Documentary photos & text by Masoud Amin Naji copyright Masoud Amin Naji, 2025
We are delighted to present Masoud Amin Naji as our featured photographer. His work documents the plight of street children in Iran, who are forced into labour due to economic hardship. Through his lens, Masoud offers a rare and powerful glimpse into a reality that is often hidden from view, as access to such stories from Iran remains extremely difficult.
“This is the Middle East. It consists of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. The people here are kind and knowledgeable, but for various reasons such as tribal wars, poor economy, cultural and religious differences, they are forced to either abandon their children or use them for a living. They force children who are deprived of education, love, happiness, fun and play to do hard and tiring work. Even if they do not want to work, they are forced to work and, without wanting to, they lose a good life full of happiness, health and respect.
Maybe they can be helped to return to the normal cycle of life. There is no doubt that they are brilliant talents. You may have heard these sentences in newspaper headlines or in films such as Bicycle Thief (Ladri di Bicicletta), but here with these documentary photos we want to talk about children whose entire childhood or perhaps their entire life is spent longing for a normal life.
After all, for what crime and mistake should the entire life and happiness of a child be ruined, this is the Middle East and such things happens a lot, let’s be together for once and work for women and children so that they can have a normal life” – Masoud Amin Naji
Photojournalism Hub is delighted to present guest photographers Evgeniya Strygina and Tori Ferenc for the IN FOCUS event on the 23rd June, 7:15 pm, hosted at Riverside Studios.
Both photographers explore themes of place, identity, and belonging from distinct yet complementary perspectives. Strygina’s minimalist landscapes, often void of people, reflect on space, architecture, and the quiet tension between presence and absence. Ferenc focuses on portraiture and documentary work, capturing the nuances of family, community, and our connection to nature. Together, their work forms a thoughtful dialogue on what it means to inhabit a space, physically, emotionally, and collectively.
Evgeniya Strygina (b. 1989) is a lens-based visual artist exploring urbanisation, contemporary landscape, and immigration. She honed her skills at the Fine Art Photography School, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and PhMuseum. Since relocating to the UK in 2022, her work has been exhibited at Photo|Frome Festival, London Lighthouse Gallery, Cicek Gallery, and LoosenArt Gallery, with publications in Fisheye Magazine, Truth in Photography, Al-Tiba9 Art Magazine, and Artdoc Photography Magazine. Notable awards include the Top 150 MIRA Mobile Prize, MonoVisions Awards, and Photometria Awards judged by Martin Parr. In 2023, she held a solo exhibition after an art residency in Czechia. Her first photobook, Home from Home, is scheduled for release in 2025 with the publisher Ephemere. As a contemporary photographer with an interest in shooting both urban and natural landscapes, I make a point of keeping my images almost or totally uninhabited as I consider people to be but one part of the world as opposed to being its centre. Even in my pictures of architecture, obviously built by people for other people to use, I am fascinated by the space and its details rather than its occupants. Juxtapositions, interactions and contradictions, rhythms and rhymes – be they intended or otherwise – is what I never stop looking for in nature and cities. In an attempt to make the viewer see aspects of the landscape that routinely go unnoticed, I offer a different perspective on things and deliberately strip down the style of my photographs. Minimalistic and geometric, my pictures are both an experiment in deconstructing reality and a quest for quiet harmony in our noisy existence. Besides exploring the nature of space in my work, I am also keen on studying the notion of home, which could be both a place and a non-place, and portraying a longing for an environment you can call your own. This is probably because, being born in a small town and currently living hundreds of miles away from it, I cannot but wonder where I actually belong.
Tori Ferenc is a portrait and documentary photographer, born in Poland in 1989. In her work, Tori is focusing on the themes of identity, community, family dynamics, and exploring the relationship between humans and nature. Over the years, her projects have been shown at renowned exhibitions such as the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize in 2021, the Hamburg Portfolio Review and Prix Virginia in 2022, and Rencontres d’Arles in 2023. She is a member of Women Photograph and Equal Lens. IN FOCUS is presented by the Photojournalism Hub in collaboration of Riverside Studios, bringing to the public compelling and thought-provoking contemporary documentary photography and photojournalism,
‘Me, and My Community’ is a documentary photography project for residents over 50 years old of Hammersmith & Fulham. The project’s beneficiaries is a group with people of ages ranging from 50 to 89 years old who have regularly met and produced some extraordinary pieces of photographic work. The overarching theme of the photographic work has been on what community is and it means on a personal and collective level . The project ended with a photography exhibition at the William Morris Museum in London Hammersmith.
Please note, if your name with the payment is different to the name submitted for your photography work, please email: admin@photojournalismhub.org to let us know. Thank you.
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