Fine Art nominee

For me, the Boyhood series is a narrative visual confession which maps both personal and mediated experiences. Boyhood is a time in our life when we begin to discover ourselves through inner dialogues and explore our self identity. We connect with everything around us, begin to discover and close in on ourselves. We create isolated places where we feel safe from all the hustle and bustle around us. Even so, a form of alienation can be poetically and visually beautiful. I offer the viewer a look at the emotionally unfinished stories. I create images that appear to be stills from a film as untold stories. What led to this situation and what will happen next is a question for all of us, which I am looking for an answer to.

Martin Stranka, a native of the Czech Republic who lives in Prague, is a self-taught professional photographer, born on April 13 1984. Martin was a bored student plodding through courses in business school when the unexpected lost of a close friend led him to pursue photography as a form of therapy. That hobby turned into a passion and, eventually, a profession. His distinctive vision of photography is etched as a unique space located in a balance and serenity, while his sophisticated and rewarding images exist in that narrow window of a few seconds between dreaming and awakening. Martin creates images that appear to be stills from a film — one that walks the line between fantasy and reality.

During the last years he has won over 80 major international photography awards from different competitions, including Sony World Photography Awards, Professional Photographer of the Year, Nikon International Photo Contest, Prix de la Photographie Paris and International Photography Awards eleven times in a row. His solo and group exhibitions have been seen from South and North America, through Europe, all the way to Asia.