In 2020, her work was shortlisted for the Prix Elysée and the Galicia Contemporary Photography Award. She also was a winner of the Fine Arts and Photography grant given by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and nominated at the Swiss Design Awards, amongst other recognitions.
She has exhibited in places such as Wilde Gallery (Geneva), Images Vevey, Verzasca Photo (Switzerland), Galería C19 (Ibiza), Galería Serendipia, Galería OTR (Madrid) and others.
Her book “Aya” published by RM (in conjunction with Yann Gross) has been recognized as one of the best books of 2020 by institutions such as PhotoEspaña or the Lucie Foundation (NY).
Prominent media like Aperture Magazine, El País, Fisheye, Gup, Le Temps, Liberation, Vogue Italia and Vistprojects have published her work.
Her work had been exhibited and screened at venues including États Généraux du Film Documentaire (Lussas, FR); KANAL – Centre Pompidou (Brussels, BE); Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival (BR); Kasseler Dok Festival (Kassel, DE); Moscow Biennal (RU); Art Brussels (BE); FIDMarseille (FR) among others. Her first medium-length film 'No blood in my body' received the short film prize at Écrans Documentaires d’Arceuil (FR). Laure Cottin Stefanelli studied literature and cinema at the University of Paris III and graduated in Photo-Video from École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris.
"A strange pleasure emanates from Laure Cottin Stefanelli’s images, a pleasure that stems from the interruption of systems, the suspension of discipline. The characters she portrays often engage in the strictures of self-imposed rigour – marriage, high-level sports, addiction, erotic role play – and her camera emboldens them in their carefully planned choreographies. Not that these choreographies become, as a result, deconstructed or “unmasked”; rather she balances the individuals between desire and ritualised gesture, arresting them in seemingly affective fulfilment. Cottin Stefanelli leaves unsaid what lies outside the frame, where conventions and rules govern the protagonists’ behaviours (...). What remains in the frame, cropped out of context, ends up looking solitary, but also confident – one dares say beautiful. (...)" Antony Hudek on Centauresse
www.laurecottinstefanelli.com
She obtained a master’s degree in Photography at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in 2016. In 2013, she spent a semester in Brussels with Erasmus, later, she completed her mandatory internship in Paris with Erasmus+.
In 2013 she was selected to the top 100 of Google Photography Prize. In 2014 she won a grant to organise her first solo exhibition titled Bleu, which took place at Gallery Várfok Project Room, Budapest. In 2015 her series Animalia Variabilis was shortlisted at the 5th World Biennal of Student Photography, Novi Sad.
In recent years, her photos gained exposure in various places including the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest, the Mai Manó House, the Vienna Photobook Festival, the Berlin Photobook Festival, the Mark Grosset Prize, Vendôme, the Kiscell Museum , and the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center and der Grief magazine.
She is a member since 2012, and a board member since 2020, of the Studio of Young Photographers. She lives and works in Budapest, Hungary.
The photographers focused on one reception centre, creating links and generating encounters by refusing to submit the refugees to further interrogation or to create stereotypical images of misery. The result of these relationships - nurtured over time - is a series of portraits.
This first project - Here, Waiting - is divided into three photographic forms. Firstly, reportage, showing the physical spaces and the realities of the reception centre. Secondly, portrait workshops were organised with the aid of a studio that was assembled during each visit. The subjects were encouraged to manipulate, colour, distort and obscure the printed images. Finally, self-portraits were taken by the children using photocopy machines – the primary bureaucratic tool of their detention.
The photographs are situated within this relationship: there is neither a sovereign author nor centre of action but instead pictures of varying intensity that allow for multiple impressions and interpretations.
https://nosovereignauthor.be/
Pauline Hisbacq was born in 1980.
After a master's degree in philosophy, she joined the ENSP in Arles, from which she graduated in 2011. She continued the same year with a post-graduate degree at the ICP in New York.
Since then, her work has been presented at the Rencontres de la Jeune photographie Internationale de Niort (2014), at the Ecureuil Foundation for Contemporary Art in Toulouse (2019), at the Image Satellite in Nice (2018), at the friche belle de Mai in Marseille (2017), and in Paris at Jeune Création (2013), at the Photo Paris Saint Germain festival (2017), at the Bal (2019), at the Rouen Normandie Photographic Center (2021).
She published Natalya at 7 Editions (2016), Le feu at September books (2017), Amour adolescente (chants d'amour) at Rayon Vert . édition (2019), Cadavre Exquis, fanzine co-published by Le Bal Books and September Books (2021), Songs for women and birds at September books (2021).
