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Win a Solo Exhibition this February. Juror: Harvey Stein
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Tariq Zaidi
Tariq Zaidi
Tariq Zaidi

Tariq Zaidi

Country: United Kingdom

Tariq Zaidi is a freelance photographer currently based out of London, UK. In January 2014, he gave up an executive management position to pursue his passion of capturing the dignity, strength and soul of people, within their environment. His photography focuses on documenting social issues, inequality, traditions and endangered communities around the world.

Tariq's stories, images and videos from Afghanistan, Angola, Brazil, Cambodia, Chad, DRC, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Georgia, Haiti, Indonesia, Mongolia, North Korea, Republic of the Congo & South Sudan have been featured internationally in over 900 magazines / newspapers / websites (in more than 90 countries) including The Guardian, BBC, CNN, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Der Spiegel, El Pais Semanal, Geo, Independent On Sunday, National Geographic Traveler, GQ, Marie Claire, Vogue, GQ Style, Esquire, PDN, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 Mois, Telegraph, Conde Nast Traveler, Global Times China, Internazionale, Feature Shoot, China Daily, People's Daily, China, Deutsche Welle, Das Erste/ARD, Hindustan Times, Newsweek, Foreign Policy Magazine and Times of London among other respected international titles.

Tariq has won many major international photography awards (POYi, UNICEF, NPPA, PDN, IPA, AI-AP, AAPA etc). His work has been shown in 80 international exhibitions and he has worked on projects and assignments in 21 countries across 4 continents. He is a self-taught photographer, holds an M.Sc. (Master of Science) from University College London and is an Eddie Adams Worksop 2015 Alumini.

In Feb 2018, Tariq was awarded one of the Premier Awards in POY75 (Pictures of the Year International Competition) - "Photographer of the Year" Award of Excellence for his work from North Korea, Congo and Brazil and also for 2nd place in the Feature Category in the same year. He was also a winner of PDN Photo Annual 2018 (Photojournalism / Documentary Category) and was awarded The Marty Forscher Fellowship Fund for outstanding achievement in Humanistic Photography, presented by PDN and Parsons School of Design, USA. In 2019, he was nominated to the Prix Pictet. In 2020, his work from Congo, El Salvador and Georgia was recognised 5 times by POY77 (Pictures of the Year International Competition) including 1st place for Portraits Series, 2nd place Spot News and 3rd Place Issue Reporting. His work from El Salvador has also been honoured as a 2020 Amnesty International Media Awards finalist (Photojournalism category) in recognition of his commitment to human rights. In Sep 2020, Tariq's work entitled Sapeurs: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Congo was shown at Visa Pour L'image, International Festival of Photojournalism.

Tariq is currently working on a long-term personal project entitled Capturing the Human Spirit - a visual anthology about hope, dignity and community in some of the poorest regions in the world. The first 3 chapters of this work from the slum communities of Haiti, Brazil and Cambodia was featured at Visa Pour L'image, International Festival of Photojournalism, in September 2018.

His first book Sapeurs: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Congo was published in September 2020.

Articles

Tariq Zaidi's Exclusive Interview
Sin Salida
Cattle of Kings - The Mundari of South Sudan
Sapeurs
North Korea The People's Paradise

All about Photo Compeitions

All About Photo Awards 2018
All About Photo Awards 2022
All About Photo Awards 2023
Selected Books on Available on Amazon
Tariq Zaidi: North Korea The People’s Paradise
Tariq Zaidi: North Korea The People’s Paradise
Tariq Zaidi
Sin Salida
Sin Salida
Tariq Zaidi
Sapeurs: Ladies & Gentlemen of the Congo
Sapeurs: Ladies & Gentlemen of the Congo
Tariq Zaidi

Websites

www.tariqzaidi.com

@tariqzaidiphoto

 

Tariq Zaidi's Video

Selected Books

Tariq Zaidi: North Korea The People’s Paradise
Tariq Zaidi: North Korea The People’s Paradise
Tariq Zaidi
Sin Salida
Sin Salida
Tariq Zaidi
Sapeurs: Ladies & Gentlemen of the Congo
Sapeurs: Ladies & Gentlemen of the Congo
Tariq Zaidi

Inspiring Portfolios

Marijn Fidder
© Marijn Fidder
Julien Chatelin
© Julien Chatelin
Marcus Yam
© Marcus Yam
Call for Entries
All About Photo Awards 2026
$5,000 Cash Prizes! Juror: Steve McCurry
© Patrick Enssler
 
