Walaa Yassien (Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism '25) has been selected as one of two Magnum Foundation’s New York City Fellows for fall 2025. The program supports the development of photographic projects, while also providing paid work experience at Magnum Foundation’s office. 

Yassien's project, Among the Grass, follows a Sudanese soccer team in New York and explores how rituals, gestures, and victories become ways of performing heritage and asserting community. While most have never been to Sudan, they carry its identity through their team while consistently winning the local league.  

“I’m looking forward to meeting new people, learning from their perspectives, and developing Among the Grass in a deeper way,” said Walaa. “This fellowship gives me the chance to bring visibility to the Sudanese-American team I’m documenting, and I hope to shape the project into something that can reach a wider audience.” 

Walaa is a Sudanese self-taught photographer who later studied Photojournalism in Denmark and New York. Her practice explores space, time, and memory, focusing on how individuals navigate their existence and the emotional landscapes that shape them. Through long-term projects and series, she uses photography as a way to reflect on identity, belonging, and heritage, often weaving dynamic movement into her work to capture both the stillness and flux of lived experience. 

Throughout the fall of 2025, fellows will split their time between supporting Magnum Foundation’s programming and pursuing their NYC-based photographic projects.  

Image: Walaa Yassien

Noy Finer (Creative Practices ‘24), is presenting a solo exhibition at Moshava Art Gallery, in New York City's Greenwich Village. On view through March 12, 2026, Fragments of Home explores themes of family, memory, and the connection to the self and nature. The project is the culmination of photos made during Finer’s move to New York, from a small village in Israel.  

Finer told ICP: “I found myself constantly searching for familiar elements within the big city, which all revolve around my immediate surroundings and nature. Making the move with my partner, Orian, naturally tied him into my exploration of what it means to define a new space for ourselves. The mixed use of both black and white and color film, along with the addition of textural paper and wood as work surfaces, created a sense of warmth that brought everything together for me.” 

Image: Orian with Tree, Noy Finer

Fragments of Home revealed that creating from a place of joy was essential to Finer's practice.

“It involves a lot of trial and error, so staying positive is vital. Each piece requires its own treatment to bring out certain memories or specific feelings. I also realized how much documenting Orian’s spontaneous actions thrills me, as his interaction with the environment feels effortless and similar to my own,” she added.  
 
Finer told ICP she hopes viewers feel more connected to themselves through the exhibition. She added, “As humans, we often find it easier to remember what we do wrong; my hope for this show is that people feel more in tune with their emotions and find something to hold onto that makes them feel ‘at home’, maybe even more so emotionally than physically.” 

Her next project is translating her series into book formats, while continuing to develop work around familial bonds through new photographic documentation and archival material. 

Image: Ottavia Giola

ICP alum Inuuteq Storch (Creative Practices ‘16) presented his first US solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 from October 9, 2025, to February 23, 2026. Soon Will Summer Be Over highlights Storch’s approach to imaging moments of intimacy, mundanity, and sublimity across Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), often focusing on his hometown of Sisimiut—a town of 5,500 people just north of the Arctic Circle. The exhibition traced the artist’s practice over the past decade. 

Storch documents the textures and rhythms of communities navigating the crossroads of Inuit traditions, Danish colonial influences, climate crises, and the pressures of globalization. His visual style draws attention to the details of the day-to-day. And in doing so, the project blurs the lines between what might be considered art and decoration.  

In Soon Will Summer Be Over, Storch uses photos and videos of the smaller details to draw out larger histories. One of the ways he does so is by thinking about how people have visually arranged their own lives.  

Soon Will Summer Be Over builds on Storch’s existing bodies of work on Greenland’s natural and cultural traditions. In his 2019 series, Keepers of the Ocean, he documented the essence of life in Sisimiut over four years. What If You Were My Sabine? reveals the themes of love, intimacy, and belonging. While Anachronism, footage from film found in a dumpster is a video projection which speaks to Inuit modernization. Through each project, Storch’s camera becomes both a witness and participant, blending stories of familial, natural and communal stories to shed light on identity and life in Greenland.   

ICP alum Ashima Yadava (Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism '20) opened a solo exhibition Front Yard, on display now at Chung 24 Gallery in San Francisco, until February 14, 2026.  

Front Yard uses collaboration as an equity mechanism and offers an in-depth conversation of the perceived realities of various families all over the Bay Area. Yadava brought these groups into the creative process, inviting them to color or embellish black and white prints and thus allowing their unique perspectives into the work.  

Yadava said the project attempts to sidestep the problematic one-sided gaze that has come to define documentary photography.  

In her artist statement, Yadava said: “One family used thumbprints to make balloons with Tamil text that translates to, ‘Everything one needs to learn is learned within the family with unconditional love for each other.’ In another instance, a family used flowers to illustrate Urdu text that reads ‘Abhi na chhed mohabbat ke geet ai mutrib, abhi hayaat ka mahaul ḳhush-gavaar nahin.’ (Do not sing of me of love, in times of such unpleasantness.)” 

Yadava continued: “This project helped me understand the realities of my communities and see how easily we could break barriers of judgment by opening our worlds to each other. While humanity is fighting wars and diseases—with isolation and distrust perhaps the antidote is in the collaborative sowing of seeds that represent, affirm, and bind us all.” 

Yadava graduated as a Director’s Fellow from ICP’s Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism program in 2020.

She said: “I had taken a large format class with Justine Kurland while I was a student at ICP. When I began working on the Front Yard series, the slow pace of using a 4×5 large-format camera gave me time to reflect on my role as a photographer. I had seen India represented a certain way through images shaped largely by the Western male gaze, making me very aware of the problematic one-sided perspective that is synonymous with documentary photography. In order to disrupt that dynamic, I invited the families I photographed to intervene—to color or embellish the black and white images freely and determine how they wished to be seen. In Front Yard, collaboration becomes a mechanism of equity, offering a more in-depth conversation about perceived realities.”