Presence in the Absence

May 18, 2023

The story takes desolated buildings and structures as its starting point. Devoid of human presence, albeit designed and constructed by humans, these are places that were once the product of a utopian vision.

Recent Stories

Holidays — The Wait
Floriana Avellino captures the joy of going on a holiday and its little, often unnoticed moments in her project The Wait. The body of work focuses in particular on the moments before departure, which are often ignored as the main part of the “real” holiday tends to be what interests most.
Floriana Avellino
The Corona Couch
Nicola Lewis-Dixon is a multidisciplinary artist and photographer whose primary focus is the taboo subjects facing women in their everyday lives. She used the sofa in her family home as an anchor for what would eventually become her hugely prolific project The Corona Couch. When Dixon and her family found themselves locked in as millions of others around the world in March 2020 she thought that this would provide an opportunity like no other to explore family relationships and their intricacies.
Nicola Lewis-Dixon
Constructed Landscapes
Dafna Talmor’s Constructed Landscapes are the end result of many years of frustration caused by her own photographs. The images are taken in different countries, among which are Israel, Venezuela, the UK and the United States, but their initial purpose was nothing more than personal keepsakes. As Talmor accumulated a large archive, she became increasingly conscious that the photographs don’t show much about the places that they depict and they are just that — pictures of places she once visited. She decided to use them as her source material instead of photographs in their own right in order to create something new and this is how her ongoing series was born.
Dafna Talmor
"The situation is fucked up, but people are fucking great!"
Kharkiv, Ukraine on the first day of Russian invasion
Pavel Dorogoy
Branches of a Tree in Winter
Zak Dimitrov moved to London in 2015 and by 2018 he had been on over 100 dates. The man he was going out with at the time, Reggie, turned out to be, as cliche as it sounds, his photographic muse, partially caused by practicalities as he had very little spare time, all of which was spent with Reggie, and he had to take pictures for his final MA project.
Zak Dimirtov
The Steel Plant Mothers
Wilfully ignoring the pleas of the local and national population, the Ilva plant, Europe’s largest steel plant, is portrayed as prioritising profit over people's lives.
Valeria Mongelli
Exemplary Home
Exemplary Home is a documentary work exploring the north-western part of rural Bulgaria. It aims to illustrate the effects of rapid urbanisation, progressive globalisation and corruption on the most vulnerable parts of Bulgarian society.
Yassen Grigorov
The Invisible Wall
Paco Poyato brings us back a few decades to the times when the Berlin Wall divided Berlin and, subsequently, Germany into two parts — East and West.
Paco Poyato
Small Town Inertia
Jim Mortram’s Small Town Inertia is an ongoing project which shines a light on the real life consequences the so-called “A-word” is continuing to have on communities, over a decade since its introduction. It wreaks havoc on the most vulnerable in our society and it targets those who can least afford basic necessities.
Jim Mortram
Beach Boulevard
Brian O’Neill is an Illinois-based sociologist and photographer whose work looks at the human condition and society’s relationship to nature. He investigates the various meanings of “industry” and how it affects local communities and environments. Beach Boulevard, his first photographic publication, is a small spiral-bound book in a small edition of 100. Rather than probing the typical documentary question “what’s going on here” it delves deeper and wonders how we actually got to our current sta
Brian O'Neil

mnngful Originals

mnngful Members

Gianluca Urdiroz
UK
,
London

Image maker and researcher based in London, UK. Whether it’s fathers & sons, humans & nature, or lockdown and the psyche, my work explores the dynamics between two elements.

David Lintern
UK
,
Kingussie

Photojournalist and writer working across the outdoor and environmental sectors, with over a decade of experience creating stories for organisations and magazines including National Trust for Scotland, Visit Cairngorms, John Muir Trust, BBC, the Guardian, Slow Ways as well as most of the UK outdoor press. I’m particularly interested in the links between place and people, and between natural and cultural history. David also works privately as a photo tutor and guide across the Highlands, and the author of The Big Rounds.

Amy Romer
CA
,

Documentary photographer, journalist telling compelling stories that elevate issues around human rights, social justice and the environment – particularly climate change. That’s why I’m passionate about helping social purpose organizations tell powerful stories through photography and video.

Milda Vysniauskaite
LT
,

Designer and photographer, after her studies at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, she continues her professional career back in Lithuania. She works with themes of gender, LGBTQ+ and masculinity. The main subject of her photographs is the male gender and social constructs around it.

Johan Brooks
JP
,
Tokyo

Documentary and street photographer based out of Tokyo, Japan. Born in the UK, he grew up in NYC, and eventually found his way to Japan where he has been living for over 10 years. He is a member of the VoidTokyo photography collective. His photography is on permanent display at the Crunchyroll HQ in San Francisco and was recently exhibited at Terranova House in Tokyo.

