To celebrate our 2026 printed issue of Anthropolitan, we held a competition, asking members of the UCL community to create images which hold our theme of temporalities. Here are our top finalists, and the winning image.
Zichen Yin – In-between Then and Now (Series I, II, III)
This photographic series reflects on urban spaces where different temporalities are entangled. In Istanbul and Selçuk, fragments of empire, religion, tourism, infrastructure and everyday life often co-present within the same visual field: a partially ruined Byzantine palace standing beside restaurants, road and parked vehicles; a children’s playground set against the distant outline of the Blue Mosque; and Selçuk’s ancient city remains overlooking contemporary hustle and bustle. Rather than treating the past as a stable heritage object for claim, these photographs ask how inherited spaces continue to act upon and be evoked by the present.
I: Kennedy Avenue, Istanbul. Near the Boukoleon Palace along the Sea of Marmara, a ruined structure stands beside tourist routes with restaurants and parked cars, amid local complaints about safety and neglect.
II: A children’s playground sits before the distant outline of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, built between 1609 and 1617.
III: The remains of the sixth-century Basilica of St. John overlook contemporary hustle and bustle, where archaeological work, touristic and domestic temporalities continue to coexist.
Yuting Fu – Love is my Armour (Tryptych)
In this triptych, my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother each dress me in a garment that belongs to them.
The act of layering reflects the inheritance of care passed through generations. Love offers protection, shielding us from the outside world, yet it also carries the weight of expectation, worry, and responsibility.
Steffi Sharma – Still Labour
Jodha Bai Mahal, Fatehpur Sikri, Uttar Pradesh. A woman employed at the site rests in the courtyard between duties. Built in the 1570s for the Rajput wife of Emperor Akbar, Jodha Bai’s Palace was a space of female enclosure, part of the Mughal zenana, where women of the court lived largely unseen by official history. Today, the palace draws tourists who move through its sandstone corridors, consuming a curated imperial past. The woman in this frame is not a visitor. She works here. And yet, the heritage economy that sustains Fatehpur Sikri renders workers like her largely invisible, much as this space once rendered the women who inhabited it invisible.
Cover Winner:
Vanisha Patel – La Double Absence
La Double Absence ~ the disconnection migrants feel to both where they migrated from and where they migrated to. Neither here, nor there. Suspended. There is now an imaginary, stuck in time at the moment of departure. And here, is inaccessible, just out of reach, a different kind of imaginary, elusive. Resting somewhere between nostalgia and hope, time moving through me, I don’t know if I can keep up.
Anthropolitan 