AAP Magazine’s #51: Colors bring together 25 photographers from 16 countries to celebrate this visual emotion, offering a vibrant, multifaceted journey across continents, cultures, and states of mind.

The contest’s theme, Colors, might sound universal, yet the winning works reveal a far deeper narrative. These images are not mere studies in hue or saturation; they are portraits of humanity refracted through color — where crimson carries grief, yellow embodies defiance, and the softest blue can whisper about endurance.

Trevor Cole: Subtlety in Ash and Light

A Portrait of Dignity and Devotion

Irish photographer Trevor Cole took the grand prize with a portrait that seems to breathe — an image of a Mundari man from South Sudan, his skin veiled in a layer of white ash. The ash, both protection and ritual, shields the body from insects while transforming the man into a spectral guardian of his herd.

Cole’s muted palette — ash gray against the warm gleam of skin — transforms restraint into emotional intensity. It’s a masterclass in understated color photography, proving that saturation is not the same as depth. The photograph, taken after years of living and returning to Ethiopia, is the result of what Cole calls “interpersonal moments”: quiet exchanges of trust and patience that bridge photographer and subject.

There are clandestine shots which are often taken with a longer lens and are discreet, but most of my ‘people’-based photography is a product of inter-personal moments… spending a little time and using a little humor can yield positive results.

– Cole told AAP.

What emerges is an image that feels timeless — a reminder that empathy, not spectacle, is the photographer’s truest color.

Laurin Strele: The Yellow Man of Aleppo

If Cole’s work whispers, Laurin Strele’s runner-up portrait sings. His subject, Abu Zakkour, stands before a red car in Aleppo, dressed head to toe in sunlit yellow — a man who, since 1983, has vowed to live every day in the same hue.

In a city scarred by conflict, Abu Zakkour’s radiant attire transforms the street into a living canvas of endurance.

Against the backdrop of war, he has become a symbol of individuality.

– Strele writes.

The contrast between his joy and the city’s rubble forms a dialogue between color and survival, where yellow becomes not merely fashion but philosophy — a refusal to fade.

The Global Spectrum: Beauty, Memory, and Transformation

Across continents, the winners and merit honorees of AAP Magazine #51: Colors turn chromatic beauty into universal storytelling.

Yuan Su (United States) captures an Indonesian volcano exhaling smoke into morning light — the molten orange glow dissolving into mist, a fragile equilibrium between danger and serenity.

Oana Daian (Romania) transforms fallen autumn leaves into a “tapestry of warm and cold colors”, their veins stitched with frost — an image of seasons meeting in whispered transition.

Fabien Dendiével (France) braves the desolation of an Iowan winter, finding poetry in muted whites and silvers — a minimalist hymn to endurance.

Oksana Omelchuk (Ukraine) paints her photographs by hand in digital space, turning flowers into emotional conduits: “Each vein, each edge, sparkles with delicate frost,” she writes, blending photography and painting into a meditation on tenderness.

Mayowa Akande (Nigeria) uses color as identity. His portrait of Ladé speaks of migration, resilience, and the quiet dignity of those moving between worlds — a face illuminated by the colors of belonging and loss.

Neşe Arı (Turkey) captures the chaos and beauty of Varanasi’s riverbanks, where strings of laundry and ritual gestures become threads in a living mural of devotion.

Benjamin Littler (United States) turns pandemic stillness into revelation: empty streets glowing under pale morning light — loneliness rendered luminous.

Simone Curzi (Italy) lifts his gaze skyward, capturing the Witch Head Nebula (IC 2118) — the ethereal reflection of starlight across cosmic dust, a celestial echo of color’s most distant origins.

Each image, though distinct in geography and tone, contributes to a collective atlas of color — not as surface, but as soul.

When Color Becomes a Universal Memory

Color in photography has always been more than pigment. It is memory’s syntax — a bridge between what we see and what we remember. The photographers featured in AAP Magazine #51: Colors understand this instinctively. Their works remind us that color can carry silence as powerfully as sound, and that behind every hue lies a human pulse.

From the ochre dust of Ethiopia to the fluorescence of interstellar light, these artists do not merely document color — they reclaim it as language, one spoken fluently by emotion, culture, and imagination.

What unites these global voices is not technique alone, but intention — the shared belief that beauty, even when born from hardship, is worth pursuing. Whether through the ash-covered dignity of a herdsman or the radiant persistence of a man in yellow, AAP Magazine’s Colors becomes more than a photography contest. It becomes a collective act of seeing — a reminder that color, at its truest, is the light we carry within us.