Following news reports of increasing numbers of young men from Afghanistan arriving on European shores as asylum seekers, McDonnell initiated a project with the so-called ‘Lost Boys of Afghanistan’, premiering this year at PHOTO 2022. The series was produced in direct collaboration with Assad Ullah (Kabul), using techniques passed down from his father. Assad hand-tinted silver gelatin fiber prints with his fingers and oil paints, creating this set of unique, colourised portraits. The resulting images are distinctly free of the objectifying Western lens that has dominated our perception of Afghanistan over the course of a decades long war.

Ross McDonnell is an Irish filmmaker and photographer based out of New York City. Ross moves between disciplines as Director, Cinematographer and Producer. In 2021 he won an Emmy Award for his Cinematography on The Trade and was shortlisted for the highly prestigious Prix Pictet in 2019 for his project, Limbs, which subsequently showed at the V&A Museum in London.

Internationally debuting at PHOTO 2022 in its largest showing to date, American Mirror is award-winning photographer Philip Montgomery’s dramatic chronicle of the United States at a time of profound change. Through his intimate and powerful reporting and signature black-and-white style, Montgomery reveals the fault lines in American society, from police violence and the opioid addiction crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic and the demonstrations in support of Black lives. Yet in his unflinching images we also see moments of grace and sacrifice, glimmers of solidarity, and tireless advocates for democracy. Like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans before him, Montgomery has made an unforgettable testament of a nation at a crossroads.

Philip Montgomery is a photographer whose work chronicles the fractured state of America. He is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Zeit Magazine. He has received numerous awards, including the National Magazine Award for feature photography for his work chronicling the opioid epidemic. His work has been exhibited at the ICP in New York, Foam Museum in Amsterdam, the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, Aperture Gallery in New York, Les Rencontres d’Arles in France, and the Deichtorhallen House of Photography in Germany. Montgomery’s monograph, American Mirror, was published by Aperture in Fall 2021.

Up to Us invites 22 Australian female designers to come together, across disciplines, to respond to the statement, “What if it is up to us?”, for Melbourne Design Week 2022.

The groundbreaking mixed media exhibition celebrates utopian thinking and explores the link between idealism and real societal change. It invites women to design the world they want to see.

Participating designers include:

Beci Orpin, Adele Winteridge (Foolscap Studio), Evi O, Jo Hook (Jo Hook Solutions), Josie Young, Katherine Kemp (Zwei Interiors Architecture), Tai Snaith, Kate Stokes (Coco Flip), Pascale Gomes-McNabb, Amanda Dziedzic, Fatuma & Laurinda Ndenzako (Collective Closets), Mirella Arapian (Mek, Womentor), Jonnine Standish, Ella Reweti, Jess Lilley (The Open Arms), Crystal Fong (Apostrophe), Courtney Holm (A.BCH), Robyn Walker (Robyn & Leon), Amy Mills, Sandra Githinji and Lily Gloria.

Ying Ang’s critically acclaimed publication, “The Quickening: A memoir on matrescence”, launched as a part of World Maternal Mental Health Day, 2021.

Shortlisted for the 2020 Lucie Foundation Prototype Book Prize, the Perimeter x PHOTO2021 International Book Prize and awarded with the silver award for the 2020 BIFA Documentary Photo Book Prize, an Honorable Mention for the Tokyo International Foto Awards, Official Selection for the London International Creative Competition 2020 and a winner of the Belfast Photo Festival 2021, The Quickening book details the claustrophobia, myopia, paradoxical loneliness and luminance of new motherhood and the postpartum period.

Riso and offset printed, this uniquely crafted book was published in a limited first edition of 250 copies. Additionally, 30 copies from a special edition each come with a choice of one of two prints. Created as an editioned art book, each copy is signed and numbered.

"The pictures in The Quickening are a gorgeous cacophony of tender and tension-filled scenes interwoven with moments of luminosity which show how easily the lightest moments of motherhood can slip into the difficult ones (and back again). There’s a softness to the pictures, too – a dreaminess that feels like the first moments of waking up, where everything is a little blurry and sleep images linger."