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More Great Photographers To Discover

Flor Garduño
Flor Garduño
Mexico
1957
Flor Garduño was born in Mexico and studied visual arts at the Academy of San Carlos (UNAM), where she focused on the search for the structural aspects of form and space. She became especially interested in the work of Kati Horna, a Hungarian photographer whose communicative dimension of her photographs had a great impact on the development of Garduño's aesthetic. She gave up her studies to work as a darkroom assistant for Manuel Álvarez Bravo, one of Mexico's most prestigious photographers, with whom she strengthened her photographic skills. Since then, Garduño has received numerable prizes, and her work has been exposed and published around the world. Garduño's photos depict the landscapes of Central and South America -- and the people whose ancestors were indigenous to the region. Her photos depict subjects that could have existed in a time long before the present moment, and through photographing them, brings the Indian land of America to the present moment. She addresses time -- past, present, and future -- simultaneously through her photographs. Through her photos we witness the slow procession from life to death, interrupted by comic accidents, childish play, liturgical ceremonies, and erotic repose. Though many themes traverse Garduño's body of work, all ultimately reach the point of incense where, uncertainly, nature, and art blend so that mankind may have a margin of whimsy, freedom, or significance on the face of the gods.Source: Peter Fetterman Gallery Flor Garduño (Born Mexico City, Mexico, 1957) studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Mexico City.  In 1979 she became an assistant to Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Between 1981 and 1982 she traveled with a team of photographers organized by Mariana Yampolsky. The team photographed rural villages throughout Mexico for reading primers published by the Secretariat of Education for Indigenous Communities.  This experience as well as her association with Kati Horn influenced Garduño's photographs, which are usually of country locales and towns depicted in strange and mysterious ways typical of Surrealism in Mexican photography.  Garduño had her first one-person exhibition in 1982 at the Galeria Jose Clemente Orozco in Mexico City.  In 1985, a compendium of six years of her work was published entitled "Magia del Juego Eterno" and in 1987 another book entitled "Bestiarium" was published.  In 1986 she participated in the first photographic exhibition of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana and in the inauguration of the Kahlo-Coronel Gallery in Mexico City. In 1986 and 1988 she was included in several traveling exhibitions "Reserved for Export" and "Realidades Mágicas" that were seen in the United States and Europe.  1996 Image and Memory, Latin american Photography, 1880-1992  Itinerary: El Museo del Barrio, New York.  Art Gallery of the University of Scranton, PA.  Lowe Art Museum, Florida.  Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico.  Crocker Art Museum, CA.  Meadows Museum, Tx.  Akron Art Museum, OH. Her one-person shows were in Paris in 1986, the Museum Volkenkunde de Rotterdam in 1989, the Field Museum of Chicago in 1990 and Montreal in 1991.  Since 1989 she has dedicated herself to photographing the images that appear in her one-person exhibition and monograph, "Witnesses of Time".  The exhibition started at the Americas Society in 1993 and will be traveling across the country to the Museum of Photographic Arts in California as well as various other venues.  Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; and Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico.Source: Throckmorton Fine Art Galleries in the USA:   Peter Fetterman Gallery   Throckmorton Fine Art   Fahey/Klein Gallery   Holden Luntz Gallery   Etherton Gallery   Andrew Smith Gallery
Julien De Wilde
Julien De Wilde
Belgium
1976
Julien De Wilde was born into a family of photographers and has been fascinated by Japanese black and white photography since his childhood. After years of commercial photography and traveling in Asia, he now focuses his work on personal fine art photography projects, moving images and short documentary films. His dark and deep black and white portraits are an invitation to dive into ourselves. Self-inquiry and introspection are omnipresent in his images full of sensitivity and truth. Go to the point, without detour or artifice. He lives in Brussels and often travels to Bangkok. His photographs have been honored with multiple awards.
Angela Fisher
Angela Fisher
United States
