The Best 30 Photos Of 2023 According To The Urban Photo Awards

The magic hour by the sea that will shape their hearts.

Home-bound people crowd onto the roof of a train to travel to their villages, ahead of the Eid-Al-Adha celebrations at the Railway Station in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Turn Round is a long-term project about Upper Silesia, the largest industrial region in Poland.

Intensive industrial development of Upper Silesia began in the 18th century, following in the footsteps of the industrial revolution that transformed Europe. The vast reserves of black coal provided jobs and income to the region. The traditional economy—based mainly on agriculture—slowly declined. Over time, Upper Silesia became a land of coal mines and steel plants. Soon, cities expanded and the Upper Silesian agglomeration comprising over a dozen of towns was formed. After World War II, during the communist era, the region turned into a local El Dorado—a land of mineral riches.

In particular, heavy industry was the lifeblood of the communist regime and was seen as an icon of the country’s modernization. Upper Silesia witnessed a vast influx of people migrating from all over Poland. Tens of thousands of people were hoping for work and better lives here.

Alas, the socialist economy turned out to be a hidden time bomb for the region. After the great Solidarity movement revolution, when Poland joined the capitalist market economy, it was Upper Silesia that suffered the harshest consequences. Many factories shut down, and people were left without jobs or prospects. The smoking chimneys quickly disappeared from the horizon, and with them, many residents. The cities steadily emptied; some people returned to their hometowns, while younger people migrated to other countries in Europe.

Today, the region still exists as the industrial center of our country yet it is also searching intensely for a new identity. Dynamic socioeconomic changes are giving Upper Silesia a new character. And yet not everybody benefits equally from these changes. If you turn around for a moment, you can still see the past prowling right behind you.

Turn Round is the project, which, in 100% of time, was carried out on the bike. I like to cycle around, discover little paths and cul-de-sacs. There is no planned strategy. I am riding my bike wherever I feel like at a time. Many photos are made when I cycle to or from work. This is how I usually find my subjects. Some of them I have known for a long time, I like to go back to them. Other meetings are more incidental. I feel quite at ease approaching people and try to make good use of it. I initiate conversations, look for contact, encourage interaction.

Main bus station

There is a peak of heat on the Kola Peninsula behind the polar circle for the month of June. With +30°C, it is 18°C above maximum averages which has been kept for 10 days. Young girls go to bathe in a stream near the family country house in Lovozero.
Being part of the last indigenous of Europe, the Saami of Russia lost their nomadic autonomy with the rise of Soviet power. Reindeer herders in the tundra on the Kola Peninsula, the Saami were forced to live in apartment buildings in Lovozero village, considered as a reserve. Settled to work in kolkhozes, the saami language and the traditional costume were prohibited. Today, there are 1500 saami people, and some 200 speak the language, most of them are elderly. Proud of their traditions, they strive to preserve their culture while adapting to modernity and global warming in the Arctic region.

The only light in a shop with a power generator during a blackout in Kyiv. After almost a year of war the situation in Ukraine is dramatic, Russia in recent months has started to strike power stations to put the population in the dark and cold during the harsh Ukrainian winter. More than half of the population is currently living without electricity, water and heating, particularly difficult is the situation in the capital Kyiv and its suburbs destroyed in the first months of the war.

This self-portrait was taken in Brooksville, Florida, in 2023. The photograph is part of a project titled Another Weeping Woman. It is an ongoing project that started in 2019. It investigates the realms of human behavior through the eyes of fictional characters created by the photographer. Part of an ongoing investigation that seeks to challenge the consistent and dominant narrative of female irrationality that permeates our visual and written culture, the project draws inspiration from a multitude of literary works where transgressive femininity is profoundly celebrated. As the title suggests, each of the characters faces reality through ways of pain, solitude and melancholy. The photographs wish to unsettle the viewer and invite them to fabricate their own narrative, one that feels familiar with their own experience of womanhood. The project consists of carefully staged self-portraits, whose aesthetics have been informed by the literary evidence, taken in a range of locations that includes Florida, Italy, Scotland and Spain.

The Montecatini colony in Cervia was designed in 1937 by a Jewish architect Eugenio Faludi a year before the promulgation of the Italian racial laws. The censorship imposed on him after the “Declaration of race” in 1938, erased the memory of the paternity of this magnificent example of Italian rationalist architecture.

A photograph of a Tokyo Metro ticket booth and attendant in Japan.

'In visible light' is a personal street photography project shot between 2013 and the present that interrogates my perceptions and experiences of living in Sydney - a city where the cost of living has never been higher and the sense of anxiety never more acutely felt. The more I am on the street photographing, the more I feel it is important to document this time and place I live in as a bystander, as witness to a city on the verge of something. A city where we are bombarded daily by the fallacies of a vapid, sensationalist media; a city where we are obsessed with status and feel constant uncertainty about what we have, if it’s enough and what we’re missing out on; a city where multiculturalism and diversity is celebrated while, simultaneously, resurgent nationalist and conservative values take a foothold ; a city that still bears the scars of the Martin Place siege and Cronulla riots; a city where the interests of businesses and the political agenda of government now outweigh the lifestyles that were once cherished; and a city where it is easy to find yourself lost.