Modern Photographers / Q

The Rohingya Muslim minority of Myanmar, who are subjected to discrimination and human rights violations and have been stripped of all rights including citizenship, are now living in IDP or internally displaced person camps.

To capture this religious practice taking place under lockdown, Canon has partnered with Jordanian Canon Ambassador and two time Pulitzer prize winner, Muhammed Muheisen and Dubai-based photographer Reem Falaknaz

This photographic project has been inspired by the events that followed the rapid spreading of the COVID-19 among the Italian population, which started at the end of February 2020.

In a place called White Sands, New Mexico, you can get lost in no time on a cloudy, windy summer day as your footsteps are erased nearly as quickly as your bare feet make them. With no sun to guide you, it's like being on another planet. The pull of places like that might be the same as the emotional grip that the tip of Mt. Everest has on champion climbers, or in the photographs of Ivan Murzin, the magnetic pull of a national park in Siberia where multitudes flock in winter to tempt gravity off the surface of an infinite tabletop of ice.

I remember the first time I looked at the works of street photographers like as Bruce Gilden, Martin Parr and Nick Turpin and strangely remembered how images under this documentary style of photography drew me further into this artform, making me appreciate a photograph as something more than an object in a frame, but rather an expression of an individual in that moment of time. In the coming years I focused solely on documentary photography and gradually became more fascinated about the relationships between the photographer and his subjects. To this day Bruce Gilden's work is central to my photographic practice, not so much in viewing his images as final pieces but rather in the process of capturing them. I'd like to believe that he himself is far more concerned with staying in those moments of pure photographic expression, with the images being only an intervention in time.

As the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic continues to cause major disruptions to our daily lives with more than two billion people worldwide isolated in their homes, we asked renowned photographers what impact the current situation has on their life and work. Here are their personal and heartfelt answers as well as a sample of their work.

As artists, we expend a lot of our emotional energy and other resources into building our resumes, seeking relationships with peers and influentials, and working on series and portfolios.

Belgium is currently in lock down. We can only go outside to get food and some people are allowed to go to their work. We can go outside for a walk and once a day around 6:30 pm, Stephan Vanfleteren leaves with his camera to the sea, forest, fields... He named his walks: Corona walks.

Natalie Obermaier's gaze is honest and sympathetic. Absent of pretense, shyness, or posturing, nothing comes between Obermaier and her subjects. Every image expresses the subtle context of his unfettered access. When they gaze directly into the camera, her subjects seem to be looking directly at us. The conjecture of photography is shaped with contradictions... ambiguously-specific, empowered-vulnerability, truthfully-inaccurate. The nuances of these paradoxes are burned into the silver halide crystals of Obermaier's film.