To celebrate Earth Day 2022, we’re revisiting some of our favorite environmental stories and interviews from the PopPhoto archives.

Nick Brandt’s 2016 photo book, Inherit the Dust, was his visual cry of anguish about the looming apocalypse for animals habitats in Africa. If the killing of animals continues at pace, the elephants, rhinos, lions and cheetahs will all but disappear. “I am embarrassed to use this phrase because it’s so corny and clichéd, but I want to make the world a better place,” he says.

The English born Brandt is a self-acknowledged environmental activist who has been shooting exclusively in Africa making eloquent and emotional animal portraits for more than 20 years. (On This Earth, and a Shadow Falls Across the Ravaged Land.) As Brandt watched both the animals habitats and the creatures disappear, he realized he “couldn’t in good conscience keep making money from the animal portraits without taking action.” In 2010 he co-founded Big Life Foundation with Richard Bonham, one of East Africa’s most respected conservationists. Big Life partners with local communities and currently employs more than 300 rangers to protect animals living on more than two million acres of land.

That epiphany was also the genesis of the idea to erect life-sized panels of the animal portraits, place them in dystopian urban wastelands or industrial sites in Kenya where the animals once roamed, and create black and white epic panoramas of the scenes. The resulting images are simultaneously beautiful and horrifying, because they illustrate the irreconcilable clash of past and present. The animals represent a time when the African landscape, filled with a plethora of species, was primal and glorious and seeing it would fill even the most jaded of us with a profound sense of wonder. The present is a world eclipsed by poverty and desperation, exploding with population growth gobbling up every inch of land for people to live on, farm or mine.

Animals and humans are both struggling to maintain animal habitats. Brandt culled his outtakes, made life size prints in California and built test flats 30 feet long on his property to see whether the animals looked correctly life sized. “Where you place the panel can totally change your perception of whether the animal is large enough,” says Brandt. When he was satisfied, the strips of images were shipped to Kenya to be mounted on site onto huge elaborately constructed wooden and aluminum flats. At times it took at least 23 men to install the flats to ensure they were level, tied down with sand bags, and the horizon lines in the animal images matched up with the actual horizon line in the scenes. With the flats in place, Brandt would wait with his Mamiya RZ67 Pro II for hours, sometimes days, for the perfect melancholy clouds and the ideal film moments. Later he meticulously stitched the images together in Photoshop to create the huge panoramas of animal habitats that were published by Edwynn Houk editions in a 13 by 15 inch book.

“The really tough part was waiting for the clouds,” says Brandt. “I went in the rainy season, but it is still Africa and you can go six days in a row with sunshine and no clouds. I had no choice but to wait, hoping that when the clouds finally came, something else interesting was happening in the frame.”

Film seems like a risky choice for a very expensive three-month location shoot in various African animal habitats. To ensure that his exposures were right, Brandt flew someone to London every couple of weeks to hand carry a couple hundred rolls of film to a certain small lab where film is still processed by hand. Even though the returned contact sheets assured him that the exposures were fine, it wasn’t until he was back home in California, scanning negatives, and deep into post production that he knew whether the focal planes of each frame aligned with the next so he could create the seamless panoramas. The obvious question is why not take the easier and safer digital route? Brandt’s answer— characteristically brash and irreverent—is that digital “stone cold” bores him. “Film just turns me on,” he writes in his book. “I covet the glorious surprises that are sometimes achieved by the magical interaction of light and film negative.”

He is turned on not just by the magical interaction of light and film, but also the serendipity of what happens when events are left somewhat to chance. On the first couple of days Brandt attempted to control every minute detail of the animal habitats, not surprisingly, since he is demanding, obsessive and meticulous. He hired a cast of locals to direct, but almost immediately, he realized it wasn’t working. “We were calling ‘action’ but what was happening was complete crap, just so staged and stilted that I realized the scene couldn’t be directed,” he says. “I decided to place one person somewhere in the frame for a size reference and wait for that perfect moment of staged and spontaneous action and interaction.”

Sometimes interaction meant no action with the picture at all. In most of the images, the contemporary figures move through the frame, picking up garbage, sniffing glue, and just walking down the street, seemingly oblivious to the large animal photograph, as if the animals were already ghosts. In one of the saddest images, “Alleyway with Chimpanzee,” a solemn chimpanzee sits with its head lowered in a trash filled alleyway next to what looks like a stream of fetid sewage. “The actual portrait was originally a quite neutral photograph, not particularly moving,” says Brandt. “In the new context, the chimpanzee seems to be lamenting the world in which it now finds itself.”

In one of the most compelling images of animal habitats, “Underpass With Elephants (Lean Back, Your Life is On Track),” Brandt has installed the image of a family of elephants under an overpass. New construction rises in the background, while homeless people anchor the foreground. Some are sleeping while others sniff glue out of empty water bottles. On the left side of the frame a toddler seems to be walking towards the elephant image. On the right, a very small child has walked up to the image, trying to touch the elephant’s trunk. In the distance we see a billboard of a man relaxing on a bench with the ironic slogan, “Lean back, your life is on track.”

“Nothing compares to the excitement of shooting on location when the unexpected happens,” says Brandt. “In the ‘Underpass with Elephants’ image suddenly on the right side of the frame this little child walks up and touches the image. It was one of those ‘where the hell did he come from’ moments.”

The urban animal habitats, where the huge panoramas exist, were not easy to work in. The crew spent 12 days at a dumpsite in Kenya, which was a toxic, smoking pile of waste where locals scavenge for food. In one image from this dump, “Wasteland with Lion,” the flat has been installed so the lion appears to be lying in the trash, lethargically surveying the wafting smoke and the people picking through the dump for scraps of food. In the case of the lions, H=humans have destroyed both the animal habitats and the human living situation.

One of Brandt’s favorite images, “Wasteland with Elephant,” was taken in the same dump. The image of a large old elephant with ragged ears that mirror the ragged edges of the flat looms large on the left hand side of the frame. The flat was installed deep so the elephant’s foot looks as if it is touching the actual foreground and he is walking out of the flat into a world in which he knows he cannot survive. The image garners emotional resonance from the sky, layered with light clouds just at the horizon, but dark gloomy clouds at the top. It produces a foreboding image of animal habitats.

