Bowled over: Photo London x Nikon best emerging photographers – in pictures
From an AI that ‘creates’ family photos to images printed on glass – and then broken – these artists nominated for this year’s prize use radical methods to achieve groundbreaking results
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Charlie Tallott: The Only Mistake, 2024 (Winner)
Charlie Tallott is the Photo London x Nikon Emerging Photographer of the Year. Tallott’s work centres around delving into the profound social and psychological impacts of deindustrialisation through photography. He captures the interiors of structures that have become nearly obsolete since the decline of industry, including social clubs, tradesmen’s homes and abandoned landscapes once bustling with activity. Through his lens, he reveals how these spaces serve as poignant reflections of a community whose sense of purpose has been stripped awayPhotograph: New Dimension
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Charlie Tallott: Don’t Go Where I Can’t Find You, 2023 (Winner)
His series At Least Until the World Stops Going Round is a body of work produced following a suicide attempt. The work acts as a euphoric counterbalance to Tallott’s real life experience at the time. He says: ‘When you experience a really low point, photography [can become] a vessel to move from it. Your eyes can go and just live somewhere else, a different world.’ Photo London runs from 16-19 May 2024 at Somerset House, LondonPhotograph: New Dimension
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Sander Coers: Post No 57, 2023
Sander Coers’ latest series, Post, explores the intersection of constructed memories and perceptions of masculinity in visual culture through the use of AI-generated imagery. The artist aims to investigate the role of photography in shaping our perceptions of the past and question its authenticity in the age of digital manipulation.Photograph: Sander Coers/Open Doors Gallery
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Sander Coers: Post No 6, 2023
Sander Coers explains: ‘I trained an AI bot to expand my family history based on my grandparents’ photo albums ranging from the 1940s to the 90s. These AI-generated images evoke similar elements found in my grandparents’ albums — landscapes, clothing and colours from that time. However, everything is completely false. By printing the images on plywood, I create a physical representation of the constructed memories that we hold on to. They become tangible objects that reflect the fragility of our memories and the impact they have on our present’Photograph: Sander Coers - Open Doors Gallery
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Aisha Seriki: Orí Inú, 2024
Aisha Olamide Seriki (born in 1998) is a Nigerian multi-disciplinary artist based in London, specialising in fine art photography and sculpture. Seriki works from a canon of personal histories which splice contemporary realities. Cosmological systems such as Yoruba spiritual tradition have informed the multisensory approach Seriki takes towards documentation, communication and creation. Through optics and trickery, she challenges the rigid imagination of self, creating space in the archive for a wider definitionPhotograph: Doyle Wham
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Aisha Seriki: Orí Inú, 2024
By using optical illusions and tricks, Orí Inú questions the camera’s historic association as a vessel of truth, which challenges colonial understandings of the black bodyPhotograph: Doyle Wham
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Caroline Tompkins: Bedfellow, 2022
Bedfellow is about the intrinsic relationship between women, sex and fear. Caroline Tompkins’ photographic series explores the primal vulnerability and power dynamics inherent in gender constructsPhotograph: Palm Studios
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Caroline Tompkins: Bedfellow, 2022
Tompkins’ personal experience as a woman who both desires and fears men informs her use of the heterosexual ‘female gaze’ to subvert the objectification of women in western art. The photographer also highlights the power dynamic at play, with her in control of the images but still experiencing inferiority as a woman in a world where women are forced to hold two opposing truths — to explore their sexual desires while navigating an inherited fear of menPhotograph: Palm Studios
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Ines d’Orey: Radoje Domanović Elementary School, 2021
Much of Inês d’Orey’s artistic work focuses on the transformation of the heritage identity of the contemporary city, where the architectural object presents itself as a subject of memory, changing its meanings over timePhotograph: Salgadeiras Arte Contemporânea
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Ines d’Orey: Beograd Concrete #24.4, 2021
Inês d’Orey’s light boxes explore the subject of skin as an ‘impression’, but also as a territoryPhotograph: Salgadeiras Arte Contemporânea
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Johnny Mae Hauser: Bildnis 75, 2024
Johnny Mae Hauser presents a collection of all new works from her ongoing series Bildnis, a German term used primarily in the context of painting. It refers to a portrait, including self-portraits. In the case of Bildnis it can be seen as both. The project began in January 2021 and grew out of a question of self-identity, particularly during a significant life transition. ‘The series started with expressing my own emotional evolution towards certain personal objects and evolved towards reflections on a more universal impermanence’Photograph: Homecoming gallery
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Lise Johansson: Absence, 2019
The starting point for Lise Johansson’s artistic practice is to create a sense of a distorted reality, existing at the borderland between the conscious and the unconscious. Working around the themes of identity and belonging, Johansson’s images often take their departure from physical miniatures of landscapes and architectural spaces, which become building blocks in a studio-based post-production process that merges different photographic elements into final compositions depicting worlds of dreams and emotions, association and longingPhotograph: Lise Johansson
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Isabelle Young: Venice Interior III, 2021
Isabelle Young blends a keen eye for detail and perspective with a poetic narrative ability. She says: ‘I like the details. The details say much more than wide shots. The framing and compositions do not speak of the whole but bow down before quieter moments. I often think of my work alongside the unreliable literary narrator who is also God within the world I created. My photographs, akin to the narrator, may appear to be all knowing but they are certainly not all telling’Photograph: Galerie Fabian Lang
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Isabelle Young: Ocean Space, October 2021
Colours come together as if in a masterful painting – sometimes rich and bold, sometimes idiosyncratic and warm and gentle. The architectural form is central to the artist’s work, and the act of devotion is always present — not in the religious sense, but in Young’s approach to the subjects she depicts. There is mystery in what has been captured, and an incredible sense of presence, as if the actors in a melodrama have just vacated the framePhotograph: Galerie Fabian Lang
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Ali Tahayori: Archival Longing, 2024
Raised in the oppressively homophobic climate of 1980s Iran, Tahayori assumed the identity of an outsider, further compounded by his migration to Australia in 2007. Tahayori’s interdisciplinary practice ranges from conceptual photography to moving image and installation. He uses archival materials, narrative fragments and performative modalities to explore themes of identity, home and belongingPhotograph: Roya Khadjavi Projects/ Nemazee Fine Art
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Ali Tahayori: Archival Longing, 2024
Archive of Longing searches for moments of vulnerability, love and belonging within an inherited family archive, glimpses that often escape the photographer’s gaze and the subject’s agenda. The family photographs are cropped, enlarged, digitally altered and then printed on glass sheets. The printed glass is broken and reassembled to create 3D sculptural reliefs from 2D vintage photographs. The personal becomes the universal, as information is removed from photos through abstraction, fragmentation and distortion provided by raised broken printed glassPhotograph: Roya Khadjavi Projects/ Nemazee Fine Art
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