In the Kurdish regions of Western Iran, Kolbars working as border couriers, risk their lives carrying heavy loads across dangerous mountains for little pay. Their journeys leave invisible scars on families waiting at home, caught between fear and hope. Every year, many Kolbars are killed by border patrols. This portrait depicts a young bride after losing her husband, a Kolbar killed on the border between Iran and Iraq.

Ebrahim Alipoor is a Kurdish photographer from Kurdistan, Iran. His work focuses on storytelling through photography, exploring social and political issues under challenging circumstances. He documents and tells stories of marginalized communities and the human consequences of conflict, borders, and displacement. 

In the Kurdish regions of Western Iran, Kolbars working as border couriers, risk their lives carrying heavy loads across dangerous mountains for little pay. Their journeys leave invisible scars on families waiting at home, caught between fear and hope. Every year, many Kolbars are killed by border patrols. This portrait depicts a young bride after losing her husband, a Kolbar killed on the border between Iran and Iraq.

Ebrahim Alipoor is a Kurdish photographer from Kurdistan, Iran. His work focuses on storytelling through photography, exploring social and political issues under challenging circumstances. He documents and tells stories of marginalized communities and the human consequences of conflict, borders, and displacement. 

A father prepares his children for bedtime as they play around him in a familiar sense of disorder. Bathed in warm, subdued light, the image evokes both the tenderness and exhaustion of parenthood through the ordinary gestures and quiet intensity of family life.

Olivia de Villaine is a Swiss photographer. Drawing from her own experience as a mother, her work sits at the intersection of documentary and portraiture, exploring the vulnerability and beauty of parenting. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally, including during Rencontres d’Arles and at the LA Center of Photography.

Constructed from broken photographic fragments, this portrait reflects the shifting and unstable nature of identity. The image suggests that the self is never singular or fixed, but layered, incomplete, and constantly reassembled.

Olesja Brandt is a Germany-based emerging photographer working across portraiture, architecture, and conceptual image-making. Her minimalist practice explores the relationship between outer form and inner experience through themes of identity, vulnerability, and transformation.

This photograph documents a “slow disaster” in Yingshang, China: long-term over-mining has caused villages to sink, leaving homes as isolated islands. Although buildings still stand, they have become monuments to a past life. Many residents relocated, but some remain, traveling by boat and fishing for a living, struggling to adapt to this place where the land slowly disappears. 

Yuchen Peng is a Beijing-based photographer. In Ground Without Ground, the 15-year-old artist records the gradual sinking of Yingshang, China, caused by long-term over-mining. Utilizing photography as a “visual archaeology” tool, he captures the fragility and resilience of community life under the shadow of industrial expansion.

This historic salt works is one of San Diego’s oldest businesses. One of only two such landscapes suitable for salt harvesting on the West Coast of the United States, this salt pan business was founded in the late 1800s. For decades, the salt works has supplied regular salts as well as products such as gypsum, magnesium chloride, bromine and more. The hues and color intensity are visually striking, changing according to the varied salinity level of the waters.

Aya Okawa is an award-winning photographer and visual anthropologist who enjoys shooting environmental transformation, abstract patterns, and documenting natural and human systems. Her work has been printed in the National Geographic Magazine, the National Geographic book ‘Spectacle,’ The Washington Post, and The Guardian.

This photograph was created in Savannah, Georgia. Shortly after this photo was taken, everything was torn down around the globe and a Starbucks was put in its place. Marshal states, “I’ve always been a believer in every picture tells a story.”

Frank Marshal is a large-format film photographer based in Virginia. His work centers around the American vernacular. Educated in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania and mentored by Ray K. Metzker, Marshal’s photographs look at the mundane stories of America and the people he comes across.

On a hot day in Kenya, I photographed scavenging action on a carcass recently abandoned by lions. Hyenas were next in line to dominate the carcass. When the hyenas were satiated and moved on, the jackals were next. The sudden arrival of the lappet-faced vulture was unwelcome and the jackals ran off. Only one put up a fight to protect his winnings but the jackal was no match for the largest of all vulture species.

Vicki Santello earned a university degree in Economics and an MBA for a career in Finance. Initially based on Wall Street, Santello moved to North Central Florida in 1989, where she could create a work/life balance rooted in Nature. She retired in 2017 to be fully dedicated to wildlife photography.

A small community of migratory birds flies at dawn in the small ecological reserve of San Gregorio Atlapulco in the municipality of Tlahuac, Mexico City. This place is threatened by sewage discharges from the houses on the hill of San Gregorio into the waters of the lagoon.

Arturo Bermúdez (Jorge Arturo Bermúdez González) is a documentary photographer and freelance photo editor. He is interested in documenting the stigma surrounding mental health issues, chronic infectious diseases, and aspects of Mexico’s ethnic and religious diversity, as well as projects involving environmental and landscape themes.

Pulse 09 was created through the camera-less process of lumen printing. To make each image, I place plant matter on light-sensitive paper and use sunlight for the exposure. The resulting impressions are s­­haped by opacity, time, heat, and the biological makeup of the materials. After the exposure, the image is scanned and printed to preserve the color palette. Early anatomical drawings are incorporated to examine our relationship with the earth and our temporal bodies.

