Olivia Steinman

Olivia Steinman

Dana Stirling

Brothers | This series came naturally. While it’s common for siblings to fight, that hasn’t been my experience with my two boys. I’ve been struck by how instinctively close they are—the way they choose to sit side by side, even when there’s space to be apart, and how they move through the world together with ease.

Brothers is an intimate portrait series exploring closeness, tenderness, and the quiet language shared between siblings. Working with natural light and understated moments, the images reflect on brotherhood as both a bond and a presence—revealing connection in its most unguarded and familiar form. www.oliviasteinman.com

Kate Mahoney

Kate Mahoney

Dana Stirling

As I Find Her: My Mother & Me | I’ve always thought of my mother, Joanna, as a constant in my life. I’ve never lived in a world in which she was not there, guiding me, caring for me, loving me. She had a similar relationship with her mother, Maria. I was with her when her mother died, and as I watched the pain of grief come over her again and again, glimpses of her as a child came into view. It brought the fullness of her life, and specifically her life before me, into a new perspective.

In Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day, Delmore Schwartz writes:
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn…)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)

This ongoing body of work is my attempt at exploring and preserving who my mother is, as my constant and as Joanna. Looking back with her, looking at her, and looking at us at the same time. We are constants in each other’s lives, evolving separately and together, yet so much is the same. How does this happen? How do time and age and life experience change us, and in what ways do they not? How does photography allow us to process and confront the passage of time, and how does it fall short?

Dmitry Yurchenko

Dmitry Yurchenko

Dana Stirling

Dacha | The village of Laitse, located 40 kilometers from Tallinn, witnessed a surge in summer house ("dacha" in Russian) construction during the 1970s when Estonia was part of the Soviet Union. These dachas were originally built as weekend retreats for Tallinn workers and employees, over time, some of these were rebuilt into permanent living places. 

I started taking photographs at the old summer house in Laitse in 2014, right after my daughter was born, followed by the birth of my son in 2015. At some point, my friend, the owner of the dacha, left his usual life in the city and moved to Laitse, renovating his inherited house to suit his needs.  

Over time, I started visiting the dacha almost every weekend with my children, thereby killing two birds with one stone - by entertaining myself and my kids. When the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, the dacha became a refuge from the initial panic and paranoia of city life under the new restrictions. It continued to serve as a sanctuary during subsequent challenges, including divorce, prolonged depression, global turmoil, and economic instability. 

Nearly ten years has passed since I began capturing these moments, resulting in hundreds and hundreds of photos. Children however are growing fast, they started to develop interests of their own and our visits to Laitse have become less frequent. Activities that once brought carefree joy, like exploring swamps or quarry, sorting through old books in the sun warmed attic or bouncing on a trampoline no longer hold the same allure for them. I wonder how long they will continue to join me on these trips. Will they still be interested in spending weekends at the dacha in a few years? When will I take the inal photo for this series? www.instagram.com/kvakabaka_dy

Constance Thalken

Constance Thalken

Dana Stirling

Eyes Open Slowly | Eyes Open Slowly employs the prism of taxidermy to investigate the tangled, often paradoxical, relationship between humans and animals. The work explores animal essence and the emotional and psychological complexities that arise from reanimations of that essence through the practice of taxidermy.

Animals possess a natural magnetism, and taxidermy sustains the illusion of their presence, providing an intimate experience impossible in real life. Yet this animal/object dichotomy can be unsettling and disorienting. We are in awe of what appears to be an animal, yet the actual animal is gone. Because death is inherent to taxidermy, a sense of loss and grief is part of each encounter.

These images were made in a taxidermy shop owned by a 92-year-old master taxidermist who has kept his shop in continuous operation for over 70 years. The shop itself is utterly breathtaking - a flow of cavernous rooms each overflowing with residue from decades of working with animal skins. The shop's diverse clientele reflects the complexity of our entanglements with animals. Prominent natural history museums, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, wealthy game hunters, international franchise steakhouses, and local trophy seekers all procure mounting services from the shop.

