AAP Magazine #58 B&W: International Photography Competition Now Open

Celebrating the Timeless Art of Black-and-White Photography

A Global Call for Entries Celebrating the Art of Monochrome Photography

Black-and-white photography has long held a unique place in the visual arts. Stripped of color, it reveals the essence of a scene through contrast, texture, emotion, and composition. In its latest international photography competition, AAP Magazine invites photographers worldwide to celebrate the timeless beauty of monochrome imagery in AAP Magazine #58: B&W.

This new edition of AAP Magazine will present a curated collection of exceptional photographic projects dedicated entirely to black-and-white photography. From dramatic portraits and cinematic street scenes to minimalist landscapes and conceptual fine art compositions, the magazine seeks powerful visual storytelling that thrives beyond color.

Black-and-white photography is more than a stylistic choice—it is a language of light, shadow, shape, and emotion. Without the distraction of color, viewers are drawn deeper into the subject, discovering subtle details, atmosphere, and emotional depth. Monochrome images often possess a timeless quality, connecting contemporary moments with the rich history of photography itself.

Unreal World from the series A City’s Tradition and Modernity © Chris Yan

Colossal Legacy from the series 'Ivory Sentinels' © Florian Kriechbaumer

For generations, black-and-white imagery has shaped the evolution of visual culture. Legendary photographers used monochrome film to document humanity, architecture, conflict, fashion, and everyday life with extraordinary emotional intensity. Today, digital and analog photographers continue to explore the artistic possibilities of grayscale imagery, proving that black and white remains one of the most powerful forms of photographic expression.

AAP Magazine’s 58th issue aims to honor photographers who understand the emotional and artistic potential of monochrome storytelling. Participants are encouraged to submit cohesive portfolios or series that demonstrate a personal vision and a strong command of black-and-white aesthetics. All genres are welcome, including documentary, portraiture, landscape, street photography, fine art, architecture, travel, and experimental work.

The competition is open to photographers using both digital and analog processes. Traditional darkroom techniques, film photography, silver gelatin prints, and modern digital monochrome conversions are all accepted. Whether highly contrasted or delicately toned, the strongest submissions will be those that use black and white intentionally to strengthen narrative impact and artistic expression.

One of the most exciting aspects of AAP Magazine #58: B&W is the opportunity for international recognition and exposure. Selected winners will receive cash prizes totaling $1,000, publication in the printed edition of AAP Magazine, and worldwide visibility through the All About Photo platform.

Balance © Astrid Verhoef

The Dark River © Michael Anker

The First Place winner will receive a $500 cash prize, an exclusive interview, and publication of their winning portfolio in the magazine. Their work will also be featured prominently in the online Winners Gallery and they will receive a complimentary printed copy of the issue distributed internationally.

The Second Place winner will receive a $300 cash award, publication in the magazine, a complimentary printed edition, and a featured online portfolio presentation. The Third Place winner will receive $200, publication in the issue, and online exposure through the official Winners Gallery.

In addition to the top three winners, seventeen photographers will receive a Particular Merit Mention. Their work will also appear in AAP Magazine #58: B&W, providing valuable visibility among photography professionals, collectors, publishers, curators, and photography enthusiasts worldwide.

All submissions will be evaluated based on creativity, originality, visual strength, and emotional impact. The jury will seek photographers whose work demonstrates a unique artistic voice and a compelling understanding of monochrome photography.

Participating in an All About Photo competition can be an important step in a photographer’s career. The platform is internationally respected within the photography industry and regularly attracts the attention of editors, gallery owners, art directors, curators, publishers, and festival organizers searching for emerging and established talent.

Winning photographers will also benefit from extensive international promotion. All About Photo actively showcases selected artists through its website, online exhibitions, newsletters, and social media channels, helping photographers reach a broad global audience.

Beyond the publication itself, selected portfolios will remain part of the permanent online exhibition hosted by All About Photo. This ongoing digital showcase allows photographers to continue gaining exposure long after the competition results are announced.

Photographers interested in applying should ensure that submitted images have not previously appeared in AAP Magazine. Aside from this requirement, the competition encourages complete artistic freedom and welcomes diverse interpretations of black-and-white photography.

