A place for women, by women: that’s what Umoja, a village in Samburu County, northern Kenya, represents. It looks much like other tribal settlements or manyattas – with surrounding grasslands and huts, where communal living is the norm – except for one thing.

It’s void of men.

Umoja is the Kiswahili word for unity, and it’s evident that this concept is at the core of this community. Founded in 1990 as a sanctuary for women of Samburu escaping gender-based violence, Umoja is home to females of all ages. Men are prohibited from entry to create a safe space for girls and women who are survivors of sexual violence and abuse, ostracized by their families, as well as those escaping child marriage or female genital mutilation (FGM).

Ghanaian photographer Paul Ninson first found out about the Umoja women from a blog post and decided to go to Kenya to photograph this village in 2017, partly because, he said, he felt these stories “needed to be told from (an African) perspective.” With no prior contact with the women, he took the trip blind, knowing only the general location of the village.

The first few members of Umoja were from remote Samburu villages scattered across the Rift Valley. Exact numbers ebb and flow, but at its largest, this self-sustained village has been home to about 50 families made up of women and their children, and continues to educate its residents on women’s rights and gender-based violence. Any male children of the women are permitted to live in the village until they turn 18.

He says gaining access was very difficult, and he was only welcomed by the women after explaining the purpose behind his visit, adding that they were “very, very happy” when he showed them the pictures he took.

The lifestyle of those who live there is modest, with the women working to earn income for food and educational resources for the village’s children and some of the women themselves. Located about a kilometer away from Umoja is a campsite where many tourists stay when visiting the region to explore the famous Maasai Mara wildlife reserve. Tourists who wish to visit Umoja are charged a small entrance fee, and can buy elaborate beaded jewellery and other crafts handmade by the Samburu women.

“Community storytelling”

“Village with no men” is one of several photography series by Ninson, who said he aims to capture images that “raise awareness about social, environmental, or political issues and inspire people to take action, provoke thought and discussion about important topics.”

He decided to travel to other African countries to share “undertold or untold stories of people of the continent” – an element of what he calls “community storytelling.”

“We [Africa] have narrative problems; how we’ve been depicted over and over again,” Ninson said. This, he added, is a consequence of Africa’s stories being told by outsiders.

After expanding his portfolio with images he shot around Ghana, Kenya and Ethiopia, Ninson went to New York to study at the International Center of Photography in 2019, where he worked closely with a friend and mentor, Brandon Stanton, of the storytelling platform “Humans of New York.”

In an email to CNN, Stanton said he’s been inspired by Ninson’s talent and drive since the pair first met in Ghana in 2016, when Ninson shared his desire to become a professional photographer. While Ninson says he learned a lot from working with Stanton during that period, Stanton added that Ninson’s faith has been a strong example for him, describing him as his “spiritual advisor of sorts.”

Africa’s largest photography library

It was while exploring New York as a student that Ninson started accumulating photobooks written by and about Africans – books that Africans didn’t have access to back home, he said.

Ninson resolved to buy as many as possible to send to Ghana, keeping them in his apartment until he ran out of space and had to get a storage unit. Eventually, with the support of Stanton and the Humans of New York platform, he raised over $1 million to fund the first stage of the Dikan Center in Ghana’s capital of Accra – Africa’s largest photography library and visual education space, which opened in December 2022.

Stanton, who attended Dikan’s opening, said watching Ninson build the center was “surreal.”

“He has stepped into a leadership role so effortlessly and intuitively. So many people who meet him walk away feeling as if they have met a future leader of Ghana,” Stanton said, adding that “(Ninson) has been so successful in launching the Dikan Center that it is often overlooked that he is an elite photographer.”

Ninson said Dikan, which means “take the lead” in the Twi language, is a space that has already started to teach other storytellers on the continent through workshops and classes, offering free use of the vast library of photobooks, and putting on photo exhibitions.

His goal, Ninson said, is “to connect people with each other and with the world around them,” and plans to return to Umoja within the next year.