In 2017, she was awarded the CNAP's Soutien à la photographie documentaire contemporaine grant for the project La fête et les cendres. In 2021, she received the Aide Idividuelle à la Création from the Drac Ile de France for the project Rimorso. She is also the winner of the national commission Les Regards du Grand Paris initiated by the CNAP and the Ateliers Médicis, with the project Pastorale.
She is currently a photographer at the Rodin Museum, and editor at September Books.
Zoe Natale Mannella was born in 1997 in London and raised in the south of Italy. She is a self-taught photographer whose projects investigate questions of intimacy and sexuality, particularly in relation to women. Her work combines elements of reportage with an interest in staged photography.
www.zoenatalemannella.com
@zoenatalemannella
Luna Scales (b. 1992) graduated as a visual artist from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2020. Several of Scales’ works have been exhibited in a number of group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, and in 2019 she had a solo exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, Sweden.
Her artistic practice reflects a consistent interest in and references to the iconography of western art history, which comes to expression through photographs and videos of the female body in particular, patterns of movement and directions of the gaze. Scales often portrays herself, playing in her works with the public’s ideas of physical functional abilities. In so doing she questions these very notions, and in this connection also simultaneously presents a critique of the gaze at and notions about the body.
She lives and works in Copenhagen.
In 2015, she received her Bachelor's degree from the Department of Photography-Videography at the Art and Design College, West University of Timisoara and, in 2017, her Master's degree in Publicity Graphics. In December 2015, she had her first personal photography exhibition in Timisoara, followed in the next few years by several personal and group exhibitions. In 2016, Oana was selected for the Professional shortlist in the Staged category of the Sony World Photography Awards.
Balázs Fromm (B.1991) is a photographer, currently living and working in Budapest. He studied photography at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest, and new media at the CityUniversity of Hong-Kong, Hong-Kong. Fromm's field of work revolves around Eastern European topics, the historic legacy of socialism, the power of masculinity, local issues, and youth culture. His photographic approach involves documenting the disappearing working class of rural Hungary and it's gloomy industrial cities ( A city built of steel 2018-2022), and unveiling the non-conventional beauty norms and the precarious identity of the Z generation. ( East and Eden 2021) Guided by an intuitive sense of connection, Fromm captures the bonds of communities and their environment in the amidst of democratic backsliding, and rising nationalism throughout the region. He works regularly on documentary commissions, shedding light on regional stories for publications as Zeit and Republik, and many others. Balázs Fromm is part of the Studio of Young Photographers of Hungary. He received the Jozsef Pecsi photography grant from the state of Hungary in 2021. Presently, he is working on two ongoing photgraphic series, Casting and Csango Land.
Michaela Nagyidaiová (b. 1996) is a Slovakian photographer based in Bratislava. Her work analyses connections between landscape, memory, identity, migration, and the topographies of Central and Eastern Europe. Interested in how ideologies and political systems influence layers of personal life – and drawing inspiration from both past events and contemporary issues – Nagyidaiová works on long-term projects that combine images with text, archival material and video. She holds an MA in Photojournalism & Documentary Photography from the London College of Communication, and is a member of Women Photograph. Her Transient Ties project was exhibited at Fotograf Festival in Prague’s National Gallery, and at a series of further shows in Czechia, Slovenia and Austria. In 2021, Nagyidaiová participated in the Wolf Suschitzky Photography Prize exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London & Fotohof in Salzburg, as well as in the British Journal of Photography’s Open Walls ’21: Then and Now exhibition at Galerie Huit in Arles.
Renée Lorie lives and works in Brussel. She graduated in art history, filmstudies and photography.
Renée captures the light, she show her experience of the world around her. It’s a world full of contrasts. Her images show disharmony, memories in nowadays. Vulnerability, white against deep black backgrounds, day and night, emptiness and fullness. Coolness and heat, burning ice. The present and the absent. She’s looking for attachment, but displacement too. Themes are the mystery, the uncanny, abjection and the enigmatic. Creaking discomfort in down, a sensory touch in a flat image. She shows a glimpse, an error, disturbance, the lyrical. She’s showing distance, yet close framing. She uses the dark room, groping for light. Light traversing trees and water, that lives on the tide during spring tide. Everything is strange, yet daily and known. Trees, water, horse and dew, rustle, a man in a suit, sand mountains and a statue. She’s look around, capturing an image and imagining immediately another image, a walking écriture automatique, a photo novel, a same story. She likes to see the past in the present.