“This is a really great example of how under a cloudy sky not all light is the same,” says Brandt. “The stormy clouds in this image inform and affect the light on the ground. There was something apocalyptic about the combination of the rising smoke and the clouds, even though not much is going on with the people who almost blend in to the landscape.”

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Working with children in war zones, Brian McCarty has discovered a couple of truisms: Whoever’s shooting at you is the bad guy; and it’s really hard to talk about war. “You can read studies on the effects of war on children, but you almost never get them talking about it—especially the most traumatized, who’ve sometimes lost the ability to talk altogether,” the photographer says. “Art is a way for them to share their experiences.”

These observations underpin McCarty’s recent self-published book, War-Toys ($32, wartoysproject.com). Composed of images paired with children’s drawings made in Israel and Palestine, the book is the first phase of a planned transcontinental survey giving voice to children traumatized by war.

McCarty works with art therapists who ask the youngsters to draw pictures reflecting their experiences of living amid conflict. In subsequent interviews, McCarty uses the drawings to coax more details from the children. The photographer then constructs mise-en-scènes based on their experience, placing toy surrogates in locations the same as or similar to those in the drawings.

McCarty is something of a toy specialist: He started taking pictures of them as an undergrad at Parsons The New School for Design; now his commercial clients include Mattel, Disney Inter­active, and the Cartoon Network. Photographing toys in war zones, however, has brought surprises, such as getting caught in an escalated eight-day offensive—Operation Pillar of Defense (the Israeli name) and Operation Stones of Baked Clay (the Palestinian name)—during a planned photo shoot.

“For that brief moment I realized how high the stakes are, and that the fear I felt is just a matter of daily life for the kids,” he recalls. While air strikes rained on the region, he continued shooting; the result, “House Bombing–Gaza Strip,” depicts a house on fire in the background with toy people lying dead in the foreground and a fighter jet overhead. “It’s a wonderful shot,” he says, “but it also summarized how helpless and powerless I felt.”

His process is not always so intense. After deciding which drawings to interpret, he scouts for toys in local shops; this reflects area socioeconomic realities, as well as the proliferation of American war-toy designs. “The idea that war toys are as ubiquitous as the AK-47 is fascinating,” he says, “because it reflects ideas of exported westernization, violence, and ways of conducting war.”

However political this project may seem, McCarty makes it clear he steers neutral. “It would be very complicated with NGOs and nonprofits if I were to take a political stance,” he notes. “And I need to take on the mindsets of the kids I am working with.”

Close-Up: Brian McCarty
BrianMcCarty.com ; WarToysProject.com

Lives In: West Hollywood, CA
Studied At: Parsons The New School for Design, New York
Publications: War-Toys: West Bank, Gaza Strip (McCarty PhotoWorks, 2013); Art-Toys (Baby Tattoo Books, 2010)
Ongoing Work: With the completion of the first phase of War-Toys in Israel, McCarty is raising money for a trip to Afghanistan; he hopes to continue the project in regions of Sudan, Mali, and the Congo.
In the Bag: Canon EOS 5D Mark II; Canon lenses (24mm, 15mm, 50mm, 24-105mm, 600EX); Gitzo GT2531EX tripod with ball head; Shure LensHopper VP83F microphone; Zacuto Z-Finder viewfinder; 13-inch Apple MacBook Air; LaCie Rugged Hard Drives (2 TB)

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Photographer Sara Naomi Lewkowicz has just come off a banner year. While pursuing her master’s degree in visual communication from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, she’s had work published in magazines including Time, Stern, L’Espresso, Das Magazin, and Days Japan.

Pictures of the Year International named her the 2013 College Photographer of the Year, and the Alexia Foundation awarded her a student grant.

To top it off, the 31-year-old garnered the 2013 Ville de Perpignan Rémi Ochlik Award, presented annually at the Visa Pour l’Image festival in Perpignan, France, to a young photographer producing the year’s best single series—an honor that had never before gone to a woman or to a student.

Many of these accolades were based on images Lewkowicz made of a couple for her thesis project, Shane and Maggie. She met the pair while shooting a school assignment at a county fair. She initially focused on Shane, a 31-year-old ex-convict covered in tattoos. Her idea was to do a story on recidivism and life after incarceration, but her attention quickly turned toward his girlfriend Maggie, a 20-year-old mother of two children (then ages 2 and 4), who had left her husband in Alaska after discovering that he’d cheated on her. “I became more interested in Shane and Maggie’s relationship than in a story on recidivism, so I spent as much time with them as I could,” Lewkowicz says.

As it has evolved, the project’s focus has further shifted to Maggie and her ability to find power and strength as a single mother after enduring two destructive relationships.

The images from the series that have gained the most notoriety include a violent fight that erupted between Shane and Maggie when Lewkowicz was with them. The pictures, capturing Shane’s physical assault of Maggie, have become perhaps the most prominent documentation of domestic violence since Donna Ferrato’s seminal work, Living with the Enemy. “My photojournalist’s instincts just kicked in,” Lewkowicz explains of her reaction.

But Lewkowicz reminds us that this episode is only part of the story. She is much more interested in Maggie’s journey as a single mom, which she continues to document. Even during a break from the series while studying in London, Lewkowicz speaks to Maggie and the kids every few days; she will continue to photograph them when she returns to Ohio.

“When you embark on a story, you don’t necessarily know if it’s going to become a long-term project,” says Lewkowicz. “I tend to photograph people I click with, whom I want to keep photographing because I want to keep knowing them. Maggie and I have become friends.”

Lewkowicz is not concerned about becoming too close to her subjects. “I am not a detached photographer,” she says. “The idea of strict objectivity is kind of BS. If you can fool yourself into thinking you’re completely objective and then knowingly fool the person you’re photographing into thinking you care, you’re lying either to them or to yourself.” Although what began as a school assignment has become a career builder, Lewkowicz knows that’s not enough. “Shooting one story is great, but it doesn’t make you a bona fide photographer,” she says. “It just means you have a good story. I want to be known for more than one story.” No doubt she will be.