“I believe in the power of storytelling,” he added. “It has the power to bring people together and to help us see the world in new and unexpected ways.”

The exhibition was organised by NGO ForumZFD Serbia, which has also published a book of Cvetkovic’s photos called ‘My Bosnia’.

Slaven Raskovic, the exhibition organiser and editor of the book, said at the opening that in all the countries of the former Yugoslavia, the narratives about what happened have been over-simplified to a few incidents and locations.

“What I would emphasise as the special value of the ‘My Bosnia’ book is the fact that through Cvele’s photographs, we can really see some of the locations and events that are very unknown, or completely unknown, not only in Bosnia but in the whole of the former Yugoslavia,” Raskovic said.

With no prior contact with the women, Ninson took the trip blind, knowing only the general location of the village. He says gaining access was very difficult, and he was only welcomed by the women after explaining the purpose behind his visit, adding that they were “very, very happy” when he showed them the pictures he took.

Raised in the small Welsh seaside town of Barmouth, photographer Lewis Vorn often found his mind wandering. “Growing up in the middle of nowhere, my imagination was triggered by TV, music and magazines,” he says. “But also by having the space to walk around for hours day dreaming.” Immersing himself in such broad visual media, Lewis now cites various pop culture as being the primary influence to his work, from Scooby Doo to Britney Spears and horror movies.

This love of “silly, weird, colourful and chaotic” creative work has fuelled Lewis’ penchant for lightheartedness, both in his images and the way he works. He loves collaborating with people who want to make something fun, and experimenting with physical materials and props (see a Teletubby eating smiley faces below).

When it comes to the photographing, Lewis describes himself as “quite greedy”, shooting interchangeably on three cameras and always trying his utmost to get as many images as possible. This results in a “messy” and “scatty” process – with brilliant results. His trademark, layered images have a certain nostalgia about them, while still exuding a fresh, current and stylish feel.

Claudia Casado is a lifelong fan of Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata, a football club in the city of La Plata in Argentina. Her daughter Mayra and her granddaughters, Katia and Mayte, are also fans of the club. They are pictured in Casado’s house in a poor neighbourhood, which is decked out in blue and white – the official colours of Gimnasia.

The fight for gender equality within sport really interests me. Clubs are generally considered to be dominated by men, but women have been occupying these spaces for many years, on and off the football field. Women’s football has grown over the past 10 years at a global level, but female players still face a struggle in terms of training, finding spaces to play, and earning a fair salary.

Female fans also do a tremendous amount of work that is only just starting to be recognised, in terms of maintaining stadiums, organising trips to matches, accompanying the team to different places, and carrying out work in the community – running soup kitchens, for example.

In Argentina, female football fans have a history of being sexualised. In the 1990s, the image of a female football fan was one of a woman with perfect curves. I wanted to show a real woman and how she lives with football in her daily life.

This photo represents what it is to be a fan of Gimnasia. I live in La Plata and for me, Gimnasia is family. Casado represents the neighbourhood and she is the head of a family with three generations of women who are football fans.

The photo is part of an exhibition, Cuerpas Reales, Hinchas Reales (Real Bodies, Real Fans), featuring photos by 78 female photographers from across Latin America. It is a celebration of female football fans and an empowering call for inclusion and diversity. As a collective, we want to show the different ways in which women enjoy and live their passion for football, while challenging gender stereotypes.

The exhibition has toured Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay and Chile, and from 13-30 July is part of the 6th annual Latin American foto festival at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York. Erica Voget is an Argentinian photographer, follow her on Instagram

PORTLAND, Maine — June’s clammy, water-logged weather wasn’t very conducive to enjoying the state’s fabled summertime outdoor attractions. The forecast for July’s first week isn’t much better.

Looks like it’s time for plan B — but don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be a hardship. 

Instead of fretting about drizzling skies, let the wet weather drive you indoors to the climate-controlled confines of Maine’s first-rate museums currently offering a dazzling array of world-class photography exhibitions.

