Alex Bex

The Sony World Photography Awards 2025 Documentary category finalist discusses his project with Niall Hampton

- By Niall Hampton

Western films, and particularly how masculinity is presented in the visual culture, have always fascinated Alex Bex, a half-French, half-American photographer, now based in Berlin, Germany. So much so that Alex has spent a period of time photographing cowboys in the US state of Texas, exploring the definition of what it means to be a 'real man' and its place in a fast-changing society.

The resulting long-form project, entitled Memories of Dust, took third place in the Documentary category of this year's Sony World Photography Awards Professional competition. Keen to find out more about his visually striking series, we spoke to Alex after the awards ceremony held in London earlier this year.

What led you to take up documentary photography?

I don't think I chose documentary photography; I think it just happened. I was always attracted to projects that I would say are a bit more post-documentary or subjective documentary, but I wasn't interested in working on projects that were too simple or too close to me. I think this aspect of documentary, the philosophical aspect of exploration and going somewhere far, was appealing to me, and I was also inspired by lots of different photographers who would work on long-term documentary projects.

Sam Contis, for example, is one of the photographers who speaks to me most. Her series Deep Springs is a long-term documentary project about a men-only school in California where the students work with cattle, doing cowboy work – ranching work, essentially. It's about masculinity and the relationship between men, their bodies and the landscapes in a highly poetic way. This is one of the projects that inspired me and the work I'm doing now.

"This project is a way of realising my dreams, but with a mature approach to what it means to have cowboy heroes"