Close-Up: Sara Naomi Lewkowicz

SaraNaomiPhoto.com
Lives In: London, England (studying abroad) and Athens, Ohio
Studied At: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (B.A., Journalism); Ohio University (M.A., Visual Communication)
Publications: Baltimore Sun, Claudia, Das Magazin, Days Japan, Internazionale, L’Espresso, Opzij, Stern, Time
Honors Include: 2013 Ville de Perpignan Remi Ochlik Award, Visa Pour l’Image; 2013 Alexia Student Grant
In the Bag: Two Canon EOS 5D Mark II bodies; Canon lenses (24-105mm, 70-200mm, 135mm, 24mm, 35mm, 50mm); Canon 580 EX II flash; Manfrotto tripod; SD cards; Zoom H4N digital recorder; Sennheiser Lavalier wireless microphones; Sennheiser shotgun microphone

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A Long Walk (Refugee Shoe Project)

A Long Walk (Refugee Shoe Project)

For Shannon Jensen, work is a continual process of searching and striving. “I only want to be a photographer if I can produce substantive work that makes a small contribution—not just make a photo that’s five percent better than the one made by the person standing next to me,” explains Jensen, a self-taught photojournalist who is doing just that.

At age 29, Jensen’s worldwide documentation of such issues as poverty and displacement has shone a light on the human condition—as well as on her own talents. A featured photographer for Reportage by Getty Images, she has earned honors from Pictures of the Year International 2013, Amnesty International, the National Press Photographers Association, and Open Society as part of its prestigious 2014 Moving Walls exhibition.

None of this seemed likely when Jensen was an economics major on her way to law school at the University of Pennsylvania. She caught the photography bug during a summer postgraduate research fellowship on economic development in East Africa. She was tapped to photograph the work of an NGO, and the resulting images gained her acceptance into the 2009 Eddie Adams Workshop. “I don’t think I would be a photographer now if I hadn’t gotten into that workshop,” Jensen says, “because it was validation that I could become a photojournalist.”

She returned to East Africa in 2010, working in Kenya, Tanzania, and South Sudan. Small news assignments further confirmed her career choice. “I was finally feeling like a legitimate photojournalist,” she says, “when my father was diagnosed with brain cancer, so I returned to the States to help him.”

Back home near Washington, D.C., Jensen faced the same decision: law school or photojournalism? While deciding, she signed up for a Look3 Festival of the Photograph workshop led by Magnum shooter Christopher Anderson. With his encouragement, her workshop project—on the transition of a Charlottesville, Virginia, neighborhood, Southwood, from mobile homes to a mixed-income housing development—became a long-term series on six families.

“I’ve done a lot of low-income housing research at Penn, and the statistics show that most mixed-income developments aren’t successful,” she says. “My guess is that very few of these families will end up in the new homes, and I wanted to document that.” She does it with an empathetic eye, producing nuanced images that invite viewers into the scenes rather than slanting the narrative POV; she avoids wide-angle lenses and post-production tricks, and even her color palette is subdued.

In 2012 Jensen returned to South Sudan because she felt the refugee story there—more than 70,000 crammed into a camp in the Blue Nile State—was not being told. She arrived just as 30,000 South Sudanese were crossing the border. “It was almost biblical,” she says. “Endless streams of people coming through the woods.”

She produced documentary photos and sent them to editors, thinking she had a great story. Few were interested. She kept shooting. Watching the refugees stumble into camp, Jensen realized their footwear told the story: However worn-out, taped, or ragtag, the shoes were kept by the refugees as precious objects. She shot hundreds of pairs of shoes, most accompanied by captions with only the owners’ names, ages, and number of miles walked. “These images function as fiction does,” she says, “helping to create the human connection.”

Not resting long on the wide acclaim this series received, Jensen headed to South Korea. “I didn’t want to be the ‘Africa’ photographer,” she says. Now she’s learning Korean and figuring out how to tell the story of a country transitioning from a poor, agrarian, post-conflict economy into one of unprecedented rapid growth—but also suffering high rates of suicide, elder poverty, and consumer debt. “This is proving to be a difficult country to photograph in because people are so private,” she says. “But I am trusting that I will find something unique here.”

**CLOSE-UP: **Shannon Jensen

shannon-jensen.com

reportagebygettyimages.com

Lives In: London, but is currently on self-assignment in Seoul

Studied At: University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (Economics)

Clients Include: Die Zeit, Entrepreneur, GEO France, The Guardian, Le Monde, National Geographic Society, The New York Times, Saturday Telegraph Magazine, Stern, Vanity Fair Italy

Honors Include: Magnum Foundation 2014 Inge Morath Award, Open Society Moving Walls Exhibition 2014 (The Long Walk); Award of Excellence, Pictures of the Year International (POYi) 2013; Amnesty International; National Press Photographers Association; Days Japan; Look3 Festival of the Photograph screening

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Even as an undergraduate at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, Matt Eich had a rigorous work ethic. He freelanced as a photographer, interned at newspapers including the Orange County Register in California and Portland’s The Oregonian, and picked up honors as the 2006 College Photographer of the Year, always a career boost.

Then, when Eich was 21, he became a parent, and life changed dramatically. “I knew I had to up my game if I was going to be able to support my family,” says Eich, now 26. “I couldn’t rely on one client or one market. I needed some stability.”

And up his game he did. Since graduating in 2008, Eich has built a roster of A-list clients such as Apple, AARP, National Geographic, Time, and Newsweek. He’s earned grants including an Aaron Siskind fellowship, a National Geographic Magazine Photography Grant, a ShootQ Grant, and a National Press Photographers Association Short Grant. He’s received international awards and his work is in several museums and private collections.

This year Eich will present a new solo show (his sixth) in collaboration with the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in Virginia Beach for his project_ The Seven Cities_. “I wanted to find a reason to work close to home,” he says. “I pitched to the museum the idea of photographing all the cities that make up what’s known as the Hampton Roads and how dependent the area is both on the water that surrounds it and the military industry.”

