AAP Magazine, printed by All About Photo, is a US-based print and digital title devoted to positive artwork and documentary pictures. Each challenge is constructed round a single theme, with an open name for submissions judged by an editorial panel, and the journal functioning as each a showcase for rising expertise and a platform for established names.
Issue 55 focuses on ladies, each as photographers and as topics. Twenty-five winners had been chosen from international submissions, spanning positive artwork, road pictures, documentary and portraiture.
Overall winner
The outright winner is Silvia Alessi from Italy, whose series The Cut is the kind of work that stops you mid-scroll. A figure sits against a crumbling, mould-blackened wall, face obscured by a roughly cut red cloth mask, holding a pair of scissors with quiet, deliberate calm. Theatrical and unsettling in equal measure, it’s the sort of image that photographers spend careers working towards: instantly readable yet entirely open to interpretation.
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Is it about censorship, identity, the act of self-reinvention? The scissors suggest agency; the mask suggests constraint. The tension between the two is where the image lives. It’s also, technically, impeccable: the exposure holds shadow detail in the dark fabric while preserving the texture of the deteriorating wall, and the composition places the single visible eye exactly where it needs to be.
Second and third place
Second place foes to Natalya Saprunova, a France and Russia-based photographer whose series Boreal People is the tonal opposite of Alessi’s work. Where The Cut is claustrophobic and charged, Saprunova’s images are warm, expansive and deeply human.
In Ancestral Heritage, a grandmother works at her needlecraft on a bed while a small girl reads beside her, surrounded by patterned rugs and floral curtains. The color palette is rich and lived-in, the light flattering without being falsified. This is documentary photography at its most generous.
Third place is claimed by Angelika Kollin from Estonia, whose series You Are My Mother is shot in black and white and centers on a close, almost sculptural arrangement of a mother and daughters. The tonal range is beautifully handled and the intimacy feels earned rather than imposed.
Merit Award winners
The Merit Award winners are Somenath Mukhopadhyay (India), Ezio Gianni Murzi (Italy), Ron Cooper (United States), B Jane Levine (United States), Aline Smithson (United States), Donna Gordon (United States), Alain Schroeder (Belgium), Mandy Ross (United Kingdom), Justin Roque (France), Oscar González (Costa Rica), Leonie van der Helm (Netherlands), Sebastian Sardi (Sweden), Nina Nelson (United States), Valentina Sinis (Italy), Beth Stahn (United States), Jelisa Peterson (United States), Mary Dondero (United States), Oksana Zhila (Russia), Ingetje Tadros (Netherlands), Leonor Benito de la Lastra (Spain), Clark James Mishler (United States) and Cheryl Clegg (United States).
Eight of the 25 winners are male, which makes sense: the brief was to celebrate women as subject and creator, not to restrict who could enter. The standard for inclusion remained the work itself. All winning work will be featured in the printed edition of AAP Magazine #55 Women and in the All About Photo winners’ gallery online. The top three winners each receive $1,000.
Key takeaway
Overall, what this work shares is a clear, considered point of view. These images were made by photographers who knew exactly what they wanted to say before they raised the camera, and that’s the biggest lesson we can all learn here.
It’s easy, particularly when shooting digitally, to adopt a try-everything approach: fire off a hundred frames, adjust on the fly, find the meaning in the edit. And sometimes that works. But the best images in this collection feel premeditated in the best possible sense. The location, the light, the subject, the mood: all of it seems to have been considered long before the shutter was pressed.
Take Alessi’s first-place shot. The decaying wall, the hand-cut mask, the scissors held just so: this is all the result of a photographer with a precise idea, the technical skills to execute it, and the patience to get it right. Similarly, Saprunova’s warm, unhurried domestic scene works because she clearly knew what she was looking for before she walked through the door.
The practical lesson is straightforward: before your next shoot, spend more time on the why than the how. The gear, the settings, the post-processing workflow, all of that matters, but it matters less than having something genuine to say. Ask yourself what the image is actually about. If you can’t answer that question clearly before you shoot, the camera probably won’t answer it for you.