To accompany an article of The New York Times Magazine about how the Air Force trains its pilots to control unmanned drones used for deadly strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, the magazine assigned architecture and portrait photographer Sean Hemmerle to photograph the aircraft at Holloman Air Force Base, a training facility in New Mexico. His images make the drones look stark and strange — "They’re blind moles in the sky," says Hemmerle — and also technologically astonishing. Hemmerle, born 1966, is a New York-based photographer whose work ranges from international conflict zones to contemporary architecture. After serving in the U.S. Army, he attended the University of Miami and earned an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1997. He quickly established his reputation as a sought-after architectural and urban landscape photographer, and since 9/11 has turned his eye toward documenting the effects of war in New York, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Xu Yong was born in Shanghai in 1954 and is an autodidact photographer. In 1989, Xu Yong photographed the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, China. All photographs of the events were strictly censored by the government later on. The images were therefore hidden in his archives for 25 years. In 2016 however, for the first time in Germany, a selection of his works has been exhibited at the 'Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie'. Yong decided against processing the images and instead reproduced inverted color negatives which may only be decoded with a smartphone or tablet camera, via the function of inverting color effect to negative, providing us with a surreal, yet unbiased glance at these historic eventsIn times of questionable governmental action concerning freedom of press (one of many examples is the recent announcement by.

"Freedom of Speech" is a series of portraits of extraordinary contemporary personalities by Oliver Abraham. Among them are journalists, musicians, philosophers, representatives of the "New Left" as well as artists and writers. Everyone deals with the topic of surveillance and press freedom and expresses their political attitude artistically. Due to the political events, the work has documentary elements, whereas the selection of the people as well as the presentation are subjective. The photographs are accompanied by a text by Noam Chomsky about independent journalism and how it should be shaped. The text is hidden behind the individual portraits, so one must "look behind the picture" interactively and investigatively. Following the example of Noam Chomsky’s ideas, the works explore questions about the impact of mainstream media on public opinion, press freedom and activism.