Judges
Courtesy of
Hossein Fardinfard
Unity and Diversity
Hossein Fardinfard
Royal Academy of Art
The Hague
Netherlands
Judges Choice
Hossein (born in Iran in 1985) was initially interested in street photography. His focus eventually shifted to documentary and environmental portrait photography. He was working as a web developer when exchanges with his street photography subjects started to bring him into closer dialogue with the people he passed every day. Fascinated with the contours of the Earth (he holds a BS in cartography, IT and a Master's degree in geomorphology), Hossein felt drawn to study the contours of the human spirit more closely. Questions of identity and social issues continue to orient his work.
He graduated in photography from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, in 2022.
Game-changer
Georgia (Tbilisi, Tskaltubo, Kojori, Kakheti, Chiatura, Gombori)
2021
As an immigrant who has lived in Georgia and observed the events in that society for about seven years, I believe this country is in a historic moment where most youths want to replace the old Soviet mentality with the new, modern way of thinking and tend to shift to the Western lifestyle.
In recent years, it is a generation that has launched several movements, among them many protest actions, to demand their social and civil rights. A new stream that is not necessarily in line with the communist manifesto.
Pictures symbolically portray the birth of this generation from the heart of massive structures built during the soviet union times— buildings that, in my project, are metaphors of that Soviet mentality where individuals did not matter.
By putting models against a white backdrop, I decontextualized them from the environment where they don't feel they belong.