Sisters Rawan and Reem in a secret location where they are hiding in Hong Kong. Reem, aged 20, and Rawan, 18, fled their abusive family and Saudi Arabia’s oppressive conditions while on holiday in Sri Lanka and were intercepted by Saudi officials in Hong Kong on their way to Australia to seek asylum. Their plight and personal stories on their daring escape from what they describe as an oppressive society and Saudi Arabia’s system of female enslavement gained international attention.
Suzanne Lee is a photographer dividing her time between long-form personal photography projects and commissions. Her commissioned work spans the genres of editorial assignments as well as producing turnkey projects for non-governmental institutions and the corporate sector while her personal work focuses on cultural identity, gender equality, women and child rights and environmental issues. Suzanne continues to work on assignments as well as collaborative projects with cross-disciplinary artists across the board in the Asia Pacific region. Suzanne’s work is recognised in multiple international awards and has been exhibited in print and multimedia exhibitions globally. She is regularly invited to speak in universities, on television and radio shows, and has served as a jury on photo competitions. After living in India and Hong Kong for over a decade, Suzanne is now working out of Malaysia. She is a member of Panos Pictures as well as Women Photograph. She is a Global Imaging Ambassador for Sony Cameras and is supported by Wotancraft Atelier.
Quick links to POY Asia 2023 Judges: Zhou Yang / Takaaki Iwabu / Uma Bista / Ki-Ho Park / Parisa Azadi / Willy Kurniawan / Suzanne Lee / Jilson Tiu / Sandipa Malakar / Nathan Tsui
Surrogate mothers pregnant with their client’s babies stay for the entire duration of the job without leaving the Akanksha IVF and Surrogacy Center’s hostel in Gujarat, India. Surrogates earn $5000-$7000 for each successful completion of a pregnancy, upwards of 10 years’ salary for rural Indians, yet they mostly keep their surrogacy a secret, telling only their immediate family fearing societal backlash and ostracisation.
"Technology is changing rapidly and photographers must adapt with new ways to disseminate information, not only to stay relevant but also to be approachable to an audience that is constantly changing their habits of consuming information. But even in this age, and perhaps more than ever, empathy must supersede sympathy to engage an audience at a deeper level. A photographer must first start with the heart in the right place."
Suzanne Lee
Khalil Khan, a Muslim caretaker of the Beth El Jewish synagogue in Calcutta, India, stands in the synagogue that his family has cared for through four generations. Muslims and Jews in India enjoy a long history of synergistic relationships and with the now dwindling community of Indian Jews, many of the final torchbearers and gatekeepers of the Indian Jewish heritage both tangible and intangible, are left in the trusted hands of the Muslim community.
Flower Cohen is one of the last Jews of Calcutta. She, together with other remaining Jews of Calcutta, maintain the heritage and history of Calcutta’s Jews, from maintaining three synagogues and a cemetery to supervising the Jewish schools. Though there has been no Jewish girl in the schools since 1975, it provides quality education to the neighbourhood’s girls, mostly Muslims.
An elderly member of the last handful of Jews in Jew Town, Mattancherry, rests in her home on Jew-Town Road, Kerala, India on a sweltering day. The history of Jews in India date back to the first century BCE, when the Malabar Jews of Cochin arrived on the sailboats of King Solomon.
A coalminer sings a love song deep in the depths of the coal shafts, mined by hand. Every day, these miners, mostly children travel 250 feet underground to crawl in a labyrinth that could bring them 150 feet deep into tiny tunnels made along the coal seams. Children and young adults are preferred for this work as the spaces are small and they spend up to 12 hours a day in a crunched position chipping away at the coal using hand made tools.
