Fine art photographer Esra Sakar has taken first place in the public vote at Doncaster Art Fair: Art as a Response to Mental Health 2025, earning the People’s Choice Award with portraits that treat psychological struggle as something you can stand in front of and recognise.
A public vote for portraits of the mind
The award was decided by public vote. It went to an Istanbul-based photographer whose best known series, The Ghosts Within, gives individual psychological disorders a human face. The 2025 edition of the Doncaster fair carried the title Art as a Response to Mental Health, and that is precisely the ground this series stands on: work about the mind, made to be understood by anyone who has one.
Inside The Ghosts Within
Each work in the series visualises a distinct psychological disorder. The territory it covers includes anxiety, identity fragmentation and dissociation, and the titles read like a clinical index turned into a gallery wall: Depression, Panic Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Dissociative Fugue, Multiple Personality Disorder, Borderline Syndrome, Fregoli Syndrome, Exploding Head Syndrome, Prosopagnosia and Alien Hand Syndrome.
Sakar has written of the series: “Each frame offers an experience and emotion that bears witness to the human struggle for existence.” The portraits meet the viewer head on, and she has described that direct gaze as part of the point: “The faces that look directly at the viewer become a surface through which they are invited to sense their own fractures.”
In her own words
The artist statement on her website puts the intent of the work in a single breath: “I follow the ache. In every frame, I look for the place where the beautiful and the broken become inseparable, where you can no longer tell which one is healing the other.”
For a fair built around art as a response to mental health, it is hard to imagine a statement closer to the brief. And for anyone who has moved countries, the subject sits closer to home than it first appears: the series is about conditions of the mind, but its raw material, identity coming apart and being rebuilt, is familiar to anyone starting a life somewhere new.
About the artist
Esra Sakar is a fine art photographer based in Istanbul. Her work has been featured in Al-Tiba9 and The Eye of Photography, and alongside The Ghosts Within her portfolio includes the 2025 series Artificial Renaissance. The Doncaster award adds a UK audience’s verdict to that record, chosen not by a jury but by the people who walked through the fair.
If you are new to the UK and want to see more art without spending much, our UK culture guide for newcomers covers free national museums, cheap theatre tickets and the rest of the UK arts scene.
