NFT – Artists Info Site
Aaron Huey
Seattle, Washington, USA
This project began with an assignment for National Geographic Magazine that documented the Metaverse. Then, the project grew into many additional projects, including this 100 self-portraits series that were all made using an in-world camera. Photographed in VRChat in a world called Pandora Night built by Fins.
National Geographic photographer. Stanford d.School global fellow. 2019 Webby winner for best VR Interactive Design. Photojournalist.
Aghogho Otega
Ughelli, Nigeria
My Project for The World Today is focused on how people interact with themselves and also their environment.
Member of the African Photojournalism Database (APJD)
Ahndraya Parlato
Kailua, Hawaii, USA
This series of still lifes observes flowers as they move from their prime to states of decomposition and explores unexpected combinations of objects, precarious balances, and the parameters and limits of three-dimensional space.
Nominee for the ICP Infinity Award (International Center of Photography)
Alan Carranza
Ciudad de México, México
In this photography project, I reflect on the human being as an inherent part of the erosion of things, of time and matter, of our planet and even of photography itself. By giving it different treatments (in this case digital), I scratch over its initial layers to find others that erase the initial one in order to exist. I also delve into the beliefs in gods and superior beings that are discarded and transformed according to the needs of those who use their favors.
We have been part of the Earth for thousands of years. Does it use us or do we use it? I destroy therefore I am. We join the natural erosion of our planet–which is not ours, perhaps we belong to this. Anthropic erosion, we say to the abuse we generate. Along the way we erode, we consume ourselves. But, as we know, nothing is created or destroyed, only transformed.
And, we create on top of what already exists. We transform an oil painting into a sea or a portrait. We tattoo our bodies. We make a myth out of a rock, a future out of letters. We raise buildings from the ground, and we create gods from fear. One day, we will no longer be, just dust and less than that.
Mirada Joven 2011 Winner
Alejandro Cartagena
Monterrey, México, México
The World Today project was, for me, a visual narrative about fatherhood and family life. It was a great opportunity to explore my outside world after months of being trapped by the pandemic and the newly found space of the Metaverse. The ordinary had suddenly become extraordinary and life happening in front of me was the only thing I was interested in.
Recipient of the Street Photography Award in London Photo Festival, Lente Latino Award in Chile, & the Premio IILA-FotoGrafia Award in Rome
Alessandra Sanguinetti
Petaluma, California, USA
An intimate visual narrative of Alessandra Sanguinetti’s daily life. A collection of eyes she looks into every day. A beginning catalog of everything in her house. Snapshots from her family vacation, a series of images of the animals and flowers she loves, and also, some photographs of Ray B shotguns, rifles, and guns to illustrate an essay he wrote about them.
MAGNUM photographer, Recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and a Hasselblad Foundation grant.
Alex Majoli
Scicli, Italy
On February 24th the Russian Federation troops crossed Ukrainian boundaries starting an escalation of violence that brought millions of people on the run toward Europe. From that day on, train stations all over the country are filled with families. Women and children leave to seek shelter in neighboring countries. Men are forbidden to leave the country. They must return to their cities to take up arms and defend their own cities. Ukraine. 2022. Odessa, Mykolaiv, Voznesensk and Isaccea.
MAGNUM photographer
Alicia Araís Fernández
Ciudad Juárez & Ciudad de México, México
Women’s Fire:
The photo essay, Women’s Fire, portrays the life of Rosario and Flor who met through juggling. After a while, Flor invited Rosario to participate with her art in feminist protests. From these interventions, Rosario rethinks her role of being a woman, mother, wife, and artist. These photographs explore different facets of their lives approaching a reflection on sensuality, objectification, motherhood, relationships, economic independence, solidarity, and networks created by women as well as urban artistic expressions.
Pink Hoods:
Las Capuchas Rosas (Pink Hoods) is a feminist collective that emerged spontaneously by women from different backgrounds to protest violence through dance and self-expression. Some of them have been activists persecuted by the Mexican authorities for which they have decided to protect their identity behind a hood. They decided to move away from the black hood and resignify their protest through the color pink, emulating the pink cross that has emerged as a symbol in Ciudad Juarez of the fight against femicide. This photographic work seeks to explore the individuality of each of its members but at the same time emphasize their collective struggle.
Signs:
The border between Mexico and the United States unfolds as hostile territory. The door is closed to those who seek refuge in this country, mostly people from Latin America. Increasingly harsh immigration policies lead to more dangerous migrations and attempts to cross this dividing line that can be deadly. On these roads, there are signs that are vestiges of migrants, artists’ work, military authorities, a wall full of spikes, signs of rejection as well as signs of life and death on these roads. The signs and images for this photo essay are collected in this territory, along the border between these two countries.
Artech:
The artistic avant-garde comes from disruption, live coding is shown as a way to slow down the algorithm, sensors are aligned to express emotions, art, and technology come together to create immersive experiences that find their audience in contemplative hosts, this photographic series portrays this world and its followers.
Artificial:
This photographic project explores the effects of artificial light to liven up natural environments.
Maria Moors Cabot Award in 2011 Winner & Independent Journalist, collaborating with the Associated Press in Mexico
Álvaro Laiz
Madrid, Spain
I was never really there.
Memory works in an amazing way. It acts as a virtual theater.
Many of my childhood memories appear as negative images, pending development, waiting to be processed. Others are projected in an intermediate place, halfway between the present and the past, between the real and the virtual.
I remember childhood and adolescence as a confusing scenario in which I felt
permanently out of place. Books, comics, movies, and video games were my passports out of a place where I didn’t quite fit in. Thanks to them I was able to connect with unknown worlds. Armed with little more than a helmet and a book, I played at projecting myself in space and time.
The items that accompany the intervened images are small treasures that have survived the passage of time and act as votive offerings through which to invoke the past and connect it with the present.
Actually, I was never there poses a game of mirrors between myself in 1984 and my work as a photographer with which I try to find a solution to the question:
What weighs more? The (child) who imagines the path or the (adult) who builds it?
2017 National Geographic Explorer Program Grant Recipient & Magnum- IT Foundation Award Finalist
Amy Woodward
Sunshine Coast, Australia
“Ellipsis traces a month-long, intuitive chapter of image-making for photographer Amy Woodward. The result is a meandering body of work spanning multiple subjects: the desolation and loss caused by a historic flood, journal-like notes of chance encounters, the natural world of plants and animals, as well as an extension of Woodward’s long-form practice with mother subjects and their changing families.
A background hum of quiet magic pervades the work as it orbits symbols of fragility, ruin & renewal, and fertility, alongside the privacy and shelter of domestic settings. Lifecycles in the natural world layer onto scenes of human experience and emotion, forming a palimpsest connecting the two inseparably.
Ellipsis punctuates the thoughtful spaces between the sequence of images, but also alludes that the photos themselves may be the true spaces between the workings of a world that is moving at an untraceable pace.”
Finalist for the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize.
Ana María Arevalo Gosen
Caracas, Venezuela
“The World Today” es una oda a la obra “The Family of Men”, para este proyecto decidí disfrutar del acto fotográfico al igual que hicieron nuestros maestros para ese cuerpo de trabajo. El hermoso e incómodo acto de pasearse con una cámara. Su poesía silenciosa y sus sorpresas tormentosas. La fotografía me ha proporcionado el placer de disfrutar del presente, y cuánta humanidad puedo poner en un encuadre es lo que intento dar a cambio a quienes miran mis fotografías.
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“The World Today” is an ode to the work “the family of men” for this project; I decided to enjoy the photographic act just like our masters did for that body of work. The beautiful, uncomfortable action of wandering around with a camera. It’s silent poetry and its stormy surprises. Photography has given me the pleasure of enjoying the present, and how much humanity I can put into a frame is what I try to give in return to those who look at my photographs.
