RESEARCH PHOTO COMPETITION AT THE GENEVA GRADUATE INSTITUTE

Hear US
Berlin, Brandenburger Tor, 15 August 2021. Afghans from across Germany gathered to protest the situation in Afghanistan and call for sanctions against Pakistan. Part of a broader wave of diaspora mobilisation, the demonstration reflected both demands for international accountability and growing frustration with global indifference.

See US 
Berlin, 28 August 2021. Protest organised by the Global Movement for Peace in Afghanistan. Showing here the reworking of a widely circulated image from the Kabul airport evacuation, the drawing shifts the narrative from rescue to rupture, exposing the violence embedded in borders and selective protection.
 

Stop Ignoring US
Berlin, Brandenburger Tor, 15 August 2021. Afghans from across Germany gathered to protest the situation in Afghanistan and call for sanctions against Pakistan. Alongside political demands, the protest also staged visibility through performative gestures, reflecting the need to capture attention within a crowded media landscape.
 

Antonio’s Work Break 
Antonio, Secretary General of the UILA union (Italian Union of Agribusiness Workers), pauses for a cigarette during a rare break in his office. After more than 40 years in the union, he embodies the everyday labour and continuity behind workers’ organising. In the background, a poster of Che Guevara echoes the enduring tension between political ideals and lived realities.

Match Day 
Founded in 2017 by migrant workers, the ASFA (African Football Sports Association) football team began competing in the official regional league in September 2025, with the support of the UILA union. It is the first team composed of migrant agricultural workers to participate in an official championship, transforming the football field into a space of visibility, collective presence, and social participation.

Night Assembly 
On a cold December evening, workers gather in the union offices to establish a mutual aid association, Associazione Senegambia. Most can only meet late at night, after long days of work in the fields. The meeting marks a moment of collective organisation, as workers formalise their own mutual aid initiative, asserting their agency.

Guardianes de los Totorales

Guardianes de los Totorales, January 2026, Huanchaco, Peru. At the edge of Huanchaco, the totora reeds rise like quiet sentinels. Each totora holds more than fiber, it carries stories, myths and ancestral wisdom, shaped by wind. The fishermen, known as los Guardianes de los Totorales (the guardians of the totorales), a name given by those who recognise their role as caretaker of living heritage, move among the totora cutting and tending what must endure. In every gesture lies quiet resistance and resilience, to loss, to time, delaying the moment when their tradition might fade into oblivion.

Voices from the Caballito

Voices from the Caballito, January 2026, Huanchaco, Peru. On the land, hands work in silence, binding totora reeds into the curved form of the caballito boat. No written instructions guide them; it is a knowledge that lives in the body rather than on paper. Each movement unfolds patience, memory and repetition passed down through generations. Just as importantly, fisherwomen also carry an embodied knowledge and preserve the social fabric around the traditional practice. As long as the totora continues to grow, their story will not fade, though fewer younger generations choose to continue this work.

Fishing Between Land and Sea

Fishing Between Land and Sea, February 2026, Huanchaco, Peru. Out at sea, the simplicity of the caballito de totora is matched only by its fragility, carrying a legacy thousands of years old. Here, the fishermen continue a way of navigating the sea shaped by inherited knowledge and present-day condition. While men navigate the sea, women maintain the everyday rhythm that makes each departure possible and each return meaningful. What has endured for over 3,500 years now faces increasing pressure, not only from coastal erosion, climate change, pollution and dwindling fish stocks, but also from the difficulty of sustaining fishing as a viable livelihood. Still, the traditional fishermen return each day, holding onto a way of life that binds them to the sea.

Ruins of Empire
Ruins of a former Danish colonial building in Serampore, a town in West Bengal, India, which was a Danish colony from 1755 to 1845. For centuries, Bengal was a site of tussle between imperial powers for financial and commercial control. The traces of these empires now appear as ruins re-used here for hanging clothes to dry.

Credit, family and womanhood
During a microfinance collection round in Bengal, women gather at home to repay their loan instalments for the month. Their financial and domestic lives are not opposed. Rather, their care within homes shapes their financial ties.

Schoolgirls pass by a local lending point as credit enters ordinary life
In northern Bengal, young girls go to school, passing a “customer service point” which provides loans in areas without local bank branches. With compounding privatisation of basic services in a neoliberal state, people turn to credit through these local kiosks simply to survive.

