Chance Encounters in The Valley of Lights

May 18, 2023

Chance Encounters in the Valley of Lights tells the story of an unsolved extraterrestrial case from 1980s Todmorden, West Yorkshire. Photographer Rik Moran combines original imagery with never-before-seen archival material to investigate the possible alien abduction of PC Alan Godfrey. In illuminating one of small-town England’s most unlikely protagonists, Chance Encounters unearths another other-worldly mystery along the way.

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Conrado Velasco is a photographer and art director born and educated in the Philippines. He currently divides his time between Ireland and Germany and here we present you his body of work Interior Design in the Age of Extinction. By Velasco’s own admission, he tends to look at the environment in zoos as a theatre for the uncanny, exuding the sense of something being ever so slightly off. They are “illusory spaces” devoid of the natural habitat and surroundings of its animal occupants — there ar
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mnngful Originals

mnngful Members

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.

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.

Ashima Yadava
US
,
San Franscisco

Photographer based in San Franscisco, California Born in New Delhi, India, Ashima now lives in San Francisco, California. She works in digital and analog methods including medium, and 4x5 large format. With the camera as her conduit, Ashima believes in art as a means to social activism and reform. Her work is rooted in documentary practice with a keen focus on issues of gender equality, race, and social justice. Like If Hands Could Speak, which deals with domestic violence in the South Asian community in the Bay Area.

Louis Sartori
UK
,
London

Independent Photojournalist and Writer focusing on matters of cultural obscurity, documenting groups/spaces on the borders of popular recognition.

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).

Alan Gignoux
UK
,
London

Documentary photographer born in the United States and now based in London. Gignoux has been working as a professional documentary photographer with photographic agencies and independently since 2000. He also works as a cameraman on documentary film projects. Recent film work includes “We made Every Living Thing from Water” and “A Letter from Venezuela.” His award-winning work has been exhibited all over the world.

Tommy Lee Grimmer
UK
,
Norfolk

Photographer based in Norfolk, East of England. Predominantly working on short and long-term personal projects as well as accepting regular commissions of all sizes and budgets. His work specialises in representative documentary, personal identities and the relationships we form with different aspects of our lives.

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.

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.

Aaron Chown
UK
,
London

Staff Photographer with The Press Association based in London, the National News Agency for the UK and Ireland an editorial photographer, with a 1st class degree in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from The University of Gloucestershire. Covering features, breaking news, politics, royals & sport.

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.

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."

Lewis Bush
UK
,

Photographer, educator and curator working across media and platforms to visualise the activities of powerful organisations, practices, and technologies. Since 2012 his practice has explored issues ranging from the aggressive redevelopment of London, to the systemic inequalities of the art world. Recent works include Shadows of the State, which examines the democratic deficit of intelligence gathering, and Wv.B which examines the dark histories of space exploration. He is currently working on a long-term project about computer vision which runs in parallel with an ESRC funded PhD at the London School of Economics. He is also course leader of the MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography (online) course at London College of Communication.

jose artur macedo
PT
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Ponte de Sor

Self-taught photographer, based in Ponte de Sor (PT)

Sushavan Nandy
IN
,
Kolkata

Documentary photographer based in Kolkata, working primarily with Barcroft Media. His work focuses on issues of climate change, human crisis, society, and culture. His works have been published in various international publications which include The Guardian, Daily Mail, CNN among many. Sushavan lives in Naihati town in West Bengal, India and is currently working on long-term photographic works.

Stories worth seeing

mnngful is a platform supporting independent documentary photography & photojournalism.
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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.

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