Other work has come from the photo collective LUCEO, which Eich formed with five friends in 2007 to provide mutual creative feedback and camaraderie; he left it in 2012 to pursue other projects and spend more time with his family. “I thrive in a creative community, and that’s what LUCEO was for me,” he says. “We would critique each other’s work and that’s where the real learning happened.”

While with LUCEO, Eich began an ongoing project, The Invisible Yoke, which comprises The Seven Cities as well as two other series, Carry Me Ohio and Sin & Salvation in Baptist Town. The latter began in 2010 as a brief assignment on rural health care for the AARP Bulletin. Baptist Town is a neighborhood in Greenwood, Mississippi, plagued by poverty and crime but held together by a sense of family and community. “I knew there was a much bigger story there about the real legacies of racism in the South, so I begged my editor, Michael Wichita, to send me back,” he recalls. “I brought prints to the people I had photographed and made friends.”

After his second visit, one of the people he’d befriended, Demetrius “Butta” Anderson, was shot to death. Eich needed to photograph the funeral—but he was broke. “I didn’t even have money for gas, so a friend gave me money and my editor got me an assignment so I could spend 48 hours there.”

Even more determined to finish the project, he raised $5,690 through the crowd-funding platform Emphas.is so he could spend a month in Greenwood. Then in 2012 he received $32,000 in grants, which he applied to continuing the series. “The Baptist Town project functions well for me in the documentary sphere, but that’s not enough for me anymore,” Eich says. “I want the images to function for the community, so I’ve been thinking about how to have it play out in the streets or in social media.” This idea was sparked when he used Instagram as a sort of digital Polaroid to engage people. “Instagram is much more permanent than a Polaroid if I can tag [the subject] on a social site.”

In upping his game, Eich always has different projects in play. Between sessions on The Invisible Yoke, he shoots commercial work. “I hope that people hire me for the way I see,” he says, “but I also hope they know my pictures aren’t always dark. I find that I can create a situation—and then real moments will occur if I step back and let life unfold.”

CLOSE-UP: Matt Eich

MattEichPhoto.com
Lives In: Norfolk, VA
Studied At: Ohio University
Awards: F25 Award for Concerned Photography, 2010; Pictures of the Year International Community Awareness Award, 2009 Clients Include Apple, Bloomberg Businessweek, Esquire, GQ, Harper’s, Mother Jones, National Geographic, Time, Sentara Healthcare
In the Bag: Canon EOS 5D Mark II; Canon EF lenses including EF 35mm f/1.4L USM, EF 24mm f/1.4L II USM, and EF 50mm f/1.2L USM; Canon Speedlite 580EX II

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Syria: Free Syrian Army Soldiers “The Things They Carry”

Syria: Free Syrian Army Soldiers “The Things They Carry”

Syria: Free Syrian Army Soldiers “The Things They Carry”

As a photography student at Parsons The New School for Design in 2009, Sebastiano Tomada Piccolomini thought he wanted to be a fashion photographer. He assisted Steven Klein and Mario Testino, among others. Yet four years later, Tomada (the last name he prefers) was at the Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan, France, accepting the 2013 Humanitarian International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Visa d’or award for his work focusing on the dangers and risks that relief agencies face in conflict zones in Syria.

Tomada switched to war photography as the glamour of the fashion world faded for him. Sensing that most fashion work was based on incentives such as clients’ needs and tearsheets and seeking to create his own identity and style, he decided to try to photograph a subject that had intrigued him for some time: human conflict.

“I wasn’t so interested in war as I was curious about the experience of fighting,” Tomada says, “what it means to leave your family and friends and go to another country to be shot at and see comrades wounded or killed.”

After graduation, Tomada left for a three-month stint embedded with American troops in Afghanistan. In the four years since, he has earned a reputation as a skilled conflict photographer with a unique style for his work in volatile hotspots in countries including Libya, Haiti, and Syria.

Among his body of work are portraits of Syrian rebels paired with a close-up shot of the most precious object each carries with him. Titled The Things They Carry, this project resulted from a serendipitous meeting with the commander of an elite rebel group during which Tomada helped the commander drag his wounded brother to safety—along with a box of homemade grenades—a move which, Tomada admits now, “was very stupid.” Foolishness aside, the gesture gained the commander’s respect and exclusive access to the rebel group.

This contact proved invaluable in 2012, when, back in Syria to cover a Free Syrian Army–controlled area in Aleppo, Tomada traveled with the elite group, this time on a mission to attack an armored battalion of the Syrian regime. En route to Ramussa, he and the fighters were attacked by the Syrian army and took shelter in the basement of an abandoned factory.

After a day in the basement, Tomada was getting antsy. In these moments it’s important, he notes, to stay focused and not lose what he calls one’s “camera sensibility.” As heavy mortar fire fell, a tank shell penetrated the wall in a corner of the building. “It was really like a sign from God, because now I had enough light to photograph,” Tomada says.

He asked each of the rebels to pose with their most essential object. Remembering his fashion work, he used the high-contrast side lighting to create stylized portraits in which only the faces and objects were visible against a black background, mirroring the bleakness of life during wartime.

Tomada plans to continue this project with the Afghan National Army during his next trip to Afghanistan. “I won’t try to recreate this lighting,” he says.

“I want to make something original every time.” What would Tomada choose as his own most precious item? He can’t narrow it down to one: He always carries local SIM cards, but he also needs the medical tourniquets that American Army medics in Afghanistan taught him how to apply. “I want to be able to help others,” he says. “You know, a tourniquet would have saved Tim Hetherington’s life.”

sebastianotomada.com

Lives: In New York City
Studied: **At Parsons The New School for Design
**Awards: Humanitarian International Red Cross (ICRC) Visa d’or award, 2013; World Press Photo, General News, 2nd prize singles, 2013
Clients: Include The Atlantic, Businessweek, The New Republic, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, Vanity Fair, Zeit
In the Bag: Canon EOS 5D Mark III, Olympus OM-D E-M5. “The Olympus is a backup. My lenses have always been the same: 24mm f/1.4, 35mm f/1.4, and 50mm f/1.2. I really don’t do zooms,” Tomada says. “Also, I carry a couple of tourniquets, plus a knife and a Joker card (from a deck of cards) that says ‘The joke is on you’ which were given to me by a U.S. Marine in Afghanistan.”

