CHISTOPHE DEMIGNÉ | 1st PLACE

BOXING CLUB Nº1 | turonesfilms.fr

Christophe Demigné is a French Photographer. He began his career in the cinema, first as an assistant director. Used to shootings and movie sets, he felt in love with lights and stories running from images to images. But, more than everything, he felt in love with spaces. Old castles. Little houses in little towns that everyone ignore, which are still telling a story. So, he guides his career as location scout. Fascinated by all treasures all around him. With his pictures, he simply wants those spaces to be alive again. To let their ghosts talk. And mostly, to tell story and let magical these places telling us.

MILOS NEJEZCHLEB | 2nd PLACE

STRONGER | nejmil.com

The Czech photographer Miloš Nejezchleb was born in 1978. He lives in the Czech Republic and has got three children. He has only been involved in conceptual photography since 2016; however, he has already won several prestigious international awards.

Milos is the absolute winner of the Fine Art Photography Award in London (2021), where he won the FINE ART PHOTOGRAHER OF THE YEAR title. He is the winner of the Malta International Photo Award (2020) also, among others, the winner of Czech Press Photo (2018) and a finalist in the Arte Laguna Prize art festival in Venice (2021).

The most characteristic features of his photographs are strikingly colored elements with a clear focus on the artistic side of photography. He likes to use minimalism, symmetry and elements of surrealism. Milos often chooses current social topics, which he processes as stories using photographic series. These stories are told by the people featured in his photos. He works on such series himself and ensures the entire production. He designs styling, searches for places and performs post-production.

SVETLIN YOSIFOV | 3rd PLACE

BOY FROM MURSI TRIBE | 1x.com/picsvet

Svetlin Yosifov  travel photographer from Bulgaria. I was born in Bulgaria, and I had the privilege of living in this beautiful country all my life. My employment is in a private sports club, focused on extreme sports, which involves a lot of travelling and keeps my life dynamic and interesting. Apart from this, I love travelling abroad and do this once a year for a period of two months. I always associate these trips with diving in the unknown, meeting new people and experiencing something new. My adventurous spirit is my main drive, the inner flame, that keeps me going!

Not a professional freelance photographer.I define myself as a travel-documentary-art photographer. Almost 20 years now photography has been part of my life. My passion is catching street portraits and trying to figure out my object’s character.Portrait photography is the most compelling genre for me. The impact of a single photo, comes from the emotion it reflects.My Point of interest – traditions in primal and natural places like India, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Kenya, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba and more. I  consider good photography to be much more that a snapshot or a memory, it is something that tells a story, strong enough to influence the world we live in and raise more awareness. Throughout the years my interviews and photographs have been published in many magazines and websites.

JOSE GIRL | HONORABLE MENTION

GNOSSIENNE Nº1 | josegirl.com

Jose Girl is a visual artist born in Spain and based in California since 2010. Describing her is describing her artwork; both are constant, crucial, precise, and alternative. Each image holds a notion of the sanctified, the erotic, and the aesthetic; ethereal concepts that we can access only with our imagination.

Some images are treated with a digital effect that works as if the prints were altered by the chemical process of time. In other images, bright colors, whites and blacks, accentuate the object in focus. She discovered her passion about capturing life shots with her camera when she was 15 years old and has been cultivating that passion since then.

Her work during the last 20 years has oscillated between her more personal work based on portrait photography and her work on music (music photography and music documentary/video direction) She has also published 3 photography books up to date. Her photographic work has been exhibited in Spain , Berlin, Mexico and the US.

ALEXANDRU CRISAN | HONORABLE MENTION

GRACEFUL LILY CYBER ELDERS | alexandru-crisan.com

Alexandru Crișan (b. Bucharest, Romania 1978) is a visual artist interested in the existential complementarity of objective and nonobjective forms of expression. To resolve the former, he is an architect – “but one doesn’t shoot the breeze when it comes to architecture, one comes with bricks and mortar where the breeze will shoot”… As far as the latter is to be unpacked, his “counter-professional” career in photography began in 2008; his paintings stand, for almost three decades, as the most intimate, borderline atavistic, acts of divulgence. Assuming that taxonomy is of any consequence, he is partial to fine-art photography and abstract expressionism.

The eclectic nature of his works is, therefore, a given. His photography is a direct result of compulsive visual disquisitions on impromptu portraiture, architectural equivocations, parametric manipulations, “hybrid storytelling” and evocative conservationism. Most of his long-term, open-ended photographic series – such as “MyRomania”, “Minimal White / Minimal Black”, or “Lost Highway / My Car is Your Avatar” – are meditations on loci and human perceptions. The research on and within photography gradually afforded him a surreal vision of immateriality, which he debonairly likes to describe as “tormenting several stages of a hyperrealist mise en abyme”. Since 2015, he developed quite a few “meta-projects”: “Erotoarchitecture”, “Metropoesis”, “Asylum (in nuce)”, “Impossible Architectures”, “Hortus Conclusus”, “Alex Transcends the Balkans for a Bottle of Perfume”, “Mechaniarchy” and “Shoah”, under the compelling awareness and besetting exploration of otherness and of self.