Heading to the top: stunning images by students

The Guardian

07-05-2025

The five shortlisted artists for the 2025 Photo London x Hahnemühle student award can now be revealed. Fiona Shields, a member of the judging panel and head of photography at the Guardian, said: 'We were truly struck by the exceptional quality of work submitted by this year's students. They have embraced a wide range of photographic and technological techniques to produce work that is engaging, original, thought-provoking and relevant.' Photo London is at Somerset House 14-18 May. The winner will be announced at an award ceremony on 17 May .
Billy Allen: ' My work has many layers and inspirations. On the one hand, it is about performing gender roles, particularly femininity, through a process of masquerade and noir-inspired drama. I like to collaborate with models, stylists and other creatives to produce absurdist tableaux featuring highly textured imagery. Location and spirit of place is also central to my process. Recently, for example, I have been working in Budapest and Stuttgart. Having worked in construction, I often use building materials in my practice'
'Bachelard's book The Poetics of Space relates to what I'm trying to do with a camera. I like to use fashion as a playground, employing humour, darkness, sexuality and elegance in turns. Much like the photographers of Japan's Provoke magazine, my imagery employs recurring signifiers such as hair, chairs, boxes and footwear as a means of making the everyday extraordinary'
Nina Kostamo Deschamps: 'Usva ('mist' in English) explores the concept of place attachment – the deep emotional bonds between people, places and memories. Places serve as silent witnesses to the passage of time, preserving layers of life within them'
'My grandparents' place, situated on the shores of a lake near the Arctic Circle in Finland, was more than just a second home – it was a place of continuity and family history. When we lost the place a few years ago, I was unprepared for the long-lasting grief. It felt as if a vital connection had been severed – not only to the place but also to myself and to those who had once been central to my life'
'Photography became my way of processing this loss. I was searching for traces of the past to make sense of the present. Usva combines my own photographs with our family archives. I have used both to question the extent to which places shape our identities and to explore the emotional imprints places leave behind'
Dulcie Wagstaff: 'Observing a shift towards spirituality within myself and those around me, Glimmer seeks to examine what spirituality looks and feels like today, within a generation who have grown up alongside technology, and in a society that no longer speaks comfortably about spiritual and religious beliefs'
'Young people who self-identify as having spiritual practices were asked for images they had taken on their phones – specifically of moments when they felt connected to their spirituality, and which they felt compelled to capture'
'Their low-resolution images were then re-photographed through the surface of the phone screen, capturing the reflections, fingerprints, scratches and marks of the device, and recording their internal worlds and the realities of contemporary life at once'
Nika Krykun: 'Svitlo (Light) is the photographic work that I have been developing since January 2024. Taking portraits of female Ukrainian artists who are now based in London was a way of finding answers for myself through other artists during conversations, sharing similar experiences of growing up as an artist in Ukraine and extending this experience after seeing the war'
'This work is a visual exploration of how female Ukrainian artists express themselves in craft and body during times of sorrow'
'It is a true appreciation of women's ability to love, see, feel, care, create and share all that beautiful light that comes to the world through their work'
Jessica Lowther's images were created with the assistance of Photoshop Generative AI. She says: 'My work explores the intersection of memory and authenticity, using artificial intelligence to reconstruct forgotten moments from my childhood. By combining AI-generated imagery with personal archival material, I examine the tension between truth and fiction, challenging the notion of photography's role as a definitive record of the past'
'In my ongoing series Familiar Strangers, I rely solely on my mother's recollections, mirroring how AI processes fragmented data to generate images that feel real yet remain inherently artificial. This approach highlights the parallels between human memory and AI: both are liable to distortion and manipulation'
'The resulting images exist in a liminal space between fact and fiction, capturing nostalgia while revealing the fragility of personal history. Through this process, I deconstruct the authenticity of the traditional family album, questioning how images shape identity and how we construct narratives around what we believe to be true. My work invites viewers to reflect on their own memories, the role photography plays in preserving the past, and whether photographs we trust are as authentic as they seem'