict, curiosity, play, pollution, despair, pride, and tenderness. Frioli’s nuanced telling of this story conveys the complexity of these indigenous cultures, which needed to blend aspects of modernity into their traditional ways of life in order to survive.