Foto Forum Santa Fe Award
2025 Honorable Mentions
Debmalya Choudhuri
A Factless Autobiography
Inspired by the book of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, A Factless Autobiography
is a deeply personal exploration of loss, desire, and the fragility of life. Through his experiences with the suicide of a lover, confrontations with tuberculosis, and grappling with queer identity, the author delves into the complex interplay of grief and melancholia. It focuses mainly on self-portraits & the lives of two protagonists, a black gay man who had survived abuse in his youth and a black trans woman who was in her first year of transitioning, both of whom I had befriended during my first years in America. Through this game of intimate exchanges, I come closer to understanding what it is to occupy a “queer” existence as a South Asian immigrant in the politically fragmented landscape of America. This work serves as a healing space for survivors of trauma and violence, amplifying anonymity and ambiguity to spark conversations on taboo topics like mental health, suicide, and LGBTQ+ experiences.
ZUYA YANG
Mimicking Nature
is a body of work that investigates how human beings understand and interact with nature in educational institutional spaces, such as zoos, aquariums, and museums. Designed to replicate the natural world, these institutions serve purposes including education, entertainment, and natural and historical preservation. In The Temporality of the Landscape, Tim Ingold describes landscape as a dynamic and emergent process of transformation and adaptation, arising from the ongoing interactions between people and their environments. Drawing from this perspective, this project examines how landscape is influenced by collective consciousness, functions as a dominant carrier of human experience, and constructs knowledge and meaning. The project specifically focuses on photographing how these institutional spaces are formally created, especially how they are oriented and developed. Considering factors such as weather, light, and air, these observations reveal how humans collect, preserve, and display natural subjects with cultural and historical significance.
Ryle Yazzie
As a full blooded Navajo, I grew up in the four corners area spending time off and on the Navajo Nation. This series of double exposure film photographs is based on the duality of growing up both traditional and non-traditional. I have been on the journey of reconnecting with my Navajo traditions and culture. I used medium format film photography and created the double exposures in camera. My purpose of shooting film is to move past the romanticized imagery of Native American landscapes taken by non natives. This series focuses on the 2 points of view to create a third hybrid view. This mirrors my visual journey to reconnecting to my traditions and culture.
Naohiro Maeda
Pet Milk
My life as a US immigrant has been for about 9 years, including the 1 year in Germany. The more I live, study, and work, the easier and more comforting life becomes. Live events felt very random when those happened, but some reasonings I can see when I look back. It has been a process of finding unnecessary suffering and releasing it bit by bit. I keep taking photos of the landscapes that pass in front of me. I distorted these raw data with the Photoshop retouching function, then printed and hand-embroidered them to repair these landscapes like traditional Japanese embroideries strengthen old clothes. These works explore the mixture of two contrasted emotions, belonging and isolation, like evaporated milk in coffee.