The Scarred Hand: Continuing Life
A male returnee, who lost his pinky finger while working in a South Korean factory, operates a sewing machine in his home workshop in Erathna. While the physical sacrifice of his labour remains a permanent trace, his bright smile reflects the resilient will to sustain his life on his own terms.

The Skilled Hand: Selecting Excellence
Local women in Erathna carefully sort through dried tea leaves to select only the highest quality buds. This delicate process of manual selection represents the invisible labour and refined expertise that sustain the value of the local industry, highlighting the dignity found in everyday craftsmanship.

The Resting Hand: Returning to the Alley
A quiet black-and-white view of the alley where the returnee’s workshop is located. This path is not a space where the pain of the past disappears, but a place where the traces of migration are integrated into the daily landscape. It marks the reality of resuming life while carrying one’s history within the body.

“Heat and Noise” for the Deities
Miaofeng Mountain, in the north western outskirts of Beijing, is a well-known pilgrimage site for those beseeching for babies and the principal cult centre of the Daoist goddess Bixia Yuanjun in northern China. Each year, during the fourth lunar month, a grand temple fair is held on the mountain to celebrate the goddess’s birthday, continuing a tradition that has endured for centuries. Photographed in May 2023, this photograph looks through the flames and smoke of the incense burner towards performers dressed as the Eight Immortals in traditional opera costume. By filling the sacred grounds with “heat and noise” (renao), these celebrations are meant to entertain both the deities seated in the temple and the worshippers gathered before them. 

When Deities Rest
Photographed during the Chinese New Year in 2024, this scene captures a moment of pause during a roaming deity procession in Fuzhou, China. Spirit mediums embodying deities sit on the stairs to rest, rendering the divine in an unexpectedly ordinary form. Through embodied spirit mediumship, the divine takes shape in human bodies that move, tire, and pause within the same social space as those who worship them, thereby blurring the boundary between the sacred and the profane.

Walking along the Deities
Also photographed in Fuzhou during Chinese New Year in 2024, this image captures a rural deity procession moving through tea fields. Villagers and tourists walk alongside the deities, some approaching to receive blessings, others simply joining the procession as it unfolds. Through this shared passage, the boundary between human and divine once again becomes blurred, as their relation is continually shaped through proximity, movement, and co-presence.

Landfill Ridge
Framed through the windshield during a site visit near Prishtina, a lone dog stands atop a ridge of mixed municipal waste. The interior frame makes the research position explicit: fieldwork is shaped by access, safety, and logistics, just as investment outcomes are shaped by operating constraints. The image captures Kosovo’s current disposal baseline and the urgency of shifting from storage toward EU-aligned waste utilisation.

Industrial Sprint 
Two dogs sprint across a muddy verge at the boundary of an industrial corridor, fencing, and heavy machinery. This is the periphery where waste governance failures become externalities: uncontrolled sites, informal dumping, and public health risks that spread beyond formal infrastructure. For a project focused on sustainability and affordability, the scene reminds us that “compliance” is not only engineering, but daily control, concrete application, and enforcement. 

Bridging the Gap
At dusk, a pedestrian navigates traffic beside an unfinished construction zone. The composition links
municipal service delivery to lived constraints: households experience transition through friction, delays, and safety trade-offs. In the capstone’s analysis, affordability is the binding variable. This image anchors the financing question in the everyday reality that cost-recovery reforms and new fees must remain socially workable and liveable.

Soledad
On the shores of Saaverda, Auraucania, Chile. My friend Rodrigo brought me here to cheer me up. I was feeling very homesick. 

Sueños
In the Atacama desert, where I went for a research residency. Felt like a poet at that time, my dreams were as clear as the stars.

Hera
One of the women I interviewed. A real star, I tried to capture her charisma, but she looks worried. 
 

Freedom of expression and Revolution 
Wall of the Revolution (unknown), Downtown, Beirut, 2025. 
In 2019, a nationwide uprising erupted in Lebanon, known as Thawra (Revolution). Protesters raised their voices against bad governance, corruption and social injustice. Some of them turned to art to express their frustrations and demands towards the political system. In Downtown Beirut, the Wall of the Revolution hosted dozens of protest-driven graffiti. This  particular piece reads, “Revolution. Go ahead, try to silence us!”

The ladder to women’s success 
Stairs of Success (mural by Elie Zaarour [Zed40] and Roula Abdo), Hamra, Beirut, 2025. 
This mural was created in 2024, representing the diverse challenges women face in life. Inspiration for this mural was drawn from participants of a project that aimed at breaking barriers and harmful social norms, promoted by several organisations (Ahla Fawda, Ruwwad Al Tanmeya, UN Women, and the British Embassy in Beirut).

