This year’s submissions reflected a striking range of ethnographic subjects and visual approaches – from spirit beliefs and altered states to oyster farming and funeral practices.
Judges were impressed by the narrative strength, composition and the ability of the images to evoke the texture of life in the field. The winning entries stood out for their exceptional visual quality and for conveying rich ethnographic meaning through atmosphere, symbolism or a strong sense of place.
Thank you to all students who submitted entries, and to the 2025 judges: Iza Kavedžija, Tim Cooper and Anna Wood.
Prizewinners
1st prize: Ashley Chin: ‘Trapping spirits with words: ghost stories and haunted spaces in contemporary Singapore’
The anthropology of spirits tends to account for what spirits are: idioms of resistance to modernisation, stand-ins to mourn a traumatic past, or the object of mental cultivation.
Southeast Asia has long been a fertile site for spectral studies. Singapore stands out as an analytical puzzle. Here, spirits upset the distinct categories of the high-tech, late-modern cosmopolitan city: intuition/knowledge, belief/culture, past/future, private/public, and racial difference.
Rather than focusing on what spirits are, my research examines how their mediation—how the form and medium through which they manifest as invisible beings (Meyer 2011)—affords these phantasmal crossings.
View all images by Ashley Chin
Read our interview with Ashley
2nd prize: Manchun Du
I have conducted my fieldwork at a village in Suide county, Shaanxi province, China. I am focused on the production and consumption of funeral objects and how their social lives are intertwined with the constitution of funeral meaning in the practice.
During the fieldwork, I met the local geomancer Mr Xu and his apprentice Mr Liu and went to several funerals with them. I also attended the village’s annual Temple Fair (Miaohui): Chinese religious gatherings held at Miao shrines.
Joint 3rd prize: Jillian Lessing
The Blue Point Oyster is a world-renowned oyster known to grace the tables at the best restaurants and events around the world.
In the 1970s, industrialised fishing crashed its population in the Great South Bay. New York State started funding habitat restoration in the early 2000s, granting leases to local fishermen eager to bring back the industry and revive the Blue Point Oyster. Millions of oysters have since been reintroduced into the Bay.
I am studying how the industry has reintegrated into society with few problems; the economic and conservation system has benefitted all the main actors. Through participant observation of the farmers and interviews with local community members, I am trying to determine how this industry works within Long Island and if the system is exportable to other locations.
View all images by Jillian Lessing
Joint 3rd prize: Juliette Gautron
These pictures are set in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, home to four indigenous groups: Kogi, Wiwa, Arhuaco, Kankuamo.
They show the south side of the Sierra, going up the mountains from Guatapuri, in the community of Sewingui. I stayed in this village for my friend Fiscalito’s wedding. We usually live on the north side of the Sierra, near Minca, but we returned to the family’s home village for the wedding-related spiritual work and ceremony.
My fieldwork looks at the interplay between indigenous politics and environmental politics in the Sierra, and how each one influences the other. I focus on collaboration between conservation NGOs or environmental projects and indigenous peoples of the Sierra, with a focus on the Kogi and the Wiwa.
The pictures were taken with a Leica M6 on 35mm film (Kodak TX-400).
View all images by Juliette Gautron
Other 2025 entrants:
Ellen Forsman Larsson: ‘The drum is how we call the ancestors’
At the sounds of the ŋŋoma drumming, spirits belonging to the balubaale pantheon descend to possess their living heirs. At a ritual feast, these drummers begin their call.
My research brings me to a town in central Uganda in the kingdom of Buganda. I am working with people whose religious lives often include altered states and other trance-like experiences. In Pentecostal churches and ancestral shrines, people ritually manipulate the boundaries of their selves – expelling or inviting the different spirits surrounding them. This entails a dramatic loss of self-awareness, a violent and highly physical outpouring of emotion. These experiments are performed to heal spiritual ills, and for many provide an outlet for psychological tension.
My research asks how these practices are learnt and experienced, and what effects they have on those who achieve them.
Emily Dixon: ‘Promise of progress or corporate narrative building?’
This photo forms a part of a series of British Official Photographs kept by the National Archives from 1959-1960 documenting Shell Petroleum’s funded community development projects.
These young Nigerian students are at the Port Harcourt Training Centre taking part in an engineering workshop. A large part of Shell Petroleum’s public relations strategy in post-colonial Nigeria involved showcasing investments in education and vocational training.
While portraying development and opportunity, these images also reflect the complexities of corporate influence, resource extraction, and the shaping of national futures through foreign capital. They invite us to question whether these were genuine investments in local capacity or strategic efforts to secure legitimacy and access to oil wealth?
Gol Tengis: ‘Children of Arkhangai’
During my fieldwork, I travelled through Arkhangai Province in Mongolia. The presence of Mongolian children in all their variety brought colour and warmth to an otherwise monotonous research journey. After preparing our morning tea, one young boy herder leapt onto his fine horse and galloped off to begin his day of tending livestock.
