Gauri Gill
Series: Notes from the Desert
1999 - ongoing
Winner Prix Pictet Human
In April 1999, I set out to photograph village schools in Rajasthan. Having grown up mainly in cities, I soon realised that school was simply a microcosm of a complex reality I knew nothing about. Since then, in the Thar desert of western Rajasthan, visiting the same people and places over decades, I have witnessed the whole spectrum of life: drought years and the year of a great monsoon when Barmer became Kashmir; dust storms that can give you a fever and a flood bad enough to cause the rebuilding of homes.
I have followed the farming cycle, migration, men travelling to work in Gujarat and Maharashtra, Food for Work programmes, rural employment and other government schemes, nomadic journeys, epidemics, cerebral malaria, tuberculosis, overwhelmed hospitals and understaffed schools, death from snakebite, from accidents, from being burned alive for providing an inadequate dowry, from growing old, the death of a camel in a year remembered as the year of the death of the camel, births, marriages, child marriages, moneylenders, dharnas, national and panchayat elections, festivals, feuds passed down over generations, celebrations, prayers... and, through it all, my valiant friends, by whom I was led.
Hoda Afshar
Series: Speak the Wind
2015-20
In the islands of the Strait of Hormuz, off the southern coast of Iran, a distinctive local culture has emerged as the result of many centuries of cultural and economic exchange. Central to this culture is a belief in the existence of winds - generally thought of as harmful - that may possess a person, causing illness or disease. A corresponding ritual practice involves a hereditary cult leader, who speaks with the wind through the afflicted patient in one of many local or foreign tongues in order to negotiate its departure. Beliefs about these winds are rarely openly discussed, whether its because some are suspicious or because some believe language has the power to manifest the invisible. The existence of similar beliefs and practices in many African countries suggests the cult may have been brought to Iran from southeast Africa through the Arab trade of enslaved people. This project documents the history of these winds and the traces they have left on these islands and their inhabitants - a visible record of the invisible, seen through the eye of the imagination.
Vasantha Yogananthan
Series: Mystery Street (2022)
In the summer of 2022, I spent three months making Mystery Street, a body of work centred on the theme of childhood in New Orleans, Louisiana. The city's 300-year-old past was partly wiped out by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, before this new generation of children were born. Like the children I photographed, it is a city whose future is greatly threatened by climate change. Composed mainly of portraits set under the burning sun of Louisiana, Mystery Street works both as a conversation with the real and an escape into multiple narrative possibilities that echo the freedoms of children's play. I gained the trust of each child on an individual basis, but I remained both an active and a passive participant: sometimes the children sought me out and sometimes they forgot about me completely. My photographs offer a glimpse into the everyday of childhood: its routine, its repetitiveness, its micro- events. Each photograph attempts to counter the burden of representation often ascribed to Black communities, and to focus on the humanity of this transitional time in these children's lives.
Richard Renaldi
Series: Disturbed Harmonies (2022-23)
Men are troubled across this troubled earth. Economic and political power have failed to assuage their anxiety. Physical strength offers only the illusion of protection. Although male supremacy was never foreordained, the obsessions of powerful men have haunted the past and reshaped the natural world. What is the source of this disquiet? Is it that men are more likely than women to commit and suffer acts of deadly violence, to be conscripted into military combat, to be jailed, subjected to corporal punishment, or executed?. Is it their lower life expectancy? Perhaps the scriptural mandate to have dominion over 'every living thing that moveth upon the earth' was too much pressure. New threads of archaeological and anthropological inquiry - as well as new ways of reading old data have begun to reveal that male-dominated societies are modern inventions. The exact mechanisms by which men have arrogated power over the last few thousand years are not fully understood. For now, literature and art must fill the narrative gaps. My photographs express a desire to pull men back into parallel with a natural world from which they have gone badly out of true.
Gera Artemova
Series: War Diary
2022
I woke up in my Kyiv apartment in the early morning of February 24, 2022, to the sound of explosions, and immediately understood that the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine had begun. The next day, we all moved as a family to our relatives' house in the village of Vyhraiv, Cherkasy Oblast, 130 kilometres from Kyiv. After three months of evacuation, we returned to the capital at the end of May 2022 and decided to stay there. I started my visual diary on that first morning, as soon as I was able to recover from the initial shock. I record my own life and that of my family, as well as our wider surroundings. The series has no strict chronology; in the diptychs, images from the evacuation period can appear next to photos I took after returning home. The importance is the internal connection between them, which becomes metaphorical. War Diary is primarily about the inner state and human feelings in the midst of war. The images are documentary, yet they carry a symbolic, universal meaning.
Series: Luciérnaga (Firefly)
2019-23
I started this project as an essay on resilience. This is a portrayal of those who have been through trauma and are fighting violence in their communities; of others who risked their lives emigrating to escape that violence and support the families they left behind, becoming their economic pillars. I made photographs and put pinpricks in the paper and then shone light through the holes. The pinpricks are an analogy for trauma and how we as human beings can transform bad energy or a bad situation, changing darkness into light. Each photograph becomes a person, a body and a metaphor for humanity. The beauty of the work comes from the resilience of our souls resisting a territory, a space or a physical body. I aim to create work that reflects the time we live in and that responds to a Latin American, as well as a Mexican, identity. I believe that when photography engages with education, culture and politics, we can create a better world with different voices and perspectives.