Whether capturing animals in the process of “becoming” or using abstraction to complicate the reading of surface, the work exposes our profound longing to connect to the natural world. Simultaneously, it questions our urge to possess and immortalize it through the act of killing. www.constancethalken.com

Ludivine Combe

Ludivine Combe

Dana Stirling

Ludivine Combe is a French photographer born in Lyon. After hopping from Paris to London, she eventually found her way to New York where she has been based for the past two years and a half. Ludivine has always had a camera in her hands and this from a young age, capturing life around her. What started as kid’s curiosity turned into a calling and career which has lead her to move around the globe on several occasions. Her style is widely documentary, focusing on the spaces in between and sometimes overlooked in our everyday life. Telling us stories that we didn’t always know were existing. Her storytelling forces us to slow down and consider all the things around us that we might see but are not truly looking at. Ludivine currently resides in Manhattan where she continues to roam the mean streets of New York with her film cameras, documenting beauty in the ordinary.  ludiinnyc.com

Josefina Fernandez Moran

Josefina Fernandez Moran

Dana Stirling

Portraits of Adolescent Girls | Photographing adolescent girls began as a personal response to loss. Years ago, I was pregnant with twin girls but abruptly lost the pregnancy at 33 weeks. After years of trying to become a mother through various paths, my husband and I came to the diHicult decision to stop. It was a painful decision that left a lasting imprint.

Several years later, almost unexpectedly, I found myself photographing adolescent girls — mostly in New York and Buenos Aires, the cities where I live and work. Many of these girls were around the same age my daughters would have been and I realized that what started unconsciously evolved into a way of processing grief.

As I spent time with these girls, I was moved by their presence — the way they expressed themselves in front of the camera, their eagerness to be photographed, they vulnerability and at times surprising self assurance. The photographs became reflections of the experience I never had, of the life I imagined but never lived. The work became about absence, loss and memory.

I also became aware of the moment we are living in—the power of photography in shaping identity and self-image, and how being seen can feel like a form of existence. This tension between inner self and outward projection drew me to artists like Rineke Dijkstra, whose work invites us to observe that delicate exchange, and Diane Arbus, who explored the complexity of identity through portraiture. Adolescent Girls has since become a long-term project. It is an exploration of identity and the complex transition young girls go through. www.josefinafmoranfoto.com

Clair Robins

Clair Robins

Dana Stirling

Robins is a photographic visual artist and Further Education educator based in Leicester, UK. An instinctive and obsessive image-maker, her creative practice has evolved continuously throughout her life, shaped by both lived experience and sustained inquiry. Working fluidly across traditional analogue techniques and contemporary digital processes, her approach resists fixed categorisation, instead embracing hybridity, experimentation, and slow transformation. Photography for Robins is not merely a method of documentation but a way of thinking, collecting, and understanding the world.

Much of Robins’ artistic output originates from close observation of the everyday. The overlooked, the habitual, and the quietly familiar become sites of contemplation & potential. Through sustained attention to daily life, her work reveals how the mundane is charged with meaning, memory, and emotional residue. Nostalgia frequently surfaces but not as sentimentality, as a conceptual tool, allowing memories, fragments of the past, and constructed scenarios to intertwine. These elements often provoke questions rather than answers, inviting viewers to reflect on their own personal histories and shared cultural experiences.

Central to Robins’ practice is storytelling. Her visual language is multi-layered combining narrative suggestion with aphoristic humour and subtle irony. Compositions are carefully constructed yet retain an intimacy that feels lived-in and personal. The collision of wit and vulnerability allows her work to oscillate between tenderness and critical reflection, offering moments of recognition that feel both deeply individual and universally resonant.

Still life and portraiture photography plays a significant role within her practice. Collections, artefacts, and memorabilia merge and collide, forming visual archives that speak to identity, memory, & belonging. Objects are never neutral; they carry traces of human presence, absence, and desire. Through the act of gathering and arranging, Robins creates quiet yet potent encounters between material culture and emotional narrative, where the domestic becomes symbolic and the personal becomes political.

Underlying her work is a persistent and passionate inquiry into fundamental questions: who we are, how we live, what we value, and what we choose to hold onto. Her photographs probe the complexities of existence, exploring relationships between people, objects, time, and place. In doing so, her practice connects on multiple levels from emotional, social, cultural, to philosophical, ultimately offering a reflective examination of our shared world.

