There are a huge number of projects that rework vernacular images but few are as arresting as these from Polish-born visual artist Weronika Gesika, who creates compelling layered works with found material acquired from image banks. “Traces” consists of a selection of fun, sinister and surreal photographs that demand attention, ranging from the believable to the impossible. The series is a collection of subtly rearranged, interpreted and manipulated photographs that piece together and create new fragments of suspended time, memory and the unexpected.

Yoshikatsu Fujii makes family trauma—his parents’ divorce—the subject of his series “Red String.” Combining new photography with archival family photographs that have been collaged and re-worked, Fujii offers a poignant excavation of fraught familial history and a reflection on the fictions and performances found in the family album.

Wiktoria’s work is both emotionally compelling and visually intriguing. Her work is playful at times, questioning the notion of memory, while it continuously situates you in the challenges and horrors of war. I was really impressed by the way she installed the work and the careful consideration she gave to the viewer’s experience in a gallery setting. Her grid of soldiers’ portraits is remarkable. This is an artist everyone should keep an eye on.

Today, the territory of the image covers an incredible variety of fields, depicting human activity and the objects that shape our daily cultural, political, economic and social life.Travelling through this extreme diversity, it is astonishing to encounter new visions on seemingly familiar subjects, especially those that have been approached since the origins of photography. For example, architecture is one of those iconic representations of our world that photography has been questioning since its inception.

Among the many images entered in this competition, I was especially marked by the original work of Ben Thomas, which offers us a new look at the meaning an architectural object can carry. We all know the famous quotation of Le Corbusier, “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.” The subject tackled by these images is precisely that of abstraction by light and color.

For chemical reasons, photography's original abstract approaches to representing reality were made at the exclusion of color, instead focusing their vision solely in black and white.Today, everything seems technically possible, from black to transparency, white to global illumination.

With undeniable efficiency and precision, Thomas' work offers us a redeeming vision of the architectural monument. Initially, as an adventure of light projected onto clean geometries. Then, beyond this frontal and luminous glance, we discover the documentation of functional objects that enjoy the happiness of space and frozen time.

Memory and time are one of the fundamental questions of human experience and, in particular, are important factors in photography as a medium. In each country, preserving and passing on the negative memories of the past is done as a form of asset management—though inevitably, the intensity lessens as time goes by.

In this work, Gesche Wurfel approaches the vital problems of memory and time in a direct manner, looking at the vulnerability of our recollections to inadvertent alterations that happen in the brain. This affects us not only personally but leads to the instability of history in general, as our collective story is constantly being reshaped or erased in order to serve the present. By using long exposures, Wurfel is able to visually express the negligence of human beings towards the past, while appealing to our senses by taking advantage of photography’s instant intelligibility and physical immediacy. This brilliant work communicates a clear and important message on the subject and brings a unique perspective to our sense of history.

Photographer/activist Johnny Miller has developed a very clever, fresh strategy to make us aware of the still startling divide among rich and poor, white and black, in post-Apartheid South Africa. By using a drone to photograph social/geographical borderlines in multiple communities, he delivers the information with instant clarity and visual impact. And by writing compelling, fact-filled captions for each photograph, he encourages deep reading and understanding about the current state of affairs and inequality in these still-divided communities.

Tine Poppe’s work is a combination of fiction and non-fiction, of surreal landscapes and highly charged political quotations, of a haunting, almost nightmarish present and a dystopian future. She plays with photographic genres in clever and disturbing ways. In fact, she is one of the few photographers to be highly political without concentrating on the faces of the candidates during this recent US election season. As a result, her work is both local and global in its stance.

Zachary’s work made me stop in my tracks, especially the Amish work. Not only did I want to see more, it truly felt like he was telling a story. There were so many talented photographers in this contest, so many that really captured a spirit, had skill, and had a command of storytelling. But not only did Zachary's story seem incredible poignant for the work he presented here, there was something about this one particular photo, the one of the Amish boys watching the elder play a baseball-like sport, that seemed so naturally poetic that I wanted to see more. And that is really what I wanted to do with this, really look at a photographer that I felt was onto something, and this idea of identity in the American Family, something that is so increasingly at question with this past election and whole campaign season, really drew me to Zachary's work.