Yelena-Zhavoronkova

seen / unseen

The visible and the implied

Years ago after being at Review Santa Fe, this might have been 2008 or 2009, I curated
an invitational show at RayKo Photo Center in San Francisco, based on the work I’d
seen at that review. I called it “Scene Unseen.” Enough time has passed that I can only
remember flickering images now, like an illuminated vacuum cleaner on a blue snow-
covered frozen lake at night and another photograph of a perfectly square brown bush,
a topiary gone wrong. When asked to jury this show, “Seen/Unseen,” I thought of all the
ways the world could look through a lens and all the small miracles that can happen
thanks to the artists’ creativity and vision and openness to magic.

It wasn’t easy whittling down thousands of images to just sixty. Sixty moments that were
unique and challenging and beautiful and dreamy and sometimes horrific and dark, but
always something I hadn’t seen. When I thought of my award winners, I thought of how
a house at night could appear like a miniature diorama. Not real at all, but a construction
in the smallest room (Bolko Stolberg). I thought of the times I’d been to Joshua Tree
National Park and the great open lands of the West, but I never saw a figure draped and
bound in the rocks. An apparition? Maybe (Sandra Hoover). And then there were
moments that felt like film stills, flashes from a movie, images that if you looked back
again, they wouldn’t be there or if they were, you still wouldn’t believe it (Lee Rogers).
It’s a wonderful journey, this show of light and shadow, dreams and reality, fleeting
glimpses, poignant moments, tiny details of hair and hands and breath and holding that
breath. The photographers have stopped time and made me look, not once, not twice,
but again and again. And as Cartier-Bresson would tell you, there aren’t many
photographs that you can look at again and again.

Congratulations to all the artists and thank you for taking me on this journey with you!

Ann Jastrab, July 2026

First Place: Bolko Stolberg

Second Place: Sandra Hoover

Third Place: Lee Rogers

Honorable Mention: Saiss Cruz Santana

Honorable Mention: Lauren Caddick

Human Presence Award: Pardis Hesami & Mahan Abasian

In Darkness 8

BOLKO STOLBERG
Los Angeles, CA

The project In Darkness, These Eyes Can See explores the moment when safety breaks without warning - when the home, once a sanctuary, turns to danger. The shift is abrupt: light that once comforted now cuts deep; silence begins to echo.

These images sit at that moment between before and after, when the familiar remains intact yet is void of meaning. The home still stands, but the promise has vanished, leaving only a ghost of sanctuary carried by memory.

In the darkness that follows, vision adapts. The eyes learn to see differently, finding clarity not in light but in loss.

125th Street Station

LEE ROGERS
Great Barrington, MA

My work consists of prints that are a combination of photograph and photogram, that I create myself in the darkroom. I originally envisioned this idea and began experimenting with it around 1990. My subject matter is landscapes, mostly natural. During the photo shoot I collect a few naturally found objects that are abundant. My prints that are created by combining the 2 traditional, pre-digital methods of black and white become a unique rendering of the landscape, in which the objects that are found within the terrain blend with the scene itself.

Joseph-1

SAISS CRUZ SANTANA
New York City, NY

Saiss Cruz Santana’s (b. 2002, New York, NY) images subtly note the role that community, intimacy, and intersubjectivity have in the subtext presented in their work. A practiced filmmaker from ACTvF (21’) and self-taught photographer based in New York, Santana catalogs their familiarity with queerness and intersectionality, based on their experiences as an afro-latino queer man.
Capturing became a medium to express the direction of their life and how the people who surrounded
them shaped it.

57

PARDIS HESAMI & MAHAN ABASIAN
Tehran, Iran

A man lies on the ground, vomiting in his sleep. Above him, a religious inscription is written on the wall — words of blessing, meant to protect. Between the inscription and the man, we embroidered fifty-seven flowers in blue and gold, floating where his breath would rise.

The flowers do not touch him. They hover above the image, closer to the words on the wall than to the body on the ground — as if blessing and suffering exist in the same frame but on separate planes, never quite reaching each other.

Fifty-seven is not a symbolic number here. It is simply how many flowers it took to fill that particular distance between a sacred phrase and an unconscious body. The gold thread catches light the way the prayer catches nothing.

What is unseen here is not the man — he is entirely exposed — but whatever is supposed to answer a prayer written so close to someone no one has stopped to help.