In eight hauntingly beautiful images, Czech photographer Martin Stranka treads the fine line between the aesthetic and the sinister. The artist has composed each of his photographs like a film still – a moment of frozen narrative, with the camera seemingly about to whir back into movement, to tell the story of shock and loss. The sense of pathos is heightened by the fact that in each photograph, impossibly beautiful young people gaze at the viewer in the same pose, with only the background and props revealing any hint of preceding events. Recalling the filmic photographs of Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall, in the series Beautiful Accidents Stranka explores our fascination with the incomplete narrative: ‘in these deliberately visually unfinished stories I seek the boundary between visual appeal and a dramatic scene that can change human life in an instant,’ he has written. Recognised with an International Photography Award in 2022 for this series, the artist has created evocative and arresting testaments to the power of visual storytelling.