It becomes increasingly clear that within Robins’ compelling creations, the mundane is never truly mundane. Instead, it is revealed as rich, fragile, humorous, and profoundly human, an ever-evolving landscape wheremeaning quietly resides, waiting to be noticed. www.clairrobins.com

Mathias Wasik

Mathias Wasik

Dana Stirling

I moved to New York in 2015 and quickly realized the city itself wasn't the subject for me – its people were. The streets felt like an endless theatre, with fleeting gestures, humor, and collisions that revealed the real New York. That's when street photography shifted for me from a long-time interest into a way of life.

I would rarely leave home without a camera. Sometimes I'd chase light across the city; sometimes I'd wait on a corner for everything to align. My style is candid, close, and colorful – rooted in patience, curiosity, and the belief that time is what makes a photograph.

Street photography is a meditative process for me. It slows me down in a city that never stops moving, helps me connect with strangers, and gives me a sense of belonging. For me, these images are both personal imprints and part of New York's living archive. mathiaswasik.com

Vera Laponkina

Vera Laponkina

Dana Stirling

Between autumn and spring  (Work in progress) | The Kaliningrad region is the westernmost territory of the country, located in Central Europe. It has no direct borders with Russia. Over its centuries-old history, this region has repeatedly changed its name and nationality: Prussia, the Teutonic Order, East Prussia, the Russian Empire, Germany and the Soviet Union. Different historical and socio-cultural contexts are intertwined here so intricately that they formed a special pattern. You can admire it, or you can try to decipher it and then the space removes the mask of provincialism and opens from a completely different side. Everything here is conducive to mystical duality - the fragility of perception. Europe and conventional "backyards", center and periphery, past and present, medieval architecture and modern buildings, forest-steppe and sea coast, Russia and the West - everything seems to exist simultaneously and yet does not exist at all.

The city and the region seemed to be frozen between the complete destruction of the German, the final overcoming of the Soviet Union and the creation of something new. But this is not the monochrome despair that often envelops small provincial towns. Rather, it is philosophical melancholy. Like a mosaic in a dilapidated church of the 15th century, which served as a granary during the Soviet era - a state of eternal off-season and a feeling of stopped time. Future and past forcibly separated by a hazy present. But despite everything, people continue to hope for the better and believe in miracles.

Rachel Jump

Rachel Jump

Dana Stirling

Everyone is Icarus | I remember when my 80-year-old grandfather attended my thesis exhibition before I graduated from RISD. After looking around the gallery at the photographs I made of my family and hometown, he said, “You know, Rachel, not everyone is going to put the work in to understand your art, because its challenging. 
“However, we are your family, and we are willing to do that for you.”

As someone who has been dedicatedly creating photographs of my family for over 15 years, I am still humbled by their unflinching- willingness to make themselves vulnerable to my lens. My practice explores and dissects the malleable nature of my family’s personal history. They represent a reinterpretation and examination of how individual family members react to hardship, and how trauma transforms individual perceptions of our collective family history. Recently, my photographs have been exploring the aftermath of my father’s genetic testing results. This unveiled a hereditary disorder that heightens his susceptibility to cancer. This revelation offered a possible glimpse into our future; a rare, yet ambivalent, gift.

This work is an exploration of my family and our efforts to provide comfort and resilience for one another in times of hardship. Through this collaborative project, we guide each other through the weight of newfound clarity, supporting one another as we confront how our lineage and shared experiences shape our sense of identity.

What aspects of ourselves do we choose to inherit, and what parts lie beyond our control? My photographs reveal not only the physical and psychological traits we are capable of inheriting, but how we decide to reconcile with that truth. Through this narrative, I hope to unveil the balance between acceptance and agency, highlighting my family’s recognition and defiance towards the path that has been carved out for us. www.racheljump.com

Elie Ranu

Elie Ranu

Dana Stirling

YOUR PARCEL IS COMING | An often-overlooked aspect of urban life is the ephemeral sculptures of discarded cardboard boxes and packaging, left on sidewalks, awaiting their final journey to the garbage truck. A weekly, monthly, or even bi-monthly event in more remote areas. This work explores the sculptural forms these piles of cardboard inadvertently take, turning mundane waste into objects of contemplation. Photographed at night with a harsh frontal flash, the series strips the scene of context, removing any temptation to romanticize the subject. What remains are these temporary monuments—fleeting relics of our consumption. The choice of low-contrast black and white reinforces this approach, reducing the piles to their geometric essence, shifting the focus from function to form.

