Bradley Secker began Kütmaan in Damascus in 2010 as a project about people displaced because of their sexuality or gender identity. Initially focused on gay Iraqi men seeking asylum, the work developed over fifteen years into a broader study of queer migration across the Middle East, Turkey, and Europe.

The project examines displacement as an extended condition rather than a single event. Its subjects face legal uncertainty, restricted access to employment, and social discrimination. Some have been displaced more than once. Others have relied on informal communities and survival sex work to support themselves.

Secker’s approach challenges established representations of queer life in photojournalism. Coverage has often been limited to images of Pride events, overt sexuality, or victimhood. Kütmaan instead presents its subjects as individuals whose identities cannot be reduced to sexuality or gender. The photographs address ordinary experiences like domestic life, boredom, intimacy and work. This emphasis places queer displacement within a wider context of the migration experience while retaining the specific pressures faced by LGBTQ+ people. Sexuality and gender identity may determine why someone is forced to leave, but they do not fully define the life that follows.

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About Bradley Secker

Bradley Secker is a British freelance photojournalist, based in Istanbul, Turkey.

His personal work mostly focuses on the intersection of identity and migration, environmental adaption, and the long-term consequences of political and social change. Through traditional documentary practices, and more conceptual approaches, he attempts to expand the visual language of photojournalism, creating work that remains relevant beyond the news cycle.

Much of Secker’s career has focused on the theme of home, its loss, the search for it, and the process of creating it anew. More recently, his work has examined how people and communities are adapting to a changing climate and increasing environmental uncertainty.

He is National Geographic Explorer, having received support for two documentary projects from the National Geographic Society since 2018.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

In episode 028 of Exposures, photographer Camille Seaman speaks with New York–based photojournalist Stephanie Keith about her career, her coverage of Standing Rock and her commitment to documenting injustice. Keith discusses how painting shaped her use of color, how living in Cairo led her to photography and how she built her career through assignments for The New York Times, Reuters and other major publications. The conversation centers on the six weeks she spent at the Oceti Sakowin encampment in 2016, where she photographed water protectors at Turtle Island and the violent confrontation at Backwater Bridge. Together, they examine the artistic, practical and emotional demands of photojournalism, the lasting lessons of Standing Rock, Keith’s continued coverage of social injustice and her advice for photographers pursuing consequential long-term work.

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About Stephanie Keith

Stephanie Keith is a news photographer and videographer based in New York City. Her work focuses on social justice issues with an emphasis on Indigenous people’s experience and immigrant life in New York City.

Working for Reuters and Getty, her work has been featured in many international publications and media outlets. The New York Times has published her photos on the cover of the newspaper 6 times from January 2015 to January 2022.

Prior to moving to the New York City area, she lived in California, Germany and Egypt. She has been documenting the Brooklyn scene most of her photo career, doing stories about Coney Island, Drag Queen competitions, Muslim holidays, Caribbean street celebrations and the Haitian American practice of Vodou.

Stephanie attended Stanford University, and received a Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology. Later she graduated from both the photojournalism program at International Center of Photography and the Master’s program in Photography at New York University. She lives in Brooklyn with her two kids and her two cats.

About Camille Seaman

Camille Seaman was born in 1969. She graduated in 1992 from the State University of New York at Purchase, where she studied photography with Jan Groover and John Cohen. Her photographs have been published in National Geographic Magazine, Italian Geo, German GEO, TIME, The New York Times Sunday magazine, Newsweek, Outside, Zeit Wissen, Men’s Journal, Seed, Camera Arts, Issues, PDN, and American Photo among many others, She frequently leads photographic workshops. Her photographs have received many awards including: a National Geographic Award, 2006; and the Critical Mass Top Monograph Award, 2007. She is a TED Senior Fellow, Stanford Knight Fellow as well as a Cinereach Filmmaker in Residence Fellow.

Camille Seaman strongly believes in capturing photographs that articulate that humans are not separate from nature.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

Part two of two-part series examining Standing Rock on it’s 10th anniversary. In the future TOTIM aims to publish authoritative perspectives such as these around shared subjects, themes and events in sequence. 🙌

In late October 2016, photojournalist Stephanie Keith traveled to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation to document the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline. She remained at the Oceti Sakowin encampment for six weeks, covering the story for Reuters.

The people gathered at Standing Rock called themselves water protectors. Their actions centered on defending the land and preserving clean water for future generations. Keith photographed daily ceremonies and demonstrations, including confrontations at Turtle Island, a sacred burial site where law enforcement had established a tactical position.

