Photographers

Lucas Lenci

Brazilian artist Lucas Lenci works across commercial, nature and architectural photography. His images run to the contemplative, a celebration of formal geometry. When they appear in his work, humans tend to function as visual accents in patterns greater than themselves. But in his aerial shots of logging in the Amazon, Lenci's abstract aesthetic emphasizes human agency's mark on the environment.

 

Shehzad Noorani

Bangladesh-born Shehzad Noorani grew up poor in Pakistan; he later emigrated to Canada. There is a confrontational urgency to much of Noorani's photography – the grainy, unstaged feel of frontline reportage. His subjects tend to be marginalized individuals and groups: refugees, sex workers, carbon-choked children employed to break batteries. In this Vancouver-set series, Noorani documents indigenous citizens' fight for residential rights. 

 

Vicky Roy

Vicky Roy lives and works in India. His photography comments elliptically on notions of progress, incorporating industry and infrastructure into majestic panoramas. Dotting or criss-crossing Roy's black-and-white palette are modern India's roads, factories, and other structures both functioning and derelict. Their presence disrupts the standard grammar of landscape photography: they question the nature of development, its footprint and its legacy.

 

Kabir Dhanji

Kenyan-born Kabir Dhanji's camera has snapped humanitarian crises, African nomadic life and Australia's outback. His is a 'skewed lens, forever learning to see and see again'. In this series on Nairobi's slums, he photographs darkness: where electricity is a luxury, every night's descent is a new threat to development. Single lit venues become communal focal points, concentrating most human activity.

 

Farzana Wahidy

For the women of Afghanistan, simply being photographed can be an act of courage. When both photographer and subject are women, patriarchal codes are doubly challenged. But this also creates a space of intimacy and solidarity. Afghan photographer Farzana Wahidy's work embraces women who defy social conventions; women who live under them; women victimized by them; and women bullied into horrific self-destruction.