About
Zana Briski spent 10 years on her project in the brothels of Kolkata, India, where she photographed, filmed and taught photography to the children of prostitutes. Her film, BORN INTO BROTHELS, won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, an Emmy and 33 other awards.
Zana founded KIDS WITH CAMERAS, a non-profit organization which teaches the art of photography to marginalized children around the world. She published a book of the children’s photographs, KIDS WITH CAMERAS, and a collector’s edition of her own photographs, BROTHEL.
Inspired by the praying mantis, Zana’s current project, REVERENCE, is an exhibit of large-scale photographic artworks of insects, a film and music, housed in a migrating museum. REVERENCE will travel to city parks around the world, bringing us face to face with insects as sentient beings and challenging our deeply held fear of otherness.
In Night Wild, Zana no longer uses an analogue camera. She collaborates with wild animals to make one-of-a-kind life-sized photograms directly onto light-sensitive photographic paper at night, which she later processes in her darkroom.