She also documented the violent confrontation at Backwater Bridge. After Lakota elders decided to remove burned-out vehicles blocking the road between Standing Rock and Bismarck, hundreds of water protectors were met with tear gas, flash-bang grenades and water cannons in freezing temperatures. Keith navigated through the crowd wearing a gas mask, carefully protecting herself and her equipment so the photographs could reach the public.

“I knew I couldn’t get wet because these images had to get out to the news,” she recalls. “I couldn’t get hypothermia. I couldn’t get my camera gear ruined.”

Her photographs and others helped bring international attention to Standing Rock and in the following weeks, thousands more arrived at the encampment, along with news organizations from around the world.

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About Stephanie Keith

Stephanie Keith is a news photographer and videographer based in New York City. Her work focuses on social justice issues with an emphasis on Indigenous people’s experience and immigrant life in New York City.

Working for Reuters and Getty, her work has been featured in many international publications and media outlets. The New York Times has published her photos on the cover of the newspaper 6 times from January 2015 to January 2022.

Prior to moving to the New York City area, she lived in California, Germany and Egypt. She has been documenting the Brooklyn scene most of her photo career, doing stories about Coney Island, Drag Queen competitions, Muslim holidays, Caribbean street celebrations and the Haitian American practice of Vodou.

Stephanie attended Stanford University, and received a Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology. Later she graduated from both the photojournalism program at International Center of Photography and the Master’s program in Photography at New York University. She lives in Brooklyn with her two kids and her two cats.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

In this episode 27 of Exposures, photographer Camille Seaman joins Eros Hoagland to reflect on Standing Rock ten years after the 2016 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline which is being commemorated this month. Seaman arrived at the Oceti Sakowin camp after hearing about Standing Rock while working on another Indigenous portrait project in South Dakota. She went on to spend a month documenting the camp, the more than 10,000 people gathered there, and the militarized response to the protest.

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Camille Seaman

Camille Seaman was born in 1969. She graduated in 1992 from the State University of New York at Purchase, where she studied photography with Jan Groover and John Cohen. Her photographs have been published in National Geographic Magazine, Italian Geo, German GEO, TIME, The New York Times Sunday magazine, Newsweek, Outside, Zeit Wissen, Men’s Journal, Seed, Camera Arts, Issues, PDN, and American Photo among many others, She frequently leads photographic workshops. Her photographs have received many awards including: a National Geographic Award, 2006; and the Critical Mass Top Monograph Award, 2007. She is a TED Senior Fellow, Stanford Knight Fellow as well as a Cinereach Filmmaker in Residence Fellow.

Camille Seaman strongly believes in capturing photographs that articulate that humans are not separate from nature.

Eros Hoagland

Eros Hoagland is a Los Angeles–based visual storyteller, photojournalist, and cinematographer. Hoagland began his career documenting communities and countries shaped by cycles of violence, working for more than fifteen years across North and South America, the Middle East, and Asia. In 2014, he expanded into film and entertainment photography after being invited to work with acclaimed directors Michael Mann and Alejandro Iñárritu. His clients include The New York Times, Netflix, HBO, National Geographic, Apple TV, TIME, Legendary Pictures, The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, ESPN, Der Spiegel, the Los Angeles Times, and the American Red Cross. A California native, he spends his time outside of work surfing and diving in the Pacific Ocean.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

Part one of two-part series examining Standing Rock on it’s 10th anniversary. In the future TOTIM aims to publish authoritative perspectives such as these around shared subjects, themes and events in sequence. 🙌

In 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe opposed the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Reservation. The proposed route crossed beneath Lake Oahe, a major source of water for the reservation, intentionally bypassing the original plans for routing to the north in favor of passing through Indigenous lands. The opposition developed into a large gathering of Indigenous Nations, environmental groups, and other supporters at the Oceti Sakowin camp.

Camille Seaman traveled to Standing Rock and photographed the people and activities within the camp. Ten years later, Seaman’s photographs provide a record of the individuals who participated in the movement and the conditions within the camp. Some of the people she photographed have since died, while the political and environmental issues associated with Standing Rock remain unresolved. In her account, an elder asked camp residents, “How does it feel to be free for the first time?”