Thirty years of work on the African continent have carried Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher across 270,000 miles and through remote corners of 40 countries in exploration of more than 150 African cultures. In the process, this team of world-renowned photographers has produced fourteen widely acclaimed books and made four films about traditional Africa. They have been granted unprecedented access to African tribal rites and rituals and continue to be honored worldwide for their powerful photographs documenting the traditional ceremonies of cultures thousands of years old. As an intrepid team of explorers, they are committed to preserving sacred tribal ceremonies and African cultural traditions all too vulnerable to the trends of modernity. The Beckwith-Fisher images are the result of a long, enduring and deeply respectful relationship with African tribal peoples. This, combined with their photographic skills, creates an intimate portrayal of ceremonies long held secret that might have never been recorded. Their work preserves and presents the power, complexity and celebration found within the rituals of African tribal life. Their extraordinary photographs are recorded in fourteen best-selling books and in their films. Their new book “Painted Bodies” (2012) follows “Maasai” (1980), “Nomads of Niger” (1983), “Africa Adorned” (1984), “African Ark” (1990), “African Ceremonies” (1999), “Passages” (2000), “Faces of Africa” (2004), “Lamu: Kenya’s Enchanted Island” (2009), and “Dinka” (2010). The special limited-edition books, hand printed in Santiago, Chile, are titled “Surma,” “Karo,” “Maasai,” and “Dinka.” “African Ceremonies,” their defining body of work, is a double volume, pan-African study of rituals and rites of passage from birth to death, covering 93 ceremonies from 26 countries. This book won the United Nations Award for Excellence for “vision and understanding of the role of cultural traditions in the pursuit of world peace.” Honored twice with the Annisfield-Wolf Book Award in race relations for “outstanding contributions to the understanding of cultural diversity and prejudice,” Angela and Carol are also winners of the Royal Geographical Society of London’s Cherry Kearton Medal for their contribution to the photographic recording of African ethnography and ritual. The photographers have made four films about traditional Africa, including Way of the Wodaabe (1986), The Painter and the Fighter, and two programs for the Millennium Series Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World. Numerous exhibitions of their photography and films have been shown in museums and galleries around the world. In 2000 their Passages exhibition opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art featuring 97 mural photographs, six video films and a selection of African masks, sculpture and jewelry. This exhibition has traveled to seven museums on three continents. Aware that traditional cultures in Africa are fast disappearing, Carol and Angela are working with an urgency to complete the third volume of their ongoing study of African Ceremonies with the goal of covering the remaining traditional ceremonies in the 13 African cultures in which they have not yet worked. Source: carolbeckwith-angelafisher.com
Daniel Dorko
Daniel Dorko
Hungary
1987
I'm a freelance photographer with 15 years of international experience. My images have been published in various mags, books, photo albums and art fairs and I work as a photographer, photojournalist and videographer. I hold a degree in photojournalism and I am also an art historian. I speak 4 languages: English, French, Russian and Hungarian. I live in Paris. Artist Statement I'm passionate about the way photography can evoke emotions and feelings, inviting the viewer for an inner journey. To me, photography is not about giving answers, but finding new questions.
Hana Peskova
Hana Peskova
Czech Republic
1967
Hanka Peskova - passionate self-taught photographer whose journey began at the renowned Skola Kreativni Fotografie in Prague. In 2021, she was honored with the prestigious International Title of Excellence FIAP (EFIAP) by the FIAP (Artiste de la Fédération Internationale de l'Art Photographique), a testament to her artistic prowess and dedication to the craft. Nestled in the picturesque town of Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic, she has turned the globe into her canvas, capturing the ephemeral beauty and indescribable energy of moments and people. Her work transcends the mere act of memory preservation to unveil the essence of life itself, through the eye of her camera. As a freelance photographer, her lens has intimately explored the vibrancy of street and documentary photography for years. With a focus on the tapestry of social life, her work dives deep into the heart of ordinary life, cultural narratives, and contemporary issues. She possesses a unique attraction to the narratives of old, the allure of isolated places, and the stories of people living beyond the limelight. Her photography is not just a window to the world but an invitation to view it through her unique perspective. Capturing not only the bustling life on the streets and the untouched facets of nature, she also ventures into the realm of creative photography. Each frame is a story, a whisper of the past or a shout of the present, always aiming to evoke emotion and provoke thought. Exclusive Interview with Hana Hana Peskova AAP Magazine AAP Magazine 38 Women
Maryam Ashrafi
Maryam Ashrafi
Iran
