Run by MUSEC and the Fondazione Culture e Musei, Unpublished Photos is a programme dedicated each year to supporting young photographers aged 18 to 30.
Its objective remains unchanged: to promote, through successive editions, new trends in artistic photography. To achieve this, the international Unpublished Photo competition awards a creative grant each year, followed by an exhibition at MUSEC and a publication. The latest call for entries attracted over 200 submissions from 35 countries, with strong representation from Italy, China and Australia. Four young photographers were selected by the jury chaired by German photographer Hans Georg Berger, who chose this year, as in 2021, to award two joint first prizes.
On the one hand, Titas Valionis’s *Artists That Can Fly* brings together images captured at parkour gatherings and meet-ups across Lithuania. On the other, Nurlana Udovenk, a Ukrainian visual artist and photographer. Her project *Boredom*, launched in 2024, caught the jury’s attention with its exploration of the experience of boredom. The artist invited several participants to sit alone in front of a camera for an hour, without any task or distraction. The images were created by projecting the videos onto a screen, onto which sheets of photosensitive paper had been applied. Each photograph, resulting from a one-hour exposure, thus condenses the experience of time into a single image and offers a reflection on the contemporary difficulty of stopping and listening to oneself without distraction.
At the end of this collaboration, Nurlana Udovenk emphasises that Unpublished Photo “was an excellent opportunity to present this project. Despite the abundance of calls for submissions, there are relatively few occasions where work is exhibited at such a high level, with full support for both production and promotion”. She also highlights the role of Alessia Borellini, the exhibition curator: “She was attentive, thoughtful and deeply involved in refining the project description, as well as in defining the right perspective to present and showcase it.”
Since the 2021 edition, which had already awarded joint first prize to two photographers – Khanh Bui Phu from Vietnam and Mouneb Taim from Syria – the programme has highlighted a wide variety of aesthetic styles and approaches. In 2022, Quan Nguyen Ho, winner of the first prize, presented a project at MUSEC that he had completed the previous year, documenting the tragic reality of certain open-air rubbish dumps on the outskirts of Hanoi, where toxic and foul-smelling waste accumulates and, paradoxically, provides a source of livelihood for both humans and animals.
The following year, the Russian Andrey Podlednev won the top prize. With Living Legends, he lyrically captured the majesty of steam locomotives and paid tribute to the anonymous engineers and workers he met during his travels. In 2024, the award went to the project Together, alone by the Iranian Amirhosein Esparham, dedicated to the theme of loneliness. Produced between June 2022 and June 2023, this work presented five stories, each built around a sequence of two images. The photographs featured the artist’s loved ones opening up before his lens, revealing their deepest fears and vulnerabilities.
Applications for the next edition of Unpublished Photo will open this autumn: a new opportunity to showcase, develop, refine and promote photographic work.
Benjamin Rullier
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