Rising Photographers / U

This series observes the physical and quiet discipline of winter sake brewing. I focus not on the finished product, but on the gestures, processes, and sincerity behind them.

For me, Christmas has always seemed like the time of the year when making photographic imagery takes a holiday. Perhaps it's the dark or just the over-the-top schmaltz that had put me off. It wasn't until I began to appreciate the humorous oddities of the season that I began to see what is so easy to overlook.

''The Garden of My Tenderness'' is a personal reflection on vulnerability, inner growth, and the quiet strength that exists within sensitivity. The series was born in winter - a season when the world feels stripped back, and the longing for warmth, flowers, and tenderness becomes especially acute. It is within this contrast between external cold and inner need that the garden began to take shape.

As an artist, I am inspired by the memories and objects that connect me to my past. "My Father's Toys" is a deeply personal project that explores the cherished wind-up tin toys from my father's collection that played such a significant role in my childhood.

The swimming hole only varies in size each season from about 20 to 40 square feet, but the range in human experience within this small area is remarkable. I have been photographing my fellow cold water plungers at the same swimming hole (a slightly different one each winter) since 2022. In this small space, there is both stillness and silliness. There is pain and joy and peace. The variety of human experience and expression I have captured in this limited area seems to expand beyond its boundaries.

The Intertidal Project delves into the concept that there’s a difference between what we see and what we are aware of. The work records the moments of impact when a person, time, and place intersect leaving an indelible imprint upon them both. With each recurring instance new layers of memory are forged like geological strata. By growing conscious of these cumulative memories, we can reveal the unfolding of time.

Over her fifteen-year photographic career, Julia has navigated seismic shifts in her artistic trajectory, moving from travel photography toward contemporary art. The upheavals of the early 2020s profoundly altered her creative path. What began as an outward gaze turned inward, catalyzing a transformation in both process and purpose, driven by a search for meaning within uncertainty. Her work examines identity, perception, and the shifting nature of reality and memory.

This images are a part of a photographic reportage about the small ethnic group of Mundari. The Mundari are cattle herders of South Sudan, the world's youngest country, who dedicate their lives to the care of their Ankole Watusi cattle, characterized by their large horns. They live in symbiosis with their cattle and nothing is more important for them than their bovines. In a cattle camp, everyone plays their role.

Near the end of WWII, weakened by six years of extreme hunger, slave labor, and Typhus, my mother was liberated from Majdanek, a barbarous Nazi extermination camp where as many as 360,000, mostly fellow Jews, were brutally murdered. She made her way back to her former home in Radom Poland in search of fellow survivors and family. At great risk, she reentered her pre-war family home now occupied by uncooperative Poles, to reclaim a set of candlesticks and a few meters of peach charmeuse fabric from her former livelihood as a lingerie seamstress.