Dylan Halvorsen
ZA
,
Kempton Park, Gauteng

I am a South African based photographer, writer, and graphic designer. I am currently studying a BSc in IT and seeing where it takes me.

Stephen Leslie
UK
,

Film director, screenwriter and photographer based in London "About 20 years ago I started to take photographs with a small point and shoot camera. What began as a simple way to keep visually alert in between directing jobs soon morphed in to a daily diary of images and eventually became an obsession I've been struggling to contain ever since."

Marc Wilson
UK
,
Bath

Documentary photographer working on long-term documentary projects, such as his previous work, completed in 2014, ‘The Last Stand’ and his current work, ‘A wounded landscape’. Marc tells stories through his photography, focusing at times on the landscape itself, and the objects found on and within it, and sometimes combining landscape, documentary, portrait and still life, along with audio recordings of interviews and sounds, to portray the mass sprawling web of the histories and stories he is retelling.

Dafna Talmor
UK
,
London

Artist and lecturer based in London whose practice encompasses photography, spatial interventions, curation and collaborations. Her photographs are included in public collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, Deutsche Bank, Hiscox and in private collections internationally. Her first monograph — Constructed Landscapes - published by Fw:Books was released in October 2020 and longlisted for the 2021 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award.

Vera Hadzhiyska
UK
,
Portsmouth

Multi-disciplinary artist and curator based in Portsmouth, England. Her practice is informed by the study of migration, cultural and national identity, history and collective memory. Her work begins autobiographically, tracing family narratives and shared traumas. Through the use of photography, archival documents, audio and video installations Hadzhiyska examines historical and political events in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe, their impact on people’s lives and identity.

James Hopkirk
UK
,
London

Documentary photographer, journalist. Began his career as a local newspaper reporter in Kent before moving to The Sunday Times and ITV. Spent six years as Editor of IdeasTap, a charity that helped young people to build careers in the arts and media. As a freelance writer and photographer James worked on stories in Afghanistan, Benin, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, India, Rwanda, Somalia and Uganda.

Keith Osborn
UK
,
Fakenham

I have been making photographs professionally for over 12 years. I focus on self-initiated documentary and art projects, combining that with commercial work for business, charity and non-profit clients.

Ardelle Schneider
DE
,
Düsseldorf

Photographer based in Düsseldorf, Germany, born and raised in Hanover. Schneider is studying photography for a master's degree at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen. In 2020 she completed her bachelor's degree in communication design at the Peter Behrens School of Arts (HSD/PSBA) in Düsseldorf. Her work "Familystories" can be seen in the group exhibition "Stopover" at Museum Folkwang (Essen, Germany) until February 6th.

Nieves Mingueza
ES
,

Artist, based in London. Her conceptually driven and intimate practice often interweaves images with research, documentary photography, archival material, collage, text, film, and installation. Bridging the space between the personal and political, she explores and activates the archives to address social and gender issues. In 2019 her first monograph book was published by IIKKI books editorial. Her work has been exhibited widely including installations at Royal Academy of Arts, Saatchi Gallery, Copeland Gallery, Tate Britain (UK), Fondazione Giorgio Cini (IT) and PhotoEspana (SP), among others. Mingueza’s work has been reviewed by multiple magazines as Der greif, Lenscratch, Blind, L’oeil de la Photographie, Metal, All About Photo, Analog, Yogurt, fisheye, Witty and Lensculture, among others.

Tony Fouhse
CA
,
Ottawa

Photographer based in Ottawa, Canada His work has attracted international attention and been featured in publications such as The New York Times, The British Journal of Photography, American Photography 26, CV Photo, Time magazine, Wired and Vie des Arts. His photographs have been exhibited internationally, most recently at the Noorderlicht International Fotofestival in Groningen, The Netherlands (2019); Cortona On The Move photo festival, Italy and, as part of the Beyond Addiction/Reframing Recovery exhibition, in NYC and Rochester, N.Y. (2020).

Stories worth seeing

mnngful is a platform supporting independent documentary photography & photojournalism.

Thanks to passionate storytellers, we learn about matters that otherwise stay neglected. Stories that matter, but have not been covered enough are captured and told by passion-driven photographers and journalists.

They create because they care about the world they live in and tell us about matters beyond our eyesight.Their work is often driven by pure enthusiasm, fuelled by own beliefs and dreams for a better world. That's why such independent work is worth special attention.

mnngful is here to support the meaningful stories they tell.

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