©Ana Margarita Flores – Female in Focus x Nikon 2025 Single Image winner
Laetitia Vançon’s The Other Battlefields and Giya Makondo-Wills’ New Scramble will be exhibited at 10 14 Gallery and PhotoIreland, alongside single image winners including Ana Flores, Esther N’sapu, Ada Marino and Karen Paz Gonzalez
In an image from Laetitia Vançon’s documentary series The Other Battlefields, smartly-dressed graduates in Odesa, Ukraine dance together in the street to mark the end of their school years. Leaving education and launching oneself into the world is a near-universal rite-of-passage. Celebrating that day among sandbags – piled high to protect you from bullets, shrapnel, and blasts – is not.
In the four years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, young people have been “standing between two worlds – the life they imagined, and the life the war has imposed on them,” says the French photographer. Her project, which began with the photograph of the graduates, “is about this moment of ‘in-between’, between childhood and adulthood, between life before the war and life after it”.
The Other Battlefields is one of two series winners of British Journal of Photography’s Female in Focus Award 2025, sponsored by Nikon, alongside Giya Makondo-Wills’ New Scramble, which highlights an emerging new era of extraction in Africa, this time focused on data. Both projects are urgent and timely takes on the 2025 theme On the Cusp, which invited photographers to muse on the anticipation of “what comes next”, for people, politics, a place, or the planet.
Female in Focus spotlights remarkable women photographers around the world and serves to challenge gender inequality in the photography industry. This year’s winning work – including 21 single images – will be exhibited at 1014 Gallery, London from 24 April – 29 May, and The International Centre for the Image, Dublin, from 10 September – 25 October. Female in Focus will incorporate a People’s Choice award, giving the public the chance to vote for their favourite image in early March.
Vançon began documenting Ukraine in June 2022, six months after the invasion. By this time, thousands of lives had already been claimed, and millions more had been forced to flee; there was widespread destruction to homes, landmarks, and historic sites. Yet, away from the frontlines, Vançon pointed her lens toward young people’s daily persistence – maritime students at school, volunteers helping craft soldiers’ bulletproof vests, a girl, Nastia, paying tribute to the flags of fallen soldiers.
“Rooted in my photographic practice is a bid to reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary,” reflects Vançon. “In a context of war, simply continuing to live becomes an act of resistance. Going to school, making friends, falling in love, dancing, resting – these simple gestures take on a completely different weight.”
What emerges in The Other Battlefields is a tender and affecting portrait of the profound imprint the conflict is leaving on Ukrainian youth, and what it means to grow up and live in a country at war. “These battles, whether close to or far from the frontlines, are those of freedom, dignity, reconstruction, and hope,” Vançon says. “Together, they draw the many contours of a conflict that is irreversibly shaping Ukrainian youth and its future.”
“The two series that are recognised in this edition of Female in Focus stand at the fault lines of history, where private lives collide with vast systems of power. Together, they are not only timely, they are alarms. They capture the world on the cusp of irreversible change and insist that photography remains an important tool not just for seeing, but for reckoning”
– Louise Fedotov-Clements, Director, Photoworks
The second series winner of Female in Focus 2025, Giya Makondo-Wills’ New Scramble, is equally compelling, exploring how tech giants threaten to replicate patterns of colonial exploitation in South Africa. Predominantly set in Johannesburg, while also branching into the Limpopo and Cape provinces, the project documents the proliferation of data centres in South Africa, used by the likes of Microsoft and Google as part of a “new scramble for Africa”. A modern race between countries and corporations for a foothold on the continent’s resources, the benefits of this tech boom are debatable.
Some argue it can aid economic growth in Africa, but others point out it locks countries into unequal relationships in which outside powers extract value without giving enough in return. “People are coming to take the gold like they did before,” writes the British-South African photographer in a letter to her Gogo, or grandmother, which accompanies layered and evocative photographs – young boys who dream of being tech engineers; seaweed that eerily resembles subsea cables. “But now instead of taking from the ground, they take from the head.”
At its core, New Scramble considers how data centres – which house 24/7 servers to process data, fuelling the internet, cloud services, streaming, AI, and beyond – strain local infrastructure and natural resources, with a cost to the land and people. “They use huge amounts of water, huge amounts of energy; especially in a hot climate, they need to be cooled much more,” explains Makondo-Wills. Meanwhile in South Africa, over 3.5 million people have no access to safe drinking water, and 3.5 million households go without access to electricity.
Then there’s the issue of ownership. “If we don’t own the channels we use to communicate, we don’t own the stories, language, identity, culture,” says Makondo-Wills. “What are the implications of this in 100 or 200 years? Could it erase our history, our culture?” With this in mind, New Scramble also draws on ancestral practices, folklore and creation stories, exploring how narratives transform over time, how we communicate forwards and backwards through our lineages and histories, how we pass on information and receive it.
“The stories that would be told through the fire, in the kitchen… They are travelling,” the photographer writes to her grandmother. “Now they are travelling in another way. From the phone to the computer. From the fingers to a screen.”
“We used to tell stories of gods and demons and the land to help us make sense of the world around us,” Makondo-Wills muses. “And now, as we tell other stories in other ways, with other sorts of information, how does that help us understand?”
The judges for this year’s Female in Focus award included Alessia Glaviano, global head of Vogue Italia; Kimberley Moulton, curator at Tate Modern; Louise Fedotov-Clements, director of Photoworks; and the photographer and artist Kennedi Carter. “The two series that are recognised in this edition of Female in Focus stand at the fault lines of history, where private lives collide with vast systems of power,” says Louise Fedotov-Clements of Photoworks, reflecting on what stirred the panel in Vançon and Makondo-Wills’ work. “Together, they are not only timely, they are alarms. They capture the world on the cusp of irreversible change and insist that photography remains an important tool not just for seeing, but for reckoning.”
Winners of the Single Image Category also offer powerful snapshots of lives and landscapes on the edge of transition. Laila Seiber’s tender portrait of Palestinian siblings Ahmed, Aseel, Samar and Joudi traces life in a temporary refuge in Cairo, where days are shaped by online lessons and uncertain futures. Oda Fjellang’s haunting image of a dead whale trapped in ice in the Oslo Fjord laments a once-abundant ecosystem, now strained by human industry and climate change.
In Nayra Aly’s autobiographical portrait, the photographer and her once-absent father sit together, their differences marking the ongoing work of rediscovering each other across generational and cultural distance. Jip Schalkx’s scene of teenage girls side-by-side in bed, each in their own sonic world via headphones, captures a generation suspended between connection and isolation. And Kinga Wrona shines a poignant light on Galicia’s “mariscadoras”: women over 40 working as shellfish gatherers – one of the oldest coastal traditions in Spain, but at risk as global warming disrupts the fragile balance of sea life.
“I’ve been particularly struck by the playful rebelliousness threaded through so many of the images, each one offering a bold and thoughtful perspective on liminality,” says Ruby Nicholson, Senior Communications Manager at Nikon Northern Europe, sponsor of Female in Focus. “It’s a privilege for Nikon to support an award that spotlights the extraordinary talent of female and non-binary photographers, and we’re incredibly proud to help amplify their voices on a global stage.”
Female in Focus 2025 goes on show at 1014 Gallery, London from 24 April – 29 May, and The International Centre for the Image, Dublin, from 10 September – 25 October.