The winners of AAP Magazine #58: B&W will be officially announced on the All About Photo website and across its social media platforms, where thousands of photography lovers and industry professionals follow the discovery of contemporary photographic talent.

In today’s image-saturated world, black-and-white photography continues to stand apart with its timeless elegance and emotional clarity. By focusing on light, contrast, texture, and composition, monochrome images invite viewers into a deeper visual experience that transcends trends and distractions.

Through AAP Magazine #58: B&W, photographers have the opportunity to share their artistic vision with an international audience and celebrate the enduring power of monochrome storytelling.

For photographers who believe that emotion is strongest when reduced to its essential visual elements, this call for entries is an invitation to create, inspire, and be seen. Submit your work and let your black-and-white vision leave a lasting impression.

Díptic 128 from the series Gaia © Jaume Llorens

City Life 20472 from the series City Life' © Kevin Lyle

Martin Parr: The Last Resort: 40 Years On

By Martin Parr

Publisher : Dewi Lewis Publishing & Martin Parr Foundation

2026 | 60 pages

"The pictures from The Last Resort still hold up brilliantly. If I ever reach the Pearly Gates, those are the ones I’d probably pull out first!" – Martin Parr

Published in collaboration with the Martin Parr Foundation, this special edition accompanies a tribute exhibition at the Foundation’s Bristol gallery, honouring Martin Parr following his passing in December. Shot in and around the English seaside town of New Brighton between 1983 and 1985, The Last Resort remains a landmark in British colour documentary photography, establishing Parr as one of the nation’s most influential photographers.

This volume presents a carefully curated selection of images from the iconic series, alongside extensive archival material, including contact sheets, photographs, and ephemera drawn from Martin’s personal collection. Isaac Blease, Archivist at the Foundation, provides insight into the project’s origins, exploring the artistic and cultural influences that prompted Parr’s shift from black-and-white to colour photography, as well as the series’ initial exhibitions in Liverpool and at London’s Serpentine Gallery.

Peter Brawne, designer of the original 1986 book, reflects on the creative process behind the design and his collaboration with Martin, while Susie Parr, Martin’s wife, contributes a personal account of New Brighton and the first public presentation of the work at Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery in 1985.

Richly illustrated and thoughtfully contextualized, this book offers both longtime admirers and new readers a unique glimpse into the development of Martin Parr’s iconic vision and the vibrant world of British seaside life that inspired it.

All About Martin Parr

Nathalie Rubens: Seasons of Time

By Nathalie Rubens

Publisher : Kehrer Verlag

2026 | 112 pages

Nathalie Rubens: Seasons of Time marks a thoughtful and intimate debut, tracing the subtle thresholds that define a woman’s life. In this carefully composed photobook, Nathalie Rubens reflects on two parallel passages: her daughter Ruby’s emergence into young adulthood and her own transition into post-menopausal life. Through this mirrored gaze, the work becomes a meditation on continuity and change, revealing how beginnings and endings often unfold side by side.

Rubens turns the camera inward and outward with equal tenderness. Portraits of Ruby capture the fragile confidence and uncertainty of youth—moments poised between dependence and independence. In contrast, self-portraits confront the physical and emotional transformations of midlife with quiet candor. The images resist sentimentality; instead, they dwell in nuance, acknowledging vulnerability while affirming resilience. The body, in its evolving forms, becomes both subject and witness to time’s passage.

Domestic interiors, shared gestures, and fleeting glances anchor the book in lived experience. Light filters through windows, falls across skin, and settles on everyday objects, creating a rhythm that echoes the seasons invoked in the title. Rubens approaches aging not as decline, but as a shifting landscape—one marked by introspection, memory, and renewed self-awareness. The dialogue between mother and daughter unfolds without hierarchy, suggesting that each stage of life carries its own clarity and its own mystery.

Deeply personal yet widely relatable, Seasons of Time speaks to the universality of transition. It honors the complexity of female identity as something neither fixed nor singular, but constantly in motion. Through measured composition and emotional honesty, Rubens crafts a visual reflection on growth, separation, and connection. The result is a quiet affirmation that time, though relentless, can also be a source of understanding and grace, binding generations even as it gently transforms them.

