Nikon Emerging Photographer Award: Shortlist Announced

We’re delighted to reveal the shortlisted artists for the 2024 Photo London x Nikon Emerging Photographer Award.

Launched in 2015, the Emerging Photographer Award, presented in partnership with Nikon, was set up to nurture and enable the career development of emerging photographic artists, placing their work within the public programme of one of the world’s most celebrated fairs championing the photographic medium. The Award champions new lens-based artists by offering transformative opportunities through Photo London’s global reach and the generous support of Nikon.

 “Nikon has a proud legacy spanning more than 100 years of empowering photographers to tell stories in powerful ways. The immensity of talent among Emerging Photographers is breathtaking. To play a small part in their future by supporting this prestigious award is not only a great privilege as part of our partnership with Photo London, but also intrinsic to our brand’s century-old DNA.”

— Julian Harvie, Nikon’s Marketing Director for Northern Europe

 

The winner will be announced at a special reception at the Nikon Gallery, on the Preview Day, Wednesday 15^th May at 18:15.

 

Discover the shortlisted artists below:

 

Aisha Seriki (Doyle Wham)

Aisha Seriki, Orí Inú, 2023, Courtesy of the artist and Doyle Wham.

 

Aisha Olamide Seriki (b1998) 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. Her practice is holistic and embodied, subverting formal photographic traditions.

Aisha’s project, Orí Inú, takes from the Yoruba Metaphysical conception “Orí’ which translates to the head and refers to one’s spiritual destiny. Using the calabash as a metaphor, Orí Inú depicts the artist’s attempts to mend the break between her mind and spirit. It thereby demonstrates how reconnecting with one’s inner spirit is both a continuous endeavour and a condition of the human experience.

 

Ali Tahayori (Roya Khadjavi Projects/ Nemazee Fine Art)

 

Born in Shiraz, Iran, Ali Tahayori currently lives and works in Sydney, Australia. 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 the moving image and installation.

Tahayori uses archival materials, narrative fragments and performative modalities to explore themes of identity, home, and belonging. And so his project ‘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 printed on glass sheets. The printed glass is broken and reassembled to create 3-D sculptural reliefs from 2-D vintage photographs. The personal becomes the universal, as information is removed from photos through abstraction, fragmentation and distortion provided by raised broken printed glass. Using glass instead of paper as a foundation to hold and reveal the image references wet plate negatives in the history of photography, wherein the 19th century, they were used for “sharper”, more stable and more detailed images. Here the broken glass is used to complicate viewers’ gaze while looking at history and memory from a queer diasporic lens, searching for glints of intimacy, desire, and queerness in an inherited family album.

 

Caroline Tompkins (Palm* Studios)

 

Caroline Tompkins received a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with her work featured on the BBC, Vogue, and The New York Times among others. Caroline has worked as a photo editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, Vice Magazine, and New York Magazine.

Tompkins’ project ‘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 constructs. While sex can be a positive, lifelong experience, women also bear the burden of violence, often perpetrated by men in the pursuit of power. The dichotomies between soft and hard, lust and violence, and heaven and hell are all recurring tropes throughout the series.  The normalization of this violence in everyday life is exemplified by the expectation placed on women to take safety measures, such as carrying pepper spray, not consuming alcohol in excess, and informing friends of their whereabouts. These expectations run parallel to the societal expectation of women to engage in lasting relationships with men and to bear children. Such contradictions lead to an intriguing question regarding the impact of fear on female desire. 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.

 

Charlie Tallott (New Dimension)

 

Charlie Tallott is a photographer from Leeds, UK. Tallott’s work centres around delving into the profound social and psychological impacts of deindustrialisation through photography. He specialises in capturing 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 away.

Tallot’s project ‘At Least Until the World Stops Going Round’ is a series of work produced following a suicide attempt. The work acts as a euphoric counterbalance to his real life experience at the time. bright snapshots act as a window into seeing the most high saturated, blissful scenes whereas black and white imagery littered throughout the project act as subdued, lonely moments. Tallott explains: “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.”

 

Inês d’Orey (Salgadeiras Arte Contemporânea)

 

Inês d’Orey, 1977, Porto, Portugal. 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 time. 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 time. The architecture, the polis, the border between public and private space, the investigation of places and their contexts are some of the elements that make up her body of work, whose main medium is photography, although mixing with installation and video. Represented by Salgadeiras Contemporary Art Gallery (Lisboa) and Presença Gallery (Porto).

