If you want to be able to capture the right emotion, to capture the image, you have to respect the people and you have to gain their trust. It’s not something you buy or you sell. It’s something you invest. It’s a long-term investment.
Zahra Mahmoud, photographed here at age seven in 2018, lives in a tent in Jordan. Muhammed Muheisen, a National Geographic Explorer who documents refugee crises, met Zahra and her family in 2015, soon after they fled the war in their native Syria. Every year he visits them at the encampment and photographs Zahra, now a teenager. Muheisen says he’ll continue telling the family’s story until they’re in a more permanent living situation.
(Muheisen tells the story of animals trapped in war zones finding a second chance.)
Photograph by Campbell Addy
Campbell Addy
London, England/U.K.
This image represents a time in my career and life where I was truly questioning my purpose and direction. … I felt that I had lost ‘me’ in the work. So, to reboot my creative mainframe, I went back to the beginning. I went back to me.
Campbell Addy’s fashion and portrait photography explores identity through boldly stylized depictions of diverse, often Black, faces and bodies. As part of an exhibition in 2023, Addy moved in front of the camera for a series of self-portraits, including this one, where he wears blackface—a motif in his work—and his hair intentionally evokes the strange rabbit in the cult classic film Donnie Darko. The photographer wanted to remind himself to stay artistically brave.
(Learn how to take perfect portrait photos.)