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Travel Grant (2018) Recipient
Ana Sofía Ayarzagoitia
Monterrey, México
Like ants forging a way forward, leaving a trail in the ground from going back and forth through the same path, Haitians and Hondurans have made an invisible path; a migrating route through Central and South America.
The option of migrating became persistent among Haitians after the devastating 2010 earthquake that caused 217,000 deaths and left more than a million people homeless.
Through the decade, this answer to despair; the possibility of migrating, became embedded in their culture.
The work of Sofia Ayarzagoitia represents the moment in which these migrants complete their journey in a train known as “The Beast”. The name of this cheap way of transportation refers to the terrifying experience of traveling in the roof of the train, for some 2,500 kilometers, being exposed to all sorts of accidents and atrocities including deaths and limb losing incidents.
This is the moment when Haitians unintentionally meet with the Hondurans, who are fleeing a country tormented by violence, extortion, and poverty.
By the time these pictures are taken, in Monterrey México, they all have traveled a long distance. Many have lost members of the group they had formed to magnify their chances of survival.
Named FOAM TALENT in 2016
Andrés Cardona Cruz
Bogotá, Colombia
This project brings together the worldview of two indigenous communities in Colombia, that of the Wayúu in the north in the desert area and that of the Uitoto in the south in the Amazon. For these communities, rituals continue to be a pillar to preserve their culture. The duel is important in the Wayúu because it is the preparation for a long journey of the dead to “Jepira” which is the heaven of these indigenous people and the tributes add importance when it comes to saying goodbye to a member of the clan, for the Uitoto in the Amazonia, the mambe and the ambil are two ancestral medicines based on coca leaf and tobacco because through them they connect with “Mo Buinaima” the god of wisdom of this people. My approach is directed towards the resistance of indigenous communities in the midst of Westernism, ancestral traditions, the way of life of communities in the jungle, deforestation, armed conflict, and the search for the disappeared.
Selected as one of the six emerging photographers from Latin America by the World Press Photo 6×6 Global Talent Program (2019).
Andressa Cruz Zumpano
Goiânia, Brazil
This essay goes through the transition paths between cities and scenarios, during the literal change of city I went through. Previously a resident of Brasilia, the federal capital of Brazil, a city that received several political demonstrations, I chose to register the protests of indigenous peoples, who occupied the city between April 4th and 14th, 2022. Currently a resident of Goiânia, in the Centro neighborhood, of diversity, but more provincial. Change or transition occurs from the inside out, traveling through cities, roads, and diverse people.
Journalist & Coordinator of the Articulação de Pastorais do Campo project & Comissão Pastoral da Terra Contributor
Anita Pouchard Serra
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Urban and intimate wanderings between Buenos Aires, NYC and Paris. Explorations with lights and shadows randomly in the territory.
Nominated twice for by the World Press Photo.
Antero Escandón
Monterrey, México
The images presented for this project bring together a range of my photographic interests, I took this commission as a pretext to have a first approach to a space that I would like to visit more, located on the slopes of the iconic hill from which it takes its name, Parque Río La Chair, in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. It also includes a variety of festivities that I participated in, a medical brigade in a house for migrants and a rehearsal in the music studio that we set up with some friends and collaborators. Among the images, it includes portraits of people close to my immediate environment, my fixation on the play of light and shapes in the shadows, but above all the interest in exploring the environment by linking photosensitive phenomena and the human-nature relationship.
PECDA Scholarship Recipient
Barbara Davidson
Los Angeles, California, USA
Davidson documents scenes of everyday life, mainly in California. Portraits and urban landscapes of life after the pandemic.
Three-time Pulitzer Prize Winner and an Emmy Award Winner
Behnam Sadighi
Tehran, IRAN
There exist turbulent waves between me and the island of Hengam, each referring to a brief moment. Every time they are born, I seem to witness their disappearance. In the same way as a moment, every time I approach one, I am simultaneously moving away from it. The essence of the island and its seclusion, nonetheless, gives space to my solitude as well as its new guests to experience a touch of relief in those transient split seconds.
Hengam (meaning moment in English, Persian: هنگام) is an island that covers an area of approximately 50 square kilometers in the south of Iran and the Persian Gulf. The island hosts nature tourists, often young people who want to escape or seek self-confrontation; they camp together for a few days or weeks in every nook and cranny of nature, away from all the social constraints back in cities. For them, Hengam, with its warm sunshine and temperate climate, is like a safe haven and shelter in which to experience a communal life, regardless of the common and traditional patterns of contemporary Iranian lifestyle. They seem to have become integrated and enclosed with hope and expectation in Iranian society’s social and cultural context, which is fragmented like an island, observing all the comings and goings between the past, present, and the future.
In the meanwhile, the natives of Hengam Island have moved from Minab, a city in southern Iran in the same province, to settle there, and throughout the past few decades, they have replaced the former Arab inhabitants of the island. The latter lived there for centuries but were expelled due to political changes in different historical periods and migrated to the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.
In this ongoing project, a variety of cameras and photographic film formats, often outdated, have been used.
Winnner of 3rd Magic of Persia Contemprary Art Perize
Bénédicte Kurzen
Brignoles, France
“…My dictionary goes on to say that color also signifies authenticity, as in ‘He showed us his true colors’. Yet does not the very phrase ‘he showed us his true colors,’ venerable with age and usage, also suggest the opposite, that color is both true and untrue precisely because of its claims to authenticity? How can you ever be sure with which variety you are dealing, his true colors or his false ones? Is this why we in the West are drawn to color, yet made uneasy, even repelled by it, as by Mafia types like me in Hawaiian shirts? Who of you reading this text would even dream of painting the living-room wall bright red or green, or any color other than off-white? Then, safe in your whiteness, you can hang a wildly colored picture on the wall, secure in its framed being.“ M. Taussig, What Color is Sacred?, University of Chicago Press (May 1, 2009)
World Press Photo winner
Benson Ibeabuchi
Lagos, Nigeria
Beauty is all around us, and if we truly want to appreciate it, we must adopt an open, receptive mindset, eager to receive what might typically raise an eyebrow. Finding beauty in the mundane allows us to let go of our prejudices and embrace life more fully.
Guardian Agency Photographer of the Year Nomination in 2020
Bernard Kalu
Lagos, Nigeria
This collection shows the mundane daily lives of Lagosians as well as the drive and dreams of the young and old alike. The streets are a microcosm of life – and in these street photographs, the essence of the people as a whole can be seen and validated.
2017 NATGEO Portfolio Review First Runner Up
Bleke Depoorter & Dries Depoorter
Ghent, Belgium
“Border Birds” is a series of photos of birds, automatically captured while crossing a border. This was achieved by a combination of artificial intelligence and open surveillance cameras at each boundary line. This camera captured birds crossing the border between the United States and Mexico.
Bieke Depoorter – MAGNUM photographer
Bruno Morais
Itacaré, Brazil
Only 67 years separate the projects The Family of Man and The World Today; however, despite the short time, the world and the image of the world underwent radical changes. For me, living south of the equator, in the midst of a pandemic and under a notoriously fascist government, these are dystopian times. Side B is a personal reflection and pessimistic testimony made during these strange times in a certainly idyllic location in the certainly idyllic state of Bahia, Brazil. Behind the postcard beaches and influencer scene, life in Itacaré is not as sweet and light as the screen savers advertise.
Founder of the Colectivo Pandilla in Rio de Janeiro
Carlos Loret de Mola
New York, New York, USA
I live in the woods and the city. This dichotomy suits me, but I love the city because of the people. I love who they are, what they do, and how they dress and present themselves. I AM ALONE when I am upstate—just me with my family. I focus on the woods, the small, nearly empty towns, and the quiet scenes. There is a built-in disconnect upstate, where everyone keeps to themselves. That suits me, too. But, in the city, it is a different kind of disconnect formed by our public anonymity. We all recognize each other without knowing each other, and that’s alright. Going from upstate to downstate is a balancing act that defines my place in the world today, and there is no disconnect between the two for me.
