Francesca Pompei

I moved to Colorado at eighteen, where the wilderness became my sanctuary while navigating years of severe depression, physical trauma, and deep personal loss. My artistic journey originally began at twenty through drawing and painting—eventually donating over 65 works to children’s hospitals across the Southwest—but I didn't pick up a camera until I was thirty. That first camera proved to be the missing link, seamlessly uniting my reverence for nature with my passion for visual expression.

Justine Georget‑Tazzolio is a French photographer based in Lyon. Trained in drawing and painting from an early age, she developed a sensitivity to gesture, materiality, and the folds of reality. This approach evolved alongside her academic studies, culminating in a research master’s degree on nineteenth‑century funerary architecture. In 2020, photography entered her life with her first camera, and with it a language that felt deeply her own, one she eventually made her profession.

I began taking my first photographs in 2010. Over the years, I became increasingly specialised in entomology, the branch of zoology devoted to the study of insects and other terrestrial arthropods. This passion gradually became my profession, further deepening both my knowledge of and fascination for the small world that surrounds us. Macro photography soon became, for me, the best way to observe insects.

My journey with photography began in 2002 while working behind a camera store counter in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. My very first encounter with the craft, however, dates back to my childhood when my father introduced me to the technical basics using a Zenit-E camera, leading to my first black-and-white frames on Soviet Svema film.

Yang Mo Lee was born in South Korea in 1978 and lives in Irvine, California — about an hour from the coast and four hours from the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. He came to photography through long drives rather than through a school or a studio, and most of his work is still made within a day's drive of home.

I have spent much of my life looking at the world through a camera. My photographs have taken me backstage on Broadway, into boxing gyms, across city streets and distant places, and into the quieter corners of everyday life. What has always interested me most is the person behind the role—the moment when someone forgets the camera is there and something genuine comes through.