This year’s AJ Page Award celebrates outstanding single images from the artists who narrowly missed the shortlist for the OD Photo Prize. While the OD Prize focuses on broader photography projects, the AJ Page Award spotlights individual images with impactful narratives, unique perspectives, and artistic excellence.
The 9 selected images are showcased on the @odtakeovers Instagram account, where everyone is invited to vote by commenting with the corresponding number of their favorite image. These votes will help determine which artist earns a place in the end-of-year exhibition and print sale at Dandi in Battersea this December.
How to Vote
Visit the @odtakeovers Instagram post featuring the AJ Page Award images.
Comment with the number of your favorite image on the post to cast your vote.
Voting starts 14 November, from 4pm GMT
Yang Su | Birds, the Flowers, and Them
Birds, the Flowers, and Them is a photographic project documenting the lives of Chinese immigrants in Switzerland, blending black-and-white landscapes and portraits to reflect their experiences. The photographer, also an immigrant from China, captures the complexities of identity, isolation, and cultural adaptation, especially intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Through his journey, he discovered diverse personal stories: some immigrants arrived as students, others for work, and many have established families, all grappling with the question of “home” in a foreign land. Drawing parallels to migratory birds and dandelions, the project explores themes of belonging and adaptation, using red—a symbolic color for China and Switzerland—as a visual thread. Through intimate indoor settings, the photographs reveal the nuanced realities of these individuals’ lives in their adopted country.
Vote Here | Using number 3 in the comments
Claudia Fuggetti | Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis captures the transformative period we are currently experiencing, emphasising humanity’s shifting relationship with nature. Referencing ecological philosopher David Abram, the project explores an “ecological crisis” as a crisis of perception, where humanity has lost its sensory connection to nature’s vitality. Through photographs infused with artificial colors, the project evokes life’s resilience in the face of environmental degradation, while also critiquing resource exploitation. These colors symbolize Earth’s regenerative potential, suggesting nature’s adaptive power in the Anthropocene. Human figures appear contemplative, aiming to reconnect with the natural world and recognise its living, ever-evolving essence.
Vote Here | Using number 7 in the comments
Maria Denise Dessimoz | The Inevitable anguish of Desire
The Inevitable Anguish of Desire is an ongoing visual diary that captures the artist’s journey of healing from intense, unfulfilled desires impacting her mental health. Beginning in October 2022, the project uses images as a means of processing and transforming overwhelming emotions. By creating visual representations of her feelings, the artist achieves catharsis and self-acceptance. Experimenting with digital and analog photography, computer work, and phone snapshots, she produces spontaneous and staged images, some inspired by REM sleep. This evolving process illustrates how pain, though challenging, can become a source of awareness and fulfillment, transforming anguish into clarity.
Vote Here | Using number 1 in the comments
Riti Sengupta | Things I can’t say out loud
Things I Can’t Say Out Loud is an introspective project by Riti Sengupta, born from her experience of moving back in with her parents during the pandemic. Through conversations with her mother, Sengupta examines how patriarchal structures shape women’s roles within the family. Referred to as “kitchen conversations,” these exchanges reveal a stark contrast between women’s lives before and after marriage and motherhood—a disparity unacknowledged in family archives. Sengupta’s work seeks to capture the intangible burdens placed on women through subtle, everyday gestures and the romanticized expectation of unconditional giving. By transforming these dialogues into collaborative performances, Sengupta and her mother explore the silent oppressions within the family structure, challenging the invisibility of domestic labor and the myth of the idyllic family.
Vote Here | Using number 8 in the comments
Lia Rochas-Paris | Zeitgeist
The series Zeitgeist, started in early July, explores the dialogue between classical and modern aesthetics by juxtaposing the sculpted drapery of antique and Renaissance art with vibrant veils from contemporary magazines. By contrasting colored elements with black-and-white images and using old paper from 1930s Louvre catalogs alongside glossy magazine paper, the work symbolizes the transmission of cultural heritage across time. Curtains serve as a metaphor for what is revealed and concealed, with each collage blending front and back views to echo this theme. The title Zeitgeist, meaning “spirit of time,” reflects how past influences shape the present, creating remnants that will inform the future.
Vote Here | Using number 4 in the comments
Tomasz Jan Kawecki | In Praise of Shadow
In Dark Ecology, Timothy Morton encourages embracing darkness as a way to confront the Anthropocene’s destructive narrative and envision a new future. Artist Tomasz Kawecki’s work echoes this idea, beginning with the Ouroboros—a symbol of humanity’s complex ties to the unsettling and monstrous. He suggests that our suppressed ecological anxieties, like weeds breaking through pavement, persist and resist human control. Kawecki leads viewers through abandoned, post-human spaces—mines, ruins—where life reasserts itself, thriving independently of human influence and unsettling our anthropocentric worldview. In this symbolic descent into “black water,” filled with coal, plastic, and fungi, Kawecki presents Lovecraftian hybrids that humankind has created, urging us to confront these neglected parts of our ecological reality and integrate them into our world.
Vote Here | Using number 9 in the comments
Tomoko Nagakawa | I taste the Blacklight
This work grapples with memory’s fragility and the uncertainty of time, inspired by witnessing a family’s aging. A phone call—“Your mother is not well”—unearths grief, disrupting the expectation that such loss belongs to a distant future. The familiar world persists, but in altered form, slipping into obscurity. The artist draws these memories from the shadows, bringing them into focus one by one, realizing a profound role reversal: once guided by family, they now lead loved ones through uncharted waters. Searching for stability in fleeting moments, sounds, and sensations, the artist longs to reclaim what is lost, though haunted by a deep yearning for the past.
Vote Here | Using number 2 in the comments
Andrea Agostini | Nòstos (Homecoming)
This photographic series revisits the landscapes of the artist’s childhood, transformed by imagination into a tapestry of memory and place. Growing up in a small Italian village he once called “nowhereland,” the artist saw it as stagnant and devoid of interest. After leaving at 18, the pandemic brought him back, confronting him with a past he had tried to forget. Wandering through familiar countryside, farms, and waterways, he set out to reconcile with his memories, rediscovering beauty that once felt invisible. These images blend nostalgia and newfound appreciation, illuminating the places and ghosts of his past—not as menacing, but as enduring parts of his story.
Vote Here | Using number 6 in the comments
Emily June Smith | A Dissonant Past Unmasked
A Dissonant Past Unmasked is a photographic series that revisits the artist’s difficult childhood, marked by ADHD, Autism, and societal stigma. Re-enacting scenes from her family’s life, the project explores private struggles and alienation within a suburban setting. Facing isolation and misunderstanding, the artist learned to “mask” her true self, hiding behind imaginary facades to fit in. By restaging moments of dissonance, he seeks catharsis and aims to reclaim her narrative, addressing how society often sidelines disability, leaving those affected without a voice. Through these images, she advocates for visibility and challenges the societal norms that obscure the complexities of living with a disability.
Vote Here | Using number 5 in the comments
Join us in early December for the OD Photo Prize group exhibition where one of the artists move will join 19 other artists from OD Photo Prize 2024. Details below.
Opening Night
Thursday 5th December | 6—9pm
Exhibition dates
05.12.2024 — 05.01.2025
Dandi, Battersea
4 Haydon Way • London • SW11 1YF
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