Waiting room, Alishan, Taiwan. 2008 by Magda Biernat

New York-based photographer Magda Biernat returns to us again in this year's second edition of competition with compelling work from her travels abroad. After entering 2009's first round of competition, she was selected (by Jen herself!) as a winner of Photo-Op, the 14th Annual Photographic Competition run by Photographic Center Northwest (PCNW).

Born in Poland, Magda attended the Wielkopolska School of Photography before making her way to New York via Seattle. Then, after stints working at Magnum Photos and Metropolis Magazine, she embarked on a year of travels in 2007 to see where and how people live in seventeen different countries around the world. The image above was made during this time abroad, and is part of the series Inhabited. While many of Magda's earlier projects look at the outsides of living spaces and buildings, lining up the geometries of architecture and nature in cities both near and far, Inhabited makes a departure into closed and more personal spaces, inviting us behind the walls of buildings previously captured.

She writes of Inhabited,

I look into the quiet spaces where people sleep, wait, and work. The interiors of the rooms I've shot serve the same purpose no matter where they are found. Stripped of obvious cultural references and detached from their surroundings, they gain a kind of disorienting universality. The rooms are unoccupied but on closer inspection, items like a crumpled pillow or a half full bottle of water imply the human presence. By carefully composing each frame and eliminating the people who otherwise would help distinguish the place geographically, I wanted the spaces to become anonymous.

Though the habitats are void of people, their objects—bed posts, chairs, windows, and table legs—create the framework for Biernat's intimate insight into their lives while maintaining an overarching cultural ambiguity. One is only able to discern her possible location by tiny hints like Chinese script written on a calendar, and is left to guess who is living in these spaces, and where in the world Biernat is capturing their homes. The tone of the images is hushed and patient, and one imagines Biernat to be shooting in silence, surrounded only by the natural light that finds its way into each of these spaces.

See more of Magda's work from this series (and others) on her website and take a look at more of our contenders on flickr and facebook.