Co-director of Los Sumergidos, a publication projects platform
Caroline Gutman
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
My work for The World Today is a variety of chance encounters and scenes across five US states. I took photos on bike rides and walks, allowing myself to slow down to photograph the scenes I was drawn to: The opening of a soul food restaurant; the afternoon light in the Shenandoah mountains; the basement of a suburban estate sale; flowers near George Floyd Square. My photos try to reflect the complexities and simple beauty of the world we live in today.
Fulbright Fellow in China
Charlotte Schmitz
Kalleby, Germany
A visual conversation between two photographers and friends – Oksana Parafeniuk on the road displaced in Ukraine and Poland, together with Charlotte Schmitz in Germany. They exchanged questions and responded with photographs.
FotoEvidence W Award Recipient
Christian Martinez
Monterrey, México, México
He was invited to The World Today a few days before the reception of projects, a fact that allowed him to finish a project that had been working on the aesthetic decisions of the residents of his neighborhood and other neighborhoods that began to be built at the same time and for people belonging to the same socio-economic class. Classic cars covered with tarpaulins for their conservation, ornamental statues, and flowerpots that match the color palette of the facades, are just some of the aesthetic constants that are repeated in those colonies. They are in constant conflict with the new architectural fashions of the contemporary generations that seek to acquire property in these neighborhoods inhabited mostly by adult people.
Christopher Anderson
Kelowna, British Columbia, Canana
Light sculptures
MAGNUM photographer
CLARA DE TEZANOS
Antigua, Guatemala
There is a speed that is typical of Clara. It is a voracious and provocative speed. Playful. A speed in which gestating implies placing the body in desire, in fire, in permanent transformation.
Her artistic experimentation originates from photography. Light, the primordial medium of her matter, remains the essential element of her work. But, now, her cosmogonic heart floods, captivated in the infinite devotion of her mystery and, as if by a mystical call, she plunges into the deep understanding of the knowledge in which the sun is the source.
The experience of feeling the mystery of the Divine light necessarily transforms her. And in that search for meanings of truth that lead her to certainty, she redefines the physical space that she inhabits, her bonds, the way in which she travels around the weight of her body, her spirit, her speed, her gaze. Clara begins a devout pilgrimage in
search of the source, which also transfigures her gestating action. The spirit of the Divine light manifests and is represented.
The sun is the source is an exhibition that begins like this: It was born as a search to manifest the Divine in a game investigation in which the artist breaks away, from an insubordinate gesture, with the two-dimensionality of the image. She disarms a camera and begins the creation of The Transmutation Machines, multiple astronomical objects made of wood, leatherette, glass, and other elements, with the function of manifesting in a ritual of mystical foundation. A procession in praise of the sun, inside an ancient sacred building, where the objects activate the fullness of their spiritual power in celebration of the Divine glory through their light manifestation in movement.
Some of these objects are preserved and keep their original ritual presence. Others are fragmented and transformed by the artist. From there are born the Votive Lamps, sun amulets, which in her mobile gesture show the desire to propitiate a space for joy, amazement, and the ecstasy of being and her surroundings. They are rays of God, they are Divine instruments.
Without measuring an exact time, Whispers, the multidimensional mural composed of sundials, works as an invitation to observe how time is translated into light, from the lightness of its composition of wood and litmus acrylic. Variation of forms, touched by the gesture of light, emit ethereal figures of color, which reflect on the cycles of life, the eternal and the ephemeral, the permanently changing. That, from its duality, in its essence of being light and being a shadow, occur in balance, like flashes of the spirit of divine poetry.
Without measuring an exact time, Whispers, the multidimensional mural composed of sundials, works as an invitation to observe how time is translated into light, from the lightness of its composition of wood and litmus acrylic. Variation of forms, touched by the gesture of light, emit ethereal figures of color, which reflect on the cycles of life, the eternal and the ephemeral, the permanently changing. That, from its duality, in its essence of being light and being a shadow, occur in balance, like flashes of the spirit of divine poetry.
Clumsy drawing of the eternal deal with that transition from light to darkness. And, in that nocturnal infinity where the absence of the glare of the sun exists, Clara offers us new conditions of coexistence and relationship in our perception of the dimension of the universe. Sky mirror in elliptical translation fulfills a similar function to its figure, an elliptical map that emulates the rotation of the earth around the sun. As an ancient gesture of using the lagoons to see the celestial bodies, she places a black mirror on it so that it reflects the sky, so the expansion of the stars in the universe can be observed. Giving space for the cosmogonic story to recover its poetic force, that one’s self can perceive his own condition in the midst of that coarseness. See the soul. Take learning with humility.
Theories of Fludd, Kepler, and Newton are mirror maps as a tribute to thinkers of the sun who accompany Clara on her journey. People who, in other times, like her, understood that the cosmos is a living consciousness.
In this way, The Source is the Sun becomes an investigation in permanent search and mutation of its light artifacts. Those who do not yearn for perfection, but to be in their essence, deep representations of the Divine spirit, in communion with the rhythm that the artist impregnates them, from a deeply loving and playful gestation.
Co-founder and Director of the Contemporary Photography Center, La Fototeca & the GuatePhoto International Festival
Comandante Vagancia – Eduardo Giralt
Zacatecas, México, México
An analogy between the Mexican banditry of the late 19th century with the sicario figure of our current times.
Cooper Ray
New York, New York, USA
A personal black-and-white perspective of life, reflected in portraits and cityscapes.
Founding Artist of the theRAWdao
Cris Veit
São Paulo, Brazil
I am an artist living in São Paulo, Brazil. Before adopting photography as a form of expression, I worked as a graphic designer and a photo editor for 18 years in the magazine/publishing business in Brazil and abroad.
Photographer for the National Geographic Magazine, Brazilian Edition
Cristina De Middel
Salvador de Bahia, Brazil
In a society with generalized attention deficit disorder, the way the news is presented to us had to mutate into digestible pills of information that are simplified and polarized in order to fit the headline or the hashtag. It is precisely now, when we are more complex, hybrid, interconnected as individuals than ever, that the language we rely on to stay updated has become the more limited and limiting. Nowadays, with an unmanageable amount of information available, and in the always difficult balance between quantity and quality, it seems like we chose the worst of both.
In the series “Fun Facts,” I play with this manner of presenting information and combine it with photographic still-lives that take the viewer into deeper layers of the language where symbolism and visual association enter the construction game of the meaning. In an attempt to return its lost complexity and to challenge the audience for higher visual literacy, I propose a combination of text and image that leave the doors open for opinion, understanding and imagination, the pillars of learning together with raw information.
Elected President of MAGNUM in 2022
Cristóbal Olivares
Santiago, Chile
Puente Alto is a commune located on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. A place where you can still have contact with the natural horizon and also one of the places with the largest population in the capital, with high rates of unemployment, drugs, crime, and state abandonment.
I lived in this place until I was 16 when my parents divorced and we lost our home, moving to my maternal grandparents in another part of the city. Even so, I could not leave this neighborhood completely, I continued attending the same school despite the distance to stay close to my friends and part of my family.
All my history is linked to this place, my memories, my frustrations, and my affections. My whole family has grown up, lived and worked there. All in one way or another have walked these same streets where they felt at home.
In 2013, after many years without seeing him, my father died there and that day I saw my grandmother again. Almost 9 years passed until I saw her again in the same house where my father died. A house frozen in time with the same smell, the same dust and the same lack of light that I remember as a child. This is also the case with the streets of the neighborhood, trapped in an eternal lethargy that is only interrupted by some criminal event or some uncontrolled celebration.
