Open Doors Gallery are proud to reveal the incredible pool of talent uncovered by OD Photo Prize 2025.
Founded five years ago as a way to discover new talent and support artists emerging from the challenges of Covid, the OD Photo Prize has since grown into an international platform drawing submissions from around the world. This year’s entries revealed an extraordinary breadth of creativity and innovation. Many projects responded directly to the challenges of our time, exploring themes of tragedy, war, and change, while others offered empowering and hopeful bodies of work. Whether through critical reflection or empathetic storytelling, what unites them is a passionate pursuit of capturing the essence of the stories they seek to tell. Each offering a distinct perspective through the lens of photographic art. The standard, as ever, was exceptionally high, reaffirming the vitality and innovation alive in contemporary photography today. We hope you discover as much depth, beauty, and urgency in these works as our jury did.
With special thanks to all artists who submitted their work to us this year. Interestingly, each of the past four winners of the OD Photo Prize, submitted work to the previous edition. So, I know it’s a cliche, but there truly is always next year!.. And also to our incredible panel of judges for their time and diligence in determining this years Winner.
We hope you can join us to celebrate these talented artists listed below at the OD Photo Prize Group Exhibition. You can also sign up to our Collectors Circle to be the first to see this year’s set of affordable Time-Limited prints.
OD Photo Prize Exhibition
Exhibition Dates | 27.11.2025 — 25.01.2026
Dandi, Battersea | 4 Haydon Way • London • SW11 1YF
OD Photo Prize 2025 | Jury
Kensuke Koike | OD Artist
Daisy Bell & Bella Cramer | Cramer & Bell, Co-Founders and Directors
Sophie Parker | Photo London, Director
Myrto Steirou & João Linneu | Void Books, Founders
Olivia & Valmont | InCadaques Festival, Co-Directors
Danaé Panchaud | Centre de la photographie Genève, Director
Professor Steven Macleod | Artist & Creative Director at Metro Imaging
Tom Page | Open Doors Gallery, Founder & Director
OD Photo Prize 2025 | Winner
J.A. Young
Angels
Grand Prize Winner
J.A.Young
Angels
Artist Statement | “In ANGELS, I explore a dimension of political power that often goes ignored in contemporary, materialist Western culture: the world of the occult. Continuing my core critique of corporate, state, and religious institutions the world over, in this series, I delve deeper to examine the hidden forces that drive and manipulate human actions and events.
My work remains rooted in my established methodology: a research-driven practice that engages photography, appropriated archival materials, and intuitive inquiry to explore the complexities of contemporary existence and metaphysical realities. Using both personal and public domain images as raw materials or substrates, my process begins with an initial deconstruction of the source material through radical re-framing and structural distortion.”
— J.A. Young, 2025
J.A. Young [b.1986, USA] is a self-taught, experimental mixed media artist and photographer based in the American South. Beginning her practice as recently as 2023, her work has already gained wide recognition, standing out as a Judges Pick in the OD Photo Prize 2024, seeing her debut solo monograph shortlisted for the prestigious Les Rencontres d’Arles Author Book Award in 2025, and winning the OD Photo Prize 2025 with the latest chapter of her ongoing series, Angels. Her research-based practice draws on cultural anthropology, world mysticism, and the occult to critically engage contemporary socio-political and ecological issues, exploring how humanity has abused its own technological innovations to dominate the planet, from the cultivation of fire and the advent of agriculture to the nuclear era and the age of the internet… READ MORE
OD Photo Prize 2025 | Runner Up
Vic Bakin
Epitome
Runner Up
Vic Bakin
Epitome
Artist Statement | “While navigating the wounded land, I look for a glimmer of hope in people and places. I keep coming back to the same trinity that absorbed me — the soil, body, and warmth of a distant landscape. For me, uncertainty, fragility, and chaos, but also tenderness and hope, are the real essence of the series.
Epitome is a personal diary visual project created between 2021 and 2023. It is my attempt to reflect on the past and process the present events. It consists of portraits of male youth set against the backdrop of devastated landscapes that the Russian war brought to our home. Printed in my makeshift darkroom in the bathroom of my apartment in Kyiv, I combine the pictures I photographed recently in the de-occupied territories with the pictures from my archive of previous years.”
— Vic Bakin, 2025
Vic Bákin [b.1993, Ukraine] is a self-taught photographer based in Kyiv who has spent years documenting Ukrainian youth, with a particular focus on queer communities and subcultures. In recent work, his lens has also turned toward the ongoing war in Ukraine, tracing its impact on identity, resilience, and everyday life.
