Visual Storytelling
& Environmental Memory
The four works on this page were made in different parts of Europe and tell four different stories. Water running out in southern Italy. A drained lake and the family memory of it. Coal country after the coal. A generation being measured for military service. They share one starting point. What is done to the land stays on the land, and stays with the people. That is environmental memory. This programme was made to tell it.
For a year, MÓN paired four early-career visual journalists with working photographers who mentored them one to one. Michele Cardano, Ella Seeger, Jozefien Van der Aelst and Lorenzo Mariani each made a work. The programme was supported by Journalismfund Europe. The four works were published in the summer of 2026. This page brings them together.
- AuthorMichele Cardano
- LocationBasilicata, Italy
- MentorPietro Paolini · TerraProject
- Published2026
In Basilicata more than a third of the water never reaches a tap, and in Anzi, above Potenza, sixty-two per cent of what remains is lost to broken pipes. The year Michele Cardano worked there, the town registered two births; Maria Teresa was the second and the last. Twenty-five centuries ago, people here left offerings to the deities of their springs. Cardano photographs a region running out of water and people at the same time.
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- AuthorElla Seeger
- LocationNorth Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
- MentorArne Piepke
- Published2026
Sites and strengths: Bundeswehr, Federal Ministry of Defence, BLB NRW and local authorities. Figures mix soldiers and civilian staff; Münster estimated from corps strength.
The first military-service questionnaires are arriving at the homes of Germans born in 2008, the year that cohort turns eighteen. Ella Seeger followed them across North Rhine-Westphalia for a year, between school strikes, Bundeswehr youth events and the places where they meet, photographing young people who are being counted before they have decided what they think.
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- AuthorJozefien Van der Aelst
- LocationCoalfields across Europe
- MentorRocco Rorandelli · TerraProject
- Published2026
Black Earth is a film book from Europe’s coal country, an alternate history of a people whose land is taken from beneath their feet and whose past is dug back out of the earth. Jozefien Van der Aelst shot it in the stark black and white of the seams, from Belgium across the continent, in places where the mines have closed but their traces remain.
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- AuthorLorenzo Mariani
- LocationMarsica, Abruzzo, Italy
- MentorMónica Alcázar-Duarte
- Published2026
The Fucino, in Abruzzo, was a lake for as long as anyone had written about it: Claudius tried to empty it, and failed. In 1878 the Torlonia family finished the job, and the water became farmland. Lorenzo Mariani crosses the dry plain a century and a half later, guided by the memory of the water that his own family kept, asking what a place holds of what it no longer is.
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Selected participants — Visual Storytelling & Environmental Memory
We’re delighted to announce the five…
