The 2023 Edition

The 2023 edition of the Citiestobe Photo Award follows the inaugural edition held in 2020, building on a shared understanding that has only grown stronger since then: cities are — and will increasingly be — the places where the most pressing dynamics of our world unfold.

More urban, more complex and more interconnected than ever, cities concentrate both the challenges and the possibilities that define our present. Climate change, migration, inequality, housing, technological transformation or social cohesion are not abstract issues here — they are lived realities, visible at street level and embedded in everyday life.

Against this backdrop, the second edition of the Citiestobe Photo Award invited photographers to look closely at what is happening in cities today, and to do so without simplification. To capture urban realities in all their density, contradiction and humanity. To reveal the multiple layers that coexist within them — from global forces to intimate, personal stories.

As in the 2020 edition, photography becomes a way of thinking: a visual lens through which to observe urban transformations, tensions and transitions. Not to offer definitive answers, but to open perspectives, raise questions and make complexity visible.

The 2023 edition selected 50 finalist works from a total of 1,189 photographs received, representing 94 countries — reflecting a much broader international participation than in the inaugural edition.

The First Prize of the Citiestobe Photo Award 2023 was awarded to Nathalie Daoust, a Canadian photographer, for her image 'In the Shadow of the Big City'.

Taken in 2022 in the Ger district of Ulaanbaatar, the photograph offers a powerful visual reflection on the urbanization of Mongolia’s nomadic communities and the impact of climate change on traditional ways of life. As global warming increasingly threatens the availability of food for livestock, nomadic families are forced to settle on the outskirts of the capital, accelerating profound social and spatial transformations.

Through a quiet yet striking visual language, Daoust’s work reveals how environmental pressure reshapes urban realities, blurring the boundaries between city and periphery, tradition and transition — and placing human experience at the centre of a rapidly changing landscape.

Author's Words

«In the last 70 years, Mongolia’s temperatures have climbed three times faster than the world’s average. Every year, summers and winters are becoming harsher. In 2017, the country saw the hottest summer in half a century, during which two thirds of the country were plagued by drought, while desertification has already turned a quarter of its land to desert. Without sufficient grass to eat, animals lack the fodder to survive the world’s coldest winter, when temperatures plunge below minus 40 degrees centigrade.

Nomadic herders whose subsistence depends on their animals, are now forced to migrate to Ulaanbaatar’s overcrowded Ger districts, the areas of the capital where they are allowed to put up their yurts for the meanwhile until they are ready to go back home. Thousands of nomadic families arrive to the “New City” created for them.

Finding a job while living in such a place with no sanitation, running water or central heating, has become an everyday struggle. During the winter, the cheapest way to keep warm is burning coal, however this constitutes 80% of Ulaanbaatar’s winter emissions, generating some of the worst air pollution on earth and most of them are looking to go back home.»

About the Author

Whether in New York, Tokyo or Berlin, Nathalie Daoust (Montreal, Canada, 1977) has always asserted a childlike contempt for reality. With a passion for intimacy, this Canadian photographer, born and raised in Montreal, has devoted all of her art to unveiling the secrets hidden beneath the apparent stability of life.

Daoust first broke onto the scene in 1997 while photographing the themed rooms of the Carlton Arms Hotel in New York. This project, her first solo exhibition, was then published into a book, New York Hotel Story. Since then, Daoust has created several new conceptual projects that have taken her all over the world, from the love hotels of Tokyo, to a brothel in Brazil, to a darkroom in Sydney and the dreamy landscape of the snow-capped Swiss Alps.

Her objective as an artist is to push the boundaries of photography through experimental methods. While working with new mediums and discovering new darkroom techniques, Daoust explores the indefinable realm between truth, fantasy and the human desire for escapism.

+ Visit Nathalie Daoust's website here