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More than 3,000 photographers and representatives from 280 press agencies representing 50 countries descended onto the medieval town of Perpignan, France last week to meet, show work, look at exhibits, hustle, eat, drink (at the Café La Poste) and celebrate the importance and value of photojournalism at the 28th annual Visa pour l’Image. Visa (as it colloquially called), created and nurtured by Jean-Francois Leroy, a former journalist from Paris, is a festival, a conference, a celebration and a tribal gathering, a Burning Man of sorts for photojournalists.

Leroy, who runs Visa with a very small staff, personally reviews the more than 4500 proposals he receives, and trolls the Internet and Instagram daily to discover work he might want to exhibit, or screen at the nightly projections in the open air amphitheater setting of the Cloister of Campo Santo. He deliberately mixes shows from established and emerging photographers. “I am a diamond miner,” he says. “I go through piles of mud every day and then suddenly find that gem. I love that.” A few of the “gems” he’s discovered and exhibited first at Visa include Paolo Pellegrin, Stephanie Sinclair, Andrew Starr Reese, Robin Hammond, Andrew Quilty, Dominic Nahr, and the late Camille Lepage and Rémi Ochlik.

Visa is a celebration of the idea of the photograph as evidence and the photographer as witness. It is the bulwark against the mass of postmodern criticism that devalues traditional photojournalism. It honors stories and photographs that are thoroughly researched, honestly presented and important: gay rights in Uganda, ivory poaching that threatens the extinction of elephants in Africa, water rights in Israel and Palestine, child soldiers in Columbia, the housing crisis in Brazil, the last of the nomads in Iran, refugees escaping ISIS, the scourge of the drug Paco in Argentina and Zika, to name a few. It’s a current events lesson that we all need.

This year the refugee crisis and terrorism dominated the news, but the twenty exhibits at Visa were more nuanced. The exhibits were all strong, so choosing a few as my favorites is difficult, and picking a top one is almost impossible. In no particular order, what follows are my favorites, defined as exhibits that I returned to more than once.

Brent Stirton, Ivory Wars

Ivory Wars: How Poaching Funds Terrorism

Brent Stirton’s shocking images depict the ivory trade, increased this decade as armed rebel and other groups in Africa have turned to poaching as a new and lucrative revenue source to fund their various terrorist activities. Ninety percent of the illicit ivory becomes religious carvings in Chinese state run carving factories or sold in the Philippines and Mexico. With fewer than 400,000 elephants remaining and 30,000 killed each year, elephants are in the “sixth age of extinction,” notes Stirton, unless action is taken swiftly.

When asked about his images, he launches into a 30-minute detailed explanation of the sociological, cultural, economic and political underpinnings of the illicit ivory business. This is not surprising given that Stirton estimates he spends 90 percent of his time on research. “The ivory trade is a smokes and mirrors world,” says the South African born Stirton. “Everyone lies to you so you just have to talk to enough people until you find out what’s most true.”

Stirton’s interest in the intersection of conflict, the environment and animal preservation began in 2007 when he was in the Virunga national park in the Democratic Republic of Congo photographing the effort by park rangers to protect wildlife. While on patrol, the rangers found a group of mountain gorillas that had been senselessly slaughtered by poachers interested in protecting the illegal charcoal trade in this area. The group of images that Stirton made, particularly one of a dead gorilla being carried out on a handmade stretcher by a group of rangers, have become iconic. “Those photographs changed everything for me,” says Stirton. “These images got a much bigger response than anything I’d shot before.”

Since that time, Stirton, a Getty staff photographer, has focused on stories that focus attention on the possible extinction of animals in Africa. “Animals are sentient beings to me,” says Stirton, while acknowledging that the situation is complex. “The poachers are poor so to them it’s just survival.”

Ivory Wars: How Poaching Funds Terrorism

For this story, Stirton spent about 12 weeks, much of it on patrol with the rangers. It’s a boring experience, he notes, because he never knows when action will happen. “I go out on patrol with them for up to 21 days, carrying a 60-pound pack on my back, eating beans and rice and drinking water in the river, waiting for something to happen,” he says.

However long it takes, the resulting images are compelling as a narrative and as aesthetically interesting photographs of almost perfect composition and exposure achieved in part because in spite of the fact that he is shooting digitally, Stirton hand meters his photographs. “My contrast is happening in the moment,” says Stirton. “Harsh light is my favorite because it is the most sculptural. If you understand light, exposure and the capabilities of your sensor, Photoshop post production is not necessary.”

Stirton’s images are a range of very specific news type images—a four-ton shipment of ivory captured by authorities in Lomé, Tongo, with a group of soldiers standing in formation next to the seized ivory, to very nuanced and emotional images of dead elephants or of the low paid rangers who try to stop the poaching. “One of my favorite images is a ranger coming out of an ambush, slightly bloody with resignation etched into his face. He’s thinking ‘Just another day in hell’,” he says.

Andrew Quilty, Afghanistan: After Enduring Freedom

Walking into this exhibit which documents the aftermath of the ironically titled Operation Enduring Freedom launched in Afghanistan in the days following 9/11, I was surprised and delighted to see that the first four photographs had a blueish cast reflecting the actual quality of the light. It was refreshing to see that Quilty’s images celebrate light and color and that he allows harsh light to remain harsh and create black shadows. The photographs have a visual authenticity lacking in so many of the overly saturated, color corrected and sharpened photographs that dominate photojournalism.

“My rule of thumb is to maintain a natural look,” says Quilty. “I don’t understand why photographers want to auto white balance everything. Overly post produced work negates the elements of light and color that constitute a beautiful and elegant photograph. I guess I use my digital camera as if it is a film camera.”

The Australian born Quilty had been living in New York shooting for major news outlets, including the New York Times. He first traveled to Afghanistan in 2013 to work with a reporter producing a story on the aftermath of the American withdrawal. He only intended to stay for three months but three years later still lives in Kabul. “I stayed because I found new meaning in my work,” says Quilty. “Everything here is infused with the struggle between life and death and that is compelling material for a photographer.”