Rebirth from the ashes, 2020
Bride of Beirut, sculpture by Hani Tabsharany, Gemmayzeh, Beirut.
On 4 August 2020, a massive blast shook Beirut, caused by the detonation of hundreds of  tons of stored ammonium nitrate in a warehouse in the port. It killed 218 people, wounded thousands, and devastated the city. The blast gave rise to renewed protests, and with them, to new forms of art. The Bride of Beirut sculpture, located next to port, was made from debris and broken glass left by the Beirut blast — like a phoenix rebirthing from its own ashes. The investigation into the blast, which was stalled for years, was concluded in March 2026 with 70 people charged. 

Sitting by the sea
The old Ternate Sultanate dock Dodoku Ali, where land reclamation projects are increasingly erasing the historical markers of a once-thriving maritime kingdom that shaped the spice trade of the Maluku islands. 

Spice Forest in Ternate
Clove and nutmeg trees populate the slopes of Mount Galama in Ternate. These spices were once a coveted commodity and symbol for global dominance, just as today’s so-called “green minerals” like nickel, mangan, lithium, copper have become the “new spice”.

Mt Gamalama in Ternate (1715 m) 
An active stratovolcano that many islanders consider a source of life on the island and a place where their ancestral spirits reside. A hike to the summit is akin to a pilgrimage where shrines, ritual sites, and megaliths declared sacred accompany the journey. This breathtaking, sharply rising volcano bears witness to the ebb and flow of life on the island, extending beyond human time.

Stubborn Light (Vietnam, 20/11/2025)
A farmer guides his buffalo home along a flooded paddy field at dusk in rural Vietnam. This image captures the centrality of smallholder agriculture in Southeast Asian rural livelihoods and reflects on the human dimension retained by agriculture. 

In the Margins (Madagascar, 10/08/2024)
A child sleeps amid vegetable stalls at a busy market in Tsiroanomandidy (Madagascar), watched over by the rhythm of trade around them. This photo makes visible what development studies often reduces to data points and statistics: the porousness between domestic life and informal economic activity. 

Right of Way (Vietnam, 20/11/2025)
A motorcyclist navigates a rural lane flanked by dozens of ducks being herded. The image, at once absurd and mundane, captures a frame of ordinary life. It is reminiscent of places where traditional agricultural practices and modern mobility coexist in everyday negotiation. 

UNhinged 1

“What are you photographing?” “Just the space.” “Cool. You should. It’s crazy how abandoned it feels this year.” — Anonymous UNOG employee

UNhinged 2

“Yes, I will also be here next year — if we haven’t all moved to Nairobi by then.” “Haha yeah, if the UN still exists!” — Conversation overheard in a UNOG bathroom stall

UNhinged 3

“But aren’t humanitarians always obsessed with this idea of crisis or the fall of the system? They lean into it. They live on the drama of it, but it just repeats.” — Anonymous friend

Wudu, ablutions before prayer
Performing wudu — the Islamic ritual of purification with water — is required before prayer. Chronic water shortages in Karachi frequently impede fulfilment of this religious obligation at mosques. As a result, some mosques have introduced water recycling systems, pioneered by local students and professors.

Tanker economies
Multiple economies, including water, in the city have been co-opted by powerful tanker operators. Low-income communities are forced to buy water at inflated prices, often contaminated and of poor quality, from tankers that operate illegally. Resistance is often met with violence. 

Mazar-e-Quaid
The distribution of water is political. Some urban pockets enjoy abundant water access, where gardens thrive and swimming pools brim. Other areas, particularly Katchi Abadis (informal settlements), struggle to obtain enough water that is safe to drink and cook with.

Dove
In war-torn Ukraine, people continue to care for animals and plants: “While I take care of my flowers, my husband takes care of his pigeons”, comments Shoira, the photographer from Kharkiv who took the picture. Her husband has been breeding pigeons for years. “It is a community, I am always at the station, sending pigeons across Ukraine, they all know me”, she explains. In the absence of peace, the dove becomes a symbol of togetherness.

Potato of love 
When many plans have to be put on hold, little gestures take on additional meaning. “My boyfriend dug up a heart-shaped potato in the garden and gave it to me, saying he had grown it especially for me”, shares Nastia, the photographer from Lviv who took this picture. This is the first harvest that they collected together, as a couple, in their new shared place.  
 

