Yana Hryhorenko from Ukraine defines a new perspective of beauty in her series Disturbing Beauty, created in the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Her images contain the unexpressed anxiety of herself and her fellow Ukrainian women.

Exploring his own concept of beauty, Iranian-American photographer Ashkan Sahihi captures self-assured female dancers who embody both power and fragility and challenge conventional gender and body norms.

The series The Moon 00 by Vietnamese photographer Duy Dao combines memories and imagination to confront and process his isolophobia brought about by the lockdowns and photographer Annick Donkers from Belgium delves into the personal, psychological, and collective aspects of people’s belief in aliens in her series Un-identified.

French photographer Maud Evrard weaves together the realms of human, animal, and plant life in her series Kosmogonía, showcasing the interconnectedness of these living organisms.

In Fragments of Being and Belonging Nigerian photographer Chidinma Nnorom explores themes of identity and familial dynamics in her collages, inserting self-portraits onto images from her father’s archive from 1970’s era Nigeria that connect her present with the past while Antonio Rodriguez from Guatemala reflects on memories of his exiled grandfather, that reshape his family's identity and his own in his series Tacaná.

Rodrigo Illescas' project The Cathedrals of Nostalgia is a poetic vision of abandoned towns in Argentina and Slovakian Petra Basnakova's Born of Sand and Sun points to the gradual disappearance of the Bedouin population in the desert of Palestine. 

In his study Type 1.5.11, Russian photographer Maxim Zmeyev uses gaming as a metaphor to question the state of the world and our place in it, whether in the physical realm or a virtual one.

With the exception of Maxim Zmeyev who combines both the virtual and traditional photographic processes, the photographic work here is still very much rooted in the traditions of photographic image making.

AI is here to stay, that’s inevitable but let’s stay open-minded, continue to create thought provoking work and know that it’s up to us as individuals and as the collective to create a utopian world.

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

Enjoy issue #8!