While Quilty photographs a lot of life and death matters—including the aftermath of the bombed Médecins Sans Frontières hospital—what distinguishes his work are the small moments, seen by someone who has spent a lot of time observing the culture. He builds a nuanced narrative from this place, mostly forgotten by media in the aftermath of the US withdrawal in 2014. His images, although strong, are sensitive: A child playing with a kite late in the afternoon on a hill overlooking Kabul; Afghan police at an outpost a few meters from a Taliban controlled area, sitting, just looking so palpably and weary of the Sisyphean nature of their situation; soldiers resting on a blanket in the mid-day heat of the desert, shielded by a bright red umbrella, the only real color in the photograph; or the other worldly look of a small child lying alone in a hospital room, swathed in a gold colored space blanket, tethered to a lifesaving IV drip after suffering serious burns from an oil heater at home.

Dominic Nahr, Fractured State (For Médecins Sans Frontières)

In a similar vein to Quilty’s work, Dominic Nahr’s project photographing the civilian victims of South Sudan’s civil war, also highlights a place ignored by mainstream media. Heralded as a victory when it became the youngest new country on July 9, 2011, South Sudan has been embroiled in a civil war since 2013, displacing more than 2.5 million people. It now faces a humanitarian disaster from three years of violence, famine and disease. Nahr, an award winning photographer who has been covering stories across the African continent since 2008, worked with Médecins Sans Frontières, often the only NGO providing food and medical aid for the displaced and malnourished across Unity State (one of the 10 states in South Sudan). Working with an NGO is essential in South Sudan to have access to transportation and move around more freely, notes Nahr. “The United Nations wants to limit foreigners to no more than two days in Protection of Civilian (POC) camps,” he says. “They don’t want us showing how horrible this situation is.”

Nahr avoids photographic clichés. We don’t see children with visible ribs, close ups of flies on children’s dirty faces or hordes of people clamoring for food. We do see a close up of a gloved hand writing “Died” and the date on a body bag. His images probe beneath the façade of the political conflict and focus on the people struggling to survive: mothers and children fleeing into swamps and savannahs or moving from island to island while trying to hide from the militias that torched their villages.

Nahr’s work has an original aesthetic. He uses color and light to create emotional nuance. His images are not overly post produced and retain a theatrical quality because of how he frames an image. The people appear as characters on a stage: a weary mother, her hand to her face, sits next to her malnourished child, surrounded by relatives peering through the white gauze of a mosquito netting. This photograph, dense with meaning, does not need a caption.

“When I first started shooting, I knew I needed a style,’ says Nahr, who earned a BFA in Photography from Ryerson University in Toronto. “I studied theatre so I rather think of a photograph as a theatrical set. You have a stage, lighting and characters. I try to find the right backdrop and lighting and then I wait for the characters to assemble themselves.”

Nahr, who carries both Swiss and Canadian passports, currently lives in Nairobi, Kenya. He, like so many others here, had his first show at Visa in 2009 on work he produced in the Congo. “It was a big break and propelled me into the industry,” he says.

Laurence Geai, Troubled Waters

La guerre de l’eau

Laurence Geai’s Troubled Waters tackles an issue that doesn’t easily lend itself to visuals: the water war between Israel and Palestine. According to the World Bank, on average, an Israeli citizen has access to four times more water than a Palestinian. In the West Bank some Bedouin communities only have five gallons of water per person per day. In the Gaza Strip, the situation is dire: 96 percent of the water is not fit for human consumption, either because it is polluted or has a high salt content because too much water is extracted upstream. Water costs up to six times more here than in Israel, particularly for desalinated water, which the Palestinians must buy from private dealers.

La guerre de l’eau

Geai who usually covers conflicts in places such as Aleppo, the Central African Republic and Syria, needed a break from conflict photography and wanted to tell a “peace” story. The challenge for Geai, a French photojournalist who has only been working professionally for about three years after studying business and working in the fashion industry, was how to visually represent the statistics. She knew it would be a complicated story to tell and took four trips between 2015 and 2016, spending one month at a time.

La guerre de l’eau

“I use photography to satisfy my curiosity, “says Geai. “I wanted to see how people used water in daily life in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, so I spoke to people about water and asked them to show me what it meant to them.” The photographs range from the factual to the daily moments of difficulty that suggest the preciousness of water: a woman washing dishes in a small bin with a trickle of water from a sponge; a child cooling off in a sink; children pushing water jugs in a small wheel barrow, jugs that need to be filled every day; a woman using bath water to flush a toilet; a man standing amid the rubble that used to be his house, drinking from a hose that he hooked up to a well even though the water is not potable. Geai contrasts these images with photographs of swimming pools at tourist hotels in Israel, or lush vegetation on Israeli farms.

The images are personal and intimate, Geai’s style. “I love the link a camera can create between two people,” she says.

Catalina Martin-Chico, The Last and the Lost: The Brave Nomads of Iran

Catalina Martin-Chico’s story on the last nomads in Iran from the Bakhtiari and Qashqai tribes is not a major story, but it is a metaphor for the cultural transitions that so many people face today. The nomads, now numbering only 1.5 million of the 78 million people living in Iran, struggle to maintain their traditional lifestyle under pressure from Iranian government policies aimed at forcing these nomads to settle in urban environments. The push to settle is education; nomadic children can only attend through primary school. Higher education requires a move to the city.

Martin-Chico, who has dual masters’ degrees in the History of Latin America and Communication, discovered her passion for photography at ICP in New York in 2003. “I just fell into the pot,” she says, using a bit of French colloquialism. A member of the Cosmos agency, Martin-Chico says she has more curiosity for under covered stories: a woman’s shelter in Yemen, female Imams in China or potato farming in Peru.

This story, funded by a private anonymous donor, required months of dogged research to find contacts to the nomads. She followed them on their pilgrimage and photographed the joy and the struggle of both those who stay and those who settle. “Modernity isn’t always better,” she says, but noting that the pressure to settle becomes hard to resist. “I am telling the story of the last nomads of Iran. Marking history is my duty as a photographer.”