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About Camille Seaman

Camille Seaman was born in 1969. She graduated in 1992 from the State University of New York at Purchase, where she studied photography with Jan Groover and John Cohen. Her photographs have been published in National Geographic Magazine, Italian Geo, German GEO, TIME, The New York Times Sunday magazine, Newsweek, Outside, Zeit Wissen, Men’s Journal, Seed, Camera Arts, Issues, PDN, and American Photo among many others, She frequently leads photographic workshops. Her photographs have received many awards including: a National Geographic Award, 2006; and the Critical Mass Top Monograph Award, 2007. She is a TED Senior Fellow, Stanford Knight Fellow as well as a Cinereach Filmmaker in Residence Fellow.

Camille Seaman strongly believes in capturing photographs that articulate that humans are not separate from nature.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

In episode 026 of Exposures, Amber Maalouf speaks with her twin sister, Ashley Chavez, about the family history, personal relationships, and ethical considerations behind her photographs from Chihuahua. Their conversation moves through Maalouf’s photography work, the importance of sincerity as a prerequisite for access when documenting communities, the role commercial work often plays in supporting her personal projects, and her understanding of photography as a way to preserve the people, places, and experiences she loves.

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Amber Maalouf

Amber Maalouf is a fine art photographer with a BFA in Creative Photography based in Los Angeles. Her Fine Art background allows her to pursue every photographic field imaginable, fusing her analogue upbringing with digital. As a second generation Chihuahuan artist, Amber has been transitioning to commercial work and photojournalism while maintaining integrity to her personal work.

Her work has been featured in publications including Life & Thyme Magazine, Secret Menu Magazine, Air France Magazine, Dazed & Confused, VICE, JPG, Artistic Visions, GUP, BLISS, Sneeze Magazine, Ladygunn, LA Canvas, and We Are The Superlative Conspiracy among many others.

Ashlie Chavez

Ashlie Chavez is an Artist and Photographer with a BFA in Fine Art and emphasis in Creative Photography. She runs an online art store selling her own work at artforyourwalls.org and predominantly shoots film.

Ashlie works collaboratively with her twin sister and is inspired by her son River.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

The Rarámuri have lived in Mexico’s Sierra Madres for centuries, with their ancestors inhabiting the region for well over a thousand years. Following Spanish colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Rarámuri communities retreated deeper into the vast Copper Canyon system, where the landscape became both a homeland and a refuge that helped preserve their language, culture, and way of life. In Rarámuri of Chihuahua, photographer Amber Maalouf returns to a region she has known since childhood, documenting a community whose relationship to place remains inseparable from its history of resilience.

Aware that the Rarámuri value privacy and have a long history of protecting their communities from outside intrusion, Maalouf approached the work with patience and care. Photographing with a Land Camera, she left each person she photographed with a Polaroid print, creating a simple exchange that acknowledged their participation rather than simply taking their image. The resulting photographs reflect not only the landscape of Chihuahua, but a process rooted in reciprocity, respect, and an understanding that meaningful documentary work begins by earning trust.

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About Amber Maalouf

Amber Maalouf is a fine art photographer with a BFA in Creative Photography based in Los Angeles. Her Fine Art background allows her to pursue every photographic field imaginable, fusing her analogue upbringing with digital. As a second generation Chihuahuan artist, Amber has been transitioning to commercial work and photojournalism while maintaining integrity to her personal work.

With almost 10 years experience volunteering in wildlife sanctuaries and local stray placement programs, her work has widened to documenting themes related to human relationships with biodiversity and empathy for animals. Specifically, she hopes to help people recognize that preserving our natural world starts the second you walk out your front door.

Her work has been featured in publications including Life & Thyme Magazine, Secret Menu Magazine, Air France Magazine, Dazed & Confused, VICE, JPG, Artistic Visions, GUP, BLISS, Sneeze Magazine, Ladygunn, LA Canvas, and We Are The Superlative Conspiracy among many others.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

In episode 25 of Exposures, Seamus Murphy speaks with Jocelyn Bain Hogg about An Education, a body of work made while Bain Hogg was a student at Lancing College in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The project began when photography became an escape from the pressures and social hierarchies of boarding school. Working first with an inherited Rolleiflex from his father, Bain Hogg used the darkroom as a refuge and the camera as a way to understand the closed world around him.

As Bain Hogg and Murphy move through the images, An Education is revealed as the remarkably assured beginning of a career. Though started decades before his defining later work, the photographs already contain many of the sensitivites that would shape Bain Hogg’s practice of intimate access, private worlds and a wry examination of British life.

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Jocelyn Bain Hogg

Jocelyn Bain Hogg is a British documentary photographer and member of VII. He studied Documentary Photography at Newport College of Art before beginning his career as a unit photographer on film sets and a publicity photographer for the BBC. He later worked across editorial, fashion, commercial, and documentary photography, with work published by Vogue, Vanity Fair, The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Observer, GQ, Le Monde, Granta, and The New Yorker.

