On June 15, 2024, LensCulture announced the winners of LensCulture Critics’ Choice 2024 on its website. Twenty photography experts from museums, galleries, magazines, and other fields each selected three personal favorites from submissions by photographers in more than 140 countries. Their individual choices resulted in 44 winning photographers.
LensCulture Critics’ Choice 2024 was open to photographers of all ages and experience levels worldwide. With no set theme, genre restrictions, or restrictive guidelines, the competition attracted a wide range of creative approaches. The entries reflected the many ways people use photography to express themselves, tell stories, capture beauty, document events, make art, and connect with one another.
Each of the 20 internationally respected critics selected three personal favorites to receive an award and wrote a short commentary explaining what drew them to each winning image or series.
The 44 winners included three photographers from China:
Wei Jinchun, Tangshan
Chen Liang, Somewhere Beside the Water
Zhang Chenglong, Eternal Water with Ripples
LensCulture Critics’ Choice 2024
Selected Winning Works
Wei Jinchun (China)
Tangshan
“In 1976, the Tangshan earthquake flattened much of the city and led to over two-hundred-thousand deaths, becoming one of the deadliest earthquakes recorded. The city, located east of Beijing, has gone on to become rebuilt—yet the shadow of the earthquake and its toll still linger. Wei Jinchun’s series Tangshan City reckons with the aftermath of the earthquake on the city’s people and landscapes. Photographing the city, surrounding landscape, and people he met, Jinchun offers a sensitive, contemplative study of the intertwined relationships between grief, growth, and self.”
—
“Once again LensCulture’s reach entices some of the best photography out there for its annual Critics’ Choice Award. The Award showcases the breadth of image makers from around the globe producing some of the most engaging portraits and series within the medium.”
Gloria Oyarzabal (Spain)
Usus Fructus Abusus — La Blanche et la Noire
Oyarzabal states that her practice is centered around “the effects and consequences of colonization and neo-colonization”. In the present series started in 2019, she illustrates precisely that through diptychs and staged vignettes, speaking about the plundering and looting of the colonies and how these materials ended up in museums in the Western world. The series challenges the notion of museums as neutral and universal spaces, a conversation that is as current and as urgent as the need for their decolonization.
Oyarzabal’s series is a rich study on museum culture, exploring the question of how far modern-day repatriation can go in healing the wounds of the past and present and even more interestingly asks if there is something even more meaningful that can be done.
Marcus DeSieno (United States)
Geography of Disappearance: Migrant Deaths on the US/Mexico Border
Marcus DeSieno’s photographs quietly speak to the desperation and dehumanization of those who die trying to traverse a harsh landscape in pursuit of a better life by crossing the US/Mexico border. By photographing locations identified through autopsy records and data collected by human rights organizations, DeSieno forces us to imagine the tragic scenes that unfolded in each location, and the landscape those who perished saw in their final moments.
Chen Liang (China)
Somewhere Beside the Water
Compiled from LensCulture
All rights remain with the respective authors and artists.
Chinese translation: Wei Jinchun