Right now, Maine is blessed with three major shows featuring broad surveys of prints by heavy-hitting shooters as well as lesser-known artists. In addition, smaller, more niche shows dot the Pine Tree State as well, offering something for just about everyone.

Bowdoin College of Art

People Watching: Contemporary Photography Since 1965

This wide-ranging, and free, exhibition is all about humans and the various ways photographers have been picturing them since the middle of the 20th century. The show is broken up into four distinct sections, showcasing 120 photographs by more than four dozen photographers.

The first section features street photography and begins with prints by superstars of the craft Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand and Bruce Davidson. These are mostly observed pictures of people on city streets who didn’t know they were being photographed.

These photos capture rectangular instants of unguarded time and then allow the viewer the luxury of contemplating that particular fraction of a second for as long as they like. The photos transform blank, anonymous moments into something almost — but not quite — knowable.

Two remarkable photos by American Indian photographer Zig Jackson are also part of the first section. Both large, black-and-white images show white tourists photographing Indigenous dancers at what looks like a public powwow. Jackson described each palindromic photo as, “Indian photographing tourist photographing Indian.”

The second section at the Bowdoin exhibition is dedicated to pictures of people at home. Most of the images were made by someone with a familiar, or intimate, relationship with their subjects. Included is a family picture by Sally Mann and a pair of prints from Larry Clark’s well-known book about drug use and sex in the 1960s, “Tulsa.”

There’s also a heart-stopping series of six prints picturing domestic violence in progress, shot in the 1980s by Donna Ferrato. They remind viewers that not all private moments at home are beautiful.

The second section also includes a handful of prints by Maine artist Olive Pierce who spent years lovingly documenting a marginalized family in Bremen, which culminated in her classic photo book “Up River: The Story of a Maine Fishing Community.”

The third and fourth sections’ images are less powerful and focus on studio portraiture and finally pictures of landscapes and interiors that hint of past human occupation. Standouts here are a series of Polaroids by Andy Warhol and a remarkable photo of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis’ lined hand by Irving Penn. 

The show runs through Nov. 5.

Portland Museum of Art

Drawn to the Light: 50 years of Photography at Maine Media Workshops + College

This show highlights 100 prints by 75 photographic artists associated with Rockport’s famous photo school since it was founded half a century ago in 1973 by David Lyman.

National Geographic shooter Dick Durrance, color photography pioneer Ernst Haas, documentarian Mary Ellen Mark and gauzy artist Joyce Tenneson are just a few of the well-known names represented in the show.

By bringing out the big guns, the show seeks to attract a wide audience, of course, but also show the outsized, cross-pollinating impact the little Maine school has had on the photographic world over the years. 

Near the beginning of the show is a stunning and famous print by Mary Ellen Mark picturing the Damm family, arms around each other, in the 1971 Buick Skylark that was their home when the photographer made her picture in the 1980s. Just down the wall from that image is a portrait of Mark, taken in Rockport by equally famous shooter Arnold Newman in 1993. 

Likewise, not far from a trippy print of glass buildings reflected in other skyscraping windows by Ernst Haas, is a playful portrait of the photographer. Taken in 1959 by Dan Budnik, it shows Haas lying in the mud, clad in a rain slicker, trying to get a shot of a leaf floating in a mud puddle.

Another arresting image is by French photographer Madeleine de Sinety, taken in Portland in 1995. The playful photo shows an oiled and bikini-clad woman trying to look glamorous and get a tan while laying on a tattered lawn chair outside a city tenement building. Children run past her on the sidewalk but she still manages to look relatively serene. 

The crowd-pleasing show also surveys work by magazine reportage artists Sam Abell, Peter Ralston and William Albert Allard, landscapes by Robert Glenn Ketchum and Paul Caponigro as well as a few arty nudes.