Talking about the present is impossible for me without revisiting the past. An exercise that is often more harmful than revealing but that in one way or another feels satisfying. A paradox to keep looking for an explanation about the world, as if every time the lack of belonging assails me, I should search my head for the images of this place to feel present.
2019 Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellow
Damilola Onafuwa
Lagos, Nigeria
Men of Steel and Caliber is an adaptation of an English idiom, “Men of timbre and caliber” which means men of repute who are respected in their community and around the world. The project, Men of Steel and Caliber is set in Ladipo Market, the largest automobile spare parts market in Africa where men and women from different walks of life import automobile vehicle parts from countries like Japan, China, the United States, etc. for resale. Lagos Beachers explores the life of beachgoers and dwellers on the coast of Lagos Nigeria.
Lagos Nights are characterized by lots of activities including food, fun, dance, and many more things better left unsaid.
Lagos Beachers explores the life of beachgoers and dwellers on the coast of Lagos Nigeria.
Founder of StoryMaxima & Member of APJD (Africa Photo-Journalism Database)
Daro Sulakauri
Tbilisi, Georgia
The photos tell stories of the current social and political everyday surroundings. Effects of modern-day imperialism on the psychological, cultural, and social effects on individuals and communities; The toll of “Creeping borders” – borders that are shrunk and redrawn by imperialist forces in the country of Georgia. Demonstration against the war in Ukraine and how people struggle to survive poverty.
Caucasus Award in Magnum Foundation’s Young Photographer & EU Prize for Journalism
Deepti Asthana
Shillong, India
Paradise is a project based in a tourist city in India, Goa. Goa is the ultimate holiday destination for the youth, honeymoon couples, and also for families. The sea takes away the distinction between class and caste. The long stretches of beaches are everyone’s place to come to and enjoy the water, sunset, and cheap booze. It symbolizes freedom for most women to be themselves and not be judged. After a long break due to the COVID travel restrictions, the city once again shinning in its full glory. Becoming the paradise every middle-class Indian dreams of to take a break from the monotony of life.
National Geographic photographer & WORLD PRESS PHOTO Winner
Derrick Carr
Buffalo, USA
City scenes, portraits, and landscapes contribute to “The Sum of US”.
Photography featured in Time magazine
Donaldo Barros
Caracas, Venezuela
On March 31, 2022, I did a one-way tour in Caracas. From 15:55 to 17:48, I was walking from La Previsora to Chacao. I chose that direction so that the people to be photographed would face the sun and thus be able to capture their faces in movement; them to the west while I went to the east.
I went with the camera in hand, reading the light meter and looking for balance, with one eye on the viewfinder and the other on the boulevard I chose to walk. I crossed Sabana Grande, then Chacaíto, until I reached Chacao, first passing through El Rosal. Each person who looked towards the camera portrayed him. There was surprise, joy, tension, strangeness, fright, and complicity.
It was a beautiful and simple exercise. Deep and with a lot of speech. And it is that the deepest answers walk in simple waters.
Visual contact is a journey from one point to another, playing with the sunset of Caracas, and capturing glances that are undressed in surprise by a lens that confronts them without warning.
It is nudity; it is transparency; It is true.
Agora Prize – Best Photo 2020 Award
https://twt.obscura.io/Donaldo-Barros
https://www.artsy.net/partner/marion-gallery/artists/donaldo-barros
Elena Subach
Lviv, Uzhgorod, Ukraine
Chairs on the Slovak-Ukrainian Border and Saving Ukrainian Heritage.
About the first one:
Now my approach to taking photos is different from what it was during the creation of the Chairs at the Border series in the first two weeks of the war. At that point in time, I felt that I could not violate people’s private space, because it would take their time, which they would rather like to use saying goodbye to their relatives. I did not dare to interfere in their already fragile and ruined private space, although I understood the historicity and importance of the moment. Also, for me personally, everything was strange, so I looked for traces of people’s presence—the things which remained after they left. I took a number of still-life photos. I photographed chairs with the objects left on them since they seemed to me like islands among waves of people, that is, places where one could stop and rest for a moment.
About the second one:
One of the unquestionable pearls of Ukrainian culture is the vast sculptural variety of works of Johann Georg Pinsel, a famous baroque and rococo sculptor of the 18th century. Pinsel was a founder of the Lviv school of sculpture. The biggest collection of his works is located in Lviv.
Pinsel’s sculptures are unique, they communicate incredible strength. His works present an astonishing combination of internal calmness and dynamics. In 2013 his works were exhibited in the Louver, and in 2016 – in Belvedere. Losing those artworks would have been a cultural disaster for the entire world. Preserving our cultural heritage is the process all the Ukrainian museums are occupied with at the moment. Museum staff relocates the exhibits to safe places with great care and professionalism. This process is not highlighted in the media due to safety reasons. The photo demonstrates the evacuation process of Pinsel sculptures.
Curatorial work at Lviv National Art Gallery
Eman Ali
Muscat, Oman
The Earth Would Die If The Sun Stopped Kissing Her, Eman Ali’s selection of works for The World Today 10k project, incorporates a set of interconnected narratives that involve the proof of human presence, sources and connections, nature and man, and the manifestation of the future.
It is a month-long meditation on the artist’s surroundings in Oman, between intimate interior settings and the beauty of the mundane. Her work draws from her car drives within and outside of the city and finds the presence in absence and the coinciding of man and nature. Some of her observations include the human connection to land, the celebration of individuality, bonds, and imperfections, and embracing underlying themes of separation and death. She furthermore contemplates life beyond earth, in a sense that seeks a higher power. In her selection, Eman Ali displays a gallery of individuals from the region – artists, friends, and strangers that crossed her path – that she captures and celebrates for their beauty and uniqueness.
The Earth Would Die If The Sun Stopped Kissing Her is thus an explorative, instinctive project that documents like a diary the daily, intimate, experiences of the artist and pays tribute to the land on which she lives.
Female in Focus Award
Emin Özmen
Istanbul, Turkey
Documenting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
MAGNUM photographer, National Geographic Explorer 2020-2021 Grantee & 2018 Pulitzer Center Grantee
Enri Canaj
Athens, Greece
Inside the War: Civilians learn how to use rifles, people crowd to board an evacuation train out of Odessa, and Ukrainians suffer the Russian invasion. Looking for the truth: Albania is a small country in the heart of the Balkans. Despite its rich culture, people outside do generally not know much about it. It is also my homeland, the place of my early childhood. I grew up separated from it and returned later to pick up the threads that were left behind 10 years later because, in the meantime, I was illegal and had no documents. Albania is that magic memory that will always be there for me.
MAGNUM photographer
Eric Gottesman
New York, New york, USA
Greenwich, Connecticut, a suburb of New York City, is one of the wealthiest towns in the world. What remains of the original indigenous inhabitants of the land, while not invisible, can be hard to see. The land was commodified by settlers nearly four centuries ago. The native Siwanoy people were mistreated and removed from their land, but a friendly narrative of sharing of the land is used to justify the virtually infinite wealth of today’s inhabitants. Massive estates now sit on streets with indigenous names. Property owners bolt convex mirrors to trees to make sure they can see everything behind them clearly, to keep their expensive cars safe as they leave their wide driveways. But rearview vision can be distorted. These mirrors make everything look like a funhouse, and make it difficult to escape seeing one’s own reflection. In my first NFT project, I am reflecting on the perils of commodification in the context of what seems like the latest technology to encourage it. When property ownership moves from the ephemeral to the physical or from the physical to the ephemeral, what is lost? Is anything gained? For whom? What stories do we tell to justify our decisions, and what distorted mirrors do we employ to look back and feel safe?
Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
Eric Ruby
Berkeley, California
Everyday perspectives of today’s world from a Californian perspective.
