Female in Focus x Nikon 2025 Winners Amplify Girls’s Voices in Photography

The British Journal of Photography and Nikon have introduced the excellent winners of the Female in Focus 2025 photography competition. The competitors celebrates the work of ladies and non-binary photographers worldwide.

The theme of this yr’s Female in Focus competitors is On the Cusp, which photographers interpreted in numerous and fascinating methods, together with work that explores private transition, cultural upheaval, and environmental change.

“We’re thrilled to celebrate this year’s Female in Focus winners, whose work brilliantly captures the spirit of being ‘on the cusp.’ I’ve been particularly struck by the playful rebelliousness threaded through so many of the images, each one offering a bold and thoughtful perspective on liminality,” says Ruby Nicholson, Senior Communications Manager, Nikon Northern Europe. “It’s a privilege for Nikon to support an award that spotlights the extraordinary talent of female and non-binary photographers, and we’re incredibly proud to help amplify their voices on a global stage.”

Two photographers received for his or her sequence, whereas 21 single photographs had been additionally chosen this yr. All the successful photographs are featured under, beginning with the pair of award-winning photograph sequence.

“The two series that are recognized in this edition of Female in Focus stand at the fault lines of history, where private lives collide with vast systems of power,” says Louise Fedotov-Clements, Director of Photoworks and Female in Focus x Nikon decide. “Together, they are not only timely, they are alarms. They capture the world on the cusp of irreversible change and insist that photography remains an important tool not just for seeing, but for reckoning.”

‘New Scramble’ by Giya Makondo-Wills

Photographer Giya Makondo-Wills’ sequence “New Scramble,” predominantly set in Johannesburg, South Africa, investigates the fast growth of knowledge facilities and what the photographer considers a modern-day “scramble” for energy and affect in Africa. The undertaking examines how historic patterns of useful resource extraction and possession have formed Africa, and the way comparable patterns could emerge via information infrastructure.

Makondo-Wills grapples with ideas of possession, reminiscence, and communication within the digital age via evocative, usually private imagery, together with portraits and landscapes.

“How we communicate is changing — if we don’t own the channels we use to communicate, we don’t own the stories, language, identity, culture,” the photographer says. “What are the implications of this in 100 or 200 years? Could it erase our history, culture?”

‘The Other Battlefields’ by Laetitia Vançon

Beginning in June 2022, Laetitia Vançon started photographing graduates in Odesa, Ukraine, simply months after Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Vançon’s early picture of scholars dancing behind a wall of sandbags constructed for cover birthed a bigger undertaking that explored how younger individuals in Ukraine had been caught between two worlds: the life that they had imagined they’d have and the life they’ve been residing beneath battle.

While many photographers in Ukraine are centered on the frontlines, Vançon makes use of her digicam to seize every day life, displaying college students persevering with to work exhausting within the hopes of a greater life, volunteers constructing bulletproof vests for troopers, younger individuals rising up in fixed hazard, and extra. Vançon’s photographs present how battle impacts individuals, whether or not they’re troopers or not, and the imprint that battle leaves on whole generations.

Winners — Single Images

Below are the 21 single photographs that received on this yr’s Female in Focus x Nikon awards.

More From Female in Focus x Nikon 2025

The winners above, chosen from hundreds of fantastic submissions, might be introduced at 1014 Gallery in London from April 24 via May 29 and at PhotoIreland Dublin from September 10 via October 25.

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Image credit: Female in Focus x Nikon is a world images award by the ‘British Journal of Photography,’ the world’s longest working images publication based in 1854, in partnership with Nikon. All photographers are credited within the picture captions.