Lorenzo Poli is the winner of this year’s Life Framer Series Award, juried by Mia + Lisa. We look forward to his solo exhibition in Fall 2025.

Lorenzo Poli’s photographs have a monstrous grandeur. In this series, he illuminates the issue of resource mining in South America. But Poli moves beyond documentation, connecting the viewer to an allegorical way of thinking about form.

The project circles around one shape — the inverted cone, the gouge in the earth. Rather than feeling monotonous, the deep holes take on more substantial meaning with every image. The land has been scooped out in almost mythic proportions, carving something like an inverse pyramid into the ground, a monument to our unquenchable appetites.

Poli’s visual language runs parallel to that of magical realism and gives the series a unique depth and communicative power. The foundation of his photographs are depictions of reality, but they are seamlessly paired with allegorical concepts. It appears that humans really did build Dante’s inferno, with our own drive, hands, ingenuity and greed.

In Poli’s images, we experience the earth like an astronaut walking on an alien planet. The project’s muted color palette is calming, beautiful in a graphic way, with its tightly controlled tonal range. But when you realize what you’re seeing, it’s disquieting. A huge piece of land is dusty grey with faint red stains seeping through, markers of the earth being drained and dissected.

It’s not easy to conceptualize the sheer amount of ground covered by the mines. 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.

- Mia Dalglish + Lisa Woodward

See more of Lorenzo’s work HERE

Learn more about the Life Framer Series Award HERE