Life Framer 2025 Winners Capture the Scars of Industry and the Soul of Isolation

The Life Framer Photography Prize has unveiled its Series Award winners, celebrating exceptional photographic storytelling across genres. This year’s top honors go to Lorenzo Poli for his breathtaking series Spirals of the Anthropocene. The series captures the colossal landscapes of South America’s mining sites and reflects on human ambition and environmental impact.

In the second place, Pie Aerts presents Los Puesteros, an intimate and moving portrait of men living in extreme isolation in Chilean Patagonia, grappling with social hardship and mental health struggles.

Life Framer’s Overall Winner: Lorenzo Poli

Lorenzo Poli’s Spirals of the Anthropocene moves beyond documentary photography, using large-scale landscapes to explore themes of resource mining, ambition, and ecological disruption.

“This photographic investigation is a personal reflection on human values and how they carve into the Land,” Poli explains.

“As a European architect expanding into the metaphysical realms of the visual arts, I traversed South America’s mining territories for 18 months in search of meaning. I sought to engage with the spiritual dimensions of our epoch, immersing myself in monumental voids descending into the Earth. What emerged transcended the commodification of minerals; these voids stand as testaments to humanity’s aspirations.”

The jury praised Poli’s ability to transform these landscapes into something almost mythical. “It’s not easy to conceptualize the sheer amount of ground covered by the mines,” the jury commented. “But in Poli’s photographs, we start to feel it. Humans have built things of an extraordinary scale, and Poli shows our ability to dismantle at an equally formidable level.”

Runner-Up Pie Aerts: A Quiet but Powerful Portrait of Isolation

The second-place series, Los Puesteros by Pie Aerts, is an intimate and emotional portrayal of a small group of men living in the southern reaches of Chilean Patagonia. Aerts captures their struggles with mental health, social inequality, and an eroding way of life with striking warmth and empathy.

“In the remote south of Chilean Patagonia, a small group of ‘puesteros’ lives in complete isolation,” Aerts writes. “Decades of seclusion and exploitation have taken a heavy toll, leaving these men struggling with
profound mental health issues.”

“Barely any social interaction, backbreaking physical labor, a shifting climate, financial insecurity and a lack of retirement provisions, fuel high degrees of alcoholism and suicide within the community. Yet, despite the consistent hardships, these men face the erosion of their culture and fading identity with remarkable dignity, resilience, and pride.

I aim to pay tribute to what may be the last generation of “puesteros.” At the same time, I hope to challenge the viewer to question established, traditional notions of masculinity, and ultimately, to reflect on their own personal relationship with nature, culture, and tradition.”

I was personally deeply moved by this series, and judging from the jury’s comments, so were they.

“Pie Aerts’ finely tuned sense of color and light is extraordinary. The delicate warm tones bring a soft fragility to the hard world of these men who live and work at remote Chilean outposts. The softness is a way in; it unifies the work and the separate worlds of the men, even as they are miles apart.

These are not quick portraits made in passing. The unguarded expressions in the eyes of the men and in their gestures are the fruit of time spent with a person. If photography can open the window to really see a person, it’s in this kind of portraiture.”

About Life Framer

Life Framer is a platform dedicated to photographers of all backgrounds. Their main goal is to foster a global dialogue on storytelling through imagery. Its exhibitions, held in cities like London, New York, and Tokyo, bring these powerful narratives to new audiences.

Both Poli and Aerts’s work will be featured in an online showcase. Lorenzo Poli’s work will also be exhibited at Pictura Gallery in Bloomington, US, in September this year – the main Series Award prize. If you’re as impressed and moved by Poli’s and Aerts’s work as I was, it’s worth exploring it further through their linked websites and Life Framer’s platform.

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• Life Framer’s “Planet Earth” 2023 winners show the beauty and vulnerability of our planet
• Photographer spends two months documenting the Arctic sailors’ life, earns 2024 Life Framer Series Award
• Life Framer 2025 Winners Capture the Scars of Industry and the Soul of Isolation