Olivia’s favorites
BredaPhoto Ambassadors 2026
Having grown up in Twente, Brabant immediately felt familiar to me. Roefs explores the shifting landscape of rural youth with a sensitive balance between documentary observation and subtle staging. I was particularly drawn to the compositions and the quiet intensity of the teenagers’ gazes, where tradition, identity and change seem to meet. Shot on analogue film and presented at life size, the work carries a timeless quality that makes these young lives feel suspended between memory and the present.
This exhibition resonated with me on a deeply personal level. As the daughter of a political refugee whose family was affected by political repression in Romania, I have always been conscious of how easily individual stories can disappear behind political statistics. What struck me here is the insistence on putting faces, names and families back at the centre. The restrained, grid-like installation strengthens that collective sense of remembrance, while keeping the artist deliberately in the background. For me, it demonstrates the profound role documentary photography can play in preserving memory and giving visibility to those who are too easily forgotten.
Elnaal’s The Salt Ate Away Her Eyes stayed with me for its remarkable intimacy. Working within her own family, she moves delicately between personal memory, documentary observation and portraiture. The raw black-and-white imagery gives the work a quiet visual strength, while the tenderness between the photographs reveals much about care, dignity and resilience. As a documentary photographer, I find it particularly compelling how Elnaal transforms such a personal story into something much broader: a reflection on what it means to see, to be seen, and to truly pay attention.
