Over the years I’ve seen so many projects in which the photographer holds a photo print and then records it in a particular environment. And yet with this series I still found something fresh. Family Heirlooms is a series of photos taken within the photographer’s original family home. Using old childhood photos, Carole places them in the same locations as they were originally taken, several decades on. In one photo, her father, now 87 and showing signs of dementia, sits as if watching his young child playing on the floor some forty years earlier. The positioning is extremely precise but much more important is the overwhelmingly personal nature of the work. These are simple juxtapositions yet they generate a powerful sense of memory, the echo of home and family - resonating with both joy and sadness.

Somebody I respect very much used to always say, “only boring people get bored,” and I have a feeling that Emily Allen is not a boring person. This is evidence by the quietness of her work. I can imagine the series that she submitted was something that she made during the extra time she found herself with this year. There is a real sense of visual exploration and also finding interesting things in quotidian objects, such as the suburban basketball hoop being overtaken by trees that are in bloom; or the simplicity of lace making shadows in the sunlight. But finally, it is her self portrait that recalls for me the ingenuity of a Bauhaus photo student exploring different angles of the world.

This photograph has a beautiful, painterly quality, catching the subject’s gaze in the gentle winter light. It’s cleverly framed, the split screen juxtaposing the landscape with the interior of the abandoned train, it seems to sum up the migrant’s plight, caught between two worlds. There’s a stillness to the image that allows the viewer to contemplate the importance of place for the people making this journey through Greece to the Macedonian border, and its title "Looking Forward" considers that no matter where or what they have left behind, their journey is driven by hope.

Pariwat’s curious version of Home was such a delight to see, especially during a year where many can’t divorce pain from memory. I loved how the pictures and process so poetically encapsulated notes on home life: possessions, chaos, changes and imperfections. "The L_st Album," with its use of found photographs and color, is a kaleidoscopic love letter from a fellow stranger to another.

My mind has returned to Choubdarzadeh’s series of women in Iran many times. I was captivated by her mix of styles and use of language to tell her story. The bare back self portrait with the soft touch of the grass paired with a quote from Prophet Muhammad. Followed by the machete laying on the grass half in shadow paired with text speaking to the murder of Romina Ashrafi. Photographers have to be brave to turn their cameras onto themselves and their communities and Choubdarzadeh certainly was brave in this series.

This series of photographs of home life in the Ozark Mountains evoke, for me, an ideal way of life in the American West: a place of openness, connection with nature, extended families and community, care-free play, relaxation, adventure and imagination. All of the people pictured here seem grounded with a sense of belonging and living fully.

I also love the way you can “feel” the light in each of these pictures, and how all of the many rich details captured in each frame contribute to the overall story. This work seems honest, authentic, genuine and full of love.