Former LensCulture Award winners share their best creative advice as well as tips for advancing your career as a portrait-maker and photographer. The first in a two-part series.

For four years, Yulia Skogoreva has been documenting female sumo wrestlers fighting for recognition in a sport from which they are banned, following the story of Nana—a young sumo wrestler who dreams of going pro.

Working in black and white, Jon Feinstein zeroes in on the forms of trees and weedy plants, drawing the eye to details, which act as mirrors for the photographer’s grief and joy during a difficult period of family life.

Calling upon lost ancestral traditions in his black and white photographs, Olivier Khouadiani enlists the children of Amanikro, a village in Côte d’Ivoire, to connect past and present in the face of the future.

A multi-layered approach to visual storytelling — a conversation, a portrait, and a detail of a personal object or a place — captures the shared experiences of Chinese citizens coping with isolation while abroad during the Covid lockdown.

Using alternative photographic processes, Mehrdad Mirzaie reinterprets archival images to question how photographs influence our perception of history and shape our vision of the future.

Here are 15 of LensCulture’s most popular highlights from 2023 — a mix of new discoveries, photobook reviews, interviews, essays, exhibitions and visual stories.

Juxtaposing intimate self-portraits with medical scans, collages and images of oddly shaped vegetables, Mayumi Suzuki explores her experience of fertility treatment—an issue rarely discussed in Japanese society.

Charles Lee hopes to confront prejudices in American mythology and give viewers a more balanced representation of US history
The post Charles Lee brings Black cowboys to SF Camerawork appeared first on 1854 Photography.

Informed by their day job as a social worker, Marley Starskey Butler traces their own complex upbringing through moving-image, text and photographs
The post When social work and art-making go hand in hand appeared first on 1854 Photography.

In New Moons, Italian artist Ada Marino channels her grandmother’s strength in a captivating vision of the future
The post ‘My beacon of light for anyone who has felt the weight of oppression’: A ghostly response to women’s struggle appeared first on 1854 Photography.

Women’s nipples are censored online while men’s are not, a state of control that has worrying repercussions for artists and marginalised groups
The post How artists are fighting Instagram’s nipple censorship appeared first on 1854 Photography.

From time-honoured rituals, to intimate homes and tight-knit communities, this year’s winning images showcase the diverse faces, traditions and stories that define Britain today
The post Portrait of Britain Vol. 6 winners: Capturing the tapestry of life in Britain appeared first on 1854 Photography.

The German-born, Australia-based photographer talks through his project highlighting our paradoxical relationships with nature today
The post Johannes Reinhart on bringing Sapiland to Indian Photo Festival appeared first on 1854 Photography.

Thirteen image-makers feature in Grafting, a special showcase for the Islington fair’s Photo50 section
The post Arts and grafts: Revolv Collective bring landscape to London Art Fair appeared first on 1854 Photography.

Heavily influenced by the Vietnam War, An-My Lê probes the fears and fictions behind our militarised era. This major solo show sees her loop history into new cycles, finds Ravi Ghosh
The post An-My Lê’s war and peace appeared first on 1854 Photography.

The post Desert, Fire, Flood by Zied Ben Romdhane appeared first on Magnum Photos.

The post Peter van Agtmael: A Decade of Documenting Israel and Palestine appeared first on Magnum Photos.

The post Three Voices From Palestine Curated by Myriam Boulos appeared first on Magnum Photos.

The post From the Archive: Israel and Palestine appeared first on Magnum Photos.

The post Moises Saman Documents the Effects of Devastating Floods in Libya appeared first on Magnum Photos.

The post Nanna Heitmann’s Photographs of Life in Russia During Wartime appeared first on Magnum Photos.

The post Magnum Welcomes Four New Members appeared first on Magnum Photos.

The post 100 Photos for Press Freedom by Abbas appeared first on Magnum Photos.

My initial response to the massive swell of attention that cryptocurrency received in 2021, and more specifically to the non-fungible token (NFT) hysteria that gripped so much of cultural discourse online and in the press, was a dismissive roll of the eyes. Admittedly, what I was reacting to most were the claims that cryptocurrency was […]

The introduction of computers in the workplace well prefigures the advent of the internet. Before the release of the PC in the 80’s, computers were mostly vast, immovable machines which by today’s standards had relatively low processing power. Located in air-conditioned comms rooms, various forms of cabling sprawled out from them into patch cabinets resembling […]

Humans leave traces of their presence almost everywhere they inhabit in the built environment. It’s difficult for humans not to leave a mark, as they have a tendency to leave a marker of their passing, however involuntary or intended. This is partly due to how we view our world and its obligations to suit our […]

  The work of Toshio Shibata is not easy to categorize by genre. The overriding and extended principle featured in the work is that of a type of industrial architectural photography. This is, in turn, echoed by a nod to ecological considerations of the landscape. The photographs feel monumental and isolated. People do not enter […]

There is a strange and perplexing photograph in Curran Hatleberg’s photobook, River’s Dream (TBW, 2022), which shows a man with a large swarm of bees attached to his face and body. The image is bewildering. The man is sitting down in a chair, with no protective gear, and his eyes are closed. His hands are […]

Keisha Scarville and I spoke via email to discuss her new book lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound (MACK, 2023), which was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo First PhotoBook Award.  The book is constructed with images from several bodies of work over the past 20 years, each of which in its own way investigates […]

I did not want to use Bladerunner as an analogy for this photobook simply because the title implies an association. I find nothing immediate in the book that relates the film to Uta’s miasmatic and crepuscular photographs. However, I could marginally make that leap if I wanted to chalk the images up to having a […]

Contemporary Slovenian photography, or at least the selected fragment of it was presented to the domestic public in another exhibition of the Croatian Photographic Union, this time held in KlovićeviDvori. The curator, Sandra KrižićBoban moves the focus from the domestic art scene to the neighboring scene, the Slovenian scene, creating a collaboration with Gallery Fotografija…

In 1929, German photographer August Sander (1876-1964) published a book with sixty photographs portraying the people of his time. In genre terms, one might call these photographs portraits which either show individual persons, or several of them set in the same environment. It is clear that each person is aware that he / she is…

She began at this time to describe landscape as if anything she saw was a natural phenomenon, a thing existent in itself, and she found it, this exercise, very interesting and it finally led her to the later series of Operas and Plays. I am trying to be as commonplace as I can be, she used to…

Media-logged journey as transcendence of “the imminent conditions of consciousness” and the naïve art-phenomenology of “reality” Đukić versus Altamira and On Kawara Assuming reality is real, its media-trace/manifestation are also real. The significance of the media-projected reality uncovers itself through strengthening the awareness of necessity to transcend the realistic ideology frame. It is exactly this…

Where does the need to build an identity by reconstructing a family history come from? What is it in the past that is so strong that we could possibly rely on in an attempt to define our own existence?  Are we looking for an explanation? For reasons? Justification?  Or are we simply denying our own…

Davor takes interest in the fringe fields of light. What does he find in them? Fringe frequencies? But there is no such a thing, cause frequencies always move on, metamorphosing from visible to invisible, from light to sound and, further down to the oscillations that make up the universe. The given possibilities of our perceptions…