Discover the Shortlist for the 2025 Photo London x Hahnemühle Student Award
Photo London is delighted to reveal the shortlisted artists for the 2025 Photo London x Hahnemühle Student Award.
Now in its third year, the award has seen phenomenal growth with over 100 students nominated by course tutors from across 34 UK-based universities. Having reviewed and discussed in depth these entries, this year’s judging panel have shortlisted five outstanding students whose work will be showcased in a group presentation at the tenth anniversary edition of Photo London (15–18 May 2025).
The judges will convene at the Fair to select the overall winner, who will be announced at a special award ceremony at Photo London on Saturday 17 May. The winning artist will be awarded a visit to the Hahnemühle mill in Germany, with the opportunity to print a body of work.
More details on the Photo London x Hahnemühle Award at the Fair can be found here.
Meet the 2025 Shortlist
Billy Allen
University of the West of England
Biography:
Billy Allen is a photographer based in Bristol, studying at the University of the West of England, and often shooting his photographic work in Budapest, Hungary. During an exchange semester he undertook in the spring of 2024, he made the kind of creative connections that have enabled him to collaborate effectively with different individuals. He finds inspiration through travel, seeing the world and embracing diverse cultures. Creating fictional narratives from observations in everyday life is what stimulates him; identifying curiosities in the world that can be materialized into absurd creations through the lens. His background in construction has dovetailed well with a passion for the fashion idiom and led to him becoming a visual builder, using objects and unconventional materials for styling and texture. Billy’s father is a skilled artisan, and he has consequently inherited an interest in and ability to use diverse materials to construct sculptural environments that stage his imaginative tableau. Billy enjoys it when there is a sense of ambiguity in his work, when questions are asked about what is in the frame, or when people create their own ideas and stories from his imagery.
Artist Statement:
My work has many layers and inspirations. On the one hand, it is about performing gender roles, particularly femininity, through a process of masquerade and noir-inspired drama. I like to collaborate with models, stylists and other creatives to produce absurdist tableaux featuring highly textured imagery. Location and spirit of place is also central to my process. Recently, for example, I have been working in Budapest, I found the left-field subcultures of thiscityhad a really positive effect on the nature of my work. I like to find unconventional beauty in the ridiculous by creating staged fantasies. Having worked in construction, I often use building materials and careful styling of objects and models in my practice. My photographs relate to how I feel about the location and people I work with, in a phenomenological sense. I like to use the fashion idiom as a playground; employing humour, darkness, sexuality and elegance in turns. Much like Japanese Provoke photographers, my imagery employs recurring signifiers like hair, chairs, boxes and footwear as a means of making the everyday extraordinary.
Paper choice: Hahnemühle Digital FineArt Collection Natural Line Range / Bamboo
Nina Kostamo Deschamps
Falmouth University
Biography:
Nina Kostamo Deschamps is a photographer, visual artist, and design lead based in Rovaniemi, Finland. Originally from Northern Finland, she spent nearly two decades living and working in Paris, Madrid, the French Riviera, and Helsinki before returning to Lapland. Her recent work explores themes of place attachment, sense of place, and human-nature relationships. Family and community are central elements in her artistic practice. Additionally, her work investigates how climate change andcultural shifts are reshaping life in Arctic communities from human-centered perspectives.In 2025, Kostamo Deschamps completed her Master of Arts in Photography with distinction from Falmouth University, UK. She previously studied Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism at the International Center of Photography and earned a professional degree in photography in Finland.Committed to community engagement, Kostamo Deschamps frequently facilitates photography workshops, photo walks, and collaborative projects focusing on memory and place. She is the founder of Studio 67 North, a creative studio specializing in portrait photography. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Finland.
Artist Statement:
Places hold stories and within them, memories. Usva (“mist” in English) explores the concept of place attachment —the deep emotional bonds between people, places, and memories. Places serve as silent witnesses to the passage of time, preserving layers of life within them.
My grandparents’ place, situated on the shores of a lake near the Arctic Circle in Finland, was more than just a second home – it was a place of continuity and family history. When we lost the place a few years ago, I was unprepared for the long-lasting grief. It felt as if a vital connection had been severed—not only to the place but also to myself and to those who had once been central to my life. Photography became my way of processing this loss—searching for traces of the past to make sense of the present.
Usva combines my own photographs with our family archives. I have used both to question the extent to which places shape our identities and to explore the emotional imprints places leave behind.
