We are sharing work from our 2025 mentorship cohort! For eight years, we have paired a group of dedicated young photographers from all over the world with industry leaders. In its third year, our cohort received project grants to help finance their work. Take a look!
This year’s program was made possible thanks to Leica USA!
CAROLINA BLUMENKRANC
Argentina | @kitiblumenkranc | carolinablumenkranc.com
This project explores the spiritual, emotional, and everyday relationships that Mapuche-Tehuelche communities maintain with their territory, a place historically and politically described as a “desert.” Through both documentary and symbolic images, the series reveals ancestral knowledge, community bonds, practices of care, and forms of resistance that coexist with the region’s current tensions—extractivism, climate change, and multiple inequalities.
Carolina Blumenkranc is a communicator and photographer who works with territory, memory, and forms of affective resistance in Patagonia.
SARA KONTAR
Syria | @_.sarako._ | sarakontar.com
Another Cut is a documentary photography project that reflects on exile through intimate gestures, following Samara, a Syrian hairdresser in the Paris suburbs. In her small apartment, haircuts, shared stories, and daily routines become acts of connection and resilience, transforming a constrained space into a place of presence, continuity, and community.
Sara Kontar is a Syrian artist and filmmaker based in France since 2016, exploring exile, identity, and displacement through documentary and experimental work.
ESSEL EKUBAN
Ghana | @_tessels | esselekuban.mypixieset.com
While working on a documentary project in Accra, I met Naa, a priestess and community leader who has long served as a pillar of support for a group of middle-aged queer Ghanaian women. Through intimate portraits and moments from their daily lives, this project honors a largely undocumented generation—centering care, survival, and self-representation in the spaces where they feel safest.
Essel Ekuban is an artist who works with both film and photography as tools for resistance, preservation, and intergenerational dialogue.
ELENA KALINICHENKO
Ukraine | @reinelen | elenakalyna.com
The project “I’m Not Fine” explores the psychological impact of the war on civilians in Ukraine. This story follows Valerii, a 24-year-old who is struggling with depression. Russia’s full-scale invasion took his youth. This work explores the total loss of safety, when a home is being destroyed along with memories of a normal, happy life. These photos are Valerii’s honest answer to the question so often asked in Ukraine: “how are you?”
Elena (Kalyna) Kalinichenko is a Ukrainian documentary photographer whose work explores the intimate stories of war and human resilience.
JULIA LÊ
France | @couinemai | maijuliale.com
Far from the universal imaginary of a carefree and protected childhood, we were just kids is rooted in a reality far less represented: childhoods marked, from early moments, by systemic forms of violence. This is a long-term photographic and sound project, co-constructed with young racialized adults who grew up in European France. Through interviews, family archives, sound walks, and photographs taken in response to the participants’ experiences, the work gathers a constellation of stories that emerge: what does it mean to grow up racialized in France?
Julia Lê is a French photographer (b. 1996), based in Paris, whose socially engaged practice focuses on post-colonial diasporic experiences, implementing long-term collaborative methods to explore memory, home, and community as spaces of resistance—where the intimate reveals its political significance.