To heighten the physical presence of the work, some images are altered using materials directly linked to the act of delivery—bubble wrap, staples, labels, adhesive tape. These interventions extend the subject beyond the image, embedding the accumulation into the very fabric of its existence, making the material more tangible, more present.

Yet, this project is far from being just a visual study. These accumulations of cardboard reflect the relentless consumerism and capitalist logic embedded in contemporary life. Receiving a package, once a rare event that didn’t warrant a dedicated collection day, has now become a daily ritual for many, highlighting how drastically our consumption habits have shifted over the past two decades.

Beyond their materiality, these boxes unwittingly reveal fragments of life. Their logos, labels, and sheer quantity sketch an economic portrait of the households that left them behind. But they also expose something more intimate: there are those who neatly stack their boxes, edges cut clean, arranged with precision, and others who discard them carelessly, torn, crumpled under their own weight. A methodical or chaotic personality, careful or rushed—each leaves an unconscious mark on the pavement, shaping the work of the waste collector. Every pile is a trace, a silent imprint of the home that produced it.

This language exists only for a few hours. Boxes left out late at night vanish by morning, swallowed by the garbage truck before the city wakes. This is the essence of the series: capturing what so few notice, what exists only in a fleeting in-between—a brief moment when the city is still asleep. To photograph them is to give presence to what disappears before it is even seen.

In a world saturated with images competing for attention through intensity and spectacle, this work stands apart in its restraint. It invites us to slow down, to reflect—not only on the forms emerging from our throwaway culture but also on the deeper narratives it carries: consumption, waste, and the inadvertent self-portraits we create, without realizing it, in cardboard. www.instagram.com/elieranu

Emma Jowdy

Emma Jowdy

Dana Stirling

The Meaning She Holds | The Meaning She Holds explores the relationship between two sisters. It represents their relationship as a unit, but also each as an individual entity. Observing the carefree intimate closeness takes me back to my childhood with my sisters. I photographed these moments, showing the closeness they carry, and bringing viewers into their world. Each photograph offers a perspective into their similarities, differences, and individualism. ‘The Meaning She Holds’ is a sister, a friend, a mentor, a companion, and everything in between. www.emmajowdy.com

Julia Wimmerlin

Julia Wimmerlin

Dana Stirling

(UN)CORNERED | I am a Ukrainian photographer residing in Switzerland. I photographed Ukrainian women who fled from war in their temporary homes in Switzerland. Dressed in the same clothes as on the day they ran, each woman’s story of escape is depicted in my portraits. Each is photographed in a corner, a metaphor of the Russian invasion. Having passed through the worst experience in their lives, none feels cornered now. They do their best to adapt to a new culture, support their families and contribute to Ukraine’s victory.

I tried to imagine, if it were me, what would I pack: having no time, no space in the evacuation vehicle, and no idea if I’d ever see home again. Beyond the bare necessities, I asked each woman to show what she packed. The results were often surprising, even to the women themselves. Each item became a symbol of their homes and their once peaceful lives.

Jarod Polakoff

Jarod Polakoff

Dana Stirling

Familiar Alien  | Familiar Alien contends with the confines of verbal language, ruminating on the expansive, subversionary power of the photograph. Borne out of a creative practice deeply concerned with interiority and introspection, these images attempt to transpose this inward gaze on subject matter decidedly attuned to physicality, mechanizing sensory experience as a vehicle for emotional excavation. The work is peppered with small doses of fantasy as a means to express and explore the strange, often mystifying nature of our internal experience. Hands squeeze, fluids ooze, and bodies exist in relationship with foreign substances, invoking biomorphic forms, queer eroticism, and surrealist whimsy through the reimagination of commonplace motifs. These ambiguous interactions, malleable in their interpretation, not only invite, but welcome speculation and personal bias, embracing the free-associative, meandering nature of our subconscious. These are images attuned to the fundamental paradigms that define our existence—the corporeal, the cerebral, and the overlapping spaces that pervade. jarodpolakoff.com/portfolio

