Red Bean Paste Balls, by Chinese photographer Zhonghua Yang has won the overall prize in the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year 2024.

Making us salivate like that incredibly well known early scene from the studio ghibli film Spirited Away, the beautiful image from Yang was taken in the rural area of Xiangshan, Zhejiang, and won the Champagne Taittinger Food for Celebration category. 

The dumplings were prepared for the Spring Festival feast, also known as the Lunar New Year, and the tradition of making dim sum dishes incorporates centuries of Chinese culture, history and craftsmanship.

Yang was awarded $6,400 (£5,000) in prize money. 

“This wonderful, perfectly balanced image is full of light, shadow, mystery and poignancy,” says Caroline Kenyon, Founder, Pink Lady® Food Photographer of the Year. “It is clear a celebratory feast is being prepared. The food is exquisitely made, its circular shapes contrasting with the angularity of the fretwork screens, through which the light pours. Meanwhile, the woman who has made the food, weary, carries in yet another tray. Her role is to labor and to serve while the guests party and enjoy.”

The work of all the winners can be seen on the website, but keep scrolling for a selection of the most delectable. 

“Lucy and Tony and their children made the long journey from Kent to the Isle of Skye to get married. They didn’t want to transport a traditional wedding cake all that way, so their cakemaker produced these fabulous little ‘cakes in containers’ for them. We found a spot by the historical Sligachan Bridge and they tucked in!”

“A woman surrounded by bananas at the fresh market in Pondicherry, India.”

“Boats fan out across a stretch of the lake, creating a floating market selling an array of fresh fruit. This is a floating market of seasonal fruits such as jackfruit, pineapple, mango etc. at Rangamati, Bangladesh. The tribal farmers sell their fruit every early morning at minimum price on a wholesale basis.”

“A Burmese fisherman attempts to make a catch in a mangrove forest. The early morning rays of the sun create a magical atmosphere.”

“Rhubarb is so fascinating to me. I adore its color and texture. It also means spring is near.”

The awards, which were founded in 2011 by Caroline Kenyon, are the world’s leading celebration of food photography. They aim to shine a light on food stories from around the world, with 28 categories open to both professional and amateur photographers alike.  

The winners of the 36 categories were announced by chef and broadcaster Andi Oliver in an awards ceremony at the Mall Galleries in London. 

This year’s global judging panel, chaired by legendary food photographer, David Loftus, included: Clare Reichenbach, CEO, the James Beard Foundation, Tom Athron, CEO, Fortnum & Mason, Asma Khan, Presenter, Chef’s Table, Cookbook Author and Founder, Darjeeling Express, Fiona Shields, Picture Editor, The Guardian and Rein Skullerud, Senior Photographer & Photo Editor, World Food Programme.

If you’re just starting out in photography and feel inspired by these winners, check out this guide to the best cameras for beginners. 

If you’re a seasoned professional, take a look at the best professional cameras on the market.

When Bernard Plossu arrived in Mexico in 1965 at the age of 20, he had received no photographic training. He had heard of neither Robert Frank nor Henri Cartier-Bresson, and his only visual culture came from comic strips and popular press magazines such as Paris Match and Jours de France. Little did he know that he was about to embark on a journey that would not only change his life, but also inspire a photographic manifesto that would leave an indelible mark on the history of photography.

As a teenager, Bernard Plossu was rocked by Miles Davis and Elvis Presley, and often skipped school to spend afternoons at the Cinémathèque de Paris, where he discovered the films of Mizoguchi, Dreyer, Buñuel, Bergman and Truffaut; it was there that he took his first photos of his girlfriend Michèle, “even more beautiful than the actresses on the screen”. When he failed his baccalauréat, he decided to leave the comfort of his bourgeois family and move to Mexico to live with his maternal grandparents, who had emigrated from Indochina. There, he began studying philosophy, which he abandoned a few weeks later to embrace the bohemian life: he befriended local beatniks and backpackers, smoked pot and sympathized with the opposition to the Vietnam War. Bill Coleman, an activist and member of the Students for a Democratic Society, became his mentor and guide after the two young men meet at university. In the zeitgeist between the end of beat culture and the rise of the hippie movement, the duo hit the road and embarked on a nomadic life, traveling by foot, hitchhiking and bus.

