The 2025 APA Awards Series Winners

First Place:  Jordan Tiberio
Title: You Have Touched Me, and I Have Grown
Location: Orquevaux, France

Series description

"You Have Touched Me, and I Have Grown" is an unreleased project that was created during a residency in the French village of Orquevaux. The project is a visual love letter to womanhood that explores the transformative value of relationships between women, how these bonds shape our personal growth, and encourage bodily autonomy.

During the creation of the work, I was grappling with the suffocating weight of a toxic, five-year relationship, whose codependent orbit I felt powerlessly trapped within. The residency granted me respite from this dynamic, immersing me in a centuries-old, idyllic village in the company of 16 strangers—all women—from various walks of life. While listening to my peers share stories of their own experiences, I came to understand that independence was not a daunting prospect but a liberating path forward. First conceptualized as a series of self-portraits, the project quickly morphed into a documentation of the sisterhood I discovered here and how we inhabited the historic environment surrounding us.

The project is a mixture of Pre-Raphaelite inspired landscapes and anxious tableaux, beautiful in their fragility, weaving a more nuanced journey of self-growth. Through the creation of the work, I regained ownership of my body, emphasizing its strength, no longer viewing it as an object of desire, and thereby subverting the oppressive male gaze I’d long felt in my relationship. These images are a testament to the ability to reclaim possession of oneself through the transformative presence of a supportive community. Exposing layers of vulnerability that had long been obscured by my partner’s shadow, this experience allowed me to liberate myself from our entanglement, and take pride in choosing myself.

Second Place: Peggy Cormary
Title: For Seasons of Flavors
(all images can be viewed in the gallery)

Series description

These are inspired by still life paintings with a modern twist

Peggy Cormary is a contemporary photographer and artist whose practice includes double-exposure, still-life, painting, drawing, and other alternative processes. Having lived and worked on three different continents, she strives to revisit and reinterpret her memories of these familiar places. By evoking these memories through the use of ordinary objects and appealing to the five human senses, she creates images that are poetic, ephemeral, metaphorical and emphasize her sensitivity, curiosity, and quest for identity.  

Third Place:  Erica Joy Sloan
Title: Coastal Expressions Reimagined
Location: Cape Cod, Massachusetts

(all images can be viewed in the gallery)

Series description

My passion for photography stems from sharing a beautiful moment in time while holding the feelings that moment evokes. Photography has helped me immensely in processing and expressing my emotions. I want these images to do the same for viewers in both feeling and escaping. Water especially has always been a grounding, peaceful force in my life. I love the quiet power of the ocean, the changing choreography of every wave and the sense of limitless freedom water provides. I want my images to express all of these aspects to varying degrees. This is a collection of composited images that combine various elements of sand, sky and water, with components of both motion and stillness. The collection blends moments of ethereal motion and fixed stillness to express multiple feelings that can’t otherwise be reflected in a single moment. My goal is for viewers to have to think about why these images look different.