The following twenty projects have been selected to be presented at the Rencontres de la Photographie Marrakech, 6th edition.
Lys Arango (Spain / France)
Documentary photographer, member of Agence VU', National Geographic Explorer, Prix Terre Solidaire 2025
"Until the Corn Grows Back"
Developed between 2018 and 2025, this long-term documentary project explores the relationship between land, food, and survival within Indigenous Mayan communities in Guatemala — a country where one in two children suffers from chronic malnutrition, the highest rate in Latin America and the Caribbean. Subsistence agriculture, the backbone of rural life, is increasingly threatened by prolonged droughts and soil exhaustion. Maize, central to Mayan cosmovision, lies at the heart of this fragile balance. Alongside this story of crisis, the project documents the collective responses led by women's groups recovering ancestral seeds and developing agroecological practices.
Jean-Marc Caimi & Valentina Piccinni (Italy)
Rome-based documentary photography duo, winners of the Sony World Photography Award and Earth Photo Award
"The Faithful"
St. Peter's Square, April–May 2025. Between the death of one pope and the election of the next, pilgrims enact rosaries, flags, and prayer gestures in full awareness of cameras and live broadcast. What began as an editorial assignment for Die Zeit becomes a social and anthropological study: a crowd that erases differences of race, age, gender, and status to move as a single body, held together by a collective act of faith.
Aurélien Goubau (Belgium)
Brussels-based photographer, winner of the Prix Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles and the Prix Roger De Conynck
"Znamya"
In the 1990s, Russian scientists used a giant space mirror called Znamya to reflect sunlight onto northern Russia during polar nights. In 2021, the governor of Murmansk announced a similar project, promising to build an artificial sun above the city. Aurélien Goubau travels to the Murmansk region to experience the darkness alongside its residents — and finds that no one has seen a single ray from the promised artificial sun. The polar night becomes a metaphorical lens through which to explore contemporary Russia, a lens sharpened by the brutal reality of the invasion of Ukraine.
Francisco Gonzalez Camacho (Spain / Finland)
Visual artist based in Finland, permanent collections at the Griffin Museum of Photography and the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts
"You Can't Enter the Same River Twice"
Inspired by Heraclitus, this project explores impermanence through Nordic landscapes in perpetual transformation. The artist focuses on the precise moment when a form is clearly in transition — not yet settled into its new state. The landscapes bear the marks of geological time: erosion, sedimentation, the collapse of a shoreline into water. Processes that occur without witnesses, captured by photography at the moment of their tipping point. The series asks what impermanence looks like when it becomes the subject, rather than merely the condition, of the image.
Ana Palacios (Spain)
Visual journalist, National Geographic Society grant recipient, International Women's Media Foundation grant, Vital Impacts Fellow 2026
"Laboratoria"
"Laboratoria" documents creative approaches to repopulating rural areas, taking us into a constellation of spaces dedicated to scientific experimentation and the protection of the natural world — in Spain and Norway. At the intersection of innovation and knowledge, the project points to concrete alternatives in environmental conservation and rural revitalisation, towards the only future that can truly be sustainable.
Catherine Le Scolan-Quéré (France)
Physician and street photographer based in Rennes, member of several international collectives, selected by Harry Gruyaert at the BSPF 2025
"Home Among the Flowers"
Mullick Ghat, India's largest flower market, stretches along the banks of the Hooghly River beneath Howrah Bridge in Kolkata. More than 2,000 sellers take turns from dawn to dusk in this wholesale market that never closes. Some people are born there, grow up there, work, sleep, and die there. Catherine Le Scolan-Quéré photographs this hidden humanity nestled among the flowers and the tunnel's light — a light that is at once an entrance, a companion, and life itself.
Sabrina Charehbili (Netherlands / Morocco)
Dutch-Moroccan photographer and visual artist, presented at Valencia Photo Festival as part of the Moroccan cultural delegation
"Inherited Presence"
In this project, light becomes more than illumination — it is a force that reveals, conceals, and transforms. Moving between body, landscape, and material, the work explores how light carries memory, presence, and change across different environments. In Morocco, light touches the landscape, textiles, and figures as something almost ancestral, carrying traces of culture, ritual, and belonging. In more recent works, light becomes increasingly unstable: through water and movement, it bends, reflects, and fragments, shifting towards abstraction. Light is no longer only what reveals the subject — it actively defines form and surface.
Antonio Denti (Italy)
Cameraman and photographer, Reuters staff video journalist for over 20 years, Royal Television Society Award 2018
"Almost Adrift (April in Africa)"
A systematic photographic diary of journeys in which the author had no role in choosing the route — journeys dictated by work, emergency, or life. The first chapter of a long-term project: professional assignments lead Antonio Denti to Algeria, Cameroon, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea. A journey driven by a current towards places and people not sought — an occasion to reflect on photographic presence, photojournalism, and the power of seduction as a fundamental force in human lives.
Chinky Shukla (India)
Documentary photographer based in New Delhi, supported by the National Geographic Society
"When Buddha Stopped Smiling"
Almost 50 years after the 1974 nuclear test code-named "Smiling Buddha", the villages near Pokhran in Rajasthan continue to pay the price of India's atomic ambitions. Cancers, miscarriages, mental disabilities: the stigmas persist in these forgotten communities. This long-term documentary project, supported by the National Geographic Society, gives voice to the residents of this zone of silence — joining the tragic global circle of communities living in the shadow of nuclear test sites.
Ariana Gomez (United States)
Visual artist based in Austin, Texas, winner of the Hopper Prize Grant and MASS MoCA University Residency Fellowship 2024
"My Mother Speaks of Land as Memory"
Born of loss — of land, of identity, of a father who died in 2011 — this project, rooted in the arid Texas landscape, seeks to personify the absent father. In that search, the artist finds her mother, an immigrant from Puerto Rico, unmoored in this vast foreign desert. Between water and desert, life and death, myth and memory, Ariana Gomez weaves together the story of a stolen past and future — three separate timelines converging through memory, myth, and the desire to reconcile what was, and what could have been.
