Emerging Lens: Safety, Visibility, Justice, and Hope for the Future is an interactive multimedia exhibition which explores the many ways new and emerging documentary photographers covering underrepresented stories across the globe have pushed the boundaries of traditional photojournalism and storytelling. This project highlights and celebrates global and community-centered photojournalism which addresses pressing and underreported human rights issues around the world and connects them to our local communities.

Each work in this exhibition was created by new and early career documentary photographers through ART WORKS Projects’ Emerging Lens Fellowship, which provides unrestricted grants, production support, and professional mentorship for new and early career documentary photographers. Despite representing a diverse international community, their work connects to universal themes, including a desire for safety, visibility, justice, and hope for the future. By embracing these themes, their work often forms new conversations and connections far beyond their regional context, eliciting empathy and mutual understanding. The photographers shown here make use of new mediums, participatory models, and community engagement, which represent an evolution of the field toward greater accessibility, activation, and voice.

While global human rights and social justice concerns seem insurmountable, our stories, though personal, often traverse borders and understanding.

 

About the Artists

Astrig Agopian (2023-24 Fellow) is a French-Armenian reporter, photojournalist and documentary filmmaker based in Paris. Her work focuses on the intersection between geopolitics, territory, marginality, and memory. She highlights identity struggles, human rights issues and the long term consequences of conflicts, mainly covering Europe, the Caucasus and the Middle East. Agopian was a featured journalist in UNESCO’s 2023 exhibition: Safety of women journalists: the stories behind the faces of women journalists. Astrig’s project “Like There’s No Tomorrow” is featured in this exhibition.

Mark Anthony Brown Jr.(2021-22 Fellow) is a journeyman of sorts. Not dedicated to a single given location for too long, he currently lives and works between Cincinnati, Ohio, Durham, North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia. Mark’s art practice is research driven and interdisciplinary, utilizing photography, sculpture, drawing and painting with an interest in vernacular aesthetic practices and sensibilities, the manifestation of African retentions in the diaspora, semiotics, and archival practices. His work has been exhibited nationally including at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Mint Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia and Block Gallery in Raleigh, North Carolina, and he has received various fellowships and awards including the Nexus Grant from Atlanta Contemporary (2022), and a Visiting Researcher Fellowship at Wilson Special Collection Library at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2023). Mark’s project “Forest Cove: All of the Above” is featured in this exhibition.

Megan Farmer (2019-20 Fellow) is a visual journalist at Seattle’s NPR affiliate station, KUOW Public Radio. She previously worked at the Omaha World-Herald. Originally from upstate New York, Megan studied photojournalism at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2013. Megan’s work has appeared in NPR, The Associated Press, The New York Times, Science Magazine, Bleacher Report, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Omaha World-Herald, and The Seattle Times. Megan’s project “Life After a Hate Crime” is featured in this exhibition.

Brittany Greeson (2020-21 Fellow) is a Detroit, Michigan based photographer and grew up in the mountains of North Carolina and in Western Kentucky. Her work examines the consequences of economic divestment and the daily life of the American working-class through long-form visual narratives and portraiture. She studied Photojournalism and Sociology at Western Kentucky University and was an international student at the Danish School of Media and Journalism in 2014. Prior to working independently, she interned at The Oregonian, The Roanoke Times, The Flint Journal, The Washington Post, and the San Antonio Express-News. Brittany’s project “A City in Limbo” is featured in this exhibition.

Isadora Kosofsky (2016-2018 Fellow) is a documentary photographer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She began photographing at the age of fourteen, documenting individuals in hospice care. Isadora often takes an immersive approach to visual storytelling, spending months and years embedded in the lives of the people she shadows. She is a recipient of a 2018 Grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and the Royal Photo Society named her one of one hundred “heroines” in photography worldwide. Isadora is a TED Fellow, part of a network of 450 global change makers, and gave a talk at TED 2018 in Vancouver. Isadora’s project “Vinny and David” is featured in this exhibition.

Emmanuel Guillén Lozano (2016-17 Fellow) is a Mexican photographer and photo editor currently based in New York City. His work focuses on social issues, human rights, and the effects of violence. His long-term projects in Mexico document the toll of the Drug War and the consequences it has brought to communities around the country that have suffered forced disappearances and killings, both at the hands of the cartels and the Mexican state security forces. He currently works as a photo editor on projects for Google at Blink Media, and has taught photojournalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Emmanuel’s project “43: The Aftermath of a Disappearance” is featured in this exhibition.

Mustafa Saeed (2022-23 Fellow) is a Somali-born artist based in Hargeisa, Somaliland. His work combines different mediums including photography, graphics, and sound to explore socio-political issues including war, conflict and the environment. He is a contributor to Everyday Africa and the founder of Fankeenna, a youth-led art platform that houses a studio, gallery and workspace for local artists. In 2015 he was chosen for the Arab Documentary Program ADPP, and his work has been exhibited at Addis Foto Fest (Addis Ababa), Lumières d’Afriques (Paris), and UNSEEN Photo Fair (Amsterdam). Mustafa’s project “Heavy” is featured in this exhibition.

Rachel Woolf (2018-19 Fellow) is a Denver-based independent visual journalist. She specializes in documentary photography, videography, and portraiture. Her work aims to intimately show aspects of humanity intersecting with economic and social issues. She has been published in The New York Times, CNN, US News and World Report, Bloomberg, Education Week, Detroit Free Press, and The Detroit News. She graduated from Ithaca College with a B.A. in Documentary Studies, attended the Eddie Adams Workshop XXVII in 2014 and the Missouri Photo Workshop in 2015. Rachel’s project “Deported: An American Division // A Family Divided” is featured in this exhibition.

Emerging Lens: Safety, Visibility, Justice, and a Hope for the Future

Featuring: Various Artists

Curated by: Annalise Flynn Noah Hanna

Locations

ON VIEW AT: Container 9

View Location Details Download a detailed map of this location Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza

1 Water St
Brooklyn, NY 11201

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All images and materials courtesy of ART WORKS Projects and the artists through the Emerging Lens Fellowship.

• #Diversity
• #Emerging Talent
• #Global Stories
• #Group Show
• #Human Rights
• #mixed-media
• #Photojournalism
• #Social Justice