A delightful addition to the show is a small selection of historic Maine Media Workshops course catalogs — which prospective students used to get in the mail during the winter and spend hours pouring over, like department store Christmas wish books. But instead of dreaming of December gifts, photographers would dream of meeting famous shooters during magic summers in Rockport.

The show runs through Sept. 10.

University of New England Art Museum, Portland campus

Rose Marasco: Camera Lucida

This photographic exhibition is completely different from the other two biggies going on in Maine right now. It features the deeply personal, idiosyncratic work of a single Maine photographer but it packs no less of a punch.

Rose Marasco, born in upstate New York, helped found the photography program at the University of Southern Maine and then taught there for 35 years. During her teaching career, she also found time to make her own photographs and mount 25 solo shows at prestigious venues including the Houston Center for Photography, Universite de Bretagne Occidentale in Brest, France, and the Farnsworth Museum of Art.

The large University of New England show coincides with the publication of Marasco’s monograph “At Home,” by OSMOS Books.

Every single photo in the show, which is grouped into distinct series, is a carefully constructed image with nothing left to chance. Most are draped with several layers of visual interest and meaning. 

Marasco made one large collection of photographs by projecting various images and pictures into curated rooms inside her own house. The resulting eyeball feasts can fascinate for minutes at a time, as a viewer’s brain attempts to catalog everything it can see.

Another series features seemingly artifice-free pictures of small, historic artifacts she unearthed in the backyard of her Portland home. Marasco couples these photographs with dreamy, written narratives.

Also in the show are a series of images from her “Domestic Objects” series, which Marasco worked on for nearly a decade between 1993 and 2002. In the images, she combines historic diary pages, written by long-dead, everyday Maine women, with domestic objects inspired by the diary entries.   

In one such image called “Egg Diary” the artist couples a single egg with a diary page, on top of what looks like a classic, mid-century formica table top.

“Dorothy Clak came to buy one egg — the only fresh one we had,” reads the entry in part.

It was jotted down in neat cursive script by East Madison’s Florence Burrill Jacobs on Jan. 15, 1921. Jacobs’ papers are part of the University of New England’s Maine Women Writers Collection.

Marasco’s show runs through Oct. 8.

More photography to see in Maine right now

The Maine Museum of Photographic arts in Portland is currently showing “Decoding the Domestic,” featuring various works centering around how an artist’s home environment influences their work.

The Maine Maritime Museum in Bath is now featuring photographic works by pioneering Maine women photographers Emma D. Sewall, Josephine Ginn Banks and Abbie F. Minott. All three were descended from shipbuilding and seafaring families and captured images of Maine landscapes, industries, and communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Penobscot Marine Museum has three photographic shows of note this summer. One focuses on Maine-built boats created especially for summer rusticators. Another exhibit hones in on historic magazine photos of fisherfolk from the pages of National Fisherman and its predecessor Atlantic Fisherman. The third show is all about the work of Maine photographer Sam Murfitt who has spent most of his life connected with the water — making photographs, building boats and working for fishing publications.

ARTE, fidèle partenaire des Rencontres d’Arles, propose une projection en lien avec l’une des expositions de la programmation des Rencontres d’Arles 2023, La Casa Susanna. Dans les années 50-60, au milieu d’une vaste campagne américaine, une petite maison en bois a abrité le premier réseau clandestin de travestis. Diane et Kate ont aujourd’hui 80 ans. À l’époque, elles étaient des hommes. Elles nous racontent cette histoire presque effacée, à une époque…

The outback of Australia has long been altered by human hands, and today there’s a real romanticism in what generations before us have left behind in small towns all across the country.

Far from the glossy tourist sites, there’s a seemingly forgotten Australia just waiting to be explored and in and around these places, and a wealth of photographic opportunities as well.

So last year, while on a month-long road trip through outback New South Wales, I decided to focus my lens on the man-made and altered landscapes I found on my travels.

I enjoyed this so much it inspired a new creative pathway and became the centre of a personal project I called West of Somewhere East – a photographic exploration of the urban environment in small town Australia.

