Hao Han (8), Shaolin kung fu student and child actor. Shaolin Monastery, Henan. (Photo by Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer)

This latest photo series by Anelia Loubser, a photographer in Cape Town, reminds us that even the simplest change in perspective can change how things look drastically. By selectively cropping and flipping the dark portraits in her “Alienation” series, Loubser makes basic human portraits look like creepy alien close-ups.

I wanted to create the smoke effects on animals I used on some few of my female subjects.
The hardest part was that while there were only faces, here there was the whole body that needed to be “smokeified”.

The Zammitt Family. “A portrait of the Zammitt family at their western Sydney home, with their dogs, Benji and Beau. Brian Zammitt (second from left) is the head of his booming family business, BAMS Hygiene Management, one of Australia’s leading deep cleaning companies, which specialises in disinfecting workplaces and locations contaminated with Covid-19. His wife, Sandra, and daughters Natalie and Louisa all play key frontline roles in the business”. (Photo by John Janson-Moore/Australia’s National Photographic Portrait Prize 2022)

Berlin-based artist Sebastian Bieniek unfolds the story of a two-faced female in his series of photographs “doublefaced”. Using an eye pencil and lipstick, bieniek simply draws an image of a face onto the side of skin. The sketch includes only one eye: carefully placed hair hides the rest of the face from view, revealing one, moving eye of the model. Blue, brown, awake, and sleeping variations create portraits with unique expressions and an illustrative sensibility. The 22 photographs of the hybrid girl expose her daily routine – drinking coffee, traveling on the train, taking a shower, and smoking cigarettes – capturing the daily life of a female with two faces.

Hawaiian surfer Sean Yoro aka Hula combines his love of surfing and his artistic talent, creating hyperrealistic portraits of bathing women at different seaside locations. His work is inspired by street art and abandoned spaces that he uses as his hard-to-reach canvases. Carefully carrying cans of colored paint on the edge of his board, the New York-based artist applies his half submerged female portraits onto the wall.

141 boxers’ by Danish visual artist and photographer Nicolai Howalt is a series of diptychs portraying boxers before and after their fight. Ranging from young boys to women, the collection of images delineates not only the brutal aftermath of a match but the more subtle changes in the subject’s physiology due to adrenaline, struggle, and the complex emotions that come with victory and loss.

Photographer Martin Schoeller examines the visual nuances of twins. Schoeller was born in Munich, Germany in 1968, studied photography at Lette Verein in Berlin and lives in New York. (Photo by Martin Schoeller)