While I Was Sleeping

May 18, 2023

While I Was Sleeping is the third part of a trilogy of projects that came out of that shift (the other two being After the Fact and Endless Plain). These projects, by and large, use documentary techniques and the resulting images look like documentary photographs, but they are not intended to document an event.

Recent Stories

The body keeps the score
The Body Keeps the Score takes its mysterious title from a book he found on his mother’s shelf when he was clearing out her house after her death. It refers to how trauma, something most would consider to have purely psychological consequences, can actually be internalised and transpire within the physical body rather than just the mind.
David Lintern
Legacy
Legacy is a response to the impact of the year of City of Culture 2017 in her hometown of Hull, within the city’s spaces and places. The work is a synthesis of careful research done within the various communities and organizations involved that were affected during and after the impact of the year of culture.
Verity Adriana
The Sunshiners. Code Red in Green China
Plastic pollution may seem to be something that doesn’t have a monumental impact on our daily lives right now, but issues like climate change and pollution do not take a gradual curve. They do not have to slowly deteriorate, kindly giving us enough time to notice that something is
Daniel Hinks
"The situation is fucked up, but people are fucking great!"
Kharkiv, Ukraine on the first day of Russian invasion
Pavel Dorogoy
The Image of a Place
Three winters ago Anne Erhard’s father unexpectedly passed away on a journey far away from home. A journey which, like all journeys, he was meant to return from. His untimely death was distressing to his young daughter but at the same time it reminded her how fragile human life is — we never know when or how we will meet our demise. The only certainty is that eventually, we will. > Death is a question of containment. For a long time, attempts at understanding felt like trying to empty the ocean
Anne Erhard
Southtown
Tommy Lee Grimmer is a young photographer based in Great Yarmouth, East England, which is, in fact, the part of the country which is the furthest East. His project Southtown explores his hometown, the area where he grew up, its physical environment and community as well as the change of his perspective from a child to now an adult. © Tommy Lee Grimmer | SouthtownThe text accompanying Southtown is nostalgic and evocative of innocent childhood — Kickpost, a game similar to hide and seek, late ni
Tommy Lee Grimmer
On the first day of the Russian invasion
We are contacting photographers and authors who work in Ukraine to help spread their stories. Here's the first one. Please share and join us in supporting Ukrainians — the info is below. On the first day of the invasion, nobody was ready for HOW nightmarish it would be, nobody believed that this will end up with rocket strikes targeting civilian neighborhoods of Kiyv and other cities. So, it is where we are now. Evgeny Maloletka [https://www.evgenymaloletka.com/], a Ukrainian freelance photojo
Evgeniy Maloletka
In-A-Gadda-Da-England
National oddities and peculiarities were the starting point for Edward Thompson’s project In-A-Gadda-Da-England. Born and bred in the U.K., he offers his viewers the perspective of an insider who had spend his whole life surrounded by British culture
Edward Thompson
After The Fall
After the Fall is a body of work by Stewart Weir documenting the fall of the Taliban when the city of Herat was taken over by the Northern Alliance. The images were taken almost 20 years ago, in 2002, shortly after the Twin Towers in the US fell on September
Stewart Weir
Presence in the Absence
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.
Karin van de Wiel

mnngful Originals

mnngful Members

Philip Butler
UK
,
Worcestershire

Documentary photographer focusing primarily on capturing the remains of Great Britain’s inter-war architecture. Philip has published two books focusing on this work; ‘Odeon Relics’ (2019 on ADM) and London Tube Stations 1924-1961 (2023 on FUEL).

Jan Enkelmann
UK
,
London

Documentary, street and travel photographer He is dividing his time between commercial work and personal projects. Most of Jan’s photography work is concerned with observations of people in public spaces.

Rik Moran
US
,

Nathan Benkemoun
FR
,
Montreuil

Nathan Benkemoun (1983) is a French photographer born in Nice and based in Montreuil (France). In his work, he tries to illustrate how people interact with environment such as nature, cities or open spaces. He also works in making concrete some common human feelings and sensations.

Zak Waters
UK
,
London

Photographer, Founder of CAMERA & Course Leader in FE Photography & Multimedia.

Neal Haddaway
UK
,
London

I am a documentary photographer/photojournalist and researcher working on topics related to environmental and social justice. My work focuses on human's connections with nature, and society's efforts to protect our planet.

Bojan Fürst
CA
,
St. John's

I am a photographer, writer, radio maker and geographer based in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada with a passion for documentary work of all kind because "The things of this world exist, they are; you can't refuse them."

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.

Nathalie Bertrams
GR
,
Athens

I am a freelance photojournalist and National Geographic Explorer reporting on environmental conflicts, human rights and social justice. My work is published in The Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Al Jazeera, BBC, De Groene Amsterdammer and NRC. I also make TV documentaries for Arte.

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).

Annie Y Saldana
PR
,
San Juan

Fine Art photographer, educator, curator. Founder at PRISMA Art Projects.

Cheryl Newman
UK
,
London

Artist and independent curator of photography living in London. She recently completed and MA in Photography Arts at the University of Westminster (Distinction) Her personal practice explores her history though archive and family images and the environment of memory For the past three years she has been working with the Gaia Foundation to commission and curate We Feed the World, a photographic global adventure documenting the lives of family and peasant farmers for an exhibition which premiered at the Barge house Gallery, London, in Autumn 2018. She curated 209 Women, one of the highest profile exhibitions of 2018 in which all the female MP’s in the UK Parliament were photographed by women photographers to celebrate 100 years of suffrage and which moved to Open Eye Gallery Liverpool in February 2019 and is now part of the Parliamentary Art collection. For more than fifteen years she was the Photography Director of the award-winning Telegraph Magazine where she raised the profile of the magazine and commissioned intelligent and inventive photography worldwide.

Nicola Lewis-Dixon
UK
,
Preston

Multidisciplinary artist based in Preston, who comes from a predominately photographic background and has just completed a photography MA at UCLan. Lewis-Dixon’s work is autobiographical and considers the social construct of women’s lived experience and shifting identity in today's society. Lewis-Dixon’s approach is research lead, highly expressive and conceptual in her visual output. Lewis-Dixon’s work explores and tests multiple methodological processes such as documentary, experimental, alternative darkroom processes, embroidery and most recently multi-sensory installations requiring video and soundscape. In her most recent work, Nicola takes us on her own healing journey, reclaiming her body following cervical cancer and hysterectomy. Both projects ‘Goosebumps’ and ‘Healing with Nature’ are ongoing as they are used therapeutically to rediscover her own broken alienated body and heal.

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."

Edward Thompson
UK
,

Documentary photographer focused on various subjects over the years covering environmental issues, socio-political movements, subcultures, everyday life and the consequences of war. He had a life-changing experience with an early apprenticeship with the Russian photographer Sergey Chilikov, whom he met at the Arles Photography Festival in 2001. That summer Ed stayed with Sergey in Paris and learnt the value of shooting everyday life, eating fried fat and drinking red wine. Sergeys friend Gueorgui Pinkhassov told him how photographing the everyday can allow you to touch at something great. And it did.

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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