Nika Sandler

Nika Sandler

Dana Stirling

In light of the increasingly concerning news about the imminent fate of the oceans, I find myself contemplating the issue of extinction with greater frequency. In collaboration with artificial intelligence, I dive into ancient waters and capture the inhabitants whose existence was interrupted and whose evidence is preserved in fossils. The aim of this work is to illustrate the fragility of life and to prompt reflection on the current, rapid extinction in which humanity plays a pivotal role. 

Yusif Zadeh

Yusif Zadeh

Dana Stirling

The project was born at a time when the world stood still in anticipation of the unknown. Suddenly, familiar spaces became motionless, streets emptied, and cities turned into backdrops devoid of their usual human presence. A shift in rhythm changed the way we perceive our surroundings: places we once considered mere backgrounds to daily life became independent narratives, revealing the beauty of silence and the depth of the ordinary.

At its core, this project explores the quiet transformations of the city, shaped by shifting histories. Through a minimalist vision, it captures the subtle traces of change—empty spaces, evolving structures, and the quiet resilience embedded in the urban environment. Rather than focusing on overt signs of upheaval, the work highlights the small, often overlooked details that reveal how cities adapt, rebuild, and redefine themselves over time.

It is an observation of transition, where simplicity becomes a language for memory, continuity, and renewal. The author captures moments when space speaks for itself, when light, form, and the absence of familiar hustle and bustle take on special significance. The photographs transport the viewer into a world where every detail is filled with meaning, where the absence of people reveals unexpected symmetry, the purity of lines, and the hidden rhythm of the urban environment. In these restrained compositions, absence carries as much weight as presence, and the gaps between past and present are felt in the spaces left behind.

The project raises the question of how our perception of space changed when the familiar became inaccessible and the well-known—unexpectedly new. The city is neither a monument to the past nor a vision of the future—it is a quiet negotiation between what remains and what is yet to come. This project serves as a reminder of a time when the world slowed down, allowing us to see our surroundings differently—with attention, with reverence, and with a desire to find beauty in places where it had previously gone unnoticed.

Georgiana Feidi

Georgiana Feidi

Dana Stirling

Imagine our planet Earth as an independent living entity, undergoing its own cycles of rest, regeneration, and transformation. Chrysalis explores this idea, portraying the Earth in a state of slumber, where the natural world becomes a cocoon for unseen changes. Through surreal imagery and ethereal blue tones, I delve into the interconnectedness between nature, the cosmos, and humanity, where the natural elements blended with the human presence reflect the Earth's quiet metamorphosis.

By extensively editing the images, I aim to amplify their surreal qualities, blending reality and imagination to evoke a dreamlike, otherworldly atmosphere. The human body becomes a symbol of transformation, mirroring the Earth's regenerative process and the deep connection between humans and the natural world.

This series invites reflection on the delicate cycles of renewal that govern both nature and ourselves. Just as the chrysalis shelters a transformation in silence, so too does the Earth move through its quiet rhythms, inviting us to recognize our place within its continuous cycle of growth and change.

Angela Ferrotti

Angela Ferrotti

Dana Stirling

Until the Sun and Moon Go Down | So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. (T.S. Eliot)

Landing on Alicudi feels like pioneering an unknown land, where enchantment instantly seduces or repels. The island only received electricity in the 1990s and continues to resist modernisaton, partly due to its unique location and layout. Beyond its status as an extreme destination, this microcosm's nuances and stark dualities reveal a reality rich with allure, shaped by its relationship with the natural elements, profound silences, and the mythology of the Aeolian Archipelago.

"Until the Sun and Moon Go Down" is an analogical tale intertwining reality and fiction, reflecting on the ways we inhabit the modern world while offering glimpses into the realm of night and dreams. The island, with its rugged nature only partially tamed by humans and its direct relationship with everything, invites one to play with perception and rediscover the hidden depths of the mind. www.angelaferrotti.com

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