Exclusive Interview with Manuela Federl

Manuela Federl is a journalist and documentary filmmaker with over 15 years of experience. She studied languages, economics, and cultural studies, focusing on the Mapuche people in Chile, which became the subject of her published thesis. In 2016, she founded her company, bergjournalisten, and has since created award-winning documentaries like 100 Hours of Lesbos and THE GAME: Gambling Between Life and Death. For the past two years, she has traveled extensively, documenting social issues through photography and storytelling. Her series 'The Roma Princesses' earned her the January 2024 Solo Exhibition. .

We asked her a few questions about her life and work.

All About Photo: What started your career as a photographer?

Manuela Federl:The Roma Princesses were my first real photography project. I visited the community with a friend, the photographer Kristof Huf. He has been there before, explained a lot to me and also encouraged me to take pictures myself. I visited the community with him several times and delved deeper and deeper into the topic. The photo series is the result of these visits.

How do you prepare for your projects?

If I'm interested in a topic, I start reading everything about it and meet with experts or members of the respective groups. I try to get as much information as possible and only then start taking pictures.

What challenges do you face when photographing such sensitive and complex topics?

There are many challenges when moving around the settlements. I don't want to portray people as victims, but rather highlight their strength, power and warmth. My photo series is not intended to be a Poverty porn, but rather a realistic representation of the situation.

How do you balance authenticity and artistic expression in your photography?

Authenticity is very important to me. I never tell anyone what to do or where to stand for the photo. My pictures are coincidences, moments taken from life. When I take a photo of someone, I don't shoot right away, but wait until the person relaxes and no longer gives me their full attention.

What role do you believe photography plays in raising awareness about social issues like poverty and discrimination?

I believe that photography is an important tool for highlighting injustices. An image can trigger many emotions in a person and stay in their memory for a long time. With my series about the Roma Princesses we were able to collect money for the Roma settlements to buy Christmas presents. That was a very nice moment – for them and for me.

How do the residents of the Roma ghettos react to being photographed?

I think the people in the settlements are happy when someone visits them and is interested in their stories. We were always received very positively. I had a special connection to women and girls. During the tours, the girls often argued about who could hold my hand. I then printed out the photos for them and brought them with me and they were often the first pictures they had of themselves.

What impact do you hope your photographs of the Roma community will have on viewers?

Of course, I hope that people become aware of my pictures and thus also of the situation in the Roma settlements. I get feedback all the time and although I want to reach as many people as possible, just changing one person's mind is often a victory.

What drives you to continue documenting difficult but important stories through photography?

I see myself as both a journalist and an activist. It is important to me to point out injustices and hold up a mirror to our society. Everyone can change something and achieve something and I try to do my part through my work and personal commitment.

What are your upcoming projects?

I recently visited the refugees on the English Channel on the English-French border for the first time and wanted to document their situation. For six months I have been regularly photographing an integration project in which people with mental and physical limitations work together with other gardeners. I'm also currently working on the story of a dropout from the neo-Nazi scene.

I always have several projects going on at the same time and it is very important to me that every project makes sense.

Cedric Roux: Before Rebirth

By Cedric Roux

Publisher : ODYSSEE

2024 | 96 pages

Empty storefronts dot the downtown, while massive brick tobacco warehouses stretch the length of city blocks—abandoned and awaiting creative reuse. Wilson, North Carolina, feels frozen in the 1970s. Invited by the Eye on Main Street festival, photographer Cedric Roux made several trips to this enigmatic town. For a photographer used to capturing the vibrant energy of New York City streets—his first book, My Wonderland (now sold out), vividly chronicled the bustling metropolis—his initial encounter with Wilson was a profound shock.

Expecting a town in the midst of a vibrant renaissance, Roux wandered Wilson daily, exploring its diverse areas: downtown, affluent suburbs, and struggling neighborhoods. On either side of the railroad tracks that symbolically and socially divide the city, he sought a light that might suggest an emerging revival..

In his latest book, Before Rebirth, Roux captures this sense of disconnection, using his lens to explore a promise not yet realized. With a population of just 47,000, Wilson is a far cry from Manhattan’s 1.5 million. Used to the dense human energy that fuels his photographic style, Roux found himself reimagining his approach. His work took on a more stripped-down, documentary aesthetic, yet it remains deeply rooted in place and retains the distinctive palette and framing that define his vision..

In collaboration with artistic director Jean-Matthieu Gautier, Roux drew from his imagination and visual archives to craft a narrative that stays true to his photographic roots while stepping far beyond his usual realm.

All About Cedric Roux

John Divola: San Fernando Valley

By John Divola

Publisher : Nazraeli Press

2024 | 60 pages

From the publisher: San Fernando Valley is where John Divola was born and raised, and it served as both backdrop and subject for his earliest, serious photographic explorations, made during the early 1970s. This previously unpublished body of work shows “the Valley” through the eyes of a young photographer who would soon become an internationally-recognized artist with the exhibition and publication of his much more conceptual “Zuma” series. The black and white photographs in “San Fernando Valley” comprise a series of subject groupings which, pulled together, show early manifestations of the deadpan humor and the ability to capture everyday scenes wrapped in loneliness, for which Divola is now well-known. The book is also, and not incidentally, a fascinating record of a quintessentially 1970s Los Angeles culture. John Divola’s work is the subject of numerous books and catalogues. Widely exhibited and collected throughout the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia, Divola’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of many public and private institutions, including those of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

All About John Divola

Cig Harvey: Emerald Drifters

By Cig Harvey

Publisher : The Monacelli Press

2025 | 224 pages

Following her celebrated monograph Blue Violet (Monacelli, 2021), photographer Cig Harvey continues her personal study of sensory experience, focusing on the ephemeral nature of light, pigment, and vision. Her latest photographs are lush tableaux of her signature subjects – flora, cakes, domestic interiors, and the human figure in landscape – accompanied by prose vignettes on the science and art of color, written in her vibrant, intimate style. Featuring an afterword by award-winning novelist and poet Ocean Vuong, Emerald Drifters is a catalogue of pleasures and heartbreaks, and ‘an urgent call to live.’

All About Cig Harvey

Helmut Newton. Berlin, Berlin

By Helmut Newton

Publisher : Taschen

2025 | 244 pages

Born in Berlin in 1920, Helmut Newton trained as a teenager with legendary photographer Yva, following her lead into the enticing pastures of fashion, portraiture and nudes. Forced to flee the Nazis aged only 18, Newton never left Berlin behind. After his career exploded in Paris in the 1960s, he returned regularly to shoot for magazines like Constanze, Adam, Vogue, Condé Nast's Traveler, ZEITmagazin, Männer Vogue, Max and the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin as well as his own magazine Helmut Newton’s Illustrated. In 1979, the newly relaunched German Vogue commissioned him to retrace the footsteps of his youth to capture the fashion moment. The resulting portfolio, Berlin, Berlin!, inspired the title of the exhibition which celebrates 20 years of the Helmut Newton Foundation. This collection includes Newton’s most iconic Berlin images, as well as many unknown shots from the 1930s to the 2000s: nightcrawlers in uber-cool clubs and restaurants, nude portraits in the boarding houses he knew from his youth, and the Berlin film scene, featuring Hanna Schygulla and Wim Wenders at the Berlin Wall, John Malkovich and David Bowie. In October 2003, only months before his death, Newton moved large parts of his archive to his new foundation, housed in the Museum of Photography beside the Zoologischer Garten station―the very station from which he fled Berlin in the winter of 1938. This publication thus closes a circle in the story of his extraordinary life and work.

Exclusive Interview with Manuela Federl

All about Manuela Federl

Selected Books