Meet These Photographers

It’s Friday so let’s Meet These Photographers: In the past, I’ve written about some of the members of the NOGA Collective (@noga.photos), photographers like @pavloskozalidis & @raul_canibanofoto. But it’s time to shine a little light on the Collective itself, a 20-year-old, independent association of 24 talented, passionate documentary photographers who live all over the world, traveling everywhere (from Afghanistan to Madagascar) in service of telling stories you likely haven’t seen before.

I asked Misha Maslennikov, the head of Noga, why the collective was started. “It seemed to us,” he told me, “that uniting into an organization of like-minded people would elevate our voices above the general stream of endless images.”

It’s hard to write about the work of two dozen individual photographers as if they were looking through a single viewfinder. And yet what I see in the pictures that come out of the Collective is a quest to enter the swirl and muck of everyday life, and then bring back images revealing the emotional ballet of human existence. When I asked Misha to describe the Collective’s approach, he talked about the pictures being “a testament to the resilience and vitality” of the subjects, a way to show their “life-affirming beauty and strength of spirit.”