Before we get started on some of my learnings from photographing these places, it’s worth having a quick history lesson.

Back in 1975, a huge change occurred in landscape photography circles in America with the launch of an exhibition in New York called New Topographics: Photographs of a Man Altered Landscape.

As well as introducing to the world photographers such as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke and others, the exhibition had a lasting impact on aesthetic and conceptual approaches to American landscape photography.

Before the exhibition, landscape photography was traditionally produced to showcase the pristine, seemingly untouched wilderness, such as the kind of magnificent “American” views championed by photographers like Ansel Adams.

By comparison, the New Topographic movement focused on man-altered topography, the suburbanised and elemental environment which is often overlooked and mundane to most people. In legitimising these places as worthy of attention, it opened new realms of possibilities for photographers to explore.

So, what’s the subject?

Unsurprisingly, most peoples’ idea of landscape photography is likely to be what’s found in a natural setting, free of man-made elements. But with New Topographic photography the key is to look for the opposite.

The genre is a celebration of the often quirky beauty found in everyday objects and places – think nostalgic objects in old service stations, empty parking lots full of shopping trolleys, urban parks and playgrounds, and other ‘monotonous’ places.

For me, what I like about this style of photography is it’s a reminder that not everything has to be a postcard moment for it to be photo worthy. Sometimes the quiet and unexpected can make for strong imagery.

Shot list

Whenever I start a new project, I’ll begin the process by writing a list with certain shots I want to make. So, before my trip, I wrote a list and stuck it to my steering wheel as a visual reminder of what I wanted to capture as I travelled.

I pre-visualised scenes and gave some thought to the different atmospheres and moods I wanted to capture. Being an Australian trip, my list had things you might expect like ‘outback pub’, ‘roadhouse’, ‘holden ute’, ‘roadkill’, ‘dark skies’, ‘outdated interiors’, ‘red dirt’, ‘long straight road’, and ‘hills hoist clothesline’.

I made a similar list when I visited the NSW town of Guyra during winter earlier in the year. Here, I had ‘tyre tracks in the snow’, ‘bowling green covered in snow’, ‘night scenes in the snow’, ‘window reflection’, and ‘shop window glowing in the evening’, among others.

I mention this because having these lists makes it so much easier to move around and find suitable subjects when you arrive in a location. It gives a sense of structure and direction that can save many hours aimlessly wandering while searching for subjects.

Don’t get me wrong, being aimless is great fun too, but often not when you’re travelling, and time is short. I recommend you give it a shot next time you head out to shoot a series. 

Composition

Centred, ‘matter of fact’ style framing, flat horizontal and straight vertical lines are all hallmarks of New Topographic photography. Composition is everything and what you exclude from your frame is just as important as what you include.

A technique I like to use is to ‘build’ the frame up from a clear focal point – once you’ve identified your main subject, compose your shot carefully by considering if everything in the frame is necessary to the final product.

Sometimes simply moving further away to include more within the frame is enough, while other times you may need to alter the angle at which you hold the camera, all while being aware you need to allow space to obtain straight vertical or horizontal lines. A tripod can be useful here.

Juxtaposition is another element that can help tell a story. Combining the natural and the man-made into one image can be powerful, and you’ll see this in much of my work. Not only can the combination provide scale and interest, but it can also provide a subtle commentary on how humans interact with our environment.

Low contrast

One of the characteristics of the New Topographic movement is repetitious lighting and relatively low contrast. I think part of this is to do with the fact that these earlier masterpieces were shot on black and white film or colour negative film. As a result, bold bright colours and high contrast are out, and images generally have a very soft or passive feel to them.

This low contrast style also plays to the subjects – often they’re not flashy or ostentatious, and so don’t need to be photographed in such a way. Subtlety is the aim.

Look out for part two next week. 

About the author: Drew Hopper is an Australian freelance documentary photographer exploring ecological themes, landscape and place. He is committed to documenting social, cultural and environmental stories around the world. See more of his work at drewhopper.com.