Arthur Perrin (France)
Photographer from the Vosges, member of the collective Le Matin Rose, winner of the Individual Creation Grant — Grand Est Region 2025
"Le Houéran"
The Vosges forest has gradually lost the intimate bond that once connected it to the collective imagination. This project is anchored in the rediscovery of a forgotten local myth: the Houéran, a creature half-man half-animal, ancestral guardian of the woods. Through walks, sound recordings with foresters and loggers, and years of visual research, Arthur Perrin makes visible the transformation of the forest — droughts, soil degradation, the scars left by bark beetles — while leaving room for the imaginary.
Fiora Garenzi (France / Corsica)
Documentary photographer, winner of the Prix Laurent Troude 2025, Prix SAIF – Women in the Spotlight 2024, and Prix de la Vocation 2023
"Nanna Strana"
"Nanna Strana" can be translated from Corsican as "the strange lullaby". This personal project dives into the question of what we call "home": a childhood spent in a village in northern Corsica, the impossibility of truly feeling at home there, and the need to return to find an answer. In Corsica, family heritage and belonging to a place are central to identity. Fiora Garenzi explores this paradox with heartbreaking intimacy.
Michael James O'Brien (United States)
Photographer, writer and educator, Chair of Photography at SCAD, collections at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, London
"Portrait of a Young Man (2000 — ongoing)"
Influenced by Velázquez's paintings in the Prado in Madrid, this long-running portrait series captures men found on the streets and in the nightclubs of the cities where the artist has lived: New York City, Paris, London, Liverpool, Antwerp, Atlanta. Each session lasts one hour, shot entirely in natural light. At once restrained and erotically charged — rich with the pearly glow of a Caravaggio, the stillness of a Velázquez.
Pierpaolo Mittica (Italy)
Humanist and environmental photographer and filmmaker, published in National Geographic, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Internazionale
"Chernobyl — 40 Years After"
On 26 April 1986, reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. Forty years on, the exclusion zone is at once a place of life, work, and memory — and since Russia's invasion in February 2022, a fully militarised and mined territory. Nine million people continue to live in areas with very high levels of radioactivity. Pierpaolo Mittica, who has been documenting Chernobyl for years, delivers here a long-term testimony to a catastrophe that never quite begins — and never quite ends.
Neil Kramer (United States)
Photographer and writer based in Queens, New York, former professional writer for television and media
"Domestic Theater"
For the past six and a half years, since the beginning of the pandemic, Neil Kramer has been living with his mother and his ex-wife in a two-bedroom apartment in Queens. Photography began as a way of fixing light into memory: window light, refrigerator light, television light, candlelight. Moving between observation and staging, documentary and performance, the apartment becomes a small theater where relationships shift, roles blur, and light marks the passing of time.
Cesar Rodriguez (Mexico)
Photographer based in Xalisco, Nayarit — published in Time, National Geographic, Le Monde, The New York Times
"Montaña Roja"
For more than ten years, Cesar Rodriguez has documented the lives of communities in the mountains of Guerrero, Mexico, facing cartel violence and the collapse of poppy production. This new chapter explores the direct connection between these mountains and the United States, following the journeys of migrants and the families who remain — in a context of tightening US immigration policies. The project takes the form of a photo essay, a documentary film, and a collaborative process with the families themselves.
Sarah Mei Herman (Netherlands)
Amsterdam-based photographer, winner of the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and the V&A Parasol Women in Photography Prize
"Touch"
Begun in 2014 during a residency in the Chinese coastal city of Xiamen, this long-running series documents the intimacy and relationships of several young women, some of whom were living secret lesbian relationships in a still-conservative social context. Revisiting her subjects on each return to China, and later finding them in Europe — in the Netherlands and Germany — Sarah Mei Herman weaves a mosaic narrative of proximity, time, and transformation.
Birte Kaufmann (Germany)
Cologne-based photographer, represented by INSTITUTE — winner of the CNN Journalist Award and Gute Aussichten
"The Travellers"
A long-term photographic project developed within an Irish Traveller family clan in Ireland, built over several years through ongoing relationships and repeated visits. The work explores the coexistence of different temporalities within contemporary Europe: inherited ways of life persisting alongside the visual language of the present, where history, identity, and ideas of belonging remain in constant negotiation across generations.
Gloria Oyarzabal (Spain)
Visual artist, finalist for the Deutsche Börse Award 2024 and Prix Elysée 2022–24, winner of the Grand Prix Fotofestiwal 2019
"Appunti per un'Orestiade Africana — A Democracy in Fatigue"
Drawing on Pier Paolo Pasolini's unfinished film shot in Uganda and Tanzania (1968–69), Gloria Oyarzabal offers a meditation on democracy as an unfinished process. The transformation of the Erinyes into the Eumenides — from vengeance to civic order — becomes a metaphor for the condition of postcolonial African nations, where different temporalities and systems of knowledge coexist, challenging dominant narratives of development and progress.
Vladimir Karamazov (Bulgaria)
Sofia-based photographer, winner of the Gomma Photography Grant, Sony World Photography Awards and British Journal of Photography
"For the Grace of God"
Belene Prison in northern Bulgaria is the most strictly guarded in the country. Situated on an island, it houses the largest number of people serving life sentences for murder. Vladimir Karamazov enters to meet these men, understand their stories, and the reasons that led to their crimes. A project to open an invisible door, reveal reality, and remind us that a crime often has its roots in childhood — and that society, too, bears a share of the responsibility.