Rachel Girard Reisert is an artist and educator working in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her creative work combines historic and digital photographic processes to address the qualities of impermanence, transformation, and magic inherent in the photographic medium. She serves as Assistant Professor and Head of Photography at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

On a summer celebration day at the Maoz Esther outpost in the West Bank, children play freely in the golden fields as families gather. What began as a handful of young women who built the first structure on this hilltop settlement has grown into a community of twenty families – a transformation documented over five years. The community is an unauthorized settlement built in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank. Over the last five years, the outpost has been evacuated and demolished by the Israeli authorities and rebuilt roughly thirty times.

Maya Meshel is a Jerusalem-based documentary photographer and photojournalist whose work focuses on people navigating crisis, conflict, and the search for belonging. She has exhibited at Eden Gallery in SoHo, New York and Miami.

Marise miscarried her first pregnancy. Soon after, she became pregnant again, but at 19 weeks, she lost baby Stokely due to an “incompetent cervix” during a horrific experience and dismissive care at the hospital. Undeterred, she got pregnant again and made it into her final trimester of pregnancy. Her umbilical cord looked unusual but everything else appeared normal so there was no reason to induce early. Three days later, Ellison was gone.

Nancy Borowick is a Sony Artisan of Imagery and a graduate of the International Center of Photography. She has told the intimate stories of people and places from every corner of the globe, winning her major accolades such as World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, and the 2026 IPC Photographic Achievement Award.

A worker climbs a huge pile of discarded plastic bottles, carrying a heavy sack of collected waste on his shoulders. While things are easily thrown away by some in seconds, others literally carry the weight of it.

Mohammad Shahriar Foisal Jitu, a 35-year-old photographer and visual storyteller from Chittagong, Bangladesh. Rooted in curiosity and compassion, his work focuses on street and documentary photography—capturing spontaneous moments and untold stories from the margins.

Accomplished by mixing milk, acrylic paint, cooking oil, and dish soap, this image depicts the shapes and textures that can be spontaneously created from a chemical reaction. This image, at its core, depicts division through the diverging cell-like forms and the opposite light-dark hemispheres.

William Prevett is a seventeen-year-old photographer from El Segundo, California. His work explores abstraction and visual texture through fine art and commercial photography. William plans to expand his practice toward images focused on the patterns and light shaping metropolitan and natural environments, while continuing to develop his commercial portfolio through his online gallery.

“I think about the process of visual perception and how we abstract architectural form.” This inverse reconstruction of the National Theatre explores negative space / the space between structures. 

35mm transparencies are layered, revealing latent configurations. The resulting geometries and color transitions create a dynamic composition that explores the idea that the architecture itself is performative and creates its own theatre.

Amelia Lancaster has a degree in architecture and won a national set design competition while training as an art director at the BBC before becoming an artist. Her first solo exhibition at the Wolfson Gallery at the National Theatre, Abstractions: Studies of the National Theatre, was featured in The Observer and The Architect’s Journal.

Held — but not held. Something gathers here, yet refuses to belong. Through soft collisions of light, color and blurred form, Held for No One explores the tension between presence and disappearance. The image suggests something human, yet remains unresolved — existing in an in-between state between abstraction and figuration. Rather than offering certainty, the work stays open, inviting projection, emotion and slow looking.

Eric Rugers is a Dutch abstract artist working between painting and photography. His work explores perception, atmosphere and emotional resonance through painterly photographic images that merge traditional techniques with digital experimentation. Inspired by artists such as Rothko and Turner, he creates images that resist fixed meaning and invite slow looking.

The series American Bodegónes reflects on our culture’s obsession with materialism. Through imagery inspired by 17th-century Dutch and Spanish paintings, it expresses the transience of our existence by exploring our shared relationship with food. This still life depicts the origins of a processed fast-food sandwich by placing it next to a lifelike chicken and raw chicken legs.

Liz Obert is a lens-based artist with a BFA from the College of Santa Fe and an MFA from Washington State University, and is currently living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work has been exhibited internationally and published in outlets, including The Missouri Review, Slate, The Huffington Post, and Fractions Magazine.

Altar of Gratitude is a project created in honor of Franco’s grandmother, Teresa Vargas. Developed while living in Barcelona, far from his family in Caracas, the work reflects on migration, memory, and healing. Through five symbolic altars built with physical materials, the series transforms grief into gratitude, honoring the values she passed on: resilience, patience, warmth, and care. These images are not about absence, but about the enduring presence of love across distance and time.

Daniel Enrique Santolo Franco is a Venezuelan visual communicator and artist working with photography, symbolism, and Latin American imagery. His practice explores migration, memory, identity, freedom, and different expressions of love through poetic visual narratives. Rooted in surrealism and everyday life, his work reflects on the emotional complexity of human experience.

In Bermuda, the Friendly Society was one of the island’s first mutual aid groups. It supported freed communities with friendship and service. Noah’s Ark was used in lodge ceremonies and initiations to show renewal and new beginnings after emancipation. From the series Descendants of Summer, this image shows Bermuda’s layered history. It traces how past events shape the community through resilience, care, and change.

Nicola Muirhead is a documentary photographer and visual storyteller from Bermuda who focuses on long-form projects and portraiture. Through research-led and collaborative approaches, her work explores how history shapes contemporary realities, identity, and community. Engaging with individuals, communities, and expert voices, she creates visual narratives grounded in lived experience and collective memory.