LENSCRATCH - Fine Art Photography Daily

The 2026 Student Prize Honorable Mention Winner: Luke Rosing by Daniel GeorgeAugust 6, 2026

It is with pleasure that the jurors announce the 2025 Lenscratch Student Prize Honorable Mention Winner, Luke Rosing. Rosing was selected for his project, Cartilage, and is working towards his Bachelors from Boston College. The Honorable Mention Winner receives a $500 Cash Award, a feature on Lenscratch, a mini exhibition on the Curated Fridge, and a Lenscratch T-shirt and Tote.

Childhood is often where our earliest ideas of belonging take shape. In Cartilage, the artist turns to two communities separated by geography but connected through the universal language of play, family, and friendship. Rooted in a personal longing for connection, these photographs celebrate the quiet gestures and everyday interactions through which trust, intimacy, and community are built, revealing the resilience of relationships that often unfold unnoticed.

In Rosing’s photographs, children engage with each other in play in a variety of locations—between neighboring homes, in backyards, on playgrounds, or on front porches and steps. He describes the motivation for making these images as a “desire for closeness.” I was drawn to this work because of themes like community and belonging, family and intimacy, adolescence and growth, and place and identity. In his pictures, Rosing shows how community functions as a kind of “connective tissue,” revealed through play as an expression of trust, quiet moments of affection among family members, and everyday experiences that shape emotional and personal growth. As a parent I find these photographs refreshing. Seeing children interact face to face is a welcome reminder that, despite pervasive social and political differences, there is still reason for hope. They suggest that solace, connection, and a sense of unity can be found through community.

Luke Rosing is a documentary photographer based in Corona del Mar, CA. His photographs focus on the relationships between people and the environments they inhabit. Grounded in sustained engagement with the communities he photographs, his practice considers how intimacy and belonging are formed through everyday moments. His work has been exhibited in Boston, including recent shows at Panopticon Gallery and Green Street Photo Collective.

Instagram: @lukerosing

Cartilage

My work, Cartilage, focuses on relationships revealed through play, physical closeness, and everyday conversation. Over the last year, I have been visiting two communities with my camera: Dorchester, Massachusetts, located near my college campus, and Santa Ana, California, near my childhood home. I became interested in photographing these places because such moments stood in contrast to my own upbringing.

Growing up, I was particularly detached from my siblings, extended family, and my neighbors. This absence of community left a desire for closeness and ultimately drove me to document these communities. I’ve continually found myself drawn to the rhythms of play between children. These imaginative games function as a performance of mutual trust and an instinctual connection to their surroundings. For me, the varying dynamics within these encounters reflect the closeness that I have imagined but never fully experienced.

The title Cartilage came from a story my Dad once told me about a surgery he performed. He described cartilage as resilient, malleable, and essential for growth. I see community in adolescence analogous to this: a connective tissue that allows movement, development, and emotional expansion. Photographing these moments is my attempt to grasp this idea of movement and growth while we’re young.

Through repeated visits to these neighborhoods, people have given me access to their daily lives, letting me photograph moments of intimacy between friends and family members. In these shared spaces and through subtle gestures, I continually observe how familial bonds form and tighten in an unspoken manner.

Daniel George: Congratulations on the Honorable Mention for the Lenscratch Student Prize!!! To begin, tell us how photography came into your life. What led to your interest in the medium?

Luke Rosing: First of all thank you to Lenscratch for selecting me, I’m honored to be among a cohort of amazing photographers. My interest in photography began in high school. I had a friend Jack who always carried around a Canon AE-1 and shot our friends and some street photography in Southern California. I didn’t have a camera so I could never shoot with him but I’d be like his editor of sorts, picking out the ones that I really liked for him. The more I looked at his photos the more I was able to tell what made a good photo, and that photos can stand on their own as pieces of art. But around the same time I became interested in video art and editing and tucked this experience away in the back of my head. I didn’t end up starting to shoot my own photos until last spring. I had a really old Canon DSLR and started shooting street photography in downtown Boston after classes. I initially started by going a few days a week, a few hours out of the day. Gradually and kind of unconsciously I started ramping up my frequency and intensity in the field. I started going another hour a day and another day of the week, and then another, and then all of a sudden I was going 7 days a week for multiple hours a day. My professors took note of that, and encouraged me to pursue a minor photography. So I did.  And that was kind of that it was full steam ahead from then on.

DG: How about the Cartilage series? When and how did that work start?