Seamus Murphy

Seamus Murphy is a documentary photographer and filmmaker. Regardless of medium or subject, he strives for intimacy and a poetic realism. As a photographer he has won seven World Press Photo awards for his work in Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Peru, UK and Ireland. He undertakes long-term documentary projects and has been published and exhibited widely. He is in the collections of The Getty Museum, Imperial War Museum, National Gallery of Ireland, and FRAC, Auvergne, France.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

In 2014, Jocelyn Bain Hogg discovered a shoe-box full of negatives stored in his mother’s garage amounting to a trove of images chronicling his experience as a student at Lancing College, a public school in the south of England (in Britain, “public” schools are private, often elite boarding schools). The found images revealed the work of a teenage boy, aged 14 through 18 as a burgeoning world-class photographer— discovering, living, and documenting life inside one of Britain’s most closed social institutions.

Seen here in essay form for the first time, An Education documents a formative period of adolescent consciousness in late-1970s England, as punk-rock, political awakening (in the age of Thatcher no less), first love, class awareness, and creative ambition began to take shape.

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About Jocelyn Bain Hogg

Jocelyn Bain Hogg is a British documentary photographer and member of VII. He studied Documentary Photography at Newport College of Art before beginning his career as a unit photographer on film sets and a publicity photographer for the BBC. He later worked across editorial, fashion, commercial, and documentary photography, with work published by Vogue, Vanity Fair, The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Observer, GQ, Le Monde, Granta, and The New Yorker.

Bain Hogg is best known for long-form documentary projects examining closed or difficult-to-access British social worlds. His books include The Firm, a study of London organized crime that received the 2003 Lead Award for portraiture, and The Family, a later project returning to Britain’s criminal underworld. His other projects have addressed celebrity culture, Ibiza nightlife, London, British youth, and the structures of class and social performance in Britain. He has exhibited internationally and has also worked as an educator, including as course leader for BA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

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In Episode 24 of Exposures, Kenyan documentary photographer Billy Miaron speaks with Chona Mwemba about Naidurra, his story from the Maasai Mara National Reserve. The project is rooted in pastoralist Maasai life, where livestock herding, movement, and preservation of the natural environment shape social and economic systems. Miaron traces his own path into photography, from growing up in Maasai community and discovering a love of images through National Geographic magazines, to studying software engineering and eventually recognizing photography as a personal practice for documenting community and the systems that shaped his own life.

Billy Miaron

Billy Miaron is a Kenyan documentary photographer whose work focuses on community, environment, public health, and social change. His photography has been recognized by Best Artworks of the Year 2019 and the 2022 “Water=Life” Global Photography Competition, which he won for his work with the World Health Organization documenting the effects of drought in the Horn of Africa on health and food security. His photographs have been published internationally by organizations and outlets including the Financial Times, the World Health Organization, and health and academic research publications. In 2023, he was selected for the Vital Impacts Photography Mentorship Program, further developing his documentary practice. He is currently working on a long-term project documenting community-led conservation efforts in the Amboseli ecosystem, with a focus on peaceful coexistence between the Maasai community and wildlife.

Chona Mwemba

Chona Mwemba is a self-taught Zambian photographer with a deep love for capturing everyday life moments that cannot be replicated. The rawness and richness of his subjects and their environments serve as a personal reminder to always see the beauty of life regardless of geography. His work has been featured on platforms such as the BBC and The Times (UK). Through his work he strives to portray Zambia in a positive light. With this series of images he aspires to bring to life the beauty and strength of the Zambian people across the country, highlighting their gracious, resilient and amiable nature.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

In Naidurra, Kenyan documentary photographer Billy Miaron documents a system of community-based economic development in the Maasai Mara. The project centers on young Maasai men, focusing in particular on Solomon and Philip, whose operation of modular safari camps demonstrates how pastoral traditions of mobility are being adapted within the modern tourism economy. Soccer functions as a key organizing structure amongst the community, with village football leagues identifying participants and providing a path towards training in hospitality and camp management. Through the experiences of Solomon and Philip and their restoration and use of abandoned Land Rovers, Miaron uncovers how local labor, shared technical knowledge, and tourism revenue are integrated into wider structures of cultural continuity and environmental adaptation.

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About Billy Miaron

Billy Miaron is a Kenyan documentary photographer whose work focuses on community, environment, public health, and social change. His photography has been recognized by Best Artworks of the Year 2019 and the 2022 “Water=Life” Global Photography Competition, which he won for his work with the World Health Organization documenting the effects of drought in the Horn of Africa on health and food security.

