The American photographer (b.1973) places the fateful story of a Ukrainian girl at the heart of her series. In 2020, when the youngster was just two years old, she was diagnosed with a rare form of eye cancer. Though this type of cancer is normally curable, treatment was unable to continue during the war. An emotional story about the desperate and tenacious struggle for survival of a girl and her family in a country torn apart by war.

In this personal project, the photographer (b.1999) reports on her homeland – the Democratic Republic of Congo – and the consequences of the war there between rebels and the army. More than six million Congolese have been displaced. The photographer documents life in her community in North-Kivu, in the eastern part of the country, which has been suffering from the fighting since 2021. In this manner, she gives names and faces to those who would otherwise remain anonymous statistics.

The series shows the attempt by the South African photographer (b.1959) to explore the global climate emergency in a personal and systematic way, in order to show that its effects ignore all boundaries of wealth, class, ethnicity and geography. Mendel has been documenting floods in 13 countries around the world since 2007. He presents direct portraits of those affected, supplemented by abstract landscape images, to create a typology of climate change.

The Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Kherson and Kharkiv are under relentless fire. Businesses are closed and the electricity supply is unreliable. Anyone able to has left the villages and cities. Only the poorest and the elderly remain. Their survival depends on volunteers who take care of the people in this gray zone. The Ukrainian photographer’s (b.1972) black and white series reveals the gruesome reality of war and the desperate situation of its civilian victims.

The Chinese photographer (b.1961) has been documenting the queer community in various cities in China since 2017. His portraits show places of freedom where people can live out their identities in an open community. The black and white series was shot primarily in clubs and at parties and competitions, which have become an important cultural phenomenon, despite official restrictions on the LGBTQ+ community. As the country slowly opens up to international influences, freedom is growing underground.

A brutal civil war has been raging in Sudan for over two years, on the edges of the world’s attention. More than eleven million people have been displaced and up to 150,000 have been killed. Last year, the Irish photographer (b.1983) managed to travel to the devastated country, on assignment for the New York Times. His pictures document one of the planet’s greatest humanitarian disasters. The harrowing images show the tragedy in the country, as well as the hopeless situation of the refugees.

For two years now, the German photographer (b.1993) has been accompanying the English and Irish Traveller communities, for whom it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain their traditional way of life. Exclusion and discrimination, exacerbated by Brexit and rising nationalism, and intensified by misinformation and hatred on social media, threaten their freedom. The photographs were taken at horse fairs, the only remaining places where Travellers can openly celebrate their culture.

The English photographer (b.1981), together with journalist Alisa Sopova, has been reporting on war and conflict in Ukraine for ten years. She documents, primarily, the fate of people in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. That is where the war began in 2014 and where it continues to be particularly violent and destructive. The aim of this impressive and direct long-term project is to show the world what it means to survive every day under the threat of military violence.

The series by the South African photographer (b.1992) focuses on the Cissie Gool House project in Cape Town. It is a former hospital that was occupied in 2017 by Reclaim the City (RTC), a social movement fighting for affordable housing, which converted the building into a refuge for almost 2,000 people. A community emerged that began fighting against exclusionary urban planning and injustices, ongoing since the Apartheid era.

Around 300 million migrant workers ensure steady economic growth in China. They come from rural areas to earn money in more economically developed regions. In the megacity of Dongguan, where over 70 percent of the population are migrant workers, the self-taught photographer (b.1973) has been a colleague, documenting their tough working days and scarce leisure time for 30 years. The selected motifs were taken mainly in the last two years, but some were taken as long as 16 years ago.