Sunflower remembers 
“The seeds of this sunflower were sent to me by my aunt from Germany. They fled there because of the war.” — Nastia, Lviv 
 

Shop and Pattimbang
A Makassarese pattimbang — a street gold trader — sets up his table in front of a Chinese-owned shop on Somba Opu Street. Shops sell jewellery; pattimbangs buy it back, second-hand, without receipts, taking on the risk that shop owners cannot afford. Each position is shaped by ethnic and class histories sedimented over generations. In the gap between what the shop will not touch and what the pattimbang will, an interethnic interdependency quietly endures.

Somba Opu
An ordinary day on Somba Opu, Makassar’s gold-trading street. Jewellery consumers drift in and out of shops, from one pattimbang — a street trader — to the next. Pattimbangs squeeze into what little remains of the sidewalk, their small tables and stools pressed against the frontage of over a hundred gold shops. You never walk alone here; someone is always calling out, asking if you want to trade. Gold is everywhere, and it is always doing something.

Smithing
Goldsmithing was once a skill every gold shop had to master. The arrival of machine-made jewellery in the 1990s upended this world: smithing became a marginal craft. Yet handmade production did not disappear. It survives in small workshops scattered across Makassar’s neighbourhoods, occupying a narrow niche: custom commissions, heirloom repairs, wedding rings. This is one of the few shops on Somba Opu where the craft is still practised, and still passed on.

Still in Motion
A young girl juggles in Parwana Circus while I observe from Geneva. As an American researcher, I am unable to travel to Kabul, so the screen becomes my field site. The split frame holds both presence and separation: her movement continues, while I remain fixed. The director moves the camera so I can see the full space, turning the interview into a guided visit to the learning classrooms and circus equipment. The black space between the two screens acts as a site of reflection and an interval shaped by geography, politics, and risk.

The Field, at a Distance
Hamid is the founder and director of a non-profit offshoot of the long-running circus programme called the Mobile Mini Circus for Children. It is dedicated to promoting the physical, emotional, and social well-being of Afghan youth through free circus programming. During our interview a young girl quietly leans into the frame behind him. The moment is unscripted, but telling as our conversation unfolds within the space where children remain present as participants, listeners, and observers. Despite Hamid’s uncertainty about the programme’s future under the Taliban’s revived Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, he continues to offer something for the children who come: community, learning, and play. Their futures, he says, are up in the air and so are some of them— on stilts and unicycles.

Blurred Joy
Two boys practice unicycling while younger children watch and wait their turn. The blur reflects motion, but also the conditions under which the programme operates. With limited resources, learning is shared, improvised, and peer-led. Girls remain present through adapted participation. The image captures a space where structure and play persist together, even as the broader environment remains uncertain.

Eileen
Belfast, March 2026. An old man contemplates a small mural of an old lady on a shop corner. The painted figure, spectral in blue against the dark wall, bears no name, except perhaps the one above her, Eileen.

Looking through the Peace Gates
Belfast, March 2026. A bearded figure painted in blue stares through the doors of the Peace Gates on Lanark Way, a barrier built during the conflict to separate two communities apart. It remains closed every night.

Lurking

Belfast, March 2026. Painted on the last wall still standing amidst a demolition site on Kent Street, a cartoonish boy lurks over a pile of rubble. Behind the fence, the city is being rebuilt.

Guardians of hope 

Traces of Resilience: The Skin That Protects the Path

Jaguar Protector of Migrants 

Seeds of the Silk Road: Heritage and Trade
An elderly man moves through Kashgar’s bazaar, surrounded by mounds of dried apricots and walnuts. The dried fruits here are not just commodities; they are intergenerational memory, goods that once travelled the ancient Silk Road. His modern bucket hat sits in quiet contrast to centuries of accumulated trade tradition.
 

The Offering 
An older man hands over two skewers of grilled meat amidst the smoke of a charcoal fire, his gaze direct yet gentle. In my research on social finance, this is not merely a simple transaction, but rather the social capital upon which the bazaar depends for its survival. On the fringes that formal financial institutions struggle to reach, this “informal credit” and mutual aid network, based on neighbourhood trust and long-term relationships, serves as an invisible contract for small vendors to mitigate economic risks.
 

Learning the Trade
The boy has watched the elder vendor long enough. Now he is doing it himself: striding forward, skewer held high, with the exact same confidence. The man beside him finds it funny enough to film. There was no lesson taught. Nobody explained the rules. This is how informal economies actually work, not through formal contracts or vocational training, but via a child deciding to imitate what he sees, right there in the bustling market, on an unremarkable afternoon.