His photographs have been published internationally by organizations and outlets including the Financial Times, the World Health Organization, and health and academic research publications. In 2023, he was selected for the Vital Impacts Photography Mentorship Program, further developing his documentary practice. He is currently working on a long-term project documenting community-led conservation efforts in the Amboseli ecosystem, with a focus on peaceful coexistence between the Maasai community and wildlife.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

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In episode 023 of Exposures, O-Young Kwon discusses the development of At Her Brother’s Grave. Kwon describes the project as an effort to examine the “psychological effects the war is leaving behind.” The conversation follows his movement through Poland and into western Ukraine, including his encounter with Tetiana on a train to Lviv and the subsequent decision to accompany her to the funeral of her brother. Kwon places the work within a broader critique of conflict photography, emphasizing the limitations of sensational imagery while identifying the “real power of visual journalism is to reveal hidden stories” and “that the role of good journalism is to achieve a more complete picture and not just a popular one.”

Exposures 023 is Hosted by TOTIM Founder/ Director Luke Mertz

O-Young Kwon

O-Young Kwon is a multimedia documentarian based in Berlin and Athens. He explores subcultures and social issues often shaped by political realities. His documentary work focuses on injustice, human vulnerability, and resilience, combining empathy with critical reflection to amplify marginalized voices.

His work continues to receive international recognition through renowned publications and visual art festivals worldwide.

His recent project on the psychological impact of war in Ukraine marked his debut as a documentary theater author, commissioned by the state theater in Hamburg, Germany.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

In late February 2022, Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The war quickly became one of the most visually documented conflicts in history, with images and video circulating globally in near real time. Reporting at the time focused on consequences of the war’s destructive toll. Less immediately visible were the psychological effects on the people in Ukraine.

In May 2022, photographer O-Young Kwon traveled by train to Ukraine to examine this often obscured dimension of war. During this journey, he met Tetiana, a Ukrainian woman who had fled the country shortly after the invasion began and was now returning to attend her brother’s funeral in Lviv. He had been killed while defending Ukraine on the eastern front.

To Experience “At Her Brother’s Grave” DOWNLOAD TOTIM APP

About O-Young Kwon

O-Young Kwon is a multimedia documentarian based between

Berlin, Germany and Athens, Greece. He explores subcultures and social issues often shaped by political realities. His documentary work focuses on injustice, human vulnerability, and resilience, combining empathy with critical reflection to amplify marginalized voices.

His work continues to receive international recognition through renowned publications and visual art festivals worldwide.

His recent project on the psychological impact of war in Ukraine marked his debut as a documentary theater author, commissioned by the state theater in Hamburg, Germany.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

In this episode 022 of Exposures, Scott Wallace speaks with Eros Hoagland about El Salvador, Central America, and the changing conditions of conflict reporting across the last four decades. The discussion moves through the practical and ethical conditions of reporting during the Salvadoran civil war: access to guerrilla forces and army commanders and the constant pressure of working in a country shaped by surveillance, death squads, intelligence operations, and contested territory. The conversation then broadens to the transformation of journalism itself, including the shift from analog to digital photography, the collapse of older media structures, the rise of the internet, and the new risks created when images from conflict zones can circulate instantly and endanger their subjects. It closes by connecting Wallace’s early Central America reporting to his current work on environmental issues, Indigenous struggles, rainforest protection, organized crime in the Amazon, and his teaching at the University of Connecticut in environmental journalism and global press freedom.

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Scott Wallace

Scott Wallace is an American journalist, writer, producer, educator, and photojournalist whose work has focused on armed conflict, international crime, Indigenous affairs, conservation, and the environment. He began his career in Central America in 1983, reporting from El Salvador as a freelance stringer for CBS News/CBS Radio and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution before expanding his work across Nicaragua and Guatemala for outlets including Newsweek, The Independent, and The Guardian. From 1983 to 1989, he covered the region’s U.S.-backed wars and counterinsurgencies, later serving as Central America correspondent for The Guardian.

Wallace’s reporting, photography, and television work have since appeared across National Geographic, Smithsonian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, The Nation, Newsweek, CNN, and the National Geographic Channel. He is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut and the author of The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes and Central America in the Crosshairs of War: On the Road from Vietnam to Iraq.