Her works and engagement has been marked by accolades, including the Bayern Innovativ’s Junge Kunst und Neue Wege Stipendium, and grants like the Neustart Kultur Stipend 2022 and Neustart Plus Stipend 2023 from Stiftung Kunstfonds. Albano's works have been showcased in both solo and group exhibitions nationwide and internationally. She premiered her first solo exhibition through the ISO 5000 Prize 2021 of Hans and Annemarie Weidmann Foundation. In 2023 she was part of Les Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles at the Fondation Manuel Rivera-Ortiz.
Albano's influence extends beyond her art, as she has been an invited guest at the German-British Democracy Forum, and held talks for the Hertie Foundation and the BARCAMP of the German Foreign Office. In 2023, she started to establish an Afro-European artist network, leveraging her Allianz Foundation Fellowship to foster collaboration within the artistic community.
Alice Pallot is a French photographer who lives and works in Brussels. She graduated with honors from the photography section of ENSAV La Cambre (BA and MA) In July 2018 and participated in the Erasmus program at Ecal in Switzerland. In the same year, she won the Roger de Conynck prize for her series L’Ile Himero, also exhibited at The Voies Off Festival in the context of Les Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles.In 2019, Alice Pallot self-edited a book untitled Land which was included in Belgian Photobook at the Fotomuseum in Antwerp, Le Bal in Paris and at the Wiels Art Book Fair in Brussels. Her photographic series Oasis was included in the 4th edition of the PhotoBrussels Festival 2019 at Hangar Art Center. This body of work was also shown in collaboration with the Satellite Gallery at En Piste ! in Liège and in Dans quel monde rêvons-nous ? curated by the collectif Xeno at Bozar in Brussels. Alice Pallot’s work was included in several places in Brussels, such as Le Botanique, Gallery Été 78, Adaventura, Vertigo Gallery, La Réserve and La Vallée. She also exhibited in France; in Paris, at Immix Gallery, N’Oblige Gallery and in Dieppe at the Diep-Haven Festival.In 2020, she presented with the Gallery Satellite a new display of L’Île Himero - accompanied with a book edited by Page Works - at the Biennale de L’Image Possible in Liège. Laureate of the PhotoBrussels Festival 05, Alice Pallot presented a new series; Suillus, part of the exhibition «The World Within» at Hangar Art Center in 2021.In September 2021, she presented her Suillus series at the Unseen Photo Fair, Amsterdam, with Hangar Gallery. In january 2022, Suillus was presented in La Caserne and at Immix Galerie in Paris. Alice Pallot has been published in Libération, La Libre, Fisheye Magazine, Vice and others.
A belarusian photographer working with documentary and conceptual photography. Graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of the Belarusian State University шт Minsk. Graduate of the Academy of Documentary Photography and Photojournalism “Photographics”, St. Petersburg, Russia. Scholar of Gaude polonia fellowship supporting the Ministry of Culture of Poland. Participant of personal and group exhibitions in Belarus, Lithuania, Georgia? Russia, Poland. Publications: Bird in Flight, F-Stop Magazine, Takiedela.ru, republic.ru, Private, SEEN Magazine.
In my work I focus on the theme of the culture of remembrance; I worked on projects about the place of mass shootings near Minsk by the Soviet authorities in the 30s and 40s, and about the liquidators of the Chernobyl disaster as a reclaimed material of the tragedy and the consequences of building a new nuclear power plant with Russian loans. I use digital and analogue photography, as well as collages and archive photos. In early drafts talked about personal transformation. I lived in Minsk, work as a journalist for a Belarusian portal Reform.by, had to leave Belarus in 2021 and currently live in Poland. Here I continue my journalistic work and at the same time shoot a project about forced migration, using my family, which was split up in 1939, as an example. My project deals with private and general questions: about the particular "homelessness" of people from traumatic periods of history and attempts to get rid of this feeling, about the sensitivity of entire nations as a result of political decisions, about the problems of self-identity, about the search for home.
Andrea Torres Balaguer’s work is influenced by dreams and surrealism, exploring the relationship between femininity and nature through the symbolism and dream transcription technique. Inspired by references to psychoanalysis theory and magic realism, her pictures experiment with the conscious-subconscious. Thinking about the scene-action concept, she creates pictures that suggest stories and invites the spectator to interpret them, searching to experiment with the boundaries between reality and fiction.
