These 10 powerful photos show us how people live around the world — and they were taken by young journalists.
Whether it’s in the trenches with Afghan soldiers or amid piles of rubble leveled by bulldozers in a Jakarta neighborhood, The GroundTruth Project’s team of reporting fellows, freelancers and featured emerging photographers have documented life experiences spanning the globe.
We’re committed to a diverse and ethical future for journalism in a time when quality, in-depth reporting is needed to keep democracies healthy and freedom of the press alive.
At GroundTruth, we work hard every day to train the next generation of reporters as they tell the stories of their time. Our fellows come from 25 countries and two thirds of them are women. These emerging talents create special reports, podcasts, documentary films and photo essays that reveal some of our planet’s rawest moments as it navigates major issues such as climate change, refugee crises, youth unemployment and rampant diseases.
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In the meantime, here’s 10 of our most powerful photos, all taken by young, talented journalists:
In 2015, members of the Uganda LGBT community came together for the Mister and Miss Pride competition — a short-lived tradition disrupted this year by police raids, when officers beat participants and arrested LGBT advocates. [See full photo essay]
By Sarah Weiser
In Northern India, many women are unaware of their options when it comes to birth control – so many of them end up getting highly-invasive sterilization surgery instead. Munni Devi, 25, rests with her newborn, Sachin, at the Darbhanga Medical College Hospital in the northern state of Bihar, India, where fertility rates are exceptionally high. India’s fertility rate has declined from about 5.9 children per woman in the 1950s to 2.5 in 2010 — and is expected to fall to 1.9 by 2050, according to the Pew Research Center. [See full photo essay]
“Portraits of black fatherhood” — Joshua Mann, 34, poses for a portrait with his son, King Joshua Mann, in East New York, NY on March 29, 2015. “I’m just gonna keep my son strong to me. He’s like my best friend. He’s gonna be stuck to me like glue. I can’t let nothing happen to him. I’d let it happen to me before it’d happen to him. I can’t be subject to my son out here being shot, stabbed or however they go.” [See full photo essay]
Sheep wait in loaded wagons that usually transport iron ore. They’re about to start a 20-hour journey through the Sahara desert from Nouadhibou harbour, Mauritania, to a mine in Zouérat, a northern part of the country. The 435-mile train journey through the Sahara is like being inside a washing machine — very shaky and noisy with doors banging off their hinges all the time. Most of the travelers are traders who use the train to transport food and live animals. [See full photo essay]
Awal Mohammed, a migrant worker, runs towards a protest in his village of Agbogbloshie, a slum that lies right outside of Accra, Ghana. The riot began when the government demolished houses as a part of a slum clearance initiative — what was once a fertile wetland is now a dumping ground for electronic waste. Migrant workers such as Awal often burn electronics to extract valuable metals to sell, putting their health and the environment at significant risk. [See the full photo essay]
Majd Suliman (left), Asaad Sieo (center) and Mahmoud Hamwi (right) cheer as they watch a video of one of their friends, also a Syrian refugee, arriving safely to the island of Lesvos by a small boat. Many refugees chronicled their journey or sharing information and rumors on social media outlets such as Facebook. Over the last five years, more than four million Syrians fled their homeland, which has been at constant war since 2011, according to UN High Commission on Refugees. [See the full photo essay]
A man carries a cage full of pigeons in Pasar Ikan, a district of northern Jakarta. A settlement in this district was recently razed as part of the city’s river revitalization project, leaving its residents homeless. The development project hopes to alleviate flooding that threatens Jakarta’s 30 million citizens. Flooding has become more severe as sea levels rise because of climate change and as Jakarta’s land continues to sink. [See the full photo essay]
By Ben Brody
An Afghan soldier plays dead during a training demonstration at Camp Hero in Kandahar, his American-made rifle tossed by his side. [See the full photo essay]
Three teenagers from Afghanistan warm themselves by a fire inside of an abandoned factory near the port of Patras, Greece, where they live. It’s one of the main escape points from the country.
According to the United Nation’s Committee of Refugees, over 500,000 migrants arrived in Greece in 2015, with as many as 8,000 arriving per day. But even so, Greece has a low asylum acceptance rate — in 2014, only 14.8% of first-instance decisions resulted in accepted asylum applications, according to Eurostat. [See the full photo essay]
Ronda Thorton, 40, a resident on the north side of Flint, rests in her living room chair after discussing severe pain in her left shoulder and a numbness in her fingers. Thorton, who says that her water tested with high concentrations of lead, believes that her state of illness is a result of Flint’s ongoing water issues.
“I can’t afford the filters every single month. When you don’t have [finances] and you want to eat, you take your choice. Either the water or food,” she said. [See the full photo essay]
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