At the wheel of a beat-up old Pontiac with Coleman, or in Crazy George’s Volkswagen convertible, they slept from beach to beach, making new friends along the way – Laurie, Karina, Juan the Puerto Rican poet, Roger and his (still stoned) ukulele. They traveled from San Miguel de Allende to San Cristóbal de Las Casas, via Guanajuato and Oaxaca, and celebrated New Year’s Eve on Zipolite beach in Puerto Ángel. Equipped with a Kodak Retina, Bernard Plossu criss-crossed Mexico for almost a year and a half. He photographed intuitively, capturing fleeting moments of grace, “just like that, without any particular reason, to live the experience, the present moment”.

It was during this voyage of initiation that he discovered his future major themes: friends, the road, wandering, sensuality, freedom, “that connivance, that ideal familiarity” he was able to establish with the people he met and the places he passed through. He found poetry in the most ordinary situations, which he captured on the fly without concern for framing, focus or light: his traveling companions dozing in the back of a car, a woman in her wedding dress, his girlfriend’s knees caught under a skirt as she crouches, arms flailing in a car window… From the start, he was passionately in love with Mexico, which gave him the impression of experiencing On the road without reading Kerouac. Along the way, he joined an ethnographic expedition and spent three months photographing the wild jungles of Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border.

Bernard Plossu’s visual chronicles reflect a rare photographic freedom, an almost childlike sense of wonder at a place where anything seems possible. Ten years later, he published a small travel diary of some sixty images, Le voyage mexicain (The Mexican Journeyà, which became a bible for a whole generation of photographers. “A lot of young people tell me they’ve traveled with this book in their pocket, considering it a reference,” he says, “but it’s not an art book about Mexico; rather, it’s a book about being twenty and going anywhere, doing anything.”

The book devoted to Bernard Plossu published by Actes Sud is available for purchase the book for €14.50. Click here.

The “Bernard Plossu, Rétrospective” exhibition can be seen at the Camera Obscura gallery, Paris, from June 7 to July 27, 2024.

Another exhibition, « Bernard Plossu, Fresson », is also on view at the festival in La Gacilly, France, from June 21 to November 2024.

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” This is certainly true of the images in “Myths, Secrets, Lies, and Truths: Photography from the Doug McCraw Collection,” on view at the Boca Raton Museum of Art June 12 to October 13. The exhibition highlights photographic works by Hank Willis Thomas, Spider Martin, Sheila Pree Bright, Liesa Cole, and Karen Graffeo that emphasize the complexity of the human condition.

From behind their lenses, these five photographers have captured snapshots that reveal the murky myths, personal truths, deliberate lies, and kept secrets that influence our perceptions of the other and the human experience overall. Also debuting June 12 is “Julie Evans: Eating Sunshine,” a solo exhibit of the New York–based artist’s new ceramic sculptures alongside her works on paper.

In 2011, a new art star burst onto the scene. A nanny and a self-taught photographer, Vivian Maier had roamed the streets of New York City and Chicago in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, her pint-sized charges in tow, snapping pictures of derelicts and swells, skyscrapers and train yards, naked mannequins and discarded dolls.

She had taken hundreds of thousands of these photos. She stashed them in a storage unit until she couldn’t afford the payments any longer. She died destitute in 2009, at the age of 83. But then a young real estate developer named John Maloof bought the contents of her locker at a Chicago auction, scanned what he found, and uploaded it to Flickr.

Breathless accolades, gallery shows, a copyright dispute, and even an Oscar-nominated documentary followed.

Photo enthusiasts responded to her funny pictures of rich ladies wearing luxe furs and mean scowls, her candid images of bums and bankers sleeping on park benches, her empathetic yet unsentimental portrayals of children, her enigmatic self-portraits. 

Moreso, they marveled at her remarkable story.

Vivian Maier, Self-Portrait, New York, NY, 1954. © Estate of Vivian Maier / Courtesy Maloof Collection / Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.

Now, Fotografiska in New York City has opened the first major museum retrospective in the United States dedicated to this mysterious artist, who was—it turns out—more than a street photographer.

“Vivian Maier: Unseen Work” (through Sept. 29), which debuted at Paris’ Musée du Luxembourg in 2021, features approximately 230 items, including vintage and modern prints, black-and-white and color photographs, Super 8 footage, contact sheets, and audio recordings.