LR: After shooting street photography for a large portion of that spring semester, I had started to feel trapped by the style. It felt one dimensional or like a one way street in that I was taking from the subject and not giving back at all. And this isn’t to bash street photography but I was more looking to have an interaction with the subject that was more intimate between the two of us, rather than me just finding the decisive moment.  So I started veering away from street photography and looking at a lot of documentary and environmental portraiture work. I started finding work that resonated clearly with me, that had a sort of tug to it. Works from Sage Sohier, specifically American’s Seen, and Skinninggrove from Chris Killip were groundbreaking bodies of work in my eyes. In the work I could tell that both of the photographers were passionate in ways I aspired to be.  And they were genuinely interested in the subjects that they were photographing on a personal level, not just the photographs themselves. That idea was something that pushed against the boundaries of what I thought photography was about at the time. And so I tried to mimic their methodology when I went out into the field. When starting Cartilage, I didn’t really have that extensive of a plan, I was simply looking for that intimate connection between the subject and myself that I found to be true in other work I had looked up to. The specifics and overall thematic elements of the project came naturally through using my gut to guide me. Using photography as an outlet to explore and connect with my surrounding community helped nurture the project into something bigger.

DG: I’m curious about those first visits to these neighborhoods. These days, people are understandably wary of someone walking around with a camera—especially an outsider. Because this work centers on community and relationships, how important was it to earn the trust of the people you photographed? In what ways do you feel that trust informed the photographs?

LR: Trust is everything. The trust between the subject and I is paramount to the work, in my opinion. Without that trust, the photo doesn’t really exist in the way that I want it to. I always would go out with the intention of making that initial connection and then taking the photo. Consent was really important to me.  Feeling comfortable was really important to me. Without those things, the photo doesn’t really work. If the subject doesn’t feel comfortable, then they’re not going to forget that I’m there and let their guard down fully enough for the photo to feel as intimate as it should be. The other side of this is true as well. If I feel uncomfortable while taking the photo then I’m not going to be able to follow my instincts to the best of my ability and take an intimate picture. Earning that trust of the people I’m photographing was essential for the photograph to even occur.

As for those first initial visits, they were really daunting for me. I mean I consider myself a pretty shy person and this was definitely a step outside of my comfort zone. But I learned that just being honest and upfront with your intentions and what you were trying to convey worked. People can naturally detect your honesty, they can detect if you truly believe in your work. By just expressing my passion for photography and for what I was doing, I made a lot of what I would call instinctual connections, which are at the center of the work in my opinion. That initial connection between someone where you’re both, I guess, trying to figure each other out is one of the most interesting parts about the photography that I do and probably will be the thing that I’m chasing in all the work that I do. So, yeah, trust is the most important part about the work.

DG: Would you mind sharing your research methodology for this project?

LR: I guess it’s quite unconventional, but I would go into the field before researching the places that I would end up photographing. I think research is important for a lot of documentary photography work, but the feelings I’m trying to convey couldn’t be researched that well, so I had to go experience these places myself to see whether or not they had the pulse I was looking for. Even when I found something interesting in one of these places, it would exist in pockets and not that widespread. Dorchester and Santa Ana were the two places I found that had this sense of community almost everywhere which was rare.

When I was starting out especially, there’d be a lot of places that look good on paper, architecturally, geographically, historically, etc. that would end up falling flat when I walked around there. Talking with people, learning their story and local history allowed me to do more concentrated research outside of the field. Playing the role of a curious and genuinely interested outsider opened the doors for research to occur. I think I was ok to go into this project not knowing everything about these places, but I made it clear that I was interested and would return with more context to back my work up.

 Dorchester and Santa Ana both, I could go on and on about how culturally rich and interesting the history of these places are. But that would be an entirely separate project, and that’s not really what I was looking to convey with this work. I was looking for that strong sense of community and bond that you can only find in certain places. It’s true that a lot of these places their history cultivates this bond, but I just wanted to focus on the bond itself. A lot of my research is based on feel, and then after that, I try to learn as much about the place in order to respect it and connect more with the people that are in the community.

DG: I was drawn to this work because it explores themes I’ve been thinking about lately—belonging, connection, and trust. It may sound sentimental to frame the work in those terms, but to me these ideas push back against many of the political and social narratives shaping our current moment. In your statement, you write about a “desire for closeness.” Could you talk more about what that means to you and how that longing has shaped this body of work?

