Often when we think about the technologies that have most changed human life, for better or worse, we think of industrial, military or medical technologies—assembly line factories, the atomic bomb, or Penicillin. However, the social technologies we are surrounded by often escape notice even as they transform the world. World Photography Day 2024 allows a moment for reflection on the form with the theme An Entire Day exploring the paradigm-shifting effects of the digital camera on connection, storytelling, politics and activism.

Photography can be benign, oppressive, humane or artistic, depending on the intention behind the lens. Photographers and visual artists seeking to wrangle the medium to create art must contend with an overwhelming deluge of available images and an ethical minefield created by the perceived truth value of the medium.

Through skill, imagination and piercing insight, many photographers go beyond capturing a moment or documenting reality to creating visual worlds that upturn convention and hierarchies. On World Photography Day 2024, STIR lists nine such creatives who contend with how technology mediates society’s view of places, personhood, conflict and the environment.

1. Yorgos Yatromanolakis

The Greek photographer Yorgos Yatromanolakis transforms the landscape of his hometown, Zaros, Crete, in his series Splitting of the Chrysalis (2019). He uses unidirectional flash and long exposure to make the familiar, new and strange. The subjects of his photographs—ferns, boulders, sheep, birds—stand out through the contrast between their sharp contours and dramatic lighting with the softness of the twilit background.

His most famous work, Roadblock to Normality (2016), uses blurred elements and isolated subjects to create impactful and personal images of the political uprising in Greece in 2008.

In Splitting of the Chrysalis, he turns inward, to a period of isolation in his life, capturing his own psychic unrest.

2. Karman Verdi

Russian artist Karman Verdi was stifled by the mundane loneliness of self-isolation during the pandemic. He turned to Zoom meetings and projected images to suffuse his apartments with ghosts, nostalgia and emotion, leading to the series There are so many ghosts at my spot (2020).

His works draw on the power of nostalgia and absence, recasting an unremarkable past into something valuable, romantic and sorely missed. Carefully posed images look spontaneous despite their stylisation.

3. Danish Siddiqui (1983-2021)

In her famous book of essays, On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag scrutinised war photography and the dissemination of images of human suffering in particular. She warned against the numbing effect of flooding viewers with images of violence. The work of Pulitzer-winning Indian photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was a model response to Sontag’s challenge, as his work invites solidarity.

His images appeal to the viewer as a responsible citizen, rather than relying on shock. His photos focused on unposed human faces behind conflicts in Afghanistan, India and other countries.

4. Richard Mosse

In his 2021 series Displaced, the Irish documentary photographer Richard Mosse also attempts to photograph refugee crises and displacements across the globe while eschewing the visual language of news media. He uses stylisation to his advantage, using unconventional colours, composition and technology to create otherworldly images.

In the series Heat Maps, he used a thermal imaging camera to create images where human bodies glow brightly, highlighted as targets for attack.

By allowing the viewers to see through the eyes of combatants, he seeks to create a new language for documentary photography and videography.

5. Peter Beard (1938-2020)

The American artist and photographer Peter Beard earned acclaim for his depictions of Africa and its wildlife as it was decimated by Western poachers, beginning with his 1965 series The End of the Game.

At a time when depictions of Africa were dominated by harmful colonial imagery, Beard used his camera to lift the curtain. He captured the destruction of African flora and fauna at the hands of Western poachers. He used the visual language of war photography to show the tragedy of killing animals for sport.

6. Vitor Schietti

Brazilian artist Vitor Schietti is looking to the future of the relationship between humans and nature in his contemporary art series Impermanent Sculptures, inspired by the natural world of Brazil and his global travels. The contradiction between home and the unfamiliar plays out in his light paintings, with beautiful twilit landscapes and trees outlined with wild, golden sparks.

Schietti turned to an unfamiliar approach—combining ‘painting’ with fireworks attached to a long rod with long exposure—to encourage viewers to imagine a different relationship with the environment. The trees in his photographs no longer seem to be background actors. Rather, the sparks become a visual metaphor for life and energy, animating the natural world around us, which is alive and worthy of respect.

His approach pushes the bounds of photography, creating the effects of painting and sculpture through lighting and exposure.

7. Vanja Bučan

Slovenian contemporary artist and photographer Vanja Bučan’s series Sequences of Truth and Deception interpolates photography and collage.

With images layered, cut up, collaged and held by disembodied synthetic hands, Bučan gestures to the human and technological interruptions of nature.

She creates visual art that eschews realism to depict our relationship with nature in a lyrical rather than literal way. By populating her fantastical world with faceless silhouettes and hands, she acknowledges human presence in nature without centring it.

8. Rob Woodcox

Rob Woodcox uses collages and multiple elements to celebrate the human body. Stripped-down, athletic silhouettes of bodies dancing reference a Greco-Roman tradition of painting and sculpture that centres the body at work, sport and play.

The images have a timelessness due to their spartan nature, near-nude forms and almost abstracted natural backgrounds. The movement and negative space in the photographs create a sense of freedom, calm and unselfconscious self-expression.

9. Paulo Abreu

Brazilian artist Paulo Abreu creates carefully staged, almost sculptural photographs of nude bodies. His minimalist art strips the image of everything but the bodies and faces in it creating powerfully thematic works. In A-paixão-esgotada, two nude models holding matchsticks are seen, facing away from each other in front of a plain background.

Abreu was inspired by Greco-Roman art and performing arts and their depictions of the body.

These are just a few of the ways creatives are shaping photography and the image-heavy cultural landscape by reimagining and recasting both the medium and the world around them.

(Text by Srishti Ojha, intern at STIR)