Eros Hoagland

Eros Hoagland is a Los Angeles–based visual storyteller, photojournalist, and cinematographer. Hoagland began his career documenting communities and countries shaped by cycles of violence, working for more than fifteen years across North and South America, the Middle East, and Asia. In 2014, he expanded into film and entertainment photography after being invited to work with acclaimed directors Michael Mann and Alejandro Iñárritu. His clients include The New York Times, Netflix, HBO, National Geographic, Apple TV, TIME, Legendary Pictures, The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, ESPN, Der Spiegel, the Los Angeles Times, and the American Red Cross. A California native, he spends his time outside of work surfing and diving in the Pacific Ocean.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

El Salvador’s civil war emerged from a prolonged period of land inequality, military rule, political exclusion, and state repression. By the late 1970s, opposition movements involving peasants, labor organizers, students, clergy, and left-wing political groups had been met with escalating violence. Armed revolutionary organizations consolidated into the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front), while the Salvadoran state, supported by the United States, framed the conflict within the broader logic of the Cold War. By 1983, the country was operating under conditions of civil war, counterinsurgency, and widespread political violence.

In “Covering El Salvador’s Civil War”, Scott Wallace describes El Salvador at that time as a country divided into distinct zones of control and instability. In San Salvador, military commanders, politicians, and wealthy civilians moved through the capital in armored vehicles, while ordinary residents lived under the threat of surveillance, abduction, and death squad violence. Outside the capital, towns existed in varying states of government control, rebel influence, or contested authority. These conditions shaped how journalists and photographers moved through the country and how reporting was conducted.

The practical conditions of reporting from contested and rebel-held areas were complex and dangerous. Wallace had to learn the political, military, and geographic topography of the country, including which towns were controlled by army-aligned forces, where guerrillas were likely to appear, and which areas existed in an intermediate state. Access to rebel-held territory required planning, fabricated cover stories, and the navigation of army roadblocks. In one case, Wallace and three other journalists traveled into the mountains of Chalatenango to investigate reports that more than 50 civilians had been killed near the Gualsinga River.

The story is situated within the broader problem of documentation during wartime. Independent outside observers were often among the few people able to reach sites of alleged atrocities, interview survivors, and assess claims made by state, military, and rebel actors. Their work was also shaped by editorial, governmental, and ideological constraints that affected whether such material reached the public. In this context, Wallace’s photographs form part of a vital documentary record of El Salvador in the throes of civil war.

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About Scott Wallace

Scott Wallace is an American journalist, writer, producer, educator, and photojournalist whose work has focused on armed conflict, international crime, Indigenous affairs, conservation, and the environment. He began his career in Central America in 1983, reporting from El Salvador as a freelance stringer for CBS News/CBS Radio and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution before expanding his work across Nicaragua and Guatemala for outlets including Newsweek, The Independent, and The Guardian. From 1983 to 1989, he covered the region’s U.S.-backed wars and counterinsurgencies, later serving as Central America correspondent for The Guardian.

Wallace’s reporting, photography, and television work have since appeared across National Geographic, Smithsonian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, The Nation, Newsweek, CNN, and the National Geographic Channel. He is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut and the author of The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes and Central America in the Crosshairs of War: On the Road from Vietnam to Iraq.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visal storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

In academic, clinical, and social research, gender transition in the United States is generally understood not as a single event, but as a layered process involving identity, embodiment, family systems, legal recognition, medical access, social acceptance, and personal agency. Current clinical frameworks, including WPATH’s Standards of Care, describe transition-related care as individualized and aimed at helping transgender and gender-diverse people achieve lasting comfort with their gendered selves.

Sarah Blesener’s story “The Sun As It Rips Away” enters this terrain from an intimate place: the body as a site of memory, trauma, gesture, and transformation. Made in collaboration with Alex Williams, the work resists the simplicity of a before-and-after narrative around top surgery. Instead, the project moves through fragments of color, dream, release, fear, tenderness, and the recovery of agency after a long period of waiting.

The collaboration itself becomes central to the work. Blesener describes trauma as something that can leave people feeling powerless, with their choices taken away. For that reason, the shared act of making images became essential. They began by journaling the colors of their dreams, using them as a guide for the photographs. Alex associated redemptive dreams with blue, and a sinking into the self with orange. From there, the images developed less as documentary evidence than as a form of excavation, as a way of reading the body as a landscape where personal history, social pressure, and spiritual change all leave traces.

What emerges is not a clean resolution, but something deeply honest. It is the act of inviting a trusted collaborator into an extraordinarily vulnerable process, and using that trust and dialogue to create work that offers comfort and recognition. Through that process, private human experience expands into something larger: a profound work of art.

