Raphaela Rosella is an Australian artist with Italian immigrant and Anglo Celtic convict/coloniser descent who resides in Meanjin QLD. Working at the intersections of socially engaged art and long-form documentary photography, Raphaela’s practice has emerged from her lived experience of being raised within a heavily policed, low socio-economic community where she has seen her sisters, friends, partners, and extended family move through the prison system. Navigating carceral bureaucracies and surveillance, Raphaela has spent over a decade co-creating photo-based projects alongside several friends and family members from her childhood and adolescence (who she identifies in her practice as co-creators). Her artistic practice draws heavily on relational exchanges and a collaborative ethos to resist bureaucratic representations (e.g., case files and criminal records) by presenting everyday stories of women’s connectedness, agency, belonging and kinship. This has resulted in a collective archive of photographic works, moving image works, soundscapes, redacted state-issued documents, criminal indexes, love letters from jail and ephemera. Raphaela now seeks to examine, more closely, the power and authority of state archives that maintain the Prison Industrial Complex and the value of their co-created ‘counter archive’ as a site of resistance.

Cynthia MaiWa Sitei is an artist originally from Kenya, who moved to England in 2010 where she has been living and working for 10 years. After graduating with a BA in Psychology with Criminology in 2017, she pursued an MA in Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales. Stories played a big impact in her upbringing; they were a form of entertainment during and after dinner and a reliable method of communication in bringing people together and creating spaces where everyone was equal regardless of their age, wealth, and health. Her work integrates photography and text, and explore themes of stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination. Her first project “Wundanyi” was about stigma and stereotypes around rape which explored the need for and importance of rape being a household conversation. In her second year of her MA 2018-2019, she travelled around different rural parts in Kenya researching and gathering photographic evidence for her project. Upon finishing her Masters, she moved to South Korea for a year where she lived and worked through the beginning of the pandemic until October 2020 when she returned to the UK. While in South Korea, she was researching her longitudinal personal project on Albinism.

Heather Agyepong is a visual artist, performer/actor and maker who lives and works in London. Her art is concerned with mental health and wellbeing, activism, the diaspora and the archive.

‘Wish you were here’ focuses on the work of Aida Overton Walker, the celebrated African American vaudeville performer who challenged the rigid and problematic narratives of black performers. She was known as the Queen of the Cake Walk which was a dance craze that swept America & Europe in the early 1900s. The Cake Walk was originally performed by slaves who mocked and mimicked their slave masters and high society. Aida Overton Walker reinterpreted the dance into one of elegance, skill and accuracy in her performance in In Dahomey. She received acclaim and praise for her rendition and soon became the ‘queen of the cakewalk’. She challenged the status quo depicting black women as cultural producers and drew attention to the limiting embodiments of her status as a performer. Wish you were here uses the figure of Overton-Walker to re-imagine these postcards as one not of oppression but of self-care with a mandate for people of Afro-Caribbean descent to take up space. The images explore the concepts of ownership, entitlement and mental wellbeing. Each image is layered with symbolism to illicit a conversation about the boundaries of how we see ourselves both in real and imagined realities. By embodying Overton-Walker as guide, ancestor and advocator, the series uses satirical commentary and depictions of radical self-worth in an attempt to disrupt the roadblocks affecting our collective mental health.

Yufan Lu is a photographer based in Beijing and Tianjin, China.

In 2017, Chinese cosmetic surgery clinics performed 16 million procedures, up 26% year-over-year. As someone who suffers from judgements by my appearance, I feel connected to the zeal. I decided to use photography to explore the mechanisms behind it, and as a therapy for self-body shaming. I went to different cosmetic surgeries for diagnosis, and asked the “beauty designers“ to write surgery plans for me. Other than pointing out my “defects”, they also volunteered to offer me different solutions according to my preference, letting me choose from the most popular types of faces like choosing products on a shelf – suggesting that face is my “permit” to my dream life. I also collected pre-surgery portrait photos of the people who have already done cosmetic surgeries from cosmetic surgery specialty websites, removed watermarks added by the websites to return their original look, and cut patterns on the portraits with a knife, before attaching to each of them thoughts shared by people who have done cosmetic surgery in my own handwriting. These thoughts include real thoughts and excerpts of advertisements disguised in the form of real thoughts. These photos remind me of death masks, post-mortem photos, or perhaps all the photos – as the moment they are being made suggests the past and the lost. But there are more to these portraits: hope, insecurity, determination, farewell, secret…

Parisa Aminolahi is a Iranian filmmaker and photographer based in the Netherlands. Her work covers a spectrum of themes such as displacement, exile, homeland, family and childhood memories, utilizing childhood and old family photographs, self‐portraits and her own family members as her subjects.

My mother belongs to the generation of Iranian parents who are living alone, and often continents apart from their children. “Tehran Diary” is a project on her life in Tehran, and while visiting her children living abroad. Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, large groups of young Iranians left the country. This self-imposed exile created a new pattern for Iranian families. In the absence of comprehensive social security to support the elderly, in a culture where it is common for young adults to remain at home till their late thirties, many parents found the absence of their children difficult to deal with. During one of my regular trips from the Netherlands to Iran, I started taking pictures of my mother’s daily life, and this became our routine; whenever we were together, either in Tehran, or in the Netherlands, or while travelling together to be reunited with my brother and sister, I was photographing her. After printing some of the images, I could not resist the urge of using black and white paint on each photo as I had this sense that something wants to burst out of the photos and they should have some extra scenery and ornaments to create the world I was searching for.

Madeline Bishop is a photography and video artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Bishop’s work is conceptually centred around relational dynamics.

“Without your mother considers the nature of absence within maternal relationships. An absence is a state or condition in which something expected, wanted or looked for is not present. We begin our lives looking for our mothers. Do we ever stop looking for them and do they ever stop looking for us? As we grow, we make attempts to detach ourselves in order to become independent and live adult lives. What remnants of this relationship that defines our early lives remain in the distance of adulthood? Amid absence, our memories morph, the details become duller and distorted over time and we’re left with a summarised version of what might have happened, similar to a photograph. Some edges will blur and some will sharpen until those are the only parts we can remember.”

Artist Charzette Torrence was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan and currently lives in Harlem, NY.

“Prevalent” means widespread, usual, common, current, popular, universal, endemic, rife, and rampant. I have taken certain social issues that are prevalent in the media, that are widespread, and that affects everyone worldwide because of the fast pace at which we receive information via the Internet or other media. How do we interact with information that we see and hear all of the time? What impact does the information have on us and our environment? Is it for change, or do we hear and see so much information that it just becomes the norm? Prevalent is intended to stimulate these questions.

In 2014 Armenian/American photographer Diana Markosian was awarded the Grant for her highly acclaimed project ‘Inventing My Father’, the photographers personal attempt to reconnect with her absent parent. By combining her own visual storytelling ability alongside archival and found photography, Markosian delivers a truly authentic and moving account, resulting in her viewer’s total absorption in, and commitment to, the story. The judges also commended British photographer Sian Davy for work exploring the artist’s daughter, ‘Looking for Alice’.

In 2016 Belgium photographer Sanne De Wilde won the Grant for ‘Island of the Colourblind’, an incredible visualisation of the true story of the residents of Pingelap, an atoll in the Pacific Ocean, who have been affected by the hereditary condition of colourblindness.

American photographer Peyton Fulford received the 2018 Grant for her work “Infinite Tenderness,” exploring her own lived experiences growing up queer in the religious American south.