Inês d’Orey’s light boxes explore the subject of skin as an “impression”, but also as a territory. There is a kind of suspension of time in a mutating place, repository of a “patina” that seems to crystallize that moment of temporary absence of human presence. We glimpse, therefore, that these are inhabited places, or rather, lived, trodden, in a time that is reset, setting history in motion.

 

Johnny Mae Hauser (Homecoming Gallery)

 

Johnny Mae Hauser is a Dutch-German artist known for her abstract compositions, a gentle gaze in dramatically rich palettes, pushing the boundaries of photography. Each piece, an expression of the evolution of emotional memory in her distinctly sensible and colourful ways. Her work invites viewers into a dialogue with their inner selves, shifting the focus from what we see to what goes on beyond the visible; what we feel and experience.

Johnny Mae Hauser will present a collection of all new works from her ongoing series Bildnis. ‘Bildnis’ is a German term used to refer to  portraits and self-portraits. This 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. My work is not about depicting a reality, the objects function as mere catalysts challenging viewers to explore and introspect beyond a singular truth.”

 

Isabelle Young (Galerie Fabian Lang)

 

Isabelle Young was born in 1989, London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art, London with an MA in Photography (2022). Her solo exhibition ‘Isabelle Young: In Camera’ at Galerie Fabian Lang, Switzerland (2022) focused on various architectural series, and the gallery recently presented her work at Felix Art Fair, Los Angeles, USA (2023). Young blends a keen eye for detail and perspective with a poetic narrative ability. Often informed by shade and absence, Young weaves the presence of stories into the curious and intriguing architecture and interiors she photographs. “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.”

At Photo London, Galerie Fabian Lang presents a selection of Young’s works from the years 2017 to 2024, many of which have not been seen before. These include works from her latest series ‘Sicily’ from the year 2024. Works from her series ‘Stills’ are also exhibited, which primarily focus on Italian architecture, but yet are rooted in neorealist cinema.

 

Lise Johansson (IN THE GALLERY)

 

Lise Johansson is a visual artist and photographer based in Copenhagen. She has lived in Paris and also travelled the world extensively as part of her photographic journey, spending time in Russia, Japan, Mongolia and China, and her time abroad has influenced her work in many aspects.

The starting point for 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 longing. They make us question not only how we perceive each other and the world which surrounds us, but also how we connect with the self, the mind and its various inherent potentials.

 

Sander Coers (Open Doors Gallery)

 

Sander Coers is an artist working with photography based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.  Coers’ work has been exhibited in various galleries and museums in The Netherlands and abroad and his work has been acquired by the Preus Museum, Rabobank, and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Coers’ work balances the borders of documentary and fiction. With a tender gaze, he seeks to establish new perspectives on masculinity by visualising, revisiting, and (de)constructing memories in melancholic and highly romanticised worlds that possess a cinematic quality.

His latest series, POST, explores the intersection of constructed memories and perceptions of masculinity in visual culture through the use of AI-generated imagery. With this project the artist aims to investigate the role of photography in shaping our perceptions of the past and question its authenticity in the age of digitalism where memories can be constructed and manipulated. Coers explains: “I decided to train an AI bot to expand my family history based on my grandparents’ photo albums ranging from the 1940’s to the 90’s. These AI-generated images evoke similar elements found in my grandparents’ albums — landscapes, clothing, and colours from that time. However, everything is completely false.”

 

 

CURATORIAL COMMITTEE

The photographers are shortlisted by the Photo London 2024 Curatorial committee. Photo London is a place to encounter the most innovative emerging artists, new work by established masters and rare vintage pieces, and as such is guided by a Curatorial Committee comprised of some of the field’s most esteemed curators, critics and museum directors.

Philippe Garner (Chair) – Former Director at Christie’s and International Head of Photographs and 20th Century Decorative Arts and Design

Renee Mussai – Independent curator, scholar, and writer – former Senior Curator / Head of Collection at Autograph, and Artistic Director of The Walther Collection

Simone Klein – Photography Advisor and Appraiser

Sofia Vollmer de Maduro – Director of Programs, Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, collector and Curator Emeritus of the Alberto Vollmer Foundation collection

Martin Barnes – Senior Curator, Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Tristan Lund – Art Consultant, Dealer and Collection Curator of The Incite Project, a UK based collection of photojournalism and documentary photography. Tristan also represents a select group of emerging photographic artists.

Brandei Estes – Former Head of Photographs (Europe, Middle East and Africa), Sotheby’s