In Maria Baoli’s series, linearity is constantly broken up. The stories she tells are diffracted; space and time overlap; images are shot through with cracks and scratches like broken mirrors. Although it is clear that the photographer is attached to human situations, to stories and environments charged with life and memories, these devices make us focus on the stylistic elements of the images and stimulate an open and complex interpretation of them. This is particularly true for one of her most recent projects, Chez moi loin de chez moi [At Home Far Away From Home], which explores the Maison Africaine in Brussels, a community home for students.
Maria Baoli’s images are balanced between the depth of their intention (archive, memory, time, love, dreams, etc.) and the surface. This plays a primordial role and in so doing forms a highly personal (and unique) response from the artist to the contemporary use of the snapshot.
Through an uninhibited use of flash, which flattens shadows and adds drama to the composition even in the most mundane and stripped-down environments; through her preference for the close-up or dense landscapes that block the horizon; through the frontality of her perspective; through her use of collage, which disrupts the documentary by introducing a fascinating graphic dimension, Maria Baoli relies on the figures of discontinuity that she turns into loyal servants of reality.
Text by Anne-Françoise Lesuisse
Thaddé Comar, a Franco-Swiss photographer born in 1993, graduated with distinction from ECAL in Lausanne in 2018. His work is deeply intertwined with current events and social movements, reflecting a profound commitment to contemporary issues. Today, his portfolio spans from editorial to commissioned work, as well as personal projects where he delves into the nuances and facets of our ever-evolving society.
Szilvia studies at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest and at the Athens School of Fine Art, in Greece.
Elena Helfrecht (b. 1992) is a German visual artist based in Bavaria. She graduated with an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in 2019, having previously studied Art and Image History at Berlin’s Humboldt-Universität, and Art History and Book Science at Erlangen’s Friedrich-Alexander-Universität. With a dark, eerie aesthetic, Helfrecht’s work navigates thresholds of fiction and reality, exploring existential questions of mortality, trauma, memory and post-memory. With Void, Helfrecht will launch her first solo monograph in the fall of 2023.
Filip Bojović (b.1984) is a Yugoslav-born graphic designer and photographer who lives and works in Novi Sad, Serbia. He studied at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, New Visual Media department. In 2003 Filip founded A3.Format, a Serbian-based self-publishing collective, particularly focused on zines and photo books. He was awarded European Design and Grifon awards for his work in the field of graphic design. Filip published his first photo book “Osijek Snapshots” in 2018, and his second book "We will walk" documenting Belgrade's Euro Pride will be published in February 2023. He's been working on an ongoing collaborative project “Turbo Dioxide” with Mirko Žarković (mirkozarkovic.com) since 2019.
Anna Ádám (b. in 1983) is a Hungarian interdisciplinary visual artist and performance maker whose work blurs the boundaries between image, object, and choreography. She graduated at ENSAPC Art School in France in 2016, and also studied styling (2010) and makeup (2018). In 2013 she was selected to the 59th Salon de Montrouge, which led her to several solo exhibitions (Budapest, Paris) and residencies (Yerevan and Berlin). In 2014, she co-founded the company Gray Box (grayboxprojects.com) at the intersection of contemporary dance, visual arts, and fashion.
Since 2015, in the frame of her personal practice (www.annaadam.net), Anna Ádám creates hybrid spaces where spectacle and exhibition merge: she "curates theater" and "choreographs exhibitions". She conceptualizes and uses the exhibition space as a theatre and the theater as an exhibition space: the plinth as stage, the installation as setting, the visitor as spectator, and vice versa. Her multidisciplinary and always site-specific projects - including photography, drawing, installation, clothing, performances, and choreographed works - echo the broader socio-political context from a feminist and queer perspective, and challenge the body as both a historically disciplined, shaped archive and a living public/private site, where power is constantly contested and negotiated.
As a photographer, by combining both personal and anonymous photos with different technics (collage, drawing, painting, sewing, embroidery…), she examines the ways vernacular photography influences memory, individual and collective identities, personal and historical narratives, privacy and public life. Her embroidered photographs, photo-objects, and photo-based clothings explore the performative, choreographic, and sculptural potential of photography.
Between 2013 and 2015, Anna Ádám worked as a performance artist in commissioned works (Palais de Tokyo, Musée Georges Pompidou...). Since 2014 she regularly presents her projects in both exhibition spaces and theaters (Museum of Modern Art Yerevan, National Museum of Immigration History Paris, Theater MU Budapest, Théâtre de la Maison d’Europe et d’Orient, Salon de Montrouge, Galérie YGREC, Dorothy’s Gallery…), and holds workshops in universities across Europe (Austria, Hungary, Serbia, France...).
