JONATHAN TORGOVNIK

Jonathan Torgovnik’s Intended Consequences series presents portraits of Rwandan women and their children born from rape during the 1994 genocide. Confronted by these women, infected with HIV, the photographer chose to hand the word over to them and his portraits are accompanied by the written text of his interviews with his photos’ subjects. These image-text sets reveal lives scarred by unimaginable suffering and make us reflect on African reality and photojournalism.

CHU HA CHUNG

The A Pleasant Day series realised by Chu Ha Chung, a Korean photographer who studied in Germany, shows peaceful landscapes and inhabitants of villages near the sea in the eastern part of Korea. The succession of ordinary scenes hides a reality barely visible: life at the foot of a nuclear reactor. By looking at the reactors in the background, we witness the slow death of a whole traditional way of life. Completed in 2008, this work took on a premonitory dimension after the accident at the Fukushima nuclear facility in March 2011.

OSAMU JAMES NAKAGAWA

Banta and Gama are two series evoking the memory of World War II in Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture. In 1945, fierce battles led to 200,000 deaths, of which 100,000 were civilians. By meticulously describing the surface of metaphorical places – cliffs and grottos – Osamu James Nakagawa, a Japanese photographer living in the United States, gives material form to memory with a rare visual intensity. These series were realised with the support of a prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.