Winners: AAP Magazine 52 Street Photography

From bustling city streets to quiet sidewalks around the world, the 25 winning photographers of AAP Magazine #52: Street, representing 15 countries across 5 continents, highlight the vibrant diversity and creative vision of contemporary street photography. Selected from an international call for entries, these talented street photographers capture everyday life, urban moments, and human interactions with authenticity, precision, and artistic insight. Discover the compelling work of this year’s award-winning street photography winners from around the globe.

This year’s winners showcase a remarkable diversity of approaches. Some photographers embrace classic documentary traditions, capturing spontaneous interactions and unguarded human moments. Others explore the street through bold color, shadow, graphic compositions, or conceptual approaches that highlight fleeting gestures, urban geometry, and the quiet rhythms of city life. Their photographs reveal humor, poetry, tension, and beauty — the very heart of street photography.

Across the series, we see human presence in all its forms: from monumental gatherings and sacred rituals to intimate, suspended moments of reflection. Whether capturing the anonymity of urban streets, the choreography of daily life, or the unexpected poetry in a single gesture, each photograph transforms the ordinary into something extraordinary.

Together, these 25 photographers remind us why street photography remains one of the most dynamic and accessible forms of contemporary photography. Every street corner holds a story — and these powerful images reveal just how many are waiting to be discovered.

Together, these 25 visions remind us that the street is not just a location, but a living tapestry. With patience, curiosity, and an open eye, photographers continue to uncover stories hidden in plain sight.

The Winner is Savadmon Avalachamveettil (Ireland) with the series 'MahaKumbh: World's Largest Gathering'

A once-in-144 years phenomenon. Ash-smeared Hindu holy men (Naga Sadhus) charged into India's most sacred river Ganges at dawn on the first most significant bathing day of the Kumbh Mela festival. An extraordinary display of human unity, spiritual energy, and collective consciousness.

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The Second Place Winner is Jozef Macak (Slovakia) with the series 'Tides of life'

This series traces the uneasy intimacy between people and water. A relationship marked by necessity, resilience, and quiet harm. Across Bangladesh, rivers reflect this same tension: lifelines turned fragile, ecosystems pushed to the edge. This series offers a glimpse into that reality where water nourishes and betrays, and where its spirit persists against the slow ache of environmental neglect.

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The Third Place Winner is David Masoko (Netherlands) with the series 'Dislocated Presences'

Dislocated Presences is an ongoing series of urban diptychs that lingers in the unnoticed moments of city life. By pairing candid street scenes, the work reflects on anonymity, displacement, and the quiet choreography of human presence. Each image resists narrative resolution, instead offering a trace — a fragment suspended in time. Through a muted palette, softened edges, and gestures caught mid-motion, the series invites the viewer to slow down, to witness rather than consume, and to contemplate the fragile tension between visibility and disappearance.

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MERIT AWARD GALLERY

Francesco Fantini (Italy)

A group of Orthodox Jewish boys in their neighbourhood of Stamford Hill, North London, on the eve of the Passover holiday. They are burning chametz, leavened food forbidden during Passover, as a symbolic and literal purging of leaven before the holiday begins.

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Danielle Goldstein (United States)

When we walk around densely populated areas of the world its easy to see only their sheer vastness: the architecture, the infrastructure, the commerce, the sensory onslaught and the incessant supply of humanity. That staggering, impenetrable vastness is what makes these areas of the world both endlessly fascinating and incredibly infuriating; and it’s easy to get wrapped up in the blunt, visceral emotion that the hugeness of these cities evoke in us. It’s easy to forget that the dense forest is, in reality, a collection of trees—all of them breathing, growing, living, and dying, one beside the other beside the other. Every one of us has a story, a life, and all the joys, hardships, pain and happiness that go along with that life. So, with my camera, I strive to pay attention to the individuals that breathe, grow, and live side by side, in the modern world. Through my photography, I want to cast their jetsam in beauty, their silhouettes in reverence, their anonymity in recognition, their hustle in stillness. Bringing awareness to the city’s small and elegant moments is, for me, an act of love, devotion and hopefully compassion. For while it is so easy to get caught up in life’s drama and difficulties, it is important to remember that we are all in this together.

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Pekka Välitalo (Finland)

I like to shoot everyday life in the streets focusing on urban landscapes with interplay of light and shadow. I try to create an emotional narrative that feels introspective, poetic and brings a sense of quiet contemplation.