- Refinery29

"Ang’s depiction of matrescence is layered and complex. Her images blend the gentle and soft, with a strain and rawness that becomes all-consuming. Velvety skin is enveloped in warm, delicate light. But, motifs of that tenderness behind misted glass at once suggest fullness and a claustrophobic repetition. The narrative is textured and sensual; it mirrors the intensity of Ang’s lived experience."

- British Journal of Photography

pépite presents 'Workflow', an exhibition of ceramic pieces from Mathieu Frossard's atelier.

This exhibition summons different themes and aesthetics that can be found in Mathieu's work, referring to the mundanity of everyday objects, not so trivial trite phrases, maximalism of Baroque style and the use of colour.

Simultaneously attractive and repulsive, precise and chaotic, he composes with different visual references, questioning diverse aspects of contemporary creation like "good taste", beauty and function.

Mathieu graduated in art and design from ESAD in Rheims, France, and completed his Masters at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, the Netherlands - he has since exhibited his work throughout Europe with various partners and events such as Paris Design Week, Galerie Revel and Axel Arigato amongst others.

Magnum photographer Sim Chi Yin’s installation Most People Were Silent is a series of nuclear-related landscapes taken at the North Korea-China border, and the United States. Ushering the viewer into the strikingly similar landscapes of both borders, Chi Yin suspends our sense of place, and leaves us in an ambiguous realm of reflection and imagination. Most People Were Silent is a work that explores the states, confusions and consequences of history, memory, conflict and migration.

Sim Chi Yin is an artist from Singapore whose research-based practice includes photography, moving image, archival interventions and text-based performance, and focuses on history, conflict, and some of the most pressing issues of our time. She is currently based between London and Beijing. Chi Yin was commissioned as the Nobel Peace Prize photographer in 2017 and created a solo show for the Nobel Peace Centre museum in Oslo on nuclear weapons, combining video installation and still photography. Her work has been exhibited in the Istanbul Biennale (2017), at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Hanart TZ Gallery Hong Kong, the Annenberg Space For Photography in Los Angeles, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art in South Korea. Chi Yin joined Magnum Photos as a nominee member in 2018. She is currently also a PhD candidate on scholarship at King’s College London, in War Studies.

Nanna Heitmann is a German/Russian documentary photographer, based between Russia and Germany. Her work has been published by TIME Magazine, M Le Magazine du Monde, De Volkskrant, Stern Magazine and she has worked on assignments for outlets including The New York Times, TIME Magazine, The Washington Post and Stern Magazine. She has received awards that include the Leica Oscar Barnack Newcomer Award, the Ian Parry Award of Achievement. Nanna Heitmann joined Magnum as a nominee in 2019.

Heitmann presents her award-winning documentary series, Hiding From Baba Yaga, for the first time in Australia. In this series, Heitmann explores the people and landscape of the Yenisei river. The river has long been home for nomadic peoples who were outcast by mainstream society or escaping persecution, and still remains a place for displaced peoples. Photographing the worlds of loners, outsiders and dreamers that live along the river, Heitmann’s work explores the mysticism surrounding the area, while revealing truths of life on the Yenisei.

THE CRIMSON THREAD investigates the ubiquitous presence of Australia’s colonial history and attempts to better understand the impacts of colonisation and white privilege on contemporary Australian society.

Using speculative documentary photography, the work encourages viewers to question official histories and to consider how strongly our past still exists in the present. The title is taken from a quote by Henry Parkes, a British-born, Australian colonial politician who described Australia’s connection to the British Motherland as, “the crimson thread of kinship, which defined Australia as a bastion of ‘whiteness’ in the Asian region.”

The project was shortlisted for the Residency Bursary at Landskrona Foto Festival ‘22 in Sweden, selected in PhMuseum’s Top Stories 2021, and as a selected participant in the Magnum x Photo 2022 PHOTO Lab.

Erin Lee’s photographs have been published in The Financial Times, Vice, The Advocate, Frankie, CNN, The Guardian and others. She has been internationally exhibited and selected for artist residencies in Venezuela, France, Morocco, and Algeria. Erin’s photobook ‘Este Lado, This Side’ was shortlisted for the Perimeter Photo 2020 Photobook Prize, The Lucie Foundation Photobook Prize, Kassel Dummy Award, and is included in the ThePhotoBook Museum, Cologne.