This International Women’s Day femLENS launched We See, a documentary photography magazine dedicated to women’s voices and their eyes. This is not to celebrate women’s achievements but, rather, to encourage women to become change agents themselves while struggling for gender equality, and disrupting gender-stereotypes in the cultural and media industries.

We See is a biannual documentary photography magazine, edited independently by femLENS, a non-profit association based in Estonia.

The magazine highlights works of women who do not have a professional background in documentary photography or photography in general.

The photographs included in We See are made by women who participated in the documentary photography workshops organised by femLENS in Balgaddy, Dublin, Ireland (August-October 2015) , Gdynia, Poland (April-May 2017) and Shatila refugee camp, Beirut, Lebanon (October 2017). They are: Paula Haverty (instagram.com/paulahavo, Ireland), Ewa Drewa (instagram.com/3_muskeeters.and.the.camera), Magdalena Kostrzewska, Faten Anbar (instagram.com/anbarfaten), Halima al-Haj (Instagram.com/everydayshatila).

The documentary photography workshops are at the core of femLENS, a non-profit association that aims at giving women from socially and culturally diverse backgrounds the chance to show the world through their own vision.

‘This first issue of the We See magazine is dedicated to femLENS, to women and to their eyes. We are starting a long walk to tell women through women, and to encourage women to tell stories and their viewpoints. Thanks to technological developments, today photography is easily accessible and can be used by a large group of people who have never had access to large audiences, or any audience”, write the editors of the magazine, Jekaterina Saveljeva and Rita Plantera.

“The pictures you are about to see are raw fruit of work done by people who had very little, if any, experience taking photos. And yet, once our participants were immersed in the basics of the visual alphabet and provided with simple tools, rather than state-of-the-art cameras, they started displaying amazing photographic skills, proving the point already recognised by many: what gives rise to quality photography goes way beyond advanced equipment or a limitless budget”, considers Bogdan Popescu, femLENS Director of Communications.