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About Sarah Blesener

Sarah Blesener is an educator, artist, and visual researcher interested in the complexity of human relationships and their visual representations. For the past decade, they have worked on investigative and long-form storytelling using guided participatory expression, pedagogy, and collaborative methodologies. Alongside photographs, Sarah uses archival imagery, mixed media, poetry, and painting. In 2025, they co-created Enter/Exit, a project of methodologies, critiques, poetry and art outlining alternative ways of working with survivors.

Their long-form work is interested in themes of silence, speech, testimony, and trauma.

They co-founded Tacet Eye, an interdisciplinary educational community focused on alternative approaches to visual narratives, poetics, process and ethics. Sarah is also faculty at the International Center of Photography.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

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In episode 021 of Exposures, photographer and publisher Kris Graves discusses Long Sun Down as well as his daily practice across photography, publishing, bookmaking, and art documentation. He also explores the long-term concerns that shape his work: the American landscape, structural discrimination, and the visible and less visible systems that organize land, power, and exclusion. Graves describes his background as a New Yorker with family roots in Montgomery, Alabama, and how repeated childhood trips to the South helped form an early awareness of the differences between regions, histories, and lived environments.

Exposures 021 is Hosted by TOTIM Founder/ Director Luke Mertz

Kris Graves

Kris Graves is an artist and publisher based in New York and California. Graves creates artwork that deals with societal problems and aims to use art as a means to inform people about cultural issues. Using a mix of conceptual and documentary practices, Graves photographs the subtleties of societal power and its impact on the built environment. He explores how capitalism and power have shaped countries -- and how that can be seen and experienced in everyday life. Graves also works to elevate the representation of people of color in the fine art canon; and to create opportunities for conversation about race, representation, and urban life. He photographs to preserve memory.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

To Experience “LONG SUN DOWN” DOWNLOAD TOTIM APP

The American landscape has been shaped by systems of exclusion as much as by geography, settlement, and development. Land ownership, housing access, municipal boundaries, public infrastructure, electoral representation, and private investment have all been influenced by policies and practices that distributed opportunity unevenly across race, class, and place.

In LONG SUN DOWN, Kris Graves documents locations connected to multiple forms of structural discrimination, including gerrymandering, redlining, sundown towns, gentrification, financial exclusion, incarceration, highway construction, and uneven public investment. Situated across the Southeast and Midwest, including sites in Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, the project examines the American urban landscape and the structural conditions that are not always immediately visible, but become apparent under closer scrutiny.

The work considers how historical exclusion continues to shape contemporary geography, from Alabama’s 7th District, to redistricting patterns linking New Orleans to Baton Rouge in Louisiana, to district fragmentation or “cracking” in suburban Atlanta. Graves discusses Janesville, Wisconsin as an example of sundown-town history, and Milwaukee’s 53206 zip code in relation to prison gerrymandering, a place defined by its status as the most incarcerated zip code in America where “thousands are physically present but politically erased.”

LONG SUN DOWN presents these sites within a broader study of land, race, policy, and representation in the United States. The project does not treat discrimination as a historical construct or an isolated regional condition but approaches the built environment as a record of overlapping systems: where residence is permitted or restricted, where capital is withheld, where political boundaries are drawn, where infrastructure is imposed, and where communities are excluded from representation.

About Kris Graves

Kris Graves is an artist and publisher based in New York and California. Graves creates artwork that deals with societal problems and aims to use art as a means to inform people about cultural issues. Using a mix of conceptual and documentary practices, Graves photographs the subtleties of societal power and its impact on the built environment. He explores how capitalism and power have shaped countries -- and how that can be seen and experienced in everyday life. Graves also works to elevate the representation of people of color in the fine art canon; and to create opportunities for conversation about race, representation, and urban life. He photographs to preserve memory.

Graves received his BFA in Visual Arts from S.U.N.Y. Purchase College and has been published and exhibited globally, including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Getty Institute, Los Angeles; and National Portrait Gallery in London, England; among others. Permanent collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Getty Institute, Schomburg Center, Whitney Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Brooklyn Museum; and The Wedge Collection, Toronto; amongst others.

Graves also sits on the board of Blue Sky Gallery: Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts, Portland; and The Architectural League of New York as Vice President of Photography.

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In episode 20 of Exposures, David Simon-Martret speaks with Paul Geddis about the slow, deliberate process behind his and partner Blanca Galindo’s photographic work and the making of Krokodil. The conversation centers on reporting within situations marked by addiction, vulnerability, and fear, and on the ethical demands of photographing people whose lives are shaped by legal risk and social stigma.