Maryam Ashrafi is a Paris-based Iranian photographer. Born in Tehran during the Iran and Iraq war, Maryam is passionate about sociology which led her to focus her interest on social and political issues. For several years, she worked on different subjects in Paris: from the mobilisation of the Kurdish and Iranian diasporas to riots following various social and political issues. Above all, as an independent freelance photographer who believes in long-term projects, she has covered the aftermath of wars from Kobani in Northern Syria to Sinjar in Iraqi Kurdistan from 2012 to 2018. Her work on Kurdish resistance movements has been the subject of several exhibitions and publications. Her first book “Rising among ruins, Dancing amid bullets” , which has won the PrixHip and Lucie Photo Book prize documents the consequences of war and the lives of civilians returning to their homes in Northern Syria and the autonomous Kurdistan region of Northern Iraq. Articles Rising among ruins, Dancing amid bullets AAP Magazine 40 Portrait
Marco Cajazzo
Marco Cajazzo
Italy
1975
I was born in Mazara del Vallo (Sicily) in 1975. Now I live in Catania where I work as a SW engineer. I started studying photography in 2017 when a friend (who is passionate about street photography) pointed out that maybe I had a good visual sense (ironically I am visually impaired in the right eye). In the last years some of my photographs have been selected from digital magazines and important competitions in Italy and abroad (MiamiSPF, ItalianSPF, IstanbulSPF, Urban Photo Awards and so on). I won ImagOrbetello (category Street) in 2021 and Observa Street Photo Festival in 2023. STATEMENT I'm deeply in love with Elliott Erwitt's photography and I think that David Gibson’s “Street Photographer’s Manual” is a milestone book for anyone who wants to start street photography. My photos are simple, based on observing the world around me. I look for overlaps, coincidences, oddities, surreal situations: everything that can make the observer say “How is it possible?” or at least make him smile. Streets can be an incredible stage of beauty and humanity.
Dominik Schulze
Dominik Schulze
Germany
1993
Dominik Schulze is a 29 year old enthusiastic amateur photographer from Dresden, Germany. He has been shooting street photography for about seven years, but prefers to call it capturing unposed moments in our daily urban environment. Besides strong light/shadow situations, the integration of people into architecture, he also likes to experiment with abstract perspectives on everyday things. To get new impressions of street life, he likes to travel and combine this with his photography. Photographers such as Thomas Leuthard, Alex Webb, Siegfried Hansen and Josef Koudelka have particularly influenced his style. Currently, a Pixel 4a is his main camera.
Nicolas Castermans
Nicolas Castermans
France
1991
My name is Nicolas Castermans. I was born in the French Alps, in a little countryside village on the border with Switzerland. I turned 31 years old last June (2022). At the age of 21, I went abroad. I did a Masters degree in International Business in China, where a real passion for traveling was born in me. I spent every spare moment that I had, with an amazing group of friends, discovering this huge country and South-East Asia. I explored this continent for about 3 years and this is where I lived my first real adventures, like Vietnam on motorbike, or traveling 14,000 km from Hong Kong to France, via the Trans-Siberian train. During this trip, I had the chance to meet Izabela, a wonderful Polish traveler, who made me the honor of becoming my wife 5 years ago. Together, we decided to go to South America, and after a year in Peru, we set up our own travel agency there. While developing this activity and guiding our first clients, I started to photograph and document what I was experiencing. Slowly, photography became a real passion ! We’ve been now on the continent for about 6 years. I can’t stop being fascinated by the diversity of cultures and landscapes in the Andes. Since February 2021, we’ve embarked on a motorcycle trip in Colombia that has taken us to Northern Argentina so far, while keeping organizing/guiding trips for our travel agency. I’ve also developed Photo Tours on the continent that I lead myself. Who knows where all these adventures will take us in the near future...
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All About Photo Awards 2026
Win a Solo Exhibition in February
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Latest Interviews

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Interview
Exclusive Interview with Marijn Fidder
Marijn Fidder is a Dutch documentary photographer whose work powerfully engages with current affairs and contemporary social issues. Driven by a deep sense of social justice, she uses photography to speak on behalf of the voiceless and to advocate for the rights of those who are most vulnerable. Her images have been widely published in major international outlets including National Geographic, CNN Style, NRC Handelsblad, Volkskrant, GUP New Talent, and ZEIT Magazin. Her long-term commitment to disability rights—particularly through years of work in Uganda—culminated in her acclaimed project Inclusive Nation, which earned her the title of Photographer of the Year 2025 at the All About Photo Awards. She is also the recipient of multiple prestigious honors, including awards from World Press Photo and the Global Peace Photo Award. We asked her a few questions about her life and work.
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Call for Entries
All About Photo Awards 2026
$5,000 Cash Prizes! Juror: Steve McCurry
© Fernando Morales Roca
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