Some stories cannot be photographed over a weekend. They require time, travel, patience, and multiple returns to the same locations. They demand trust, observation, and often years of work before the full story begins to emerge. That’s where the FUJIFILM GFX Challenge Grant Program enters the picture.
This Earth Day 2026, I find myself thinking about what endures when everything else feels fragile, and about the stories that outlive us.
In March 2020, the world stood still. I remember sitting in my apartment in Vienna, watching the news roll in — cities shutting down, borders closing, planes grounded. The silence was deafening.
Many of you may have recently seen images of an upside down American flag hung from a cliff’s edge at Yosemite National Park in California. I was one of the photographers who captured this scene, which has been interpreted as a protest against the recent firings of over 1000 National Park Service employees. Here is what was going through my head when I captured these distressing images.
I arrived at Solio Game Reserve on February 21, 2025, to spend three days photographing rhinos. Sitting on the plains between Mount Kenya to the east and the Aberdare range to the west, Solio has a population of 250 rhinos, both white and black, on its 20,000 acres. Solio is a paradise, and it was there I learned to love these unlikely creatures.
Mud and invisible gas. I’m not sure there are two less photogenic things to capture in nature, but they were central characters in my recent long-term photography project documenting permafrost thaw in the Siberian and Alaskan Arctic. Permafrost is defined as soil that has been frozen for more than a year, and it can be found in a vast belt circling the Arctic.