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Bartosz Michalik (Poland)

National Gallery, London, 2024. A visitor in an open-back dress sketches before “Susanna at her Bath.” Her posture echoes the model’s turned back and backward glance, creating a quiet dialogue across centuries between observer and image.

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France Leclerc (United States)

In Dhaka, overcrowded trains are a crucial part of daily life. But once a year, during the Bishwa Ijtema—the world’s second-largest Muslim gathering—the crowds grow beyond what seems possible. Pilgrims pour into Tongi from all parts of Bangladesh, drawn by three days of prayer and sermons by Islamic scholars. Special trains are added, but demand far exceeds supply, and so travelers climb wherever they can. Amid the frenzy, there are rare pockets of calm: a train car with only a handful of passengers, a balloon vendor chasing potential customers, almost otherworldly against the backdrop of the mass pilgrimage, moments where time seems to pause before the next surge of humanity.

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Gail Just (United States)

On a late February afternoon, Venice Beach (Ca) was hosting an “underwear” running event. Despite the flamboyance and energy of the runners, it was the bystanders that caught my camera’s eye.

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Derry Ainsworth (United Kingdom)

From my new Hong Kong book ‘HIGHS & LOWS’ showcasing Hong Kong from unique perspectives - a mix of aerial cityscapes and intimate scenes of everyday life in the streets.

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Alon Goldsmith (United States/South Africa)

Captured on the Venice Beach Boardwalk at the height of the COVID-19 shutdown, Surveillance reflects a moment of quiet tension and unexpected connection. Against a wall freshly painted over in what I call “COVID Brown,” a man and his dog glide by on a skateboard—the man masked, the dog locking eyes with the camera. The image embodies one aspect of my approach to street photography: finding a stage and waiting for life to unfold. Only later did I learn that the subject was unhoused. I found a way to send him a print, and he was thrilled to receive. For me, that exchange completed the story.

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Giedo van der Zwan (Netherlands)

This picture I too during a workshop with ShootLike a Local that I was conducting in Madrid. It was evening in May and I was walking to a meeting point where I would meet the group after an assignment when I passed this scene. I saw the light on the wall, the bags in the window, the letters on the wall and the shadows of two men playing around… Four layers that I saw could work together very well!. I stayed with the scene until the shadows were perfectly placed on the wall, and took many shots until I was happy, before I rushed of to meet the others..

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Pelin Guven (Turkey)

I’m a Turkish photographer now calling Switzerland home. Photography is how I live and how I see. When I walk into the street with my camera, I feel at home. I wander without a plan, following light, then a gesture, a flash of color, a fleeting glance. I move as if dancing, led by instinct and the rhythm of the street. In those moments, I’m completely present, alive, and free.
New York is the great daylight stage, alive with sirens and steam, cab yellows and reflections, the quick rhythm of movement, grit and light. In this series, I let light do the talking. Pink glows where shadow softens, color interrupts routine, and people drift through the frame like passing thoughts. I don’t chase stories; I let them come to me. Each photograph is both discovery and surrender to what the city gives.

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Denise Pensky (United States)

While at a Santeria dance demonstration, I initially focused on the costumed dancers, And then I turned around and saw these young boys leaping on and off a bench. They were having such a good time together - not a care in the world, confident, literally jumping for joy. This was such a happy moment and I remember hoping that they would never lose their spirit.

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Jay Calderon (United States)

These are attempts at expressions of the indecisive moment, the momentary pause that comprises individual experience. My hope is, like the ellipses, they hint at something "more" or that something has been left unsaid.

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Eric Davidove (United States)

The Slow Ride series is about the art of going nowhere in style. From toy lowrider classics to theme-based convertibles, these tiny vehicles, and their even tinier drivers, prove that it’s not about the destination, it’s about the vibe.

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Jaejoon Ha (South Korea)

I'll never forget my walks in New York this summer! I spend both sorrow and joy in Washington Square Park.

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Chris van Dolleweerd (Netherlands)

This image is part of my ongoing Incognito serie.
In a world where everyone seems to be constantly visible, there is a fascinating beauty to be found in the unnoticed, the inconspicuous, the anonymous. This serie is a visual journey through moments of silent anonymity, in which the everyday person, unrecognizable and undirected, is captured in its purest form.
The origins of this project lie in a time of isolation and distance, during the corona pandemic. When our faces were covered and we often felt invisible, a sense of anonymity grew in many — and sometimes even of deep loneliness. This work is an attempt to capture and preserve that feeling: the anonymity of a crowd, the silent sadness of a soul-alone person on the street, and the hidden stories in every face that never really becomes visible.

