Category: People

Yanrong Guo

Miss (2019)

This work was taken in the Daliang Mountains, located in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture; the largest settlement of Yi people in China. The Daliang Mountains are located at the junction of Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces, in the southwest of Sichuan, and they cover an area of more than 60,000 square kilometres, with a total population of 4,730,400.

There are more than ten ethnic groups such as the Han, Yi, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Naxi Peoples living in the territory. Young people in the mountains move out of the province to work, leaving the elderly and children at home. The old man in the picture is missing his relatives far away.

Ly Hoang Long

Red Net Mending (2020)

Ly Hoang Long is a freelance photographer living in Vietnam. His favourite subjects are of traditional and cultural activities.

This picture shows fishermen and their family members mending a net before their next trip out on their boat in the province of Ninh Thuan, in the South Central Coast region of Vietnam. Hoang Long has won over 200 national and international awards since 1999, including winning the Asia Pacific Region category in the 2014 CBRE Urban Photographer of the Year.

Ruan Kezhuang

Fingerprints of the Earth (2019)

Ruan Kezhuang is a freelance photographer.

This image was taken in Mount Wuyi, Fujian Province, China in September 2019. The vast tea farmland is magnificent, shaped like human fingerprints and dotted with several women picking tea leaves.

Chen Mingchong

Before Going to the Sea (2019)

Chen Mingchong uses photography to enrich her personal and daily life; she believes it requires not only good equipment and technique, but also deep-thinking and wisdom to capture the world and its peoples.

This image was taken in Myanmar, 2019 and shows two fisherman preparing their boats before travelling out to sea.

Javier Clemente Martinez

Potosi Mines (Since 1545) (2020)

Javier Clemente Martinez is a freelance photographer whose work focuses on social and humanitarian issues, the conservation of culture, and the environment.

"The mountains also cry”

The Mines of Potosí were and still remain an important mining center located in the Cerro Rico de Potosí, a mountain in present-day Bolivia. Over 4,000m high and laced with miles of tunnels, the silver excavated there by indigenous slaves began in the 16th century and contributed to the wealth of the Spanish Empire and all of Europe during the colonisation of the Americas. The city of Potosí still lives in the shadow of Cerro Rico and the exploitation of the mines continues to form the basis of the local economy. Two centuries after declaring independence from Spain, Bolivia has failed to put in place measures to protect the almost 15,000 workers, including children, who continue to lose their lives due to the very hard conditions.

At 80m below ground level, the workers experience temperatures of 40°C and the air is a lethal combination of moisture, dust and particles of silver, sulfur and arsenic. Few of those who work in these painful conditions exceed 45 years of life expectancy but, even so, men descend daily into the bowels of the mountain. Many of them know of no other way to support their families.

"Women were always considered bad luck for the mine. They have been working alongside men for a long time."

The difference in remuneration, poor knowledge of mining work, danger in the underground levels (exposed to a series of accidents), and shared beliefs among miners that "work inside mines is not for women", causes them to feel diminished and undervalued. Thus, a majority choose to leave the shafts and engage in open-pit mining work, practically in clearing or tailings.

Li Ming

Gathering Stones in the Sand (2020)

Li Ming's photographic subjects range from landscapes and people to wildlife and documenting environmental change. He began experimenting with aerial photography in April 2018 and has won numerous national and international awards including winning the Top Ten Chinese Photographers in the World competition in both 2018 and 2019, in the Landscape category.

In drought season, people excavated the riverbank of a river in northern Bangladesh to collect rocks for construction. In the image, the workers were collecting rocks in the round pits.

Rob Ferguson

The Great Outdoors (2019)

Rob Ferguson FRGS, is a writer and photographer, and uses human-powered expeditions on foot or by bicycle to explore and bring back stories from around the world on varied subjects, from climate impact to human geography.

At a time of renewed and marketed interest in 'adventure', The Great Outdoors brings home the juxtaposition and reality of survival in the growing global, social epidemic of homelessness; the image is an attempt to facilitate a better understanding and empathy of life without shelter.

The Great Outdoors was also the title for a series of talks Ferguson gave in London, exploring the experience of homelessness using attendees' experiences of hardship outdoors to build empathy and understanding of a global crisis.

Dong Min

Back From Fishing (2020)

Dong Min's image was taken in Xiapu in January 2020.

Xiapu, China, is located in the north-eastern part of Fujian Province and is the oldest county in eastern Fujian. Xiapu's long coastline, shallow sea, sandy beaches and beautiful mudflats provide rare and unique scenery for photography.

Sandipani Chattopadhyay

Clean the City (2019)

Sandipani Chattopadhyay is a passionate amateur photographer whose award-winning work focuses on people, travel, culture, current affairs and the environment.

Scavenging is a source of income for most unskilled people in developing countries. Manual scavenging is a term used mainly in India for the physical removal of untreated human waste from bucket toilets or pit latrines by hand with buckets and shovels in urban areas.