Merlion Memories

May 18, 2023

Darren O’Brien’s project takes this fragile idea of the nature of memory as its starting point. He accompanied his partner on her return to Singapore, where she spent six years as a child, eighteen years later.

Recent Stories

Chance Encounters in The Valley of Lights
Chance Encounters in the Valley of Lights tells the story of an unsolved extraterrestrial case from 1980s Todmorden, West Yorkshire. Photographer Rik Moran combines original imagery with never-before-seen archival material to investigate the possible alien abduction of PC Alan Godfrey. In illuminating one of small-town England’s most unlikely protagonists, Chance Encounters unearths another other-worldly mystery along the way.
Rik Moran
The 2nd day. What it means to be there
Oleksandr Khomenko [https://www.facebook.com/oleksandr.khomenko] is a Kyiv-based photographer who shows life in Ukraine as it is in independent media like hromadske.ua [https://en.hromadske.ua/] and Ukrainer [https://ukrainer.net/en/]. For the second day, people with emergency bags and pets have been staying at the Kyiv subway stations. The entrance is free. Many people have found shelter at the ‘Politekhnichnyi Instytut’ metro station — the hall is full. They are sitting on their suitcases,
Oleksandr Khomenko
Separation
The European Union, or the Council of Europe as it was known when it was founded in 1949, brought in tremendous change to society permeating its very core. The benefits were of economic, cultural and security nature but some also argued that it erased their national identity. One of the biggest improvements, though, was that one could travel, live and study in a place different from one’s birth country unhindered — it has never been this easy to meet, fall in love with and settle in with people
Laura Pannack
Beach Boulevard
Brian O’Neill is an Illinois-based sociologist and photographer whose work looks at the human condition and society’s relationship to nature. He investigates the various meanings of “industry” and how it affects local communities and environments. Beach Boulevard, his first photographic publication, is a small spiral-bound book in a small edition of 100. Rather than probing the typical documentary question “what’s going on here” it delves deeper and wonders how we actually got to our current sta
Brian O'Neil
Hors-Jeu (Offside)
When we think of homosexuality, the world had made huge leaps in recent years. Gay marriage is now legal in the US and the UK, protections from discrimination exist in law, gay people are allowed to adopt children — events that we have come to accept as normal, as they should
Hannah Cauhépé
Casitas
The project exposes the living conditions that Puerto Ricans have to endure such as natural catastrophes, limited government support and unstable electric service. Although the series began in 2013, it wasn’t until 2017 when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico that Saldaña realised the series is something more than just a personal project — it is a testament of the residence of the local population.
Annie Y Saldana
Coastal Mammoth
The 2011 tsunami caused an unprecedented amount of damage, chaos and grief. Everyone in Japan was affected in one way or another. The Japanese government soon began to erect a gigantic wall at the cost of billions in the northeast region of the country after the earthquake that caused the tsunami.
Pengkuei Ben Huang
Front Yard
The front yard is as much a metaphor as it is a space. Homes reflect the material successes of their inhabitants, their aesthetic tastes, and concrete the ties that bind family, lovers, and friends. When the shelter-in-place order was announced in March and time came to a proverbial standstill, I turned to my community to make portraits of people in their front yards.
Ashima Yadava
The Palaces of Memory
Stuart Freedman has the kind of experience in photojournalism that the word “expansive” hardly does it justice. Born in London, he has been a photographer for just over 30 years now and his photography has been published in the likes of Life, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, Der Spiegel and The
Stuart Freedman
Ebbing Away of Identity with the Tides
Sushavan Nandy, based in Kolkata, focuses on the climate catastrophe, society, culture and the crises experienced by humankind collectively. He enjoys working on long-term photographic projects as it allows him to delve deep and explore issues in depth rather than simply scratch the surface; he has been published by the Guardian, CNN, New York Magazine, Vogue India, British Journal of Photography, and many others. As a young child Nandy experienced the effects of climate change. He lived in Jal
Sushavan Nandy

mnngful Originals

mnngful Members

Stephen Leslie
UK
,

Film director, screenwriter and photographer based in London "About 20 years ago I started to take photographs with a small point and shoot camera. What began as a simple way to keep visually alert in between directing jobs soon morphed in to a daily diary of images and eventually became an obsession I've been struggling to contain ever since."

Onur Tatar
TR
,
Çanakkale

Photographer based in Turkey, was born in 1984 in Canakkale. In 2008, he graduated from the Department of Photography of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Dokuz Eylul University (DEU) and with a Master of Arts degree at the DEU Institute of Fine Arts Department of Photography in 2021. Onur completed his PhD in Ege University Social Sciences Institute Radio Television and Film Department in which his thesis Hypertext and the Changing Aesthetics in Photographic Art. He works as an associate professor at the Adnan Menderes University Radio and Television Department, teaches photography and aesthetics. His artistic works have been exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions.