Freelance photographer
Eunice Adorno
Mexico City, México, México
Landscapes and spaces in Mexico City. Even with the cosmopolitan in which this city has developed, the architecture of the past survives among corners, neighborhoods, and old neighborhoods of the great capital. I photographed this series of places thinking about this eternal connection between past and present, between the possible ruins that we can be in the future, between water and asphalt. My tours are also part of a drift in my city where an almost fragmentary memory of the water we were, Xochimilco, still survives until our relationship with the city in its entirety.
Received the Premio Nacional de Cultura Fernando Benítez award for her work: Mujeres Flores
Eva Verbeeck
Antwerp, Belgium
Eva Verbeeck is a photographer based in Belgium. She is based between Antwerp, Belgium, and New York. Her family traveled around the world for most of her life.
Her work explores her love for visual storytelling with her deep interest in social justice, youth culture, and activism. Focusing on portraiture and collaborative storytelling, her personal work has revolved around environmental issues, human rights, gender, and the exploration of identity employing a mainly analog approach. Her long-term projects are developed by building trust and working collaboratively. This series that she made for TWT explores the beauty and bounty spring brings to our world.
National Geographic’s Short Film Showcase “Age of the Farmer” & PDN Photo Annual 2019 Recipient
Fabiola Cedillo
Cuenca, Ecuador
I am Fabiola Cedillo, an Ecuadorian photographer and educator. Engaged in following, from the image, the movements of adaptation and resistance of the human being in the face of social roles, desire, frustration, and idealization. Part of my work focuses on the destigmatization of bodies and lives marginalized for not adjusting to dominant norms.
Awarded The “New Generation Prize” of PHM 2018 Women Photographers Grant
Fernando Gallegos
Monterrey, México, México
10 DAYS ON MARCH is a brief exploration of my immediate reality in a changing world. After the relaxation of some of COVID restrictions and with a hostile economical and political world landscape, the expectation for disaster makes living in a place like México feel like trying to resume life on an unexplored planet.
Recipient of the PECDA Nuevo León & PECDA/FECAS scholarships
Girma Berta
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Growing up in a city as dynamic and colorful as Addis Ababa really opened my eyes to its changes. The city is always changing; old being replaced by the new. Being a primate city itself, Addis Ababa’s changing shape ripples in other cities as well. This always interests me. Merely capturing these moments in their absolutely colorful stances places me in history as a documentarian, but I simply follow the dynamic colorful wind of these cities and the people that make its moments.
New York Times Portfolio Review 2017 Participant & CAP Prize 2017 Finalist
Gisela Volá
Buenos Aires, Argentina
To search for our desire and to draw up our own personal map. To open oneself to live our fantasies and to make sense of body language. What is love without sex? Can sex exist without fantasy? What were we before we were ourselves? Bodies express interventions, modifications written on the skin, they look for ways to subvert and disobey the established regime of public space. To surrender oneself in the midst of the city and trust a new force will emerge. To investigate the impulses that do not depend on will. To stop searching and just find signals among the concrete. Faith and chance: hands hold precious stones, hearts, stars, and money. Metaphors in the hands of people for the magnetism of life.
First prize for the Picture of the Year Latinoamérica (2012/2014)
Gregory Halpern
Rochester, New York, USA
These pictures were made in and around Buffalo, New York, where I grew up. They were made on medium-format film, printed as analog contact sheets, and then scanned on a flatbed scanner. This process creates occasional dust, imperfections, and a sense of softness to the image.
Guggenheim Fellow
Gui Christ
São Paulo, Brazil
Since the development of the first tools, and especially after the abandonment of nomadic life, humankind has been creating several forms of constructs in order to overpass the natural limitations of their lives. Passed thousands of years, with the exponential development of the societies, these creations became part of daily life as well as local landscapes, perpetuating a continuous cycle of creation and abandonment at the same intensity as the economic systems develop. “Desconstructo” is a visual research on the physical vestiges of abandoned objects and buildings found in São Paulo, the biggest south-American metropolis, where thousands of constructions are abandoned or transformed every day, becoming this way part of the local landscape.
Recipient of National Geographic Society Explorer Grant & Pulitzer Center Rainforest Journalism Fund Grant
Hugo Faz
São Paulo, Brazil
About my concept for “The World Today,” my starting point was Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose embrace of art and science-fiction still generates instigating questions about human evolution. If the black monolith from the movie once transformed our ancestors, making them intelligent but perhaps also competitive or aggressive, it is invited back after many ages to be a guiding thread for witnessing contemporary society and to help me with asking unsettling questions.
Do the current complexity of human relations, urban development, and dynamics actually make for better living? What does the advent of crypto entail for the average person? Is a society that’s become used to isolation and virtuality still capable of empathy? Is there a point to our civilization? What makes the essence of the human experience? In our age, in which post-truth thrives and where “all that is solid melts into air,” truth becomes a non-fungible token, molded to what the minter wants it to be. Faced with such an ‘imbroglio,’ what is the reigning paradigm? Innocuous or transformative, discreet or disturbing, starring or observing, the black monolith experiences the present and its inhabitants, naming visions, telling truths, or making guesses about “The World Today…”
Founder of Casa NUA, São Paulo’s first dedicated NFT Gallery
Igor Chekachkov
Kharkiv, Ukraine
About 10 years ago, I worked on the series Daily Lives, researching the interaction of people sharing a common space. I asked my friends and relatives for permission to become inconspicuous observers of their daily lives. For several years I dived into the atmosphere of someone else’s private space, someone’s story, and captured the picture of “How do we live together”. On February 24 in 2022, when Russia began an armed invasion of Ukraine, I was forced to move out of Kharkiv to Lviv like many other displaced people.
This prompted me to continue the Daily Lives series in a new context documenting the lives of Ukrainian displaced and how people re-inventing their daily life in new places, leaving behind their home, jobs, and their past life. I visit shelters, houses, and apartments where IDPs live and photograph how they live, their household, and their relationships with those with whom they ended up in the same space. This project is a series of photographs of people in their new spaces, immersed in the everyday life of a new life.
Photography featured in National Geographic & The Guardian
Irina Rozovsky
Athens, Georgia, usa
I’m photographing the texture of contemporary life and environment, mostly in Athens, GA. I make these images in transit, running errands, and grocery shopping, often from or around the car.
Photography featured in The New Yorker & The New York Times Magazine
Jack Simpson
San Francisco, California, USA
A look at “The World Today” from street photography.
First-Place Winner in ObscuraDAO Playground Photography Challenge
Jacqui Kenny
London, United Kingdom
We are at an inflection point. I know the metaverse is coming, I feel it, but I can’t see it yet.
The TWT10K project has given me a chance to explore this new dimension. This collection is an expression of my attempt to migrate my Web2 practice into Web3 and try to understand how photography can play a critical part in taking what is best from one reality and seeding it into another.
“Flora of Argleton Lane” is a collection of images of nature that I have captured in Google Street View over many years of virtual travel (instagram.com/streetview.portraits), that I have now reimagined for the metaverse using AI. The focus on nature was inspired by my sense that the metaverse is something that is emerging organically, it reminds me of a Brian Eno quote where he says, “composers are becoming more like gardeners than architects”. “Flora of Argleton Lane” is an experiment in fusing the mindset of a gardener with the sensibilities of a photographer.
“Argleton Lane” is the name of the corner of the metaverse I discovered during lockdown (opensea.io/collection/homes-of-argleton-lane). Not for the first time, my anxiety disorder manifested itself as a desire to virtually escape to new places, this time by collaborating with an AI trained on my Street View images. The process has revealed an alternate reality, that looks a bit like here but isn’t.