Nina Medioni (b. 1991) lives and works in Marseille. In 2015, After graduating with an MA in Literature, she enrolled at the National School of Photography in Arles. Here, she developed an interest in documentary photography; in the image as a tool to meet the ‘other’. In 2019, Medioni spent several months with her Jewish Orthodox family in Tel Aviv, marking the start of her series, The Veil. The project has since been exhibited in both France and Israel. In 2022, she began the Un été au Prépaou series, which charts her encounter with a working-class neighbourhood in the city of Istres. She is currently editing her first film, Le Chalet, which studies the complexities of a neighbourhood surrounding her uncle's house – a seemingly misplaced cottage in the Parisian cityscape.
website: nina-medioni.com
Instagram: @ninamedioni
Tashiya de Mel is a photographer, environmental advocate, and communications specialist from Colombo, Sri Lanka who uses visual storytelling to create narratives that drive social change.
Her practice explores the nature and possibilities of documentary image-making and deals with themes such as colonial histories, representation, heritage, family, landscapes, and the climate crisis.
Tashiya is driven by a curiosity to forge connections with diverse disciplines such as art, history, academia and the environment. And find ways of bridging these disciplines through different forms of image-based media.
She was the recipient of the Visura grants for freelance visual journalists in 2023 for her project ‘Great Sandy River’ and received the Stroom talent award in 2024. Tashiya is a recent graduate of the ‘Photography and Society’ masters programme at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague (NL). She is based between Colombo and the Hague.
He often follows the subjects of his photo essays for many years. His series are mostly people-focused, trying to explore the problems of individuals or social groups with the tool of photography. His work has been rewarded with honored awards: shortlisted in the See.Me The Exposure Award competition in landscape category, and his image was exhibited at the Louvre in Paris. He has won several awards at the Hungarian Press Photo Competition, including the André Kertész Grand Prize, the Károly Escher Prize and the Zoltán Szalay Prize for three consecutive years for the best-performing photojournalist under 30. He has been participant in international masterclasses such as the Nikon-NOOR Academy Masterclass and is now a third-time scholarship holder to VII Academy seminars.
His latest photo essay on air pollution in Northeast Hungary was chosen by the Reuters news agency as one of the most important Wider Image story.
Lisa Bukreyeva (b. 1993) is a photographer based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Since her journey with photography began in 2019, her works have been presented at a range of museums and festivals, including Photo Elysée, Lausanne; Noorderlicht Festival, Groningen; and Deichtorhallen – Internationale Kunst Und Fotographie, Hamburg. Meanwhile, her images have featured in the likes of Der Spiegel, Zeit, The New York Magazine and Blind Magazine. Bukreyeva is a member of the Burn My Eye collective.
Maxim is a co-founder of SHKLO – online platform about Belarusian photography and visual arts. From 2020 he is a member of Inland - international cooperative of 13 photographers.
Maxim’s work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions including shows at the Latvian Museum of Photography (2020, Riga), Kasarna Karlin (2018, Prague) and CECH (2017, Minsk). He was published in Wall Street Journal, Stern Crime, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Courrier International, Meduza, The Telegraph, Le Monde Diplomatique among others.
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Kinga Wrona (b. 1983) is a Polish documentary photographer currently living in Krakow. She is a student at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, Czech Republic. In her latest projects, Wrona explores the relationship between humans and nature in relation to climate change, natural disasters and environmental degradation. Her images have been published by FOTO Magazine, The Calvert Journal, National Geographic and New York Post, whilst her projects have been exhibited internationally. Her recent 85 project will soon be exhibited at Circulation(s) Festival in Paris, France.
Just as much a physical experience which disturbs the tranquil surface of the photograph as a workshop narrative with a documentary character, Laetitia Bica’s series Cream, cannot be confined to a single genre. Following two years of collaborations with the CREAHM workshop in Liège (Creativity and Mental handicap), she undertook two months of intense research with the workshop’s artists, the result of which is this corpus of disruptive and vibrant photographs. Collaboration, a creative process which is a daily part of this photographer’s life as she typically works on commission in the areas of fashion, music, and design, in these photographs is transmitted through the body. Gestures, colours and materials become elements of language during their creative exchanges. Thus unfolds a series of figures covered in paint with thick and bold features and accents that are at times wild, at times warlike. A few of the images, placed in a sequence, follow an artist’s movement, rendering the in progress nature of this experiment and indicating Laetitia Bica’s double position on what takes on the appearance of almost ritualistic practices: at the same time actor and master of ceremonies.
The polish photographer Natalia Kepesz (*1983) lives and works in Berlin. After studying cultural studies and art history at the Humboldt University in Berlin, she graduated in 2021 with a degree in photography at the Ostkreuzschule Berlin. Since 2016 she has been working as a freelance photographer. She is a member of bbk Berlin, VG Bild and Women Photograph.