Annie Y Saldana
PR
,
San Juan

Fine Art photographer, educator, curator. Founder at PRISMA Art Projects.

Lewis Bush
UK
,

Photographer, educator and curator working across media and platforms to visualise the activities of powerful organisations, practices, and technologies. Since 2012 his practice has explored issues ranging from the aggressive redevelopment of London, to the systemic inequalities of the art world. Recent works include Shadows of the State, which examines the democratic deficit of intelligence gathering, and Wv.B which examines the dark histories of space exploration. He is currently working on a long-term project about computer vision which runs in parallel with an ESRC funded PhD at the London School of Economics. He is also course leader of the MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography (online) course at London College of Communication.

Callum O'Keefe
UK
,
Bristol

Documentary photographer focused on the relation between people and place. Building the base of my portfolio on live music, he has recently graduated with a First Class Honours in Photography from The University West of England.

Jan Enkelmann
UK
,
London

Documentary, street and travel photographer He is dividing his time between commercial work and personal projects. Most of Jan’s photography work is concerned with observations of people in public spaces.

Rik Moran
US
,

Johan Brooks
JP
,
Tokyo

Documentary and street photographer based out of Tokyo, Japan. Born in the UK, he grew up in NYC, and eventually found his way to Japan where he has been living for over 10 years. He is a member of the VoidTokyo photography collective. His photography is on permanent display at the Crunchyroll HQ in San Francisco and was recently exhibited at Terranova House in Tokyo.

Timo Knorr
DE
,
Hamburg

Documentary photographer focused on the photographic research of groups that move in a field of tension of the social conflicts of the current time. I am looking for the questions: How do we want to live today, how do we want to eat and how can we make our world a little bit better.

Verity Adriana
UK
,

Visual artist who uses light, installation and photography to investigate the phenomenology of the metaphysical and existential. She has been a practicing and exhibiting artist for over a decade. Adriana was born in Hull, UK, and grew up around the world wherever her mother found work, including Spain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Adriana returned to Hull independently at the age of 14 to see herself through her final years at school and went onto establish herself in the regional arts community.

Max J
CY
,
Limassol

Documentary and street photographer from Cyprus. Founder of mnngful, The Phooks. Author of TheIslandArchive.com.

Marc Wilson
UK
,
Bath

Documentary photographer working on long-term documentary projects, such as his previous work, completed in 2014, ‘The Last Stand’ and his current work, ‘A wounded landscape’. Marc tells stories through his photography, focusing at times on the landscape itself, and the objects found on and within it, and sometimes combining landscape, documentary, portrait and still life, along with audio recordings of interviews and sounds, to portray the mass sprawling web of the histories and stories he is retelling.

Nathan Benkemoun
FR
,
Montreuil

Nathan Benkemoun (1983) is a French photographer born in Nice and based in Montreuil (France). In his work, he tries to illustrate how people interact with environment such as nature, cities or open spaces. He also works in making concrete some common human feelings and sensations.

Cheryl Newman
UK
,
London

Artist and independent curator of photography living in London. She recently completed and MA in Photography Arts at the University of Westminster (Distinction) Her personal practice explores her history though archive and family images and the environment of memory For the past three years she has been working with the Gaia Foundation to commission and curate We Feed the World, a photographic global adventure documenting the lives of family and peasant farmers for an exhibition which premiered at the Barge house Gallery, London, in Autumn 2018. She curated 209 Women, one of the highest profile exhibitions of 2018 in which all the female MP’s in the UK Parliament were photographed by women photographers to celebrate 100 years of suffrage and which moved to Open Eye Gallery Liverpool in February 2019 and is now part of the Parliamentary Art collection. For more than fifteen years she was the Photography Director of the award-winning Telegraph Magazine where she raised the profile of the magazine and commissioned intelligent and inventive photography worldwide.

Bojan Fürst
CA
,
St. John's

I am a photographer, writer, radio maker and geographer based in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada with a passion for documentary work of all kind because "The things of this world exist, they are; you can't refuse them."

Stories worth seeing

mnngful is a platform supporting independent documentary photography & photojournalism.

Thanks to passionate storytellers, we learn about matters that otherwise stay neglected. Stories that matter, but have not been covered enough are captured and told by passion-driven photographers and journalists.

They create because they care about the world they live in and tell us about matters beyond our eyesight.Their work is often driven by pure enthusiasm, fuelled by own beliefs and dreams for a better world. That's why such independent work is worth special attention.

mnngful is here to support the meaningful stories they tell.

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