Ivar Hagren obtained his bachelor's degree from the Gothenburg University of Photography in 2012 and his master's degree in fine art from Konstfack in 2014. Weronika Bela earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in fine art in 2013 and 2015, respectively, also from Konstfack. Their works have been exhibited both in Sweden and internationally, including in Poland, Finland, and Greece. In 2022 they where Iaspis artist in residency grant holders in Stockholm.
They are currently developing a project on the defunct East German manufacturer ORWO, best known for affordable black-and-white photo paper, who held a monopoly over photographic darkroom material in the Eastern bloc market before ceasing operations in connection with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
IG @hagrenbela
Website www.hagrenbela.com
Brahim Tall (b. 1993) is a Brussels-based artist. Of Belgian, Dutch and Senegalese heritage, his practice studies the politics and expression of identity, as well as paying homage to nightlife and underground culture. With a BA from LUCA School Of Arts, Tall’s works combine photography with video, installation and elements of performance. Where his BA graduation project, Untitled, questioned his sense of identity as an artist, his later Tukuleur project – reflecting on the experience of coming from an ethnically-mixed household – took the form of a video.
Gonçalo C. Silva (b. 1997) lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal. He has studied at both the Faculty of Fine-Arts in Lisbon and at Atelier de Lisboa, and is currently pursuing an MA at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities from NOVA University of Lisbon. In his work, which applies an artistic approach to photography, Silva addresses themes related to the representation of the landscape, and to the relationship between humans and nature. In his projects, the interconnection of images from different contexts creates new meanings and narratives with a strong symbolic character, related to the artist’s personal experiences.
The perfect skin and the smooth image which accompanies it, Eva O’Leary knows all too well the different ingredients and recipes of commercial photography. She too, as a teen, ate this cake which now, as an artist, she presents to us on a plateau. In a refrigerator rests a sponge cake, accompanied with printed icing: a saccharine young woman with perfect blow-dried hair watches us. Since it is said that revenge is a dish best served cold, this is the fate which the photographer reserves for the young blonde haired woman with the Colgate smile and her diktat. She grew up in the United States of America in a campus town whose name is almost an order – Happy Valley – and remembers her years spent masking her Irish head in the hood of a must have Abercrombie sweatshirt. The series, Happy Valley, is rooted in her town and her adolescent memories, describing an environment which is intrusive and worrying, modelling individuals whose self identity has been traded for a generic body. With the more recent Spitting Image, it is the years before, the adolescent vulnerability which are exposed. Young girls, around fifteen years old, present themselves to us, tightly framed on a vibrant blue backdrop which permits neither an escape for the gaze, nor breathing room for the model. Eva O’Leary accompanies these photographs with videos: perched upon a stool, we watch them searching for the person they hoped to find in the mirror. In this interval the photographer reopens the field of representations and with it, the freedom to be complex, different, uncertain, unique, human.
Corso began working as a documentary photographer in 2011, publishing in media outlets like National Geographic, Al Jazeera, TIME Lightbox, GEO magazine, MO, Il Reportage, VICE, El País, and or Revista 5W. Among the cultural centers that have hosted and exhibited his projects, the following stand out: The Cervantes Institute in New York, the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Palau Robert (Barcelona), Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), the International PHOTON Festival (Valencia), Photo Romania Festival and the LUMIX Festival (Hannover). His work is part of the traveling exhibition "Creadores de Conciencia", curated by Juan Manuel Castro Prieto and Chema Conesa, which compiles the work of 40 authors under the topic "committed photographers".
His documentary work has been recognized by the International PHOTON Festival, BANFF Photo Essay Competition, Prix de la Photographie Paris, Moscow International Foto Awards, International Photography Awards and as a finalist of other contests such DAYS JAPAN Photo Awards, the World Reporter Award, the Contemporary African Photography Prize, the Siena International Photography Awards, the Balkan Photo Awards and the LUMIX festival, among others.
In 2018 he is nominated for the World Press Photo 6x6 Global Talent Program and his project MATAGI received the National Geographic Society Explorer Grant.
www.javiercorso.com
Drawing inspiration from clichés and contradictions, her work raises questions about identity, exotism, contradictions and social status. She dissects the layers of these themes, often starting from a personal narrative, which organically speaks to a collective spanning different cultures.
El Ouardani takes her camera to places where men are prominent in public spaces. As she actively interacts with them as subjects, she insists, “ I believe it’s crucial for the female gaze to participate in uncovering masculinity’s place in our contemporary world.” Her work has been exhibited at notable venues, including the Van Gogh Museum, Unseen Amsterdam, Foto Tallinn and Paris Photo.