Syrian President Bashar Al Assad watches as Pope John Paul II boards his plane at Damascus airport May 8, 2001 at the end of the Pontiff's four-day visit to Syria.
Nyaueth by Peter Zelewski – £2,000 third prize winner. This was taken near London’s Oxford Street as part of Zelewski’s series Beautiful Strangers. Zelewski explains: ‘The aim of Beautiful Strangers is to challenge the concept of traditional beauty with a series of spontaneous street portraits of everyday citizens who show character, uniqueness and a special inner quality’. (Photo by Peter Zelewski/Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize 2015)
Artist Amber Wheeler of Minneapolis, Minn., has given her 2-month-old boy just that. All she used was some Photoshop and well-timed photos. Using simple black lines – much like the ones in this series of cat Instagram portraits – Wheeler transformed her son into an astronaut, a superhero, and a cowboy without spending one dollar on costumes.
New Zealand Paralympic swimmer Cameron Leslie poses for portrait at the Millennium Pool on March 26, 2012 in Auckland, New Zealand. (Photo by Hannah Johnston/Getty Images)
Born in 1958 in Kiev, Ukraine, artist Mark Khaisman studied Art and Architecture at the Moscow Architectural Institute in Russia. Now living in Philadelphia, USA, Khaisman uses rolls of brown packaging tape to create incredible works of art. Mark characterizes his work as ‘pictorial illusions formed by light and shadow’. The three key elements are: translucent packing tape, clear acrylic or film panels, and light. By superimposing layers of packaging tape Mark can ‘play on degrees of opacity that produces transparencies highlighted by the color, shading, and embossment’.
After 12 years photographing models, musicians, and celebrities, Brad Wilson decided that he wanted to photograph something a little more unpredictable: wild animals. Photo: Serval. (Photo by Brad Wilson)
“A Kind of You” is a documentary work of an uncanny asian tradition, where monkeys are trained and dressed to act humanlike in order to ask money from the bypassers. Modern city culture has turned the old tradition in to eerie and haunting act of cruel street theatre where animals become something else, never able to reach our expectations”. – Perttu Saksa. (Photo by Perttu Saksa)
The above portrait is part of London-based photographer Roman Sakovich's project, “Half”, which highlights the drastic physical effects of substance abuse. Sakovich has created split images that simultaneously portray an individual prior to and post addiction, leaving the viewer with a stark visualization of the damaging effects of drug use on our bodies.