LR: Yeah, I definitely feel you there on the societal implications of the feeling that our current culture is going through. It’s definitely a sentiment between a lot of my friends and even fellow photographers that a lot of people just don’t go outside anymore, that this type of interaction just doesn’t happen that often anymore.  I felt like some part of this work for me was trying to prove that notion wrong. Now, on the personal level, I had directly experienced this problem. Growing up, my siblings and I were all not particularly close with one another and I didn’t know any of my neighbors in the ways the people that I’ve interacted with in these communities do. And because I could contrast my personal experiences to what I saw out photographing, I think I started to truly understand the value of community in ways I hadn’t seen before. Subconsciously, I was also looking to fill gaps in my own life with the experiences of others. By photographing these adolescents in community, I could vicariously live out some of these moments. It’s for this reason I think the work will continue for a while. Those gaps will probably never be filled, but I’ll keep looking anyways because I’m curious about what could’ve been for me.

Individuality is important, but it’s also just as important to recognize we are all living in this shared experience together, that we need one another at a fundamental level. Honestly, I now think one of the most important aspects of life is to be in community without one another.  And although it does sound a little sentimental, I think it’s important. A large portion of the meaning of the work is to try to foster community in everybody else, to motivate other people to go outside, talk with their neighbors, and strengthen their local ties. Most importantly, I want to remind people that what happens in these photos is what it’s all about.

DG: In your statement, you also explain that the title of the project comes from the idea of cartilage being “resilient, malleable, and essential for growth.” As you returned to these communities over time, how did your understanding of those qualities evolve? What insights did you gain about connection and community through photographing these “moments of intimacy between friends and family members?”

LR: Yeah, when I’m thinking about how these communities embody these qualities I immediately think of a specific photo and the experience that I had taking it. It’s this portrait of a large group of Jamaicans that are hanging out sharing food with one another. For context, this group has been coming to this specific spot in a park in Dorchester every Sunday for as long as I can remember being there and they said they’d been doing it for decades. It’s actually supposed to be a cricket club, but they hardly play any cricket.  They honestly just hang out with each other and enjoy food.

What I really like about this photo, and actually is what someone else pointed out to me in a critique, is the cyclical nature of the relationships in the photo. There’s a group of kids on the left in the foreground enjoying their own food while the elders of the community and the parents are enjoying their food on the right in the background. The kids on the left are sharing this experience with one another, just starting to nurture their first few friendships,  just as the elders of the community had done before them, and their elders before them. Those kids will probably remember this moment and bring their kids to the same exact spot in years to come. The cycle of this togetherness will probably continue long after these generations are gone, likely shifting as the club shifted from being a cricket club to just hanging out together. The specifics may change, like the food or the people or even the name of the club, but the core activities remain the same. They may mold and bend but that central idea of togetherness is resilient. That really stood out to me as something that is representative of a lot of the activities that take place in my photos. That familial and community bonds may take different form over time, but the core act itself is eternal.

DG: I’d like to hear about your educational experience. How did your creative practice evolve while you were in school?

LR: Because I had started so late in photography and it wasn’t something that I honestly considered pursuing for a long time, I didn’t learn a lot of the basics and kind of took it all in instinctually. There’s still fresh perspectives about the medium that I’m consistently discovering and learning about. This lack of knowledge about these boxes people check when considering a good photo really worked in my favor though. I would let instincts take over when I was going out and photographing, not really worrying about any of the universal rules of photography kind of just making it up as I go. I had realized what I’d liked. I realized what I didn’t like.  And I was very decisive about that in the beginning, and so because of that, I was able to kind of teach myself what what a good photo really should be to me. Then, of course, I had a great educational experience at Boston College and great professors to back me up later when I really wanted to take it seriously. A lot of my professors encouraged me to delve deeper into the philosophies behind the medium, and recommended a lot of different texts and work to look at. School did a lot for me in making sure that I was photographing ethically and I understood the pretexts that come with documentary photography. It had also fostered my interests and helped me push further than I would’ve gotten alone. I’m very lucky to have had the professors I did and receive the advice I’d gotten at the time, that guidance is invaluable to me.

DG: Was there any advice that you received (perhaps even in the form of a critique) that you feel had a significant impact on the trajectory of your work? Would you mind sharing?