Paper choice: Hahnemühle Digital FineArt Collection Natural Line Range / Photo Rag® 308
Nika Krykun
Richmond American University London
Nika Krykun is a multimedia artist from Kyiv, Ukraine, who has been based in London since May 2022. Her work utilises different art mediums, and in addition to photography, has also worked with painting, sculpture, performance, film and music. In 2019, she graduated from the Kyiv School of Art and Music, and during her studies participated in various concerts and exhibitions across Ukraine and Europe. Two years before the invasion started, Krykun took part as an actress in ‘Stop Zemlia’, the Berlinale winning feature by Kateryna Gornostai. In 2024, she joined two other artists from Ukraine to form the Triyka art collective, staging two exhibitions in London. Krykun’s current primary focus is analogue photography.
Artist Statement:
‘Svitlo (Light)’ is the photographic work that I have been developing since January 2024. Taking portraits of Ukrainian women artists who are now based in London was a way of finding answers for myself through other artists during conversations, sharing similar experiences of growing up as an artist in Ukraine and extending this experience after seeing the war. This work is a visual exploration of how Ukrainian women artists and themselves in craft and body during times of sorrow. A true appreciation of women’s ability to love, see, feel, care, create and share all that beautiful light that comes to the world through their work.
Paper choice: Hahnemühle Digital FineArt Collection / FineArt Pearl
Jessica Lowther
Arts University Bournemouth
Jessica Lowther is a UK-based photographic artist whose work questions Artificial Intelligence’s place in the art world, exploring memory, authenticity, and the reconstruction of her past. She is currently studying BA (Hons) Photography at Arts University Bournemouth. By combining archival family photographs and AI-generated imagery, Lowther investigates the fragility of personal and collective memory, reimagining lost or unreliable moments and challenging photography’s role as a truthful record. Her ongoing project, ‘Familiar Strangers’, draws from her mother’s recollections –descriptive yet unreliable memories that become the foundation for her AI-generated series. In doing so, she highlights the parallels between human memory and AI’s reconstructive processes, both of which are liable to distortion. Through this, Lowther invites the audience to consider the shifting boundaries between fact and fiction in photography and challenges the notion of reality and perception.
Artist Statement:
My work explores the intersection of memory and authenticity, using Artificial Intelligence to reconstruct forgotten moments from my childhood. By combiningAI-generated imagery with personal archival material, I examine the tension between truth and fiction, challenging the notion of photography’s role as a definitive record of the past. In myongoing series‘Familiar Strangers’, I rely solely on my mother’s recollections of her memories, mirroring how AI processes fragmented data to generate images that feel real yet remain inherently artificial. This approach highlights the parallels between human memory and AI –both are liable to distortion and manipulation. The resulting images exist in a liminal space between fact and fiction, capturing nostalgia while revealing the fragility of personal history. Through this process, I deconstruct the authenticity of the traditional family album, questioning how images shape identity and how we construct narratives around what we believe to be true. My work invites the viewers to reflect on their own memories, the role photography plays in preserving the past, and whether photographs we trust are as authentic as they seem.
Paper choice: Hahnemühle Digital FineArt Collection / Photo Rag® Pearl
Dulcie Wagstaff
University of the West of England
Biography:
Dulcie Wagstaff is a British photographer, based in Bristol, England. Her practice seeks to visualise often invisible elements of the human experience – such as spirituality, mental health, family bonds, dreams, and societal fears – exploring common narratives that shape us as individuals and as communities in the hope that by unveiling them we can learn from them. Wagstaff’s work has been featured in The Telegraph, Der Greif and elsewhere, and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Photography Prize 2020. She is also a founding member of Make Hay While The Sun Shines, an artist network that hosts monthly events which facilitate peer-to-peer feedback around the work of emerging photographers, and participates on book fairs, events and exhibitions. Wagstaff graduated with a BA (Hons) in Photography from the University of Brighton in 2016; she is currently completing a MA in Photography at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol).
Artist Statement:
Observing a shift towards spirituality within myself and those around me, Glimmer seeks to examine what spirituality looks and feels like today, within a generation who have grown up alongside technology, and in a society which no longer speaks comfortably about spiritual and religious beliefs. Young people who self-identify as having spiritual practices were asked for images they had taken on their phones –specifically of moments when they felt connected to their spirituality, and which they felt compelled to capture. Their low-resolution images were then re-photographed through the surface of the phone screen, capturing the reflections, fingerprints, scratches and marks of the device, and recording their internal worlds and the realities of contemporary life at once.
Paper choice: Hahnemühle Photo Range / Photo Silk Baryta X