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Shay Lari-Hosain (United States)

Silence in B-Flat critiques the individualistic surveillance-centric natures of the built environment, investigates localized histories through dreamlike layering and sequencing, and plays with time by blurring the boundaries of verisimilitude in a photograph.
In Silence in B-Flat I, by making hundreds of exposures and selectively averaging frames of my choosing, I assume editorial control—toggling the positions of stoplights, illuminated windows, cars, and pedestrians. Some scenes may resemble a single frame, while others are effectively "staged" from events that transpired over hours. The resulting scenes reconstruct time nonlinearly, creating new narratives.
This process creates a surreal rendering of the scene that appears simultaneously authentic and unreal (almost painterly, as the process removes nearly all photographic noise, heightening the radiance of color gradients through no other manipulation), raising instinctive questions in the viewer about the veracity of the scene. This ambiguity impacts the trust the viewer may place in the images as a photographic record.

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Igor Gladkov (Russia)

Sergey loves to smoke a pipe. He looks like he came out of a Van Gogh painting.
In St. Petersburg, residential buildings built in Tsarist Russia resemble wells. There are abandoned houses, and homeless people live here. At the very bottom of St. Petersburg wells. These people have their own history, biographies.

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Asako Naruto (Japan)

Night descends upon Madrid. A faint tremor runs through the silence, where unspoken words seem to linger. I listen to those quiet murmurs and imagine the stories that were never told. I consider myself a street photographer, yet I am drawn less to the decisive moment than to scenes where time appears to pause—moments of introspection suspended in stillness. I am particularly fond of photographing at night, perhaps because the darkness allows me to disappear and become the narrator myself. Using highlight-weighted metering to capture fragments illuminated by artificial light, I collect these moments as if recording someone’s monologue. Together, they form this body of work—an intimate record of nocturnal Madrid.

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Gabriel Marcos (Venezuela)

This series is the result of wandering the city while exploring my own inner streets. I never set out to define a place or a theme; I simply observed and collected fragments that resonated with something already within me. Through faces, reflections, and silhouettes, a sense of fragmentation and estrangement took form—feelings long present, now given shape. But far from offering answers, these images opened new questions. These images are those questions.

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Justin Roque (France)

I had gone to the northwest of France for a few days to take photos in the port of Le Havre, the largest port in France. During this stay I wanted to go for a walk in Deauville a little further south to change the atmosphere. I had very little time there, so I decided to go directly to the Deauville boards by the sea. There, I didn't see much to photograph, Deauville is very famous with these boards and its colorful parasols by the sea. There was nothing original to photograph. Then, I saw a small recess on the left, I ventured there out of curiosity and there, I discovered an area where vacationers have their changing cabins with a sort of very shallow and empty « pool » in the middle. I already liked the atmosphere and the light. Then I saw at the very end of the pool, 2 people reading quietly. The photo was there, they were perfect in this environment, a little cut off from the world compared to the large number of tourists who were walking the boards right next to them. The framing was imposed quickly and I had to act quickly because I didn't want them to spot me. The light was very beautiful too, there was a very cinematographic side to the whole thing, which is good for a city like Deauville which hosts the American film festival every year.

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Fabrizio Intonti (Italy)

In the era of pervasive communication, of continuous and hyperactive interaction with our peers, a question arises again: who are others, truly? "Hell is other people," Sartre replied, meaning that the gaze of others objectifies us, fixes and crystallizes us into a representation.
And how much can the external representation we give of ourselves at a given moment, our way of appearing, here and now, truly tell about us?
What can photography, in this sense, show of the "others," of their interiority?
I start from this insurmountable dichotomy of internal and external, of subjectivity and objectivity when I take photographs of perfect strangers, alone or in groups, near or far, as if for a moment it were possible to overcome the very limit of representation and create a form of connection.

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Nicola Balestrazzi (Italy)

Catholic tradition and symbolism are still very strong in Mexico. From North to South, being either religious events and festivals such as the Passion of Christ and the Day of the Dead or being simply a square, a street, or the numerous churches all around, the cross is the most omnipresent symbol in Mexico. This street photography project showcases all the crosses I have come across in all the different surroundings I found myself in, on the many occasions I have visited the country.

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