OD Photo Prize 2025 | Runner Up
Sarfo Emmanuel
Youthful Spirits
Runner Up
Sarfo Emmanuel
Youthful Spirits
Artist Statement | “Youthful Spirits is a photography series that captures the lives, dreams, and resilience of African children, especially young girls. Through powerful portraits, it explores themes of unity, identity, and social inequality, using a continuous rope as a visual metaphor. This line connects the children, symbolizing shared humanity, community, and relationships, while also representing the constraints they may face. The series challenges stereotypes, celebrates African beauty and spirit, and aims to inspire global empathy by portraying youth not just as subjects, but as symbols of hope and a more equitable future.”
— Sarfo Emmanuel, 2025
Sarfo Emmanuel Annor [b.2002, Ghana] is a young visual artist from Koforidua who uses colour to share the stories and dreams of young people from his hometown, Koforidua. At the confluence of portrait and documentary photography, he uses his smartphone/camera to revive the art of portraiture by capturing colourful images of the local youth, translating the dynamic story of contemporary Africa. Annor hopes his work can tell a beautiful African story while providing therapy for his audience. In his own words: “I use colour as a language for emotions. I use these vibrant colours in my works to act as a colour therapy for myself and hopefully for my audience too.”
2025 Judge’s Picks
Each year our panel is able to choose just one artist each, outside of voting for the Grand Prize Winner and two Runners-Up, whose project really stood out to them and deserves a special mention. This year’s Picks are listed below and will be exhibited online & at our group exhibition in London.
Uta Genilke
How To Fly
“The work exudes a refined, mature sensibility. At first glance, it may appear painterly, yet its photographic foundation keeps it grounded, creating a compelling bridge between imagination and reality.”
— Kensuke Koike
How To Fly tells the story of the artist’s father, Sigi, who worked for Pan American World Airways for more than three decades. Growing up in modest circumstances in Hamburg, he found recognition and purpose as an aircraft mechanic with Pan Am, bringing fragments of the golden age of aviation into his family’s everyday life. After his death in 2015, the artist began collecting photographs, manuals, and letters to create a book that traces his life, his dreams, and the lasting imprint of flight on their shared history.
Selected by Kensuke Koike
OD Artist
Cinzia Laliscia
Finalmente posso andare
“Cinzia Laliscia’s photographs immediately stand out for their narrative depth. Each image feels like a fragment of a larger story…her photographs unfold like whispered stories, quiet yet powerful in the way they hold our attention.”
— Cramer & Bell
Finalmente posso andare [Finally, I can go] traces the artist’s journey through grief after losing her grandmother and aunt during Italy’s first COVID-19 lockdown, when restrictions prevented any final goodbyes. Turning to photography, she created a visual diary that reconnected her with nature and the landscapes of her childhood, offering a language for mourning. Through these dreamlike geographies—united by light—she continues to navigate absence, transforming it into a quiet space of remembrance and renewal.
Selected by Daisy Bell & Bella Cramer
Cramer & Bell, co-founders
Justus de Rode
Views of Nature
“It’s not often you come cross a young artist who exudes such maturity. Not only do I find the process and the body of work compelling, but the execution and the attention to detail of the final artworks is outstanding. Definitely an artist that has a bright future in my view.”
— Tom Page
In his series Views of Nature (2024–present), De Rode draws on Alexander von Humboldt’s Ansichten der Natur (1808) to explore the interplay between rational thought and emotional experience in perception. Working with cyanotypes—historically used for botanical documentation—he tones the prints with natural tannins, giving them an earthy quality that evokes both science and mysticism. The series reflects on Humboldt’s call for sensibility, suggesting it as a counter to modern alienation.
Open Doors Gallery now represents the artist in the UK.
Selected by Tom Page
Director & founder, Open Doors Gallery
Sarah Sullivan
Hairouna
“With Hairouna, Sarah Jade Sullivan offers a nuanced and insightful portrait of a younger generation entangled in a complex colonial legacy impacting their lives in many tangible ways, without ever losing the individuality of the persons she depicts or the complexity of their story.”
— Danaé Panchaud
This project examines the lives of young people in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a nation formally independent since 1979 but still shaped by colonial legacies. Through photography, interviews, and archival engagement, the artist explores how Vincentians aged 18 to 30 navigate identity, cultural heritage, inequality, and the tension between staying and migrating abroad. Centered on everyday life and personal voices, the work offers a nuanced perspective that highlights both resilience and struggle, challenging reductive postcolonial narratives.
Selected by Danaé Panchaud
Director, Centre de la photographie Genève
Jaclyn Wright
High Visibility (Blaze Orange)
“I was drawn to the multi-disciplinary aspects of Jaclyn’s practice in particular the series High Visibility (Blaze Orange) which explores challenging topics centring on land politics, environmental issues and ecological change impacted on by human activity… On one level the work is ambiguous, playful, and beautifully presented. On another is exposes the dark underbelly of environmental abuses, played out against misconceived and naive beliefs in freedom and nativism.”
