Creative Finalist

With more than 130,000 individuals currently reported missing in Mexico, and a new disappearance occurring approximately every 40 minutes, The Black Album transforms archival imagery into a haunting collective portrait of absence, loss, and unresolved grief. Rather than documenting disappearance directly, this photographic essay reinterprets the past to question the future. Through an intervention in a photographic archive, the project constructs a symbolic ‘album’ of Mexico’s disappeared — an unsettling reflection of a country living through a prolonged dark era in which absence has become routine and invisibility systemic.

Pablo Ramos is a cinematographer and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on social justice, exploring the links between violence, memory and resistance. Ramos is a co-founder of Tortugas al Viento, a Mexico City-based film and photography collective. His work has screened at festivals worldwide.