AAP Magazine 56 Shadows - International Photography Competition Now Open for Entries

Unleash the Poetry of Shadows

A Global Photography Call for Entries Celebrating the Art of Light and Darkness

Photography has always been a dialogue between light and darkness. When light fades, shadows emerge, revealing hidden narratives, sculpting forms, and transforming ordinary scenes into evocative visual stories. With its latest international call for entries, AAP Magazine invites photographers from around the world to explore this timeless relationship in AAP Magazine #56: SHADOWS.

This new edition will showcase a curated selection of powerful photographic projects dedicated to the theme of shadows—one of the most poetic and expressive elements in visual storytelling.

Shadows in photography are more than the absence of light. They carry emotion, mystery, and symbolism. They can evoke nostalgia, tension, solitude, or serenity. A shadow may conceal as much as it reveals, leaving space for imagination and interpretation. For photographers, learning to master shadows is an artistic skill that transforms a simple image into a compelling narrative.

Silhouettes are also an essential part of the shadows theme. By reducing a subject to its outline against a bright background, silhouettes create striking graphic compositions and powerful storytelling moments. Whether subtle or dramatic, silhouettes highlight the relationship between light and darkness and allow photographers to simplify forms while amplifying emotion and atmosphere.

Woman on Coney Island Pier Looking Skyward from the series 'Coney Island People 50 Years' © Harvey Stein

AAP Magazine’s 56th printed issue aims to celebrate photographers who understand this visual language and can translate it into a cohesive body of work. Artists are encouraged to submit a portfolio or series of photographs that explores the theme in a personal and creative way. The subject matter is completely open. From urban street scenes and dramatic landscapes to intimate portraits or conceptual compositions, any genre is welcome as long as the work captures the poetry and the power of shadows.

The competition is open to photographers working in color or black and white, and both digital and analog processes are accepted. Alternative techniques such as monochromatic toning are also welcome. What matters most is the ability to create a meaningful photographic series where shadows become an essential storytelling element.

What makes this call particularly exciting is the opportunity for photographers to gain international recognition. Selected winners will receive cash prizes totaling $1,000, publication in the highly respected printed issue AAP Magazine #56: SHADOWS, and global exposure across the photography platform All About Photo.

The First Place winner will receive a $500 cash prize, an exclusive interview, and publication of their winning image or full portfolio in the magazine. Their work will also be showcased in the online Winners Gallery and they will receive a complimentary printed copy of the issue distributed worldwide via Blurb.

The Second Place winner will receive $300, publication in the magazine, a free printed copy, and a featured portfolio in the Winners Gallery. The Third Place winner will receive $200, publication in the issue, a complimentary copy of the magazine, and online exhibition.

Beyond the top three awards, the competition will highlight seventeen additional photographers, ranked from fourth to twentieth place, who will receive a Particular Merit Mention. Their work will also be published in AAP Magazine Volume 56: SHADOWS, giving them valuable international visibility within the photography community.

Facing Shadows © Junxian Wang

All submitted images will be carefully reviewed based on three essential criteria: creativity, originality, and visual or emotional impact. The goal is to identify photographers who bring a distinctive voice to the theme and whose work resonates with viewers on both an aesthetic and emotional level.

Participating in an All About Photo competition can be a transformative step in a photographer’s career. The platform is widely recognized in the international photography scene and attracts the attention of editors, book publishers, gallery owners, festival directors, curators, and creative directors. For emerging artists and established photographers alike, a single opportunity to present work to the right audience can open doors to exhibitions, publications, and collaborations.

Selected photographers will also benefit from international press exposure. All About Photo actively promotes winners through its website, newsletter, and social media channels, ensuring their work reaches a global audience of photography enthusiasts and industry professionals.

In addition, the winning portfolios will become part of the permanent online exhibition hosted on the All About Photo website. This digital gallery serves as a lasting showcase for photographers and allows their work to remain accessible to collectors, editors, and art lovers long after the competition results are announced.

Photographers interested in submitting should ensure that their images have not previously been published in AAP Magazine, as previously featured work is not eligible for re-submission. Beyond this requirement, the competition encourages artistic freedom and welcomes diverse interpretations of the theme.

The winners will be officially announced on the All About Photo website and across its social media channels, where thousands of photography followers actively engage with new talent and contemporary photographic projects.

In a world saturated with images, the power of shadows remains uniquely captivating. They guide the viewer’s eye, create drama, and evoke atmosphere in ways that few other visual elements can. Through AAP Magazine #56: SHADOWS, photographers have the opportunity to explore this profound artistic language and share their vision with an international audience.

For photographers who believe that light is only half the story, this call for entries is an invitation to reveal what lies within the darkness. Submit your work, share your vision, and let your shadows speak.

Shadows Behind Saree © Divyanshu Verma

Shapes of significance © Hugo Thomassen

Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast

By Anastasia Samoylova

Publisher : Aperture and the Norton Museum of Art

2025 | 144 pages

Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast opens a vast, quietly unsettling portrait of the American East Coast — one in which nostalgia, dislocation and transformation are sewn into the landscape itself. In this new monograph, Samoylova retraces the route pioneered by Berenice Abbott in 1954, journeying from Florida to Maine to revisit the places Abbott once documented, and to observe what has become of them decades later. Her images — in vivid color and stark black and white — reveal the tension between myth and reality, between promises of progress and the traces of decay or displacement.

Where once small towns and coastal communities had a certain stillness, Samoylova finds change carved into facades and roadside signs, into suburban sprawl and shuttered shopfronts. She frames these scenes with a photographer’s patience and a poet’s sensitivity — capturing abandoned diners, empty motels, decaying houses, ghostly intersections. At the same time, there is stubborn life: occasional portraits of people, wildlife, reminders that behind every sign of decline, someone, something endures.