— Professor Steven Macleod
This series uses debris from improvised gun ranges in Utah’s West Desert to explore the ecological and cultural legacies of settler colonialism and late capitalism. Centered on the blaze orange clay pigeons scattered across ancestral Goshute land, the work reflects on how photography codifies land use and exposes the tensions between nature, bureaucracy, and fantasies of freedom.
Selected by Professor Steven Macleod
Artist & Creative Director at Metro Imaging
Hanna Lautreamont
The meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella
This series of photogravures and silver gelatin prints traces the arc of hand-crafted image-making, from the alchemy of light on film to the tactile depth of the final print. Figures, objects, and garments emerge in surreal compositions that blur reverie and performance, evoking the disquieting beauty of chance encounters and dreamlike juxtapositions. Each frame offering suspended moments that invite the viewer to wander through mystery, intimacy, and impossibility.
Born in eastern Ukraine in 1991. I worked as a lecturer in Western literature at the university for three years before deciding to follow a childhood dream and lifelong hobby – photography. Due to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 I relocated to London.
InCadaques Award | Solo Exhibition at InCadaques Photo Festival 2025
Selected by Olivia & Valmont
Directors & Co-founders, InCadaques Photo Festival
Jeremy Chih-Hao Chuang
Ephemeral Intimacy
“Chih-Hao Chuang’s work is intimate, brave, complex and vulnerable. Such a contemporary topic, explored in a unique way.”
— VOID BOOKS
Ephemeral Intimacy explores the blurred boundaries of connection on dating apps and the search for love through the lens of self-discovery. As a Southeast Asian navigating societal expectations of heteronormativity, the artist photographs men met online in intimate, domestic settings, revealing both vulnerability and power. The series confronts questions of race, desire, and the complexities of contemporary dating culture, particularly within a Western context.
Selected by Olivia & Valmont
Directors & Co-founders, InCadaques Photo Festival
Aaryan Sinha
Namaste or Whatever
“Photography was introduced to India by the British in the mid-1850s, serving as a tool to catalog ethnicities, communities, and landscapes. This process reduced India to an exotic spectacle, framing it through the lens of Western desires and power. Historically, the term “Indian Photography” often referred to images of India created by outsiders, continuing a fraught dialogue between India and the West. The British gaze isolated subjects from the web of meanings they were embedded in, robbing them of their depth and spirit.”
— Aaryan Sinha
Namaste or Whatever is a visual research project that examines the entangled history of India, the West, and photography, a medium long used to exoticize, catalog, and control. Confronting both colonial archives and his own practice, the artist reflects on how Western narratives shape not only global perceptions of India but also the way he has learned to see and represent his homeland. Through this work, he seeks to dismantle inherited clichés and foster a more nuanced understanding of Indian identity in a global context.
Selected by Sophie Parker
Director, Photo London Fair
Full Shortlist
We are delighted to reveal the full list of artists that make up this year’s Shortlist including the artists named above. All of these photographic artists caught the attention of our panel with their powerful imagery and their unique approaches to storytelling. Each of these artists are invited to participate in our online exhibition that opens in November and the exhibition in London. Priced affordably, this annual exhibition has become the perfect opportunity to collect work by the best emerging artists.
One more name will be added to this list as part of the public vote hosted on our Discovery account in the coming weeks. As well as sharing more info on each of these projects in the coming weeks.
Ci Demi
Ben Osborne
Jason Hendardy
Madeline Cass
Justus de Rode
Sarfo Emmanuel
Jaclyn Wright
J.A. Young
Cinzia Laliscia
Uta Genilke
Ayline Olukman
Vic Bakin
Aaryan Sinha
Zoe Louise Montgomery
Hanna Lautreamont
Maria Siorba
Jeremy Chih-Hao Chuang
Pie Aerts
Florence Goupil
Sarah Sullivan
At least one more artist will join the shortlisted exhibitors through the AJ Page Public Vote Award, coming soon. We’ll be sharing a selection of standout single images from this year’s submissions, and you’ll be able to vote for your favourites by commenting on the Instagram post.
Congratulations to everyone who submitted work to OD Photo Prize 2025. The standard was extremely high. We look forward to seeing new iterations and projects from you next year.
Sign up to our Newsletter for updates on future exhibitions as well as news from our roster of artists.
Header Images
J.A. Young | From Angels
Jaclyn Wright | From High Visibility (Blaze Orange)
Jason Hendardy | From Personal Technologies
