25 Outstanding Winners in the Shape Category from the 2025 AAP Magazine Awards

The 2025 AAP Magazine Awards have once again celebrated the art of photography by spotlighting a fundamental yet endlessly versatile element: shape. This year’s Shape category brought together 25 outstanding winners whose works highlight the profound role that form, geometry, and structure play in visual storytelling. Shapes are not just design elements—they guide the viewer’s gaze, establish rhythm, and transform even the most ordinary scenes into something extraordinary.

Photo by: Cristiano Bartoli

Selected from hundreds of submissions worldwide, the winning photographs represent the vision and creativity of artists from 11 countries across 4 continents. Each image demonstrates a unique interpretation of shape, whether rooted in minimalism, symmetry, abstraction, or unexpected contrasts. Some photographers focused on architectural details, where lines and curves create harmony and precision, while others turned their lens toward nature, capturing fleeting patterns of light, shadows, and organic forms. The result is a stunningly diverse collection that reveals how shape can simultaneously anchor and disrupt composition.

What makes this issue remarkable is not just the technical mastery of the photographers but also their ability to uncover beauty in both simplicity and complexity. From human silhouettes framed against bold urban backdrops to subtle repetitions in natural landscapes, the selected works remind us that shape is everywhere—waiting to be discovered, reimagined, and celebrated.

AAP Magazine #50: Shapes stands as a milestone issue that proves how this elemental aspect of art continues to inspire across cultures and genres. By showcasing the 25 outstanding winners, the magazine highlights the timeless relevance of shape in photography and its power to evoke emotion, spark curiosity, and reveal the extraordinary in the everyday.

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#1. 1st Place Winner: "The Illusion of Poppies" by Julie Wang (United States)

"In this photograph from the series “The Illusion of Poppies,” the fragile forms drift between presence and shadow. Seed pods linger like echoes of blossoms once in bloom, their outlines fading as if memory itself were dissolving into silence. What remains is neither beginning nor end, but a quiet trace of time’s passing—tender, elusive, and ungraspable."

#2. 2nd Place Winner: "Tangled in Blue" by JP Terlizzi (United States)

"As an artist with red-green color blindness, my work investigates the complexities of color perception—how those with this condition experience, interpret, and understand color. It examines the differences between what we see, what we believe we see, and how we learn to recognize and understand color. When paired with colorblind eyewear, the work also enables individuals with the same color deficiency to perceive a broader spectrum of hues.

Inspired by the color and light principles of Bauhaus Design and the Munsell Color Tree—a system that organizes colors by hue, value (lightness), and chroma (intensity)—I reinterpret the Ishihara colorblind test and create new patterns, carefully considering the hues, values, and chroma I perceive when viewing my image. A custom-colored frame completes each piece, adding another layer to the visual tone.

#3. 3rd Place Winner: "Vacuum World" by Jingyi Zhang (China)

"In my work, Emei Mountain, I depict a figure journeying toward nothingness and a dreamscape—the distant temple appears both realistic and like a mirage.

In the chaotic material world, vacuum represents a state approaching the limit—an existence that is invisible and often overlooked. Within a vacuum, all sound and substance are stripped away, leaving only the faintest fluctuations. We are compelled to sense the natural presences that are “unseen and unheard.”In my photo series Vacuum World, I place the world within a vacuum-like environment, peeling away external noise to trace the emotional and material remnants submerged in everyday life—those things that are forgotten, unspoken, or never mourned. This work attempts to critically construct a purified vacuum space outside the information-saturated modern society, in order to explore the most essential—yet faint and unseen—connections between matter and nature."