Nairobi-based photographer Natalia Jidovanu shadowed social media content moderators who are fighting back against Big Tech companies like Meta Kenyan courts. Rulings in these cases could jeopardize the outsourcing model upon which tech giants have built their global empire.
What does exile mean for artists who have fled Russia? Reporter Nadia Beard met a new generation of Russian painters, performers and musicians now working outside the country, and learned about how their work is different from previous generations of exiled Russian artists. The story features photography from Elene Shengelia in Tbilisi and Lorenzo Meloni of Magnum Photos in Paris.
Frankie Mills captured the vast, mountainous landscape of the Swedish Arctic, where Coda’s Isobel Cockerell reported on the clash of ideologies and motivations underlying Europe’s bid to transition to green energy.
“I’ve never been to a place where I felt so constantly under observation,” said Magnum photographer Peter van Agtmael after he travelled to Medellín to investigate the city’s complex ecosystem of police and drug trade surveillance. “I watched them all watching each other, and became a part of this circle of surveillance.”
Louiza Vradi’s photos transported readers to Kukes, Albania, a city that has lost about half of its population since the fall of communism in 1991. In recent years, thousands of young people — mostly boys and men — have rolled the dice and journeyed to England, often on small boats and without proper paperwork, only to find themselves indebted to smugglers and criminal gangs. Together with Coda reporter Isobel Cockerell, Vradi examined the driving forces behind recent waves of migration from Albania to western Europe.
Magnum photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa took readers to downtown Nairobi, where 2,000 Chinese-made Huawei surveillance cameras send real-time data to police. The cameras are there to prevent terrorism and crime, but is Nairobi’s surveillance net actually making people safer? As writer and poet Njeri Wangari found, so far the answer is no.
What is it like to live on the front lines of a decades-old border dispute between China and India, as the two countries vie for the spotlight on the geopolitical stage? Working alongside Coda’s senior editor Shougat Dasgupta, photographer Ishan Tankha captured cultural and economic contrasts across India’s jagged Himalayan borderlands.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sparked a widespread embrace of Ukrainian culture and language. But Ukraine is home to more than one culture and language. Romanian photographer Andreea Campeanu accompanied reporter Amanda Coakley to western Ukraine where Romanian ethnic communities say their language and culture are suffering collateral damage in wartime.
Photographer Seth Berry gave us a window into the world of Hery Flores, one of an untold number of Hondurans caught up in the state’s complex surveillance web. Originally deployed as a weapon in the region’s ongoing drug war, police surveillance technology has been turned against opposition figures like Flores, all while the drug trade continues to thrive. The story by Anna-Catherine Brigida was shortlisted for the 2023 Fetisov Journalism Awards in the category of contribution to civil rights.
Rachel Woolf brought readers to southern Colorado’s historic mining heartland where the U.S. is hoping it can find the silver reserves that will be essential for the green transition. The resurgence of U.S. mining is happening in the shadows of decaying infrastructure of the past.