Martin-Chico’s approach is to get close and find the humanity in a story such as one image of a group of young men, huddled around a cell phone, lit only by the light of the screen. Although she thinks about the arc of a narrative, “I let myself be surprised by what I find because it is important to tell how the story is, not what you thought it would be.”

David Guttenfelder, Coming Home

Guttenfelder, an award winning photographer, worked for twenty years in Asia and Africa as a roving photographer for the Associated Press (AP). He first used his mobile phone as a camera in Afghanistan in 2011 and 2012 because he saw that the Marines he was photographing were using their phones to photograph each other. He decided he wanted to make photographs that had the look or mood of the keepsakes the Marines were producing for themselves so he shot with his iPhone and a Polaroid film filter app. That project, Through the Eyes of Marines was published in Time Magazine to much criticism from major photo trade magazines because of his choice to use an iPhone with a filter app.

“That seems like such a silly argument now,” says Guttenfelder.

He helped the AP open the first news bureau in North Korea in 2011, making more than 40 trips to photograph there. “I felt a very heavy responsibility because I was interpreting North Korean reality for everyone,” he says. Although his work was not censored, he was always accompanied by his handlers. He noticed they were far less suspicious of what he was photographing when he was using his phone, so he opened an Instagram account.

“Instagram had become a platform for photographs of personal life or experience,” he says. “I started thinking like that and it changed the way I photographed overall. There is much less distinction now between how I shoot on the margins and what I shoot as a professional.”

He photographed small pieces of culture: toothpicks made from antler bones or a soldier lacing up his ice skates at an indoor ice skating rink, still dressed in his uniform. He wanted to photograph what was unique to North Korea and things we wouldn’t imagine. The work from North Korea garnered a growing audience. Followers would comment and Guttenfelder, ever the journalist, realized he could communicate directly with his audience from his hotel at night. “There wasn’t much else to do.”

The images are simultaneously empathetic, quirky, funny, sardonic and at times maybe even judgmental. Guttenfelder is circumspect about his intentions. “Photographs register on several layers of meaning,” he says. “I try very hard to leave it up the viewer as how to interpret my photographs.”

Today he is a National Geographic Explorer doing in the U.S. what he did in North Korea. Instagram, he says, is the world’s largest newspaper. The National Geographic account has 60 million followers and Guttenfelder’s personal account has one million. He still uses it to create dialogue. For example, on an assignment in Florida to follow Donald Trump, he decided to select some of Trump’s list of voter issues, find a representative photograph, post it on Instagram and pose a question to create a dialogue, just as he did in North Korea.

“Every photographer should have an Instagram account,” says Guttenfelder. “It is so important to our business.”

Yannis Behrakis, Paths of Hope and Despair

This exhibit reflects the reality of the refugee situation over twenty years, putting the current crisis in perspective. “The refugee crisis today may not be the worst, but it is the most photographed,” says Yannis Behrakis, an award winning Greek photojournalist for Reuters who has photographed refugees from Bosnia, Somalia, Albania, Iraq, Croatia, Libya, Chechnya, Kosovo and Syria.

He has been a witness to the inevitability of refugees as an aftermath to war, simply a human condition in his opinion. “War is human nature,” he says, and with war, refugees follow, with so many remaining permanently displaced. In spite of this inevitability, which many would find depressing over such a long period, Behrakis remains optimistic because although he has seen the worst, he has also seen the best. “I cry and I have nightmares, but I always see hope, such as my image of a Syrian refugee kissing his daughter as he walks through a rainstorm towards Greece’s border with Macedonia. Men like him are superheroes.”

Behrakis’s photographs, while not ignoring the helplessness and misery, do focus on those very human and very hopeful moments such as a close up of a man, carrying his two children in his arms as he tries to make it from a boat to land. The man’s intense focus on keeping his baby’s head above water says it all. Behrakis chooses moments of strong emotion or a connection of humanity rather than clichés of crushed and despairing refugees. Even at the ubiquitous and oft shot crowded boat landing at Lesbos in Turkey, Behrakis captures a moment of relief and freedom as a refugee leaps midair from the boat to shore. “You know who a man is in difficult situations,” he says. “We know who our friends are or who has humanity. I see humanity in all of the ordinary people—farmers, shepherds or fisherman in Greece—who have reached out to help these refugees.”

Juan Arredondo, Born into Conflict: Child Soldiers in Colombia

Juan Arredondo shows us that the problem of child soldiers isn’t confined to Africa with his project on the children in Columbia who have fought with the guerrilla movement, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia – People’s Army (FARC). Arredondo moved to Columbia, the place of his birth, to tell the stories he thought were not getting media attention. He photographed demobilized child soldiers, 25 to 50 percent of whom are women, recruited as early as nine years old. Although they receive the same training as the men in weapons, intelligence gathering and military operations strategy, they are also victims of sexual abuse by the commanders.

“Columbia has the second largest number of displaced persons due to the drug wars, but the media does not focus on Columbia,” he says. He chose to shoot this story in black and white because “the kids blended in so well in color that they disappeared in the image.”

His photographs are surprisingly intimate given the circumstance. “My approach is to get to know the subject well before I photograph because once I get to know them I will be able to get more intimate photographs,” says Arredondo, who apprenticed with noted photojournalists Lori Grinker and Eugene Richards. When working in these complicated situations it is always best to be “straight and honest and not promise what you can’t deliver,” he says. “My role as a photographer is to give people a voice.”

Peter Bauza, Copacabana Plaza, Brazil

Copacabana Palace

Peter Bauza spent almost a year at the Copacabana Plaza, an abandoned and dilapidated unfinished condominium originally built to house middle class Brazilians, but which is now home to 300 families who squat here in extreme poverty without the basics such as water, sanitation and electricity because they have nowhere else to live. The environment is always damp, with stagnant water and human waste causing serious health problems. The residents share one working shower.

Copacabana Palace

Bauza, originally from Germany, but now living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, lived on site two or three days a week to get to know the people he wanted to photograph. “I did sleep in a tent,” says Bauza, “because it was just so filthy and the rats were really big.”

