Although we have yet to meet in person, I feel in some ways I know John Lusk Hathaway by the kind of images he makes—down to earth and honest.

For five years now John Lusk Hathaway has been traversing the low country in South Carolina, making connections, driving back roads, taking his time with folks, sometimes with a camera and sometimes without. All the while gaining trust and listening to stories so he can make pictures. It is no wonder his perspective makes us feel we are both a part of while at the same time acknowledging we are not from.

Adriana Loureiro Fernández’s images of the protests and street clashes in Venezuela are dark — masked figures emerging from shadows, backlit by flames or wrapped in swirls of tear gas. People flash a gun or a knife, or show off stones that would soon be launched at police. She gets up close, which is bold considering she once had a fear of crowds. Still, she has gotten used to pushing herself, physically and emotionally, as she witnesses the political chaos that continues to upend her homeland.

In 2008, French photographer Antoine Bruy spent a year in Australia. When he returned home, he planned to bring with him more than a hundred rolls of film. All of them were lost. “Since then, I kept thinking of going back, to do something about this place,” the artist says.

The images were etched in photographer Nick Otto’s mind as he recently traveled to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Desaturated and monochrome images of war and destruction from the 1990s. The siege of Sarajevo had been the longest siege of a major city in modern warfare. San Francisco-based Otto aimed to tell the story of a city still mired in a long recovery from the fog of war, with high unemployment and a lagging economy. However, when he got on the ground and started working, a different picture began to emerge.

A woman bundles up behind a jumble of mismatched chairs. A man at a table leans into his palm. A veiled woman averts her eyes as she steps into the light. Some of these photos are sentences, others phrases, and still others seem to be straight out of a Joseph Brodsky poem. For Igor Posner, they represent the “half-seen, half-recollected” return to his hometown — St. Petersburg — where he had not been since coming to America as a 20-year-old Jewish refugee in the early 1990s.

Visual activist photographer Zanele Muholi has her first solo exhibition opening this month at the East London gallery Autograph ABP. For more than a decade, she has focused on documenting black LGTBQI people in South Africa. Her ongoing portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama was inspired by her experiences on the road and the socio-political events she encountered along the way. Using her body as a canvas, her psychologically driven portraits confront the politics of race and representation.

In 2014, Diego Ibarra Sánchez was photographing at a school in Iraq. The building was pockmarked with craters from mortar shelling that obliterated an Islamic State encampment that had sought refuge there. In one classroom, Iraqi soldiers kicked around the head of an Islamic State fighter like a soccer ball. A severed leg sat atop a desk behind them.

When he learned that Lithuania’s suicide rates are almost three times higher than the rest of Europe—especially among adult men living in Lithuania‘s countryside—31 year-old German photographer Hannes Jung was made curious to find out more about the reasons of such numbers. After consulting a range of experts on the subject, he discovered that the general causes of this phenomenon may date back to the history of the country’s post Second World War years; but he also realized that no wide assumptions can be made

When the Road Seeks sets us in the midst of a short story with each image we read. We open our eyes and we feel the atmosphere, curiosity, the romanticized history of the landscape, solitude, and slight quirkiness that is part of the multi-faceted country in which we live.

Join us in congratulating Marlena Jablonska for her honorable mention in the 2017 Lenscratch Student Prize.  It is understandable the desire to re-image old fables as their themes are reminiscent of development and coming of age. Within contemporary photography, fables have been prompts for tableaux, and other narrative driven projects, to dress up these very humanistic, basic themes.  Marlena, dissecting what exactly fables are, finds herself returning home and photographing the changes that she faces.  Her introspection becomes the story, lore in real-time, void of color and excitement as she navigates through spaces once familiar.  This perspective, highlighted by Marlena’s somber aesthetic, provided a peculiarity that we agreed was unique and deserving of recognition.

When the statue of Vladimir Lenin in Ukraine’s Bessarabska Square started coming down on Dec. 8, 2013, Swiss photographer Niels Ackermann was watching it on television at a pizzeria less than a mile away. He left his food and raced to the scene.

Waldy Martens never intended to begin the documentary project from which the photos above are taken. As a commercial and editorial photographer, Martens was simply using his camera to deal with a problem that confronted him daily after he first moved in 2011 to an apartment and studio in downtown Vancouver. Voices from the alleyway could be heard at all times of night and throughout the day, and he quickly realized he was living next to a popular hangout for drug users, prostitutes and dumpster divers. He grew frustrated with the trail of needles, garbage and feces they often left behind. He started opening the window to his second-story studio and taking pictures, using the sound of the shutter to shoo away the people below.