Aaron Elkaim’s work, Where the River Runs Through, addresses issues of the utmost importance: environmental degradation, endangered traditional culture of indigenous people, and their deep connection to nature. Elkaim’s photographs achieve a beautiful aesthetic while documenting pressing issues of our times. This approach goes beyond a mere “art for the sake of art” concept, and therefore deserves our admiration and attention.

Extraordinary as they are, there’s more to the eye than the ghoulish and uncanny in Diego Moreno’s Guardians of Memory. The settings are real, of course, and so are the pot-bellied monsters – kind of. These ‘panzudos mercedarios’ represent past sins in the annual festival of Our Lady of Mercy in the photographer’s hometown of San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico, a city steeped in Catholic symbolism. Bringing them into domestic settings, where they appear unsettlingly at ease, they embody family ghosts, transmogrified into grotesques living side by side with the present. Indeed, the series was inspired by a dark secret within his own family history – his great aunt Tía Cati, who was horribly disfigured by a rare autoimmune condition, was hidden away from public life and abused, until she was eventually taken in by Moreno and the grandmother who raised him. Behind the masks and costumes in his pictures lies something far more complex and troubling than the stuff of Horror.

Leah Kennedy’s work stood out to me among all the wonderful entries for this competition because of her exquisite sense of composition, color palette and concept. Her images, which explore the relationship between humans and the environment, have resulted in a very strong series of works that are simultaneously beautiful and thought-provoking, directly addressing the mark we make on our landscape.

Drummies is an ongoing series focusing on the aspirational subculture around female drum majorettes in South Africa. I picked this work as one of my favorites because it celebrates the diversity and inclusion of black women in sport, especially those of young women who are looking for further empowerment and ways to succeed. Mann’s images communicate the pride and confidence these girls have achieved through identifying as “drummies,” in a context where they may face many social challenges and stereotypes.

I have to be honest, when I came across this series by Kai Bastard – I immediately took a screenshot of it and sent it to the entire photo department to revel in its beauty like I did. I also wanted to know if I was crazy for loving it, but I quickly got verification from my peers that, “Yes! It’s very awesome.”

What I love about this work is its delicate nature. The lighting and the placements of the “bodies” are perfect. Harsh lighting would have taken it in another direction completely, almost making it crime-y. I can’t tell if they’re supposed to be floating in the air or discarded on the ground. The latter would make more sense with the controversial prop, but I don’t feel like I’m looking at something dirty. One knows what they are right away, and then you look further and see details that you might not want to remember.

This project is such a great conceptual piece for so many topics, and it really makes me want to encourage the WIRED editors to quickly greenlight a story on “the loss of mojo” or “the bankruptcy of a what-once-was a flourishing sex toy factory,” so that we can splatter our pages and website with all of these!

You do not have to be under a certain age to be an emerging talent. Barbara Peacock has been making photographs for many years, and her series American Bedroom - Reflections of the Nature of Life stood out by virtue of its strong visual composition, conveyance of intimacy, and rigor in her approach. Peacock is definitely a photographer to watch.

Ronghui Chen’s pictures of Chinese adolescents growing up in a once-booming remote area tell a universal story of young people at critical turning points in their lives. They seem globally connected yet terribly set apart from any worldly opportunities in the declining industrial town where they were born. Should they stay or should they go? What fate awaits them? The series title, Freezing Land, is both an observation of their local environment and recognition of this limbo-like state in which they currently find themselves. The pictures seem fresh, honest and poignant — with tiny details that carry a lot of weight.

My personal choice among this year’s emerging artists is Marta Blue. Her work appealed to me because it holds one of the most important features of great photography: it makes me ask many questions. The clarity with which the series is imbued makes every photo a small film script, where I can immediately start to imagine the complete storyline.