Ragnar Axelsson
Series: Where the World is Melting
2013-22
In the regions around the Arctic, change is happening more quickly than anywhere else on Earth. Sea ice and glaciers are melting fast, and small hunting villages are being abandoned as Inuit hunting grounds are no longer sustainable. Thousand-year-old traditions of hunter-societies are on the decline. Documenting this way of life is vital as it is unfamiliar to most people. I have accompanied Arctic hunters for almost forty years, witnessed the changes in sea ice and sensed local worries about the future. Now, the glaciers are retracting, the Siberian tundra is thawing and wildfires are raging. There are signs everywhere. Earth is in the phase of warming up and scientists are giving us warnings. There is no reason to ignore them. Where there is life, there is hope, and people living in the Arctic must have that hope just as much as the rest of the world. There are also opportunities and solutions. We must never forget that.
Siân Davey
Series: The Garden
2021-23
Why don't we fill our back garden with wildflowers and bees, and the people we meet over the garden wall - we'll invite them in to be photographed by you?' announced my son Luke in the kitchen, in midwinter 2021. Our back garden had been abandoned for at least ten years. What came next was a pilgrimage: an ongoing act to cultivate a space grounded in love, a reverential offering to humanity. We worked intensively: researching, sowing, praying, obsessively sharing our dreams. We collected stories from people we met over the garden wall, which came to feel like a confessional space. As the flowers opened, they called in the community mothers and daughters, grandparents, the lonely, the marginalised, teenagers, new lovers, the heartbroken, those who had concealed a lifetime of shame. The Garden became an expression of joy, interconnectedness, yearning, sexuality and defiance. It became a metaphor for the human heart. It shows us that we are more than our suffering, we are not separate from nature nor from one another we are all interconnected just by being human.
Michał Łuczak
Series: Extraction
2016-23
I am from Upper Silesia, a region of southern Poland where hard coal has been mined for more than 200 years. Since 1989, when Communism collapsed in Poland, Upper Silesia has undergone constant transformation. Most of the region's mines were closed because deposits are exhausted, or the seams are too deep to be profitable. The Polish government recently announced that, by 2049, no more coal mines would operate in the country. Our house is visibly crooked, although its inhabitants no longer feel the slant. Outside, the pavement sinks into the ground. This process - the result of mining operations hollowing out the earth will continue long after the last mine has been sealed. Across the street from the house is a spoil tip: a heap of mining waste overgrown with pioneer plants. Eventually, someone will haul it away as raw material for road construction and the pile will be gone. Extraction is my record of the multilevel experience of living in the shadow of a mine and a visual representation of mining's impact on landscape, architecture, the air and humans.
Vanessa Winship
Series: Sweet Nothings: Schoolgirls from the Borderlands of Eastern Anatolia (2007)
Schoolgirls in their blue dresses, with lace collars and embroidered bodices, were a symbol of the Turkish state. The dresses were the same in every town, but those who wore them were simply girls. In the borderlands of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Armenia, euphemistically called the 'emergency area' because of a guerrilla war, the dresses were still the same. Here, life is difficult. Attitudes about sending girls to school were a combination of traditional values, in which girls are expected to stay home, and a suspicion of anything that represented the state. Conscious of this situation, the Turkish government launched a campaign to get more girls into schools. I wanted to give these girls space for a small moment of importance in front of a camera. The symbol of the uniform, the distance in repetition and the austerity of the landscape would represent one thing. However, I also hoped to draw attention to the idea of these young girls poised at the moment 'just before': the moment where possibility lies, a time where the presentation of self teeters into consciousness.
Federico Ríos Escobar
Series: Paths of Desperate Hope
2022
Two crises are converging at the perilous land bridge known as the Darién Gap, which connects Central and South America: the economic and humanitarian disaster underway in South America, and the bitter fight over immigration policy in the United States. In the past, only a few thousand migrants braved the arduous crossing, comprising sixty-six roadless miles of jungle. But it is now crossed by waves of people pushed from their homes by pandemic-battered economies, climate change and conflict, hoping eventually to enter the United States. In 2022, an estimated 250,000 people trekked through the Darién.
I followed the migrants' route in September and October 2022. We started at a Colombian beach town, passed through farms and indigenous communities, crossed the menacing Hill of Death, where being stranded overnight can be fatal, and followed winding rivers to arrive at a government camp in Panama. Amid the horrors, we witnessed countless acts of kindness. Everyone knew that, somehow, they had to keep going. I'll never know how many of those we met made it - and how many didn't.
Series: Peru, A Toxic State (2017-23)
My work chronicles the difficult coexistence between the indigenous Quechua people, their land and the mining industry. Quechua communities along Peru's mining corridor have endured centuries of discrimination, pollution and economic stagnation, despite the mineral wealth around them. The country is a significant global source of copper, silver and gold. But, under the scorching sun, metallic opulence coexists with abject poverty. Today, the Andes are home to the country's poorest indigenous communities, whose wealth was once ransacked by Spanish rulers and is now exploited by multinational corporations.
Water sources were either diverted for mining or polluted by it. Many indigenous Peruvians have heavy metals in their blood, causing anaemia, respiratory and cardiovascular disease, cancer and congenital malformations. Mining has also destroyed fields and killed livestock, the engine of the local economy. Quechua people have a special connection with the land and devote themselves to agriculture with delicate care. Corporate mining has not only devastated the land with toxic metals, it has reconfigured the relationship between people and their territory, leading to the gradual loss of Andean folklore and identity.