Copacabana Palace

The time commitment paid off because Bauza gained unfettered access to the daily lives. Shot in color with a Leica M, these images are soft and muted, almost metaphorically dark, which suits the feeling of the story. “By the end of the project, I was welcome everywhere and could move freely throughout the complex,” he says. The resulting images are remarkably intimate and sympathetic, yet not romanticized. The people in his photographs are people, not statistics or clichés: we see a boy coming home from school carrying his kite, or a woman who has set up a beauty parlor in her house; or a couple making love. But we also see filth, poverty, death and drugs. It is clear that just as Bauza respected his subjects and understands the challenges of poverty, they trusted him to be their voice. The only promise he made to them was to try to have the work shown as much as possible. “I don’t really have a political agenda,” he says. “I just want to defend their rights to have dignity and a decent place to live.”

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In March 8, Tomas van Houtryve wasn’t sure he’d have the money to return to Laos. Without funding, his ambitious seven-year project documenting the last surviving holdouts of the Communist movement would lie incomplete. He’d been to North Korea, Cuba, China and Vietnam repeatedly. Laos was his last stop. There he planned to photograph the remaining CIA-trained Hmong guerrillas living in hiding since 1975, when the U.S. left Vietnam. But he was having trouble coming up with the $8,800 he needed for expenses.

By March 10, van Houtryve was considerably more optimistic. That was the day Emphas.is, a new crowdfunding website for photographers, launched. His project was one of the first nine featured, and in its first 24 hours online, it had received $1,985, almost a quarter of the funds he needed. By April 4, 127 backers had donated more than $8,800 and van Houtryve set out for Southeast Asia to make them proud.

There are several other crowdfunding sites (the most famous is Kickstarter), but where most others represent a variety of project types across all forms of media, Emphas.is has a singular vision: to get photojournalism funded in an era when outlets are drying up and assignments are scarce. Beyond making individual projects possible, it aims to build a community of engaged donors who are interested both in global issues and in supporting quality journalism. “We wanted to create a platform where photographers would be able to communicate directly with backers,” says Karim Ben Khelifa, an award-winning New York City–based photojournalist who cofounded Emphas.is with his partner, Tina Ahrens, formerly the senior photo editor with GEO magazine, and Fanuel Dewever, an Internet business consultant.

“We thought about how or why people consume media and realized that the younger audiences do it through social networking sites,” Ahrens says. As you’d expect from a concept born in the age of social media, interactivity and personal involvement are key components. “Rather than just feed viewers stories, we let the public decide what they want to see funded and covered. People still care about news. We just need to give them a platform where they can be involved.”

The activity on Emphas.is in the first few weeks seems to support Ahrens’ conviction. In the site’s first month, donations totaled $45,000 across the nine featured projects, including Matt Eich’s Sin & Salvation in Baptist Town, about the inheritance of slavery and its ongoing impact on the current generation; Guillaume Herbaut’s La Montaña, covering one of the most violent regions in Mexico; Carolyn Drake’s The Story of Uyghur, focusing on changes in the cultural landscape of the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim people in Western China; and Aaron Huey’s collaboration with artist Shepard Fairey and Ernesto Yerena, The Pine Ridge Billboard Project, which sheds light on the Lakota and other tribes’ continued fight for treaty rights (see sidebar on page 66).

The raison d’être for Emphas.is is freedom: freedom for photographers to tell their stories without interference from editors, and freedom for the public to fund the projects, photographers and issues that interest them. To maintain quality, reviewers from a panel of more than 40 international photo-industry and journalism professionals rate each project according to a set of 13 criteria, including photo quality, realistic budget and photographer’s experience. Once they’re vetted, projects are placed on the site to live or die. Funding is an all-or-nothing proposition: If a project fails to raise its stated funding goal by its deadline, Emphas.is refunds the donors’ money. “The public is the gatekeeper,” Ben Khelifa says. “If a project fails, it’s either because it wasn’t pitched well or it just isn’t interesting enough to the community.”

The photographers’ offerings are tiered. For $10, backers get access to a “making-of zone” while the project is running. There, photographers provide updates via tweets, blog posts, photographs and videos as the creative process unfolds. Higher donation levels confer greater rewards, which are set by the photographer. So far they’ve ranged from signed copies of photo books to invites to screenings and exhibits. Once a project is finished, all its backers get an exclusive four-day viewing before it’s released to the public. Photographers retain copyright and all usage rights, though interested media outlets can acquire first-publication rights in their markets by funding up to 50 percent of a project (this donation goes exclusively toward expenses and does not include publication fees).

Letting the public follow the creative process in real time distinguishes Emphas.is from both traditional funding models and crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter. Naturally, it favors photographers who are literate in social media and at home with self-promotion. “This model is not for everyone,” Ben Khelifa notes. “At least at first, it will work best for the most media savvy—those who are comfortable blogging and posting in feedback forums.”

Ahrens believes their approach will help restore transparency and integrity to journalism. “We are offering a glimpse of the raw process of how news is created,” Ahrens says. “In the past, readers saw only the final polished piece. Here they see how photographers get the story, or how they make decisions. It also will make photographers more 
accountable as journalists, because they can’t blame their editors anymore.”

The site’s founders expect the new platform will engage younger, more naturally tech-savvy audiences because it serves up journalism the way they want it: 24/7 and participatory. Ben Khelifa feels this approach also has the potential to add a previously unavailable dimension to the historical record. “Years from now,” he says, “you will be able to go back and see what was happening behind a news event, what the photographers were thinking.”

It’s hard to see a downside to this latest form of photographic funding. Emphas.is isn’t so much an alternative to the media as its latest mutation, one with a high transparency factor and an eye toward archiving. Now it’s up to the public to put their money where their eyeballs are and fund some worthy projects.

The featured photographers don’t seem bothered by the model’s inherent uncertainty. “I am not worried about the public choosing,” says Herbaut, who’s represented by the Institute for Artist Management. “It’s the same problem we’ve always had when we have to find a producer from the press.” Adds Drake, “I don’t think the general public is less able than an editor to make a smart decision. Hopefully what emerges with crowdfunding will challenge traditional publishing and vice versa.”AP

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