Maciej Dakowicz

Maciej was born in Bialystok, Poland. He's a software engineer currently living in Cardiff, Wales and working as a researcher and PhD student at the University of Glamorgan. His real passion, however, is photography. Maciej used to live for four years in Hong Kong and has traveled to India, Cambodia, Taiwan, Thailand, China, Vietnam, and elsewhere as an amateur photographer. His expressive humanistic style has made some of his photo galleries on pbase.com the "Most Popular of all Time". His gallery pages have been viewed more than two million times to date. Maciej has been interested in photography for only two short years, yet his images show the promise of a brilliant photographer. [After Need Magazine]

Full portfolio: Maciej Dakowicz

Katharina Hesse

Ms Wang, 54, lived in mental institutions for more than thirty years. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic, her disease triggered by events during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) when she was sent to the countryside to learn from farmers (Xiaxiang movement). She started to live in her own world and convinced herself that she was a man. Social interactions such as talking to other patients were unpleasant to her, and everyday tasks, like combing her hair, physically painful. Wang's health deteriorated in early 2003 and she passed in September the same year.

More material from Katharina Hesse can be found on her website.

Zbigniew Kosc

My photographs were taken during a journey to the Republic of Altay, an autonomous region in Siberia. Located close to the Mongolian border, Altay is a beautiful country of mountains and remote valleys where shamanism and ancient nomadic traditions are still practised. After a long flight from Moscow and two days of driving in a 'Wolga' car, I arrived upon an immense plateau high in the mountains. For three rainy days, I witnessed a Woodstock-like festival full of dancing and singing in various local languages and styles. Together with thousands of people I admired traditional sports like stone lifting, wrestling, archery competitions and, notably, horse races.

I was born in Poland in 1951, but have lived in Amsterdam for the last 30 years. While I have photographed a variety of subjects, I have a particular interest in people living in the countryside, traditional cultures and religious cults. Please visit my website to see photos from my other series: Mount Athos Monks, Beduins of the Eastern Desert and People of Islamic Cairo.

Matthew Maaskant

Matthew Maaskant is a freelance photographer/musician based in the Toronto, Canada area. His focus in photography is on trying to create portraits, especially photographs that reveal the subject in ways they themselves don't expect. Matthew does this by embracing the fact that his own presence will necessarily affect the behavior (and finished portrait) of a subject. There is no "pure" portrait, portraits are really about capturing a relationship between a photographer and subject. It's portraiture that works to create and simultaneously capture a moment of mutual revelation.

Matthew's complete portfolio can be viewed at qr5.org

Pancho Tolchinsky

(Mexico DF 1978, Buenos Aires 1979, Tel Aviv 1980, Barcelona 1988) I studied Mathematics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and now I'm working as a researcher while doing my PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. I have published in a few magazines and had a few exhibitions. I see photography as a means to capture a little bit more than what I can see with my eyes, or recreate in my mind. My photography is almost always related to travelling. Even on my way to work, if I carry the camera, I become a traveller, a tourist in my own house.

Portfolio website: Pancho Tolchinsky.