Natalia Kepesz got third place in the World Press Photo Contest 2021 (Portrait Series). She also won the residency prize in the Portraits Hellerau Photography Award 2021, Les Jour Prix at Les Boutographies - recontres photographiques de Montpellier 2021 and was named GUP Fresheyes Talent 2021, among others.
Her works have been exhibited at the Belfast Photo Festival, Helsinki Photo Festival, Festspielhaus Hellerau Dresden, Münzenberg Forum Berlin, Noorderlicht Photo Festival and the World Press Exhibition Foto Tour, among others.
Ugo Woatzi’s photographs reference real and imagined spaces caught between the worlds of freedom and constraint. He reveals and yet conceals, as a chameleon changes colour to blend in and survive. Ugo’s collaborative process is a reflection of the desires and struggles of his community. Together they create a more sensitive and accepting world, one that both escapes from and confronts the harsh realities of divisive heteronormative structures. The images, tender yet defiant, transmute feelings of love and of conflict, a relatable and universal sense of longing. His sensuous, quietly intimate gaze taps into subtler aspects of human desire — and yet these seemingly accessible emotions are simultaneously blocked in an act of obfuscation. His concealment of faces and identities evokes the fear, censorship and stifling experienced by queer communities across the globe.
Ugo invites us to consider and celebrate a range of masculinities, performative bodies, psyches, and experiences, as he explores the idea of “visibility” as one fraught with both fear and excitement. This duality is embodied powerfully in Ugo’s work, which is both a performance and a lived reality, the speaking of truths and the creating of fictions. That is the nature of photography: to create new worlds from fragments of previous ones. It is in this new world, in the sensitivity of Ugo’s gaze, that we finally access a space of acceptance.
- Text by Michelle Harris (.TIFF)
Marta Machado is a Portuguese-Cape Verdean artist who lives and works in Braga, Portugal. A graduate of Architecture from the University of Minho, she also holds an MA in Photography from the School of Arts at the Catholic University of Porto. Her photographic work analyses the ambiguities of history and the so-called ‘official’ narratives of the Western world, focusing on themes of colonialism, identity and territory. Machado’s Beyond Solid Ground project was exhibited at Braga’s Encontros da Imagem festival, whilst her Nos Txôn series was presented at Lisbon’s Imago Gallery. Her academic research, meanwhile, has been widely published in peer-reviewed journals.
Richard Kiss (b. 1994) holds a BA in Photography from Budapest Metropolitan University. He is currently an MA student in Photography at the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences. As society and visual culture change rapidly, Kiss uses new media to grasp at the essence of our saturated present, focusing on changes triggered by the internet and their effects on contemporary art. In his projects, Kiss often strips photographs of their original contexts and meanings, transforming them into entirely new artworks. Throughout his projects, Kiss seeks to question the relationship between the spectator and artwork and the reasons behind an image’s production, thus making the act of photography a subject of reflection.
Website: kissrichard.com
Instagram: r_ch_k.ss
Katerina is an artist based in Athens. She leads a lens-based practice that explores the relationship between space and narratives through long-term research projects. An exploration that expanded and developed during her decade long scenography practice, and evolved into incorporating a different medium. Her work often utilizespublic oral archives, fragmented narratives and the spaces they inhabit to retell stories that have been silenced or misrepresented.Her first monograph, “The Fumes of Mars” will be published by GOST Books in the Summer of 2025. This work has won The Format Reviewers Choice Award 2022, was featured in the printed and online issue of the British Journal for Photography (BJP) that was presented in Paris Photo ‘21, was selected and featured for the COCA Project 2021, was shortlisted for the Belfast Dummy Award and Festival ’22, and was exhibited at LCC in London as part of the “Common Ground” Exhibition.She holds a BSc in Mathematics & Theoretical Physics from Imperial College London, a BA in Design for Performce from Central Saint Martin’s and a MA with Distinction in Photojournalism & Documentary Photography from LCC.
Nina Hansch is a photographer who works in classical photojournalism. Her documentary works are characterized by their nuances and a cinematic quality in her visual language. At the same time, she succeeds in emphasizing the socio-political relevance of her stories and in exploring their visual complexity.
"I am always curious about the facets and details of life and humanity. And often ask myself questions like: What are the decisions and circumstances that consequently made us who we are today?", explains the artist.
As an artist, João Ramilo aims to document human intervention in the world, capturing theinteraction between them. The essence of his work is to portray social and economic issues through images and immortalize those moments in time.Currently, he resides in Lisbon and works as a freelance photographer.
Van Wyk is a member of the African Photojournalist Association with World Press Photo, Women Photograph and Black Women Photographers. Her work has been featured by the internationally based i-D, The Washington Post, Photo Vogue, Der Greif and The Times UK.