The AI does not simply transform a photograph, it uses a photograph and written words as the seeds to grow an entirely new image. It has been exciting to explore how to creatively collaborate with an AI to craft the emotional effect of my output. I have spent most of my time exploring how to amplify the nature of what I loved about the accidental essence of the moments I discovered in Street View, and how those moments resonated with my feelings of awe, harmony, and isolation.
Work featured in National Geographic & Wired Magazine Japan
Jake Verzosa
Manila, Philippines
The Maharlika Highway is the longest highway in the Philippines. The network of roads, bridges, and ferry routes connect the major islands of Luzon, Samar, Leyte, and Mindanao. It has been the country’s principal transport backbone for travel, trade, and commerce since its inception in 1965.
I have long been fascinated by the idea of traversing the country on my old motorcycle. I was curious to test my physical and mental limits but more so interested to witness a country in transition and uncertainty: one emerging from a long pandemic lockdown, amid a global inflation crisis, and on the last weeks of a national election.
On the day travel restrictions were eased across the regional border checkpoints, I started my ride across the archipelago via Maharlika Highway, covering a distance of 4000 kilometers across 37 provinces in 30 days. All images were taken on brief transitory stops for gas, food, rest, and roadside repairs.
Verzosa’s portraits are held in the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône.
Javier León Cuevas
Oaxaca, México, México
My main interest as an artist is queer identities and the intimacy that the act of photographing others who, like me, assume sexual diversity can create. The production of these portraits is a collaborative process with the subjects, allowing me and them to slow down and create an emotional space between them that allows us to offer something of ourselves and be fully present in this exchange, thus allowing them to be who they are. themselves on camera. My main interest is to create images that document that meeting and atmosphere of affection, as well as that these photographs can also be images that can function as validation and possibility for other people who are trying to discover how to live their queer identity without fear.
2015 Young Project of the Museum of Oaxacan Painters award
Jim Goldberg
San Francisco, California, USA
A visual invitation to the intimacy of his family life.
MAGNUM photographer & Guggenheim Fellowship
JJ Estrada
Antigua, Guatemala
This photo essay by JJ Estrada (Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala) is a portrait of one of Guatemala’s greatest creative minds of the last century, “El Gran Maestro” Efrain Recinos who left a legacy in architecture, painting, sculpture, and drawing. The images were taken on a sunny afternoon outside his studio. In the series of 49 photos of his iconic vests, which he wore as part of his attire to protect his clothes from the daily routine while he was in his construction days, we see a colorful expression of his lucid, defying, and brilliant character. Long live Maestro Recinos.
Joe Matty
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
In this work, I am interested in exploring the way in which the creation of these images allows the viewer to enter the virtual worlds we inhabit unencumbered by disbelief. Drawing from 19th-century photographic practices, such as the geographical surveys sponsored by the Department of War and early imaging techniques, the photographs from this series are created as documents that explore the virtual worlds we inhabit in video games using the process of wet-plate collodion. I seek to mirror the relationship between the real and unreal that the player experiences.
Recipient of the Robert Elder Memorial Scholarship.
Johanna Alarcón
Quito, Ecuador
¨Runas¨ means secret and symbolizes the noise of a stone colliding with another. Runes are a legendary mystery, a whisper that helps to understand the divine. They are sacred symbols that connect you with a dimension of sacrifice, wisdom, and knowledge. This series consists of 54 photo illustrations made collectively by the visual artist Santiago Haro. We began by photographing our stones, which we collected over the years from mountains, rivers, and various places in Latin America. Each image evokes the non-human alphabet that inhabits us. Blank Mind is a short series of my daily life reflected in context-intervened images that represent a broken circuit or mental block. This freezing is liberated by recognizing or photographing what is closest to me. These images generate a notion of “mind without content” and are superimposed with phrases about the sensations of a blank mind that resorts to innate reflexes to get out.
Grantee of COVID-19 Magnum Foundation Found & Selected for Social Justice Fellowship Magnum Foundation
Jorge Panchoaga
Medellín, Colombia
My work has taken me to different places in the last weeks. One of them was on the top of a mountain to photograph how a paramo ecosystem was burning due to human actions. During that travels, I made short reflections on the world today. I share these reflections with you. My connection and closeness with those people I portrayed, the situations and places that caught me. Instinctively I looked at the footprints in the landscape while flying. I have been thinking for years about how these marks on the landscape reveal our human relationship with nature. In the landscape, it will be where the most significant sample of our social and human life will remain in that clash of time: the time of the earth, long and deeply, and the human, short and distressing, where life appears. After photographing the long journeys glued to the plane’s window, looking at having different uses of the land photographed in different geographies, I decant myself to share with you those images where the use that we have made is more explicit. These images also speak of the possible future of many areas on earth: the desert. I also opted to look at that relationship with the land in a symbolic and biological way, thinking about how we return to it. The cyclical return of death and life. Observing and searching along the paths, the traces of what was life, carrying as if it were a background the words written by Alvaro de Campos
José Luis Cuevas
Mexico City, México, México
We are nothing’ is a short series in which I intuitively walk through Mexico City in search of people to portray; people in their routine; public manifestations of power and social resistance; public structures, residential buildings, abandoned plants, animals, waste, etc.
In the beauty of an open landscape, we discover as we proceed down the road that ‘Century 21’ has collapsed. ‘Century 21’ is a short sequence, but also an epilogue to the main series.
2010 Second-place winner Sony World Photography Award
Joshua Irwandi
Jakarta, Indonesia
Asmat is a group of people residing on the southern coasts of West Papua. In 1961, the Asmat were notorious for the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller, and so forth widely labeled cannibals, headhunters, and savages. In the same period, Indonesia annexed West Papua from The Netherlands. It followed with the arrival of transmigrants from other parts of Indonesia, immediately setting forth the journey of the Asmat to a diabolical course. Ever since, Indonesia has reinstated government and military control of the area, leading to construction projects, severe deforestation, and the Asmat economy overpowered by the transmigrants. The Asmat, despite all advancements, continue to celebrate their ancestral feasts. Since the turn of the century, Catholicism – brought by Dutch and American (and now Indonesian) missionaries – and Islam – brought by Indonesian transmigrants – have gradually challenged the very existence of Asmat customs and ritual feasts and, to an extension the Asmat way of life: the subsistence that has sustained them for centuries. Among its last defenders is an American priest, the last Catholic American priest in West Papua, who has served Asmat for 40 years. Given all the difficulties, effectively the Asmat is orphaned in their own land, barred access to health, education and welfare. By 2030, less than 17% of Papuans will remain in West Papua. Asmat people are a minute fraction of Papuans currently in existence.
2021 Recipient of National Geographic Society Storytelling Grant & World Press Photo Award in General News
Julia Gaisbacher
Vienna, Austria
“A March in the City” is about the individual and collective attempts of bonding again with everyday life in Vienna and Hamburg throughout the city after two years of the onset of the pandemic and during the beginning of the war in Ukraine. During this month, Austria and Germany had the strongest wave of covid-19 while, at the same time, a war a few hundred kilometers away was initiated. People accumulated a lot of anxiety, tension and exhaustion produced by the pandemic and its layered implications. At the same time, the war triggered even more distress and worries as well as collective memories and fears of a devastating (nuclear) war.
This work looks at the search for certainty, for a feeling of safety and connectedness with everyday life in and through the city landscape. A continuous movement, paused at times, felt and manifested in the daily walking and commuting in the city, driven by a longing for sense and peace.