“My aim was to give a complete overview of the work,” said the show’s curator, Anne Morin of Madrid-based cultural management company diChroma Photography. In addition to her beloved street pictures, there are abstract experiments with light and shadow (often done in collaboration with the children she cared for), extreme close-ups of wrinkled hands and newspaper headlines, and complicated self-portraits using a variety of mirrors and reflections.

Vivian Maier, Chicago, IL (1957). © Estate of Vivian Maier / Courtesy Maloof Collection / Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY

When she first embarked on the project 15 years ago, she explained, “We had a goal, which was to set her name in the history of photography near the main monsters: Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson. And no question: she’s seated and well-settled.”

Born in the Bronx in 1926, Maier spent much of her childhood between New York City and France. She got her first Brownie camera as a kid. In 1951 she was hired as a governess in New York, and in 1956 she moved to Chicago and continued to nanny for several families for the next few decades. Her job allowed her time and money to pursue her passion for taking pictures, which she often did while on the clock. 

Vivian Maier, Grenoble, France (1959). © Estate of Vivian Maier / Courtesy Maloof Collection / Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.

Her street photos have a certain frankness. Probably because she was poor herself, she portrayed the poor and vulnerable without sentimentality: a toothless elderly woman, smiling warmly at the camera, or an older, bespectacled man struggling to read the paper. She often showed contempt for the rich: a garishly dressed woman with too much makeup yelling at a driver, a suited businessman caught mid-yawn. 

She sometimes displayed a prurient, or maybe puritan, streak. For example, she filmed the outside of an adult cinema with her Super 8 camera, documenting the men sheepishly, skittishly contemplating buying a ticket before going inside. 

Vivian Maier, Central Park (1959). © Estate of Vivian Maier / Courtesy Maloof Collection / Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.

Yet, she seemed to appreciate beauty, too: a young brunette with cat-eye makeup holding a fluffy black cat; Lena Horne, radiant in pearls; all manner of couples holding hands.

“Vivian Maier had the faculty and capacity to just take the extraordinary in the banality of daily life,” Morin said, citing a Victor Hugo quote: “The extraordinary is in the deep of the ordinary.”

“I think she was collecting the world in which she was living,” she continued. “She was doing a kind of portrait of her time. She was a pack rat: she was collecting little moments that completely escaped [most people’s vision].”

Vivian Maier, Untitled (1958). ©Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.

And yet, what struck me most about this exhibition is not Maier’s skill as a documentarian, but rather the guileless experimentation and enthusiasm that characterizes so much outsider art. Howard Greenberg, whose gallery represents Maier’s work in New York, agreed. “Vivian Maier is one of the great outsider artists,” he told me.

Like other self-taught artists, such as Henry Darger or Judith Scott, Maier was always, compulsively, creating. Her early self-portraits using mirrors, reflections, and shadows were experiments in lighting and special effects. Later, when she moved to Chicago, she urged the children she nannied to pose behind sheets, to blow bubbles, or to hide in concrete tubes so she could try to show their shadows, their kinetic motion, their gleeful energy. These photos don’t all work, but they capture, more than a moment, the very magical, radical act of photographing itself: the joy of holding a camera up and going “click.”

Maier stopped taking pictures entirely sometime in the 1990s. She had switched to color photography and her images got more abstract as time went on. She was unhoused for a while. At some point in the 2000s, three of the boys she had taken care of in Chicago moved her into a nice apartment and checked in on her until her death. 

Vivian Maier, Chicago area, IL, 1961. ©Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.

What would Maier make of her discovery? Her fame? “I don’t think she would be happy,” said Greenberg. “She may have wanted or liked the attention when she was younger, but not by the end.”

Maier certainly didn’t seem to seek the spotlight. She rarely printed her work. She barely looked at the hundreds of thousands of pictures she took. After a certain point, she didn’t even bother developing her film.

Perhaps she couldn’t afford it. Perhaps it was too much of a hassle. Perhaps it wasn’t even the pictures that were that important to her, but the act of taking them: the way it encouraged a new way of seeing, of looking, and of being in a world—as a woman and as an outsider.

“Vivian Maier: Unseen Work” is on view at Fotografiska New York, 281 Park Avenue South, through Sept. 29.

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