Linda Zhengová Named BJP Ones to Watch 2025

Czech-Chinese photographer, curator, and writer Linda Zhengová has been selected for British Journal of Photography's Ones to Watch 2025, as nominated by Ukrainian artist Alex Blanco. Born in 1995, Zhengová grew up in the Czech Republic and studied diplomacy in the Netherlands before earning a BA in photography. Her work explores sexuality, repression, motherhood, and trauma, often capturing intimate encounters with strangers and close friends. She aims to depict real intimacy against what she calls an 'explosion of fabricated intimacy'—AI companions, hourly husbands, 'girlfriend experiences.' Her project 'KULISHEK' (2018) documents her parents' unusual relationship: they met in Moscow in 1989, were separated by the Soviet Union's collapse, exchanged hundreds of letters, and remain married despite living apart. During the Covid pandemic, she focused on capturing revelatory emotional moments with subjects' consent. She published the risograph zine 'Strangers' with Editions Bessard in 2024, and earlier zines 'Katabasis' (2023), 'The Ambiguity of Visual Representations of Trauma' (2020), and 'Catharsis' (2021). Ongoing projects include one on Ukrainian models and another with collaborator Ronin de Goede. Zhengová is moving to Paris to compile her long-term project 'Maybe, Happiness Is…', begun in 2022.