The episode follows how a work ethic rooted in time and trust expanded into later work, moving from the specific realities of drug use toward larger questions of addiction, social systems, and ecological loss. In discussing their more recent focus on coral reefs, biodiversity and climate, David reflects on the challenge of finding a visual language for slow-moving crisis’ without relying on over-dramatization. The result is a thoughtful conversation between old friends about photographic ethics, visual form, and how documentary work can continue to make people look carefully at difficult subjects.

David Simon / Leafhopper

David Simon and Blanca Galindo ( Leafhopper) are visual artists working in photography and film based between Barcelona, Spain and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. David studied philosophy at UB and photography at IEFC. Blanca obtained her Media degree at UAB and University of California SB.Their work takes in photojournalism, art photography, fashion, music, NGO commissions and commercial projects.

In 2012 David and Blanca co-created Leafhopper, an image based project taking its name from the common cicada, and focused on concept driven long form stories that combine philosophical criteria with powerful aesthetic images creating a reflection on the human and the natural world. In their work as Leafhopper, culture, people, fauna and flora are seen as equal expressions of the natural sublime, creating a common thread across subject matter as seemingly disparate as LGBTQ communities in Malaysia, narco-iconography, coral bleaching and a global study in addiction published in 2019 titled ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’.

Paul Geddis

Paul Geddis is a Barcelona-based journalist, editor, and communications professional whose work spans media, music, culture, and tech. After spending 2007–2015 at VICE Spain, including time as Editor in Chief, he went on to lead content at Sónar Festival, serve as EU Content Lead for Patreon EMEA, and later move into PR. Across those roles, his work has focused on original storytelling, cultural communication, youth audiences, emerging talent, and content-led campaigns that connect strong ideas with wider publics.

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.

To Experience “Krokodil” DOWNLOAD TOTIM APP

Krokodil, by David Simon-Martret and Blanca Galindo, aka Leafhopper Project, documents the human fallout of one of the most toxic homemade narcotics to emerge from the post-Soviet world. Commonly known as a cheap substitute for heroin, krokodil became associated with severe tissue damage, infection, and rapid physical deterioration.

The project began in 2012 after Simon encountered television footage of users with advanced wounds and skin damage while working in Armenia. That initial shock developed into a sustained inquiry, first in Saint Petersburg and later in TIibilis, where access depended on fragile trust, local intermediaries, and the willingness of users to be photographed anonymously.

The word that emerged was not a document of a drug scene, but a view into the surreal atmosphere that surrounds it: poverty, domesticity, anxiety, and isolation. Krokodil is concerned with what becomes visible when a person’s decline is no longer abstract, and when the systems surrounding that decline have receded. The result is a visual narrative that stays close to its subjects and records, with unusual and dreamlike clarity, the intersection of chemical dependency and human persistence.

About Leafhopper (David Simon & Blanca Galindo)

David Simon and Blanca Galindo are visual artists working in photography and film based between Barcelona, Spain and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. David studied philosophy at UB and photography at IEFC. Blanca obtained her Media degree at UAB and University of California SB.Their work takes in photojournalism, art photography, fashion, music, NGO commissions and commercial projects.

In 2012 David and Blanca co-created Leafhopper, an image based project taking its name from the common cicada, and focused on concept driven long form stories that combine philosophical criteria with powerful aesthetic images creating a reflection on the human and the natural world. In their work as Leafhopper, culture, people, fauna and flora are seen as equal expressions of the natural sublime, creating a common thread across subject matter as seemingly disparate as LGBTQ communities in Malaysia, narco-iconography, coral bleaching and a global study in addiction published in 2019 as ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’.

Their work has appeared in media such as VICE, Aint Bad Magazine, Fisheye Magazine, Yet Magazine, Playground Magazine, Yorokobu, El País, Bust Magazine, Darwin Magazine, Humble Arts Foundation, Neo2, Libération or JUICE Magazine. Work has also been exhibited at festivals such as Encontros da Imagem, PhotoIreland, Obscura Photofestival, Scan Festival, Art Photo Barcelona, Visa pour l’image, Dong Gang, Cortona on the Move, RPF, and PHotoEspaña.

To Experience “Krokodil” DOWNLOAD TOTIM APP

TOTIM is a new, nonprofit initiative built to support and amplify a global and diverse community of visual storytellers. We rely on your support to bring under-reported stories to light and sustain vital, independent documentary photography. Please consider a charitable, tax-deductible gift.