Three ZEKE Award recipients will present their winning projects and discuss doing documentary work in different parts of the world.
Speakers: Sofia Aldinio Nicolò Filippo Rosso Ashkan Shabani
Location: Online
Presented by:
Supported by:
Our Online Sessions are proudly supported by our partners PhotoWings.
ZEKE Award recipients Sofia Aldinio, Nicolò Filippo Rosso, and Ashkan Shabani will present their winning projects.
Aldinio’s project, “Awake in the Desert Land”, documents how climate change is uprooting small, inland, and coastal communities in Baja California, Mexico.
Rosso’s project, “Path Away”, documents thousands fleeing their homes in Central America as they cross through gang-controlled areas, deserts, and jungles–all made even harder by the pandemic– in often failed efforts to start a new life in America.
Shabani’s project, “Love, Fear, and Freedom”, explores the struggle to be gay in Iran, where any type of sexual activity outside a heterosexual marriage is forbidden and homosexual sex is punishable by death.
Sofia Aldinio is an Argentine-American documentary photographer and multimedia storyteller. She is currently based between Portland, Maine, and Baja California, Mexico. Her work uses collaborative practices to tell stories about home, immigration, climate change, and preserving natural and cultural heritage through an interdisciplinary process that uses photography, archival materials, illustrations, motion, audio, and written narratives.
Much of Aldinio’s documentary work amplifies stories of immigrants and refugees arriving in the American Northeast. She was awarded two grants through the Maine Arts Commission to develop community-based projects where immigrants explore belonging in a foreign place.
In 2022, she received the Kindling Fund Grant to develop an interdisciplinary storytelling workshop and exhibition within the immigrant community in Portland, Maine.
Nicolò Filippo Rosso is an Italian documentary photographer based in Colombia. Photographing in Latin America is often about witnessing stories of trauma, inequality, and injustices that have shattered the region for generations. Rosso tells stories of abandoned communities, mass migration crises, conflict, and climate change. Since 2018, after numerous editorial assignments documenting Venezuelan migration in Colombia, Rosso decided to work on that historical phenomenon personally. He started spending weeks and months in some of the border areas—walking along the migration routes with those who have no money to reach a major city or the next border by bus. In 2021, expanding an already-existing body of work, he traveled to Central America and Mexico to document the crossing of refugees and migrants into the United States. In addition to his personal and editorial work for magazines, newspapers, and NGOs, he often lectures about photography and journalism at universities in Colombia, Europe, and the United States.
Ashkan Shabani is a photographer and visual storyteller originally from Iran who is now based in Turkey. He started his career with a local news agency and then he began working for the Iranian Students News Agency. Since then, he has covered stories such as Iran’s presidential election, the Kermanshah earthquake, and the 2018 and 2019 floods in Iran for ISNA. Over the years, his focus has shifted away from journalistic photography to photography as art. Now Shabani mostly explores social experiences and human rights in Iran. He is currently working as a freelance photographer at Redux Pictures.
The Social Documentary Network (SDN), founded in 2008, is a global community of documentary photographers, editors, curators, NGOs, journalists, and others, who believe in the power of visual storytelling to build understanding and appreciation for the complexities, diversity nuances, wonders, and contradictions that abound in the world today.
Since our founding, the SDN website has featured more than 4,000 exhibits by nearly 3,000 photographers from all corners of the globe.
Our flagship publication, ZEKE: The Magazine of Global Documentary, is printed twice a year in print and year-round in digital, and features the most successful projects from the SDN website.
We also create gallery exhibitions, educational programs, lecture series, award programs, and portfolio reviews.
Recent stories on SDN and in ZEKE have explored sustainable solutions to the climate crisis, the war in Gaza, migration from Central America to the U.S., the war in Ukraine, the COVID-19 pandemic, the rising seas of Antarctica, life in Iran, asylum in America, teen mothers, and many other global themes.
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