Her book does not simply document physical places. It traces the shifting contours of identity, belonging and memory in a nation where the open road has long symbolized freedom — and where that ideal has become tangled with consumerism, environmental degradation, and socio-economic upheaval. Through Atlantic Coast, Samoylova asks whether the “American Dream” remains intact, or if it has fractured along with the towns her car passes through.

Reading this volume is to experience a slow, attentive journey — as a witness, as a traveller, as someone invited to reconsider what America has become. Her photographs linger, subtly unsettling the viewer’s assumptions about beauty, progress and decline. In its silence and restraint, the book whispers that memory, identity and place are fragile — and that every road carries stories worth listening to.

Lisette Model

By Lisette Model

Publisher : Prestel

2026 | 256 pages

Lisette Model presents a definitive exploration of one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, whose bold vision reshaped the way urban life and society were captured on film. This stunning hardcover features over 200 reproductions, ranging from her early Parisian portraits to the striking images of New York streets that defined her career.

Model’s photographic journey began in Vienna and matured in France, where her keen eye for social observation developed. Early works, including portraits of idle elites in Nice, reveal her sharp sense of critique tempered by empathy. These images, at once confrontational and intimate, established her as a formidable observer of human behavior. After emigrating to the United States, Model brought this incisive approach to New York, producing iconic images such as the Coney Island Bather and the Cafe Metropole series, which juxtapose vitality, vulnerability, and the stark contrasts of city life.

Her lens captured both the glamour and grit of her surroundings: the bustling streets of the Lower East Side, the grandeur of high-society gatherings, and the nuanced everyday gestures that reveal the inner lives of her subjects. Model’s distinctive framing, bold compositions, and unflinching attention to human detail created a visual language that remains influential to this day.

This collection also includes lesser-known works from her travels along the U.S. West Coast and Venezuela, highlighting her continued exploration of character, form, and place. Insights from scholar Walter Moser contextualize her work within the broader trajectory of twentieth-century photography, illuminating her enduring impact as both an artist and a teacher.

Lisette Model is more than a retrospective; it is an immersive journey into a world seen through a lens of unvarnished reality and poetic observation. It celebrates a photographer whose fearless engagement with her subjects, combined with her artistic rigor, forged a path for generations of street and documentary photographers, offering an essential resource for enthusiasts and scholars alike.

All About Lisette Model

Fred Herzog: A Color Legacy

By Fred Herzog

Publisher : Hatje Cantz

2026 | 144 pages

Fred Herzog: A Color Legacy opens a fresh chapter on the streets of Vancouver and beyond, offering the public previously unseen images from the archives of a man whose eye for color and life defied the conventions of his time. Herzog’s work in the 1950s and 60s stands out because he chose Kodachrome — a decision nearly heretical when art photography still equated seriousness with black and white. What emerges through his Leica’s lens is a world awash in warm reds, neon signs, and the soft glow of streetlights — a world that feels alive, tactile, and tender.

After emigrating from Germany to Vancouver in 1953 and working by day as a medical photographer, Herzog spent his evenings and weekends roaming the city streets. He captured storefronts, everyday people going about their lives, second-hand shops, Chinatown alleys, decaying cars, neon reflections — details often overlooked, but rich with character. He treated photography not as artifice but as observation, documenting modern urban life with precision and empathy. His photographs turned ordinary city scenes into a tribute to human presence and urban texture.

The volume collects these rediscovered gems alongside his best-known photos, offering a more complete portrait of a photographer who stubbornly trusted color when many of his peers turned away. The images span Vancouver and also trace Herzog’s travels to the U.S., the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America, showing a restless spirit and a worldwide curiosity. Each frame is infused with intimacy, subtle humor, and a respect for the quotidian — light on one face, a reflection in a shop window, the curve of a car hood shimmering in rain.

Fred Herzog: A Color Legacy is not just a homage to a photographer but a statement about memory, time, and beauty in the urban fabric. It reminds us how much of a city’s soul lives in small moments — a street sign, a storefront, a quiet onlooker — and how color, long seen as frivolous in serious photography, can reveal more truth than monochrome ever could.

All About Fred Herzog

Critical Photojournalism: Contemporary Ethics and Practices

By Tara Pixley, Judy Walgren

Publisher : ‎ Routledge

2025 | 226 pages

An essential introduction to the complexities of visual representation, this book offers a critical new framework for understanding and practicing photojournalism in a global digital context.

Critical Photojournalism guides readers through a variety of ethical, technical and business skills, plus the mental health, self-care and safety considerations necessary to thrive in the field. Drawing on their extensive industry and teaching experience, the authors provide real-world advice on how to navigate the demands of the profession while addressing the impact that photojournalism has on society and ways that photojournalists can mitigate harm. Consideration is given to understanding and disrupting implicit bias and power structures in newsrooms, as well as issues around access, working in breaking news environments and balancing informed consent with varying media laws around the world. In accessible language, this book highlights the importance of collaboration and community engagement in contemporary photojournalism and encourages students to adopt a decolonial approach to their work. Readers will learn to balance the needs for accuracy and thoughtfulness with the priorities of a global, social-media-engaged audience.

This is a key textbook for those seeking a nuanced introduction to visual journalism and/or a fresh approach to their craft. This book is supported by a website which can be accessed at www.criticalphotojournalism.com. The website includes a full-length bonus chapter on video and photojournalism, interviews with professional visual journalists, further tips and tools, and a glossary of key terms.

AAP Magazine 56 Shadows - International Photography Competition Now Open for Entries

Unleash the Poetry of Shadows

A Global Photography Call for Entries Celebrating the Art of Light and Darkness

Enter AAP Magazine 56 Shadows

Selected Books