Recipient of the 2021 Theodor-Körner-Fond Prize for Visual Art & a 2020 Federal Chancellery of the Republic of Austria Scholarship
Juliana Gómez Quijano
Medellín, Colombia
Luck must be sought out. She walks down the alley behind a man who has a brown rabbit on his head, he’s wearing a winter hat, even though we don’t have seasons and the sun is twinkling at zenith right now. Listen to what he has to tell you. Go ahead, sit down to fried fish and rice while you listen to the news on the restaurant’s TV. Ask for directions to the small downtown theater, the one with hanging glass lamps and a velvet curtain. In the pool allow your fingers to wrinkle in the water, your hair to stick wet to your back, open your eyes, and swim flush with the tiles. Scream while the sugar melts in your mouth, dance with your dog, and hold a ripe mango in your hands. Ask for the keys to the laboratory, put a ripe watermelon under the microscope lens, be quiet and follow with one of your eyes the repeating circles, the fine lines of water and the craters in light red tones.
2017 First place Winner of FIDAAC for Colombian photographers MOOOV & Cámara de Comercio Medellín, Colombia 2016 Finalist
Juri Koll
Venice, California, USA
The photographs of where I have lived and worked for several decades – Venice, California – show sides of this place as tourists never see them. The waning light of a cool evening when the lights begin to come on, the shadows of an alley with a beautiful mural lit by street light, the glow of the wet sand as it reflects the sky. The people who live here, going about their business. The camera gives us an opportunity to see things differently, from a perspective that is unique, special, personal yet public. Other photographs from my travels in the south and in Europe hopefully reveal the same type of seeing, of looking, something that is not what everyone is told or expects to see.
Freelance photographer and filmmaker.
Kamau Kamau
Nairobi, Kenya
Tales from the East’, is a collection of photographs taken in different counties in Kenya, straight from the heart of East Africa. These pieces showcase daily life through strangers, friends, nature, transportation and so much more, captured using my camera and phone.
Freelance photographer
Karla Leyva
Monterrey, Mexico, Mexico
For TWT I presented two works that are part of the same line of research. The first of them is The Capitalism of Appearances, a project that revolves around the post-organic, a concept that refers to the hybridization of the organic and the inorganic in the body through science and technology. The work is made up of a series of self-portraits using Instagram apps and portraits of people who have undergone some body modification, as well as photographs taken in beauty clinics, spas, and gyms; With this, I am interested in investigating how the virtual person is built and how it travels from the screens to our three-dimensional space shaped by the millionaire beauty and wellness industry.
As a continuation of The Capitalism of Appearances, I presented Baroque Bodies, with which I carry out a visual investigation on the bodies colonized by the image in Latin America, for this I made photographs in the streets of the beauty of the Tepito neighborhood in Mexico City, a neighborhood near where I live.
National System of Art Creators Member
Kevin Cooley
Los Angeles, California, USA
Echoing The World Today’s homage to the Mid-20th Century, this collection draws inspiration from “The Pedestrian,” a story by Ray Bradbury about a man who wanders city streets alone at night.
Photographing in a different Los Angeles neighborhood each night, people were often skeptical of my presence, drawing a parallel to experiences Bradbury had during his own nocturnal walks in Beverly Hills, which inspired him to write his story seventy-plus years ago.
One night, I decided to bring along Galaxy, my fawn-colored pug, and my presence became more innocuous. He unknowingly became instrumental in finding that unique quietness found only in L.A.’s lonely, dark corners.
Exhibits in the Guggenheim Museum & the Museum of Photographic Arts
Koral Carballo
San Andrés Cholula, México
This photographic series is a journey I made from the north to the south of Veracruz, a state on the Gulf of Mexico. In this trip I had as my only objective free transit, the right to travel for pleasure, in a territory where sometimes violence prohibits it. So in this journey, I documented the landscape, the people who inhabit it, the tropical exuberance, the work, the ruins, the papanes, the bugambilias, the river, the oil bimbas, the atarcer and the plants, thinking that each photo would become a couplet that would eventually form a verse to understand and portray contemporary Veracruz.
2021 Catchlight Leadership Fellow & 2019 Woman Photograph and Getty Images Grantee
Kristyna Archer
Los Angeles, California, USA
This portrait series documents one of the 21 Century’s fundamental shifts in “The World Today” by capturing virtual connections in real life. This constant interconnection marks a change of the greatest magnitude in how humanity interacts. Chance encounters moved from bars and coffee shops to dating apps and social media. Any disruption in one’s internet connection, no matter how brief, is akin to a sense of loss that runs deeper than the code 404 message. The virtual connections we have are our new sense of community.
Freelance photographer
Lauren Hermele
Berkeley, California, USA
Lauren Hermele is a documentary photographer and visual storyteller based in Berkeley, CA. Her work centers around narratives created through explorations of portraiture, landscapes, rural communities, social justice, relationships, and solitude.
Mappings is a meditation on the shades of drought in California. Water and the dry earth have dialogues with one another and become reflections.
The drought is deepening in California, and though it is March 2022, and it should be the rainy season here, there is little rain. The earth is so parched that, even when it rains, sometimes it can barely absorb the water. This can lead to landslides or flash floods.
As the drought continues, the dialogue between land and water, climate change, and human consumption of water will make our access to water more and more unpredictable.
Printing cyanotypes on fabric is a process full of variation and imperfections. It is reliant on how much sunlight is available at the time of exposure. The slowness of this printing process and its dependency on nature itself is a key element of Mappings.
Fulbright Fellow
Lily Hatten
Mullumbimby, Australia
Rural Landscapes and family portraits. Life in the Anthropocene.
Freelance photographer
Lindokuhle Sobekwa
Johannesburg, South Africa
This project looks at two places one in Johannesburg and the Eastern Cape where I spend most of my time working on personal projects this project developed from a series of walks I’ve done in both places going to places I had memories of as a kid those memories are both fictional and real.
MAGNUM photographer
https://twt.obscura.io/Lindokuhle-Sobekwa
https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/lindokuhle-sobekwa/
Linn Phyllis Seeger
London, United Kingdom
The world seen as and through my Instagram Stories, posted to the public, private, and non-existent following of my three personal accounts. 3rd March 2022 – 16th April 2022.
Fed up with the unpaid labor of posting about what it means to live through an infinite array of major historical events, I am minting screenshots of my posts as NFTs.
Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 Participant
Lorenzo Meloni
Rome, Italy
This selection of 100 images represents my trip to Ukraine from the 14th of February 2022 until the 24th of February 2022, the day the Russian army started its invasion.
MAGNUM photographer
Luciana Demichelis
Ensenada, Argentina
In the Sovereignty project for The World Today, I investigated different nuances of that concept by taking notes on the book Brave New World by Aldoux Houxley.
The project has 3 chapters: the first and longest is called Periphery. There I investigated the concept of sovereignty over one’s own body by photographing non-binary identities and fluid genders. I believe that in today’s world for the first time many people are beginning to question their own identity. As soon as we were born, we were told that we belong to the category ‘man’ or to the category ‘woman’. Are we quite sure if we are one and the other? Why? Are we really sovereign of our own bodies?
In the second, Órbita Wireless, I asked myself questions about space and Latin space sovereignty to think about today’s world. In various texts, Huxley philosophizes about how far the near space race would go. The movies talk about a meteorite that could destroy the earth, but what happens if something like this happens to any of the objects that surround the atmosphere? Historically, the continents that send the most satellites into space year after year are the USA and Europe, leaving Latin America behind despite its excellent scientific quality. These satellites sent into space would offer great internet services, but at a very high cost for the countries of our region.
In part #3, All presents, all pasts, all futures, I decide to talk about Argentina’s foreign debt. I imagined how the lack of economic sovereignty affects the lives of the Argentine people.
The photos were created in Ensenada and La Plata, industrial cities on the coast of the Río de La Plata, Argentina.
