THIRD PLACE WINNER
International Virtual Juried Exhibition — Landscape Cityscape Edition 2026
AWARD-WINNING ARTWORK
Third Place Award in the International Virtual Juried Exhibition — Landscape Cityscape Edition 2026
Awarded Artwork: The Dome
Artist Biography
Nora Geist is a London-based photographer whose practice began in New York in 1991. Her work encompasses architectural studies, constructed portraiture and staged narrative, ranging from the ceremonial imagery of Saintly Cadavers to the geometric drama of The Dome. Rather than adhering to a single genre, Geist approaches photography as a meeting point between place, performance and perception. Her images juxtapose order with disorientation, composure with vulnerability, and the visible with the withheld. Revisited across decades, her early work remains in dialogue with her contemporary photographs, revealing a sustained fascination with how an image can both disclose and disguise its subject.
Statement of Artistic Practice
In my work, looking is never passive. I approach architecture and staged photography as two forms of choreography: one arranged by buildings, the other by human bodies. Both ask where a viewer stands, what they notice first, and what escapes them. I am drawn to thresholds—between sacred and secular, classical and contemporary, intimacy and spectacle. Through framing, angle and tonal contrast, I try to disturb settled expectations without dictating a single interpretation. Photography interests me because it appears to describe what is there, while quietly transforming the relationship between subject and spectator. That ambiguity is not an obstacle to meaning; it is where meaning begins.
Awarded Artwork:
The Dome
Photographed inside the British Museum’s Great Court, The Dome brings two architectural languages into a deliberately unstable conversation. The neoclassical façade stands beneath the vast geometric glass roof; below, the sweeping staircase refuses to behave as a neutral route through space. By tilting the camera, I allowed verticals to lean, planes to collide and the roof’s rigorous lattice to become almost vertiginous. Black and white removes the distractions of colour, concentrating attention on geometry, light and the opposing textures of stone and glass. My interest was not simply in documenting a celebrated building, but in revealing how architecture directs the body and unsettles the eye. The image invites a second look: what first appears fixed and monumental becomes unexpectedly fluid, as though the museum itself were in motion.
Published by New Road 2 Art Editorial Team