2025 Photo Awards Winner: Sophie Altemus

Can you describe three life moments that made you who you are today?

The first would be driving across the United States. I’ve done this a few times now, driving between home in California and school in Ohio. These journeys have provided me with a taste of how vast the world is, and with each new experience my thirst to explore deepens.

My great grandparents opened a camera store when they moved to Los Angeles from Belgium, after escaping a concentration camp during WWII. I grew up visiting the store with my sister when we were young, running around the offices upstairs and playing with packing peanuts in the basement. Although the store closed before I became serious about photography, I believe that being surrounded by images and the smell of darkroom chemicals before I even knew what they were set off some urge within me.

I had horrible food poisoning on my twelfth birthday which fell on Thanksgiving, and spent most of the day hunched over a green toilet in a bathroom that smelled like orange-infused natural soap, as my mom held my hair back. In that moment of physical intensity and a lack of control over my body–my stomach sore and my vision blurry—I stared into the toilet bowl and thought to myself, “I’m going to remember this image forever.” I blinked my eyes harder than I ever had before as if taking a photograph, and I still remember the image, almost ten years later. Forcing that snapshot upon myself was the only way I felt I could regain control of the moment.