LR: I’m fortunate enough to have had a lot of interesting critiques. And one that has stood out to me the most was a critique that I had with Stephen DiRado. Stephen DiRado had come to Boston College to guest critique a class of the photo minor’s work and I was fortunate enough to show him a great portion of my body of work at the time. He had liked it which I was very happy about, but there was one thing that he had said completely unrelated to the content of the photos that changed my practice quite a bit. He had asked if I give back to these people that I was photographing. Am I sending them the photo? And I said, yeah, I’m sending them digitally. He said, no, you should really be giving out prints. He mentioned giving out prints really brings the work back full circle, that offered everyone he photographed a print regardless of if the photo was ever going to see the light of day. It was interesting because it has never occurred to me to give out prints like that before.  And so, the next day I had printed out a bunch of the photos I’d already taken and tried to deliver them to as many people as possible. They had already had their digital copies, but I thought it’d be interesting to see the reaction of giving out these printed copies.  And DiRado was right, this gesture of reciprocity makes the work come full circle. To me it signifies I care more about the relationships I’m making rather than just taking a good photo. This act has become an essential part about the work at this point. This physical object becomes a part of their lives in a way that I’ll never fully understand. Documentary photography can be quite confusing for someone who’s not really invested in it. Many times I’ve photographed people that have been questioning what I’m doing there and curious what it’s all about. But when I give out the prints that confusion fades away, everything becomes clear in seeing the photos in person. And maybe it’s the fact that the photographer is physically giving it to them, or the concrete nature of the print as an object, or they recognize the importance of that moment, or they just simply like the photo. The important part is that the gesture means something to most people. A lot of the times that can deepen these relationships that I’m making and lead to more interesting photographs, because the subject is now clued in on the magic! Sometimes that’s also just the end of the relationship but it’s a great way to close the loop. Regardless of if it leads anywhere, giving out prints is now central to my work because it aligns with the philosophy behind it, that is to give back and contribute to my community.

DG: Being a student can be exhausting, and burnout is real. What motivates you to continue creating?

LR: I think I heard Curran Hatleberg say in an interview that you should focus on building a sustainable practice, one that molds to your specific philosophy on life, rather than the other way around. That may sound a little straightforward but is was tricky to understand completely when I first heard it. Most of the other mediums I’ve tried and practices I’ve tried to nurture haven’t felt as natural as photography has, and that has a lot to do with my outlook on life as whole. I guess what I’m trying to say is if your life philosophy aligns with the medium that you’re using or the practice that you are partaking in, then you really don’t ever have to worry about motivation being a factor. For me, when I’m going out and photographing, I’m pursuing something that I believe to be true at all times. If I were ever to lose that sort of truth in my life then I’d be honestly pretty lost.  It’s not ever really about motivation or burnout. It’s about, do I still believe in photography as a tool for conveying a deep and unique form of empathy? If I don’t or if I stop believing in that, then I’ll stop photographing.  But I don’t ever see myself losing faith in that.

DG: Do you have advice for younger artists just getting into their creative studies?

LR: My advice for anybody starting out is to try as much as possible, try everything and anything under the sun. You have no idea what’s going to stick. You don’t know what will speak to you personally. I would honestly focus more on trying to figure out what you want to get out of your medium or your practice rather than the practice itself. I wouldn’t worry about all these externalities or things like how can I get a show or how can I make a project that’s impactful and never been done before.  I would just worry about finding what you like and finding why you like it. A lot of people get wrapped up in trying to build something or be something that they have no interest in, to “make it”. But the reality is that if you truly care about the work you’re producing, it’s not going to matter, it will find its way into places because simply you care! I think that’s the most important thing to focus on, your passions and what you truly care about. Just follow your instincts.

DG: Finally, is there a mentor that you’d like to acknowledge? In what ways has their guidance informed your work?

LR: Yes, I would specifically like to shout out my Boston College Studio Art Minor Professor, Greer Muldowney. I’ve taken multiple classes with Greer and she’s been there for me in ways that a professor has never been there for me before.  She’s pushed me to pursue the medium and take it more seriously, and also was the one who recommended me apply for this prize! Without Greer, I wouldn’t have known a lot about the history of documentary photography, I would not have some of the influences that I have on my work, I honestly wouldn’t have had that good of a guide into photography as a whole, and I definitely wouldn’t have had the encouragement to pursue this as seriously as I have. Mentors are extremely important in photography and in basically any artistic medium, and I’m so grateful to have had her as a professor and someone to rely on. Whether it was for critique, or questions about something obvious that I was missing, or just to complain about Boston weather in her office, I was really fortunate to have had her guidance and support while making the work at school. On a more serious note, a lot of what I know about the power dynamics and ethics of documentary photography comes from her reading recommendations and specific lectures that I remember having. The dialogue she fostered in class with students was eye opening and helped me think in a variety of different perspectives. We sometimes butted heads on a few points but it was always meaningful and helpful in a lot of different ways. Knowing the history behind the medium and being able to back up your passion with rhetoric is important, I cannot thank Greer enough for giving me the guidance to push forwards and for being there for me when I needed it.