Scholarship Recipient for Black Kamera Photojournalism
Luján Agusti & Nicolás Deluca
Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina
This project aims to describe, through studio photos, different natural elements that are part of Tierra del Fuego. Fundamental components of daily life on an island of sub-Antarctic conditions, pristine and hostile climate. What is rooted and remains builds the Fuegian identity. To reconstruct the meaning and give value to objects that are connected to nature. What meaning do these elements have for our culture?
https://twt.obscura.io/Luj%C3%A1n-Agusti-&-Nicol%C3%A1s-Deluca
Lynne Brouwer
Amsterdam, Netherlands
‘A permanent record’; ‘telling the story of our world for centuries to come’: I wish I had faith in permanence, in centuries to come. I’d like to believe in witnesses to these stories we’ve created. But right now, optimism feels silly at best, irreverently ignorant at worst. Unless urgent action is taken, half of all species face extinction by 2100. I’m not afraid to die and leave this world – I’m afraid I might outlive it. ‘Florae facticae’ (‘factitious flowers’) presents a predicted archive of a projected future. A world in which half remains, albeit on possibly the brink of fossilization; the other half black and white dreams, colored-in by memories, or replaced with man-made materials.
The Silver Camera Award for best National Documentary Series & the Overduin Award
Mariela Sancari
Mexico City, Mexico, Mexico
Image acts explore the potential of gestures to give shape to the world around us. Based on Sara Ahmed’s notion that “emotions involve affective forms of reorientation” and starting from the movements learned in a feminist self-defense handbook, I intend to focus on the transformation of the space that surround us and that leaves an “impression” upon our bodies.
Recipient of Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte Fellowship & Premio Arts Libris Banc Sabadell
Marion Durand
Brooklyn, New York, USA
I chronicle my family’s daily life, kids growing, meal making, and dog walking.
Currently oversees visuals for BRIGHT Magazine & former Photo Editor at Newsweek magazine
Mark Steinmetz
Athens, Georgia, USA
Visual dialogues between nature and urban landscapes.
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship & Georgia Council for the Arts Grantee
Mayumi Suzuki
Zushi, Japan
Memory of March – Every year March depresses me. Because it is in March that my parents were lost in the tsunami, the huge earthquake of 2011 triggered a tsunami that destroyed my hometown with 16 meters of water. But I still love the ocean. Now I live in another city, Zushi 500 km away from my hometown. The Pacific Ocean has been connecting here and there. When I follow the waterfront, the souls of my parents are suddenly close to me.
Melba Arellano
Mexico City, Mexico, Mexico
Mexico City seems burdened by nostalgia, we are quick to adopt the new but never let go of the old. Cities either change or die out but Mexico city only saturates and superimposes itself onto an atemporal mess. In this collection of images, I portray the physical and metaphysical time lags that are an everyday occurrence in my city. I zoom in on these details at once banal and transcendental, that completely escape most people’s perception in the bustle of day-to-day interactions.
Tierney Fellowship Recipient
Mia Forrest
Northern NSW, Australia
“After the Flood” is a photo story dedicated to the people of Lismore, a regional city in Northern New South Wales. In March 2022 torrential ongoing rain caused the river to reach the highest level in recorded history – 14.4m – flood waters inundated the city and people’s homes and local businesses. The catastrophic event was declared a national emergency; thousands of people were displaced without homes to return to, and hundreds of businesses are unable to start over again, following a similar flood event only 5 years earlier, in 2017.
Much like the rescue efforts were led by citizens, the community is “in this together”, with much of the clean-up effort being administered and supported by the residents of Lismore, and volunteers from out of town helping people rebuild their lives.
Wollumbin Art Award & Photo Collective Australian Photography Awards Finalist
Michael Schmelling
Los Angeles, California, USA
An ode to memory through urban architecture and daily walks.
Author of numerous published photo books
Mishka Henner
Manchester, United Kingdom
Putin’s Prison presents a series of screen captures taken from unsecured security cameras across Russia between 3-4 April 2022, on the 40th day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Many of these images show barriers, fences, corridors, stairwells, entrances, shop interiors, and parks in Russian cities and suburbs. In some, these banal views are punctured by hackers’ replacement of standard data with anti-war, anti-Putin, and pro-Ukrainian slogans. These interventions highlight vulnerabilities in Russia’s domestic surveillance apparatus and allude to a larger information war being waged across the media on either side of the conflict. However successful these actions may be, the inclusion of counter-narrative text to the surveillance image is an ingenious attempt to subvert the camera’s ability to enforce State control over its citizens.
Infinity Award for Art & Deutsche Börse Photography Prize
Murillo Neves Dias
Salvador de Bahia, Brazil
When I think about the world today I think about people and their relationships – with the place they live in, with nature, with their families including friends, with themselves. So, while I was shooting I built a diary of images that could translate these relationships in the city I live in – the oldest city of Brazil, the first capital of the country where the African influences have a memorable presence and the ocean is everywhere you look. I decided to use an analog camera – medium format Pentax 6×7 with Kodak Portra 400 and choose a film processing with a more realistic perspective, without interventions, remembering that life is full of imperfections.
Musuk Nolte
Lima, Peru
Iquitos is one of the most important cities in the Amazon. In spite of being located in the middle of the jungle, towards the end of the XIX century, the amazon rubber boom encouraged its expansion and growth but also brought with it genocide for the indigenous cultures that inhabited the area. Today, Iquitos still shows the remnants of this history but has been transformed into a city of extreme vitality. Where nature overflows and coexists with the stridency between historic buildings, the crowds of “moto-taxis” that run wildly through the city, and the tropical climate. The series is an urban registry of the space and the ecosystem of elements and characters, turning its tones to cyan making a reference to the botanical cyanotype wow made by Ana Atkins, but this time not from cataloging, on the contrary from the unclassifiable.
Magnum Foundation’s Emergency Fund Grantee & VI National Photography Award
Mykhaylo Palinchak
Kyiv, Ukraine
The photo series “Sirens Whisper” which has become part of TWT Obscura collection was done by me amid of Russian invasion of Ukraine under the air siren sounds. I have witnessed chaotic first days of the invasion, bombing, and shelling of Ukrainian residential houses, sheltering of civilians, volunteers, and territorial defense, and massacre on the highway and in Bucha town.
Founder of Untitled magazine & Co-Founder of Ukrainian Street Photography Group
Nani Gutiérrez
Madrid, Spain
Most of the things you’ve grown up with are social constructs that have little to do with each other. But, how to differentiate what is naturally yours and what has been inoculated into you? Most of the time it is impossible to know, the only thing left for us is to reconcile with it, accept or reject and rebuild.
My date and place of birth are Spain 1979, a key date and place to understand parents raised under the Franco dictatorship, a traditional family, and Catholic education as an essential framework for society at the time.
As a good Christian, I have been educated in the values of turning the other cheek, generosity, and humility as well as sin and guilt. Not to mention if you are a woman, what you are supposed to be and how you have to behave. By writing this I may mislead you into thinking that my family was especially Catholic or severe. Not at all, I come from what I call an average dysfunctional family of the time, nothing exceptional.
Reviewing your memories makes you more aware of who you are and who you want to be. Looking back, understanding your context, and knowing where you came from help you know where you are going.
As if it were a fair attraction, I invite you to get on the wagon and enjoy the trip. This path will go through memories, not truths, sensations, constructs, and rebellions that make up my head, until today, who knows what I will discover tomorrow?
Former Forbes magazine Photo Editor & currently Contributor to Vogue, Esquire & Forbes
Neec Nonso
Lagos, Nigeria
Oftentimes, when we are seated with the remote controller in hand, we believe that we are in control of the programs we watch or listen to. But, in actuality, the world around us dissolves away, not because our spectacles are false or fake, but because we hold sovereign sway over a menu of endless spectacle options. We control it all. We remote-control it all. And, inside the buffet of digital options, we lose sight of the edges that give shape to our embodied existence. We grow blind to what we cannot control.
Lagos Photo Festival Winner for Emerging Photography & Awarded the African Artists’ Foundation’s Residency
