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Victoria Ahrens

In a quiet corner of Camberwell, south London, palm tree fronds shade an intricately tiled pond of Islamic design. This hidden oasis, named Chumleigh Gardens, was created in 1995 to reflect the multiculturalism of the local inhabitants. Nearby stand the ruins of a 19th-century limestone kiln, which was used to smelt chalk into quicklime to light London’s theatres before the invention of electricity.

Chalk and palm trees, both of which appeared in the fossil record of the Cretaceous period, are close to my heart. I grew up in Argentina, surrounded by palm-lined parks, and as a child I remember visiting family on the Dorset coast, collecting fossils on the beach.

Here, I bring Chumleigh’s palm trees together with silver-gelatin prints of my grandfather, a Jewish émigré to Argentina. His self-portraits in front of palm trees attest to the kinship he felt with these gentle giants: both tall, alien species in a new city. I’ve used chalk to rub the photographic collage, leaving my fingerprints on the corners of the image, as a record of my encounter with deep time.

Ibrahim Azab

When I was a child, we would travel from Slough into London to visit family. Driving along the Hammersmith flyover, I would look out for the giant boat-shaped building. I was blown away by the scale. Back home, I felt I could almost see the glass towers glistening from a distance. Now I know that enormous building as The Ark, a block of offices.

When I finally arrived in the capital, I got an internship, endlessly archiving images from magazines and arranging taxis to photography studios. I saw the gap between my fantasy of London and real life. I began to pay attention to the surfaces of the city, to the glossy facades of the skyscrapers, spreading from Vauxhall to Canary Wharf, which had so impressed me.

In making this commission, I thought a lot about the philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s 1974 book The Production of Space, and the way capitalism shapes space in London. I made images of the city’s architecture and used industrial processes like laser cutting and UV printing to make them into a modular sculpture.

The pieces form a house of cards-style structure, beautiful but brittle. Like the glass buildings that seemed to glimmer back at me as a child, light bounces off the images of metal and glass. London can feel so solid, almost a part of the natural world. In this work, I attempted to make the unseen processes of production visible.

Lola & Pani

Adulthood started for me at 18, when I moved to London. It’s been my home now for more than 21 years, longer than I lived in my motherland of Poland. For my partner Pani, it’s been 14 years since he emigrated from Australia. The city has become not just the place where we found our identities as photographers, but a part of us, too.

We began photographing young adults because we wanted to imagine what it might have looked like had we been teenagers here. It’s a nostalgic impulse: we’re trying to see parts of ourselves and the friends we grew up with in others.

London is vast, which gives its different communities the space to breathe, but it’s also wildly populous. People from disparate backgrounds end up stacked on top of one another (usually in harmony). In this series, shot in a skate park in Hackney with local friends, we wanted to explore the city’s ability to embrace these differences.

There’s something so effortless about how cool and ahead of the curve they are, not just their dress but in their attitudes. They look directly into the lens of the camera with complete ease. By Lola Paprocka

Lola & Pani will be exhibiting as part of this year’s Photo London’s Discovery

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