Jon McCormack: Patterns: Art of the Natural World

By Jon McCormack

Publisher : Damiani

2026 | 168 pages

The structural organization of the biosphere is the primary subject of Patterns: Art of the Natural World, a comprehensive visual catalog by Australian photographer and conservationist Jon McCormack. The work operates on the premise that life and geology are governed by a shared geometry, manifested in the recurring arrangements found within botanical specimens, animal migration routes, and topographical transformations. McCormack utilizes high-resolution digital sensors to isolate these rhythms, presenting a data-rich look at the physical world that spans from the macro-scale of elephant trails in the Kenyan savanna to the micro-textures of fossilized feathers. This survey functions as an empirical record of the planet’s innate design, emphasizing the mathematical consistency of natural forms across disparate ecosystems.

The geographical scope of the project encompasses a wide range of extreme environments, including the volcanic coastlines of Iceland and the sub-zero fjords of Antarctica. McCormack documents the silent, systemic logic of the earth, such as the intricate symmetry found within the ice caves of Svalbard and the rhythmic branching of tree rings. A significant portion of the archive focuses on the photographer’s local environment in California, where the interplay of desert erosion and coastal tides provides a laboratory for studying the evolution of landforms. By removing the distraction of color in certain instances or utilizing flat lighting, the imagery highlights the "technofossils" of the natural world—the enduring structures that define the history of a landscape and its inhabitants.

Supplementing the visual evidence are a series of short essays penned by a multidisciplinary group of scientists and explorers. These texts provide a theoretical framework for the photographs, explaining the biological and physical forces that generate specific patterns, such as the fractals in river deltas or the hexagonal tiling of basalt columns. This collaboration ensures that the book remains a rigorous journalistic inquiry into the interconnectedness of life rather than a purely aesthetic exercise. As ecosystems face unprecedented pressure from climate instability, Patterns stands as a definitive document of the planet’s foundational architecture, recording the complex symmetries that underpin global biodiversity before they are irrevocably altered by human intervention.

Albert Watson: Kaos

By Albert Watson

Publisher : Taschen

2026 | 408 pages

Albert Watson: Kaos is a masterful survey of one of photography’s most influential voices, spanning five decades of work that oscillates between intimacy and spectacle. Watson’s photographs are at once meticulously composed and viscerally immediate, capturing both the iconic and the unexpected with equal authority.

KAOS charts Watson’s journey from his breakthrough Alfred Hitchcock portrait in 1973 to the present, revealing the astonishing range of his vision. Across its pages, readers encounter a kaleidoscope of subjects: celebrities in revealing vulnerability, strangers in fleeting urban moments, wildlife in arresting stillness, and landscapes that shimmer with elemental power. Each frame is a study in light, shadow, and narrative tension, embodying Watson’s extraordinary ability to render the familiar as extraordinary.

The book moves fluidly between worlds. Supermodels and pop icons—David Bowie, Kate Moss, Jay Z, Jennifer Lopez, Mick Jagger—sit alongside anonymous figures in neon-lit cities and remote Scottish landscapes, their presence amplified by Watson’s uncanny sense of timing and composition. From sensuous nudes to stark urban street photography, his work explores surface beauty while hinting at the emotional and psychological depth beneath. Watson’s camera captures not only what is seen, but the subtle textures of human experience: desire, humor, solitude, and magnetism.

Accompanied by an essay from Philippe Garner and enriched with Watson’s own reflections, as well as previously unpublished Polaroids from his personal archive, KAOS is both an authoritative career retrospective and a deeply personal document. The photographs pulse with cinematic allure, formal precision, and the irrepressible vitality of a life spent observing the world in its most dynamic and intimate moments.

Presented in a sumptuous hardcover, with optional signed Art Editions including exclusive prints, Albert Watson: Kaos is a definitive celebration of an artist whose work continues to inspire photographers, collectors, and enthusiasts around the globe, capturing a universe simultaneously chaotic, poetic, and utterly compelling.

AAP Magazine #58 B&W: International Photography Competition Now Open

Celebrating the Timeless Art of Black-and-White Photography

A Global Call for Entries Celebrating the Art of Monochrome Photography

Enter AAP Magazine 58 Black and White

Selected Books