Surreal scenes and broken dreams: 2021’s best street photography – in pictures
From a giant eyeball on the subway to a winged dog at a wedding, here’s the year’s best photography at street level
Maude Bardet: Goat Auction in Nizwa (single photo winner) You can find out more about the winners and finalists in the Street Photographers Foundation awards 2021 here • This gallery was amended on 4 October 2021 as a matter of editorial discretion.Dimitri Mellos: Oblivious City (series winner) ‘I walk the streets of New York City and photograph strangers. The scope of my photos is narrow and mundane, like the lives they depict – like the lives of most of us. But I seek glimpses of transcendence in the mundane. I am interested in fleeting gestures and glances, moments of connection in the urban flow, the ephemeral dance of light and shadow and street life. More than anything, what moves me is capturing the infinitesimal outward signs of an inner emotional life, the interiority of people even in the midst of the most public of spaces’Dimitri Mellos: Oblivious City (series winner)‘My photographs are relics of a momentary merging of photographer and environment, subject and object. The city brings us together, the city prizes us apart. Immersing myself in the flow of the life of the city I feel the boundaries of my self momentarily become fluid, permeable. I abandon myself to the flow. These photographs are as much portraits of individual people as they are portraits of moments of being. They are my feeble protest against the city’s forgetfulness’Subhran Karmakar: Dog Got Wings‘I took this photograph while I was out on a winter morning at my favourite place for shooting in Kolkata. I’ve seen many wedding photographers bring their clients here for a picture with the Howrah bridge behind. On this day, I saw a shoot going on, I saw the couple and the dog and a bird coming closer. I started composing the picture and suddenly the bird jumped, maybe scared of my camera, so I pressed the shutter immediately. When I returned home to look at the pictures, I saw that I had a great image’Bouwe Brouwer: Postcards from Fryslân (series finalist)‘The province of Friesland (Fryslân in local dialect) is located in the northern region of the Netherlands. I was not born or raised there, but my parents and grandparents were. My first name, Bouwe, is a very typical Frisian name that you don’t hear anywhere else in the Netherlands. With this project, I hoped to learn more about the place and the people that live, and lived, here. And in doing so, to learn more about my roots and belonging’Bouwe Brouwer: Postcards from Fryslân (series finalist)‘People from Fryslân are looked upon by the rest of the Netherlands as stubborn people. Going back as far as the Spanish occupation, they have a history of resisting authority. Postcards from Fryslân is still an ongoing project — hopefully a lifelong one. When it started, it represented only a collection of places that seemed interesting. Currently, the hope is to cover most of the province, as you never know in advance where the best narratives are. But still, it is all candid, unposed and in the public realm’Andy Hann: Champions (series finalist)Growing up in Los Angeles, Andy Hann always knew it was one of the strangest places in the world. As an adult, he set out to prove it. Through a three-year photo essay, Hann chose to document the quarter mile stretch known by the locals as “the boulevard of broken dreams”. To everyone else it is Hollywood BlvdAndy Hann: Reality Bites (series finalist)Shooting two or three times every weekend, during early mornings and the golden hour, Hann strove to playfully capture this small strip of land occupied by strange characters and garish structures. A street with no real equal in the rest of the worldBartosz Świątnicki: Green Brain‘I took my camera in my hand and started to figure out how to combine these two seemingly incompatible elements. The effect I achieved is satisfactory for me. The photo shows what I like the most about street photography: a creative approach to the subject and being able to capture things with irony’
Alan Burles: Clapham Junction (series finalist)‘I never asked why the man had a huge eyeball lying next to him on the station platform – maybe he worked in a props department. But when his train came in he got on and this lovely accident happened. Maybe Big Brother really is watching us wherever we go’Alan Burles: Kebab Feast Take Away (series finalist)‘A cafe called Kebab Feast Take Away at Clapham Junction. Magic happens in the most unlikely places’Filip Machač: Untitled‘Photography is an instrument that forces me to perceive my everyday life more intuitively, more mysteriously and surreally’Ilya Nikolayev: Morning on 47th StreetThis photograph of a woman and her iced coffee was taken in New York CityAndrea Pieri: Eiffel MatrioskaA family looks at the Eiffel tower from the Trocadero, Paris
Jakarta Street Photography 
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