LONDON.- Naomi Lewis and Maria Daniel Balcazar are two outstanding photography artists whose respective body of works – in subject matter as well as technique and style - are testament to the breadth and richness of contemporary photography.

Albumen’s Director and Founder, Stephan Schmid said, “We are pleased to announce the representation of two formidable artists in the international fine art photography world – Naomi Lewis and Maria Daniel Balcazar. In their own respective subject matters and artistic style the works of Naomi Lewis and Maria Daniel Balcazar align perfectly with Albumen Gallery’s commitment to championing boundary-pushing photographic art.

Naomi Lewis

Naomi Lewis is a multi-disciplinary artist working across film, performance and writing. At the axis of her work is a belief that our relationship with the maternal, as an agentive force inherent in nature, is in tatters. Central to Naomi Lewis’s work is her experience of growing up with a mother who suffered serious mental illness, which affected every aspect of family life. This has led the photographer to examine in her work wider themes of how societal disregard for mothering forms and ways, entangled with our reliance upon them, impacts who we are and how we behave.

Her two recent series ‘Black Bag and My Father’s Eulogy is a Mask explore the anonymisation, abstraction, and psychological survival of the human form across distinct environmental landscapes. By consistently obscuring the face, the work strips the figures of traditional narrative portraiture, turning the body – whether collective or singular – into a sculptural site of performance, constraint, and visceral tension.

At their core, these images confront a profound sense of grief, both personal and cultural, surrounding societal polarisations of the masculine and feminine. The images navigate the pain of these divides, utilising raw physical restriction to mirror internal psychological fracturing. Through this carnal struggle, the sequence evolves into a ritual of release, moving past rigid structures of identity toward a shared, elemental space of vulnerability and fluid survival.





Maria Daniel Balcazar

The Bolivian photographer Maria Daniel Balcazar is known for her long-term photographic essays. Her work explores migration, the vitality of traditions, and the role of women in society. She combines research and memory to transform archives into images with historical and symbolic value. Characteristically, she deploys experimental techniques, combining research and poetry to transform archives and personal or collective memories into images with historical and symbolic weight.

In her long-term series of portraits ‘Nuances of your Gaze’ she his honouring the Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos (1914-1953), whose life and work challenged the limits imposed on women, from the most intimate terrain of the self to the wider struggles of society. Rendered largely in chiaroscuro, the project moves through light and shadow, presence and absence, revealing the complexities of identity, memory, and transformation.

Inspired by her poetry, figures from myths, religion and history appear as echoes of transformation, resistance, knowledge and freedom across time. These fragments of memory and imagination converge in the photographic image, where the body becomes language and poetry becomes a visual form.

‘The Paths of Tears’ is an elegy to grief and memory, a spiritual journey through the Andean landscape, where death is not an end but a passage through which the past continues to inhabit and shape the present. Tears carve paths toward the mountains, where ancestors merge with Mother Earth and become the guardians of memory.

Personal sorrow weaves into the collective, and loss is felt not only as absence, but as a form of reunion through ritual and remembrance. Grief doesn’t resolve. It settles into an inner landscape, one that keeps shifting under the weight of remembrance, time, and all that quietly remains.

Books Published by Maria Daniel Balcazar featuring her work include

• Kilombo – African Legacy in Brazil
• Heirs of the Dawn – Oruro, Bolivia
• Shades of Your Gaze – Tribute to Puerto Rican Poet Julia de Burgos
• Invisible Guardians – Documentation of 15 Indigenous Communities of Bolivia
• Paths of Tears – Book and Exhibition to be Presented at the National Museum of Art Bolivia, 2026