When I have some free time or got tired too much from work, I start doing even more work but in a different direction or field, and it should be about photography.

This happened in April 2019 when I launched The Phooks. The preceding months have been grueling due to many reasons, but then a short pause made me feel I’m still having a lot of energy and there’s a gap I need to fill with something good and exciting. In two weeks of non-stop work, I launched the first version of this platform supporting self- & independent photobook & zine publishers.

mnngful 🔴 has come into my mind even before The Phooks, but I was not sure what exactly it should be. The only thing I was and stay confident about is that this project will be supporting passion-driven projects by photographers working in a documentary genre.

I started to work on it more than a year ago and it was built around the idea of photobook publishing, but with the pandemic and the effect it brings to the international peer-to-peer shipping we faced at The Phooks I decided to focus on a purely online format. At least at the begining.

Three weeks ago I rebuilt it almost from scratch to launch it as a newsletter with a web version.

Carefully curated documentary stories by independent photographers three times a week in your inbox

The format is simple: we select three stories per week, write our foreword and deliver them to readers via newsletter.

Our search is focused on documentary photography but not strictly limited to boundaries of the genre: we do not draw a sharp line between journalism and art. We see artistic expressions as a strong way to convey a personal attitude towards a subject and represent society’s mood. We’re always open for stories submission.

What should you expect from mnngful?

Delightful photography-based stories that will satisfy your curiosity, of course.

This is how it works:

Three selected stories are delivered via email to our paying Members throughout a week and one prior announcement, Sunday Preview, is sent to all newsletter subscribers every Sunday.

— Sunday Preview tells what’s on the menu for the upcoming week.
— Stories themselves are sent to paying Members only, but also available for a free public preview on the newsfeed. The whole story along with the full archive is available to Members only.

All the publications are available to Members in the archive.

Right now, in the very beginning we open some stories to free newsletter subscribers, other — to anyone who comes to the website to let readers give it a taste.

Have a look at stories from the first week:

“End of Olympics 2020” by Johan Brooks

Johan Brooks offers a reportage from the streets of Tokyo covering the protest against the event, International Olympics Cometee and the whole organization.

“NachtClubsBerlin” by Sabrina Jeblaoui

Sabrina Jeblaoui presents us with a glimpse at one particular breed of music lovers — techno fans partying in Berlin — and brings to the fore complex psychological problems which might elude us at first glance.

“When everyone is in search of an identity that is connected to well-defined codes (such as fashion, dance, drug use, and exposure on social networks), there can only be one result: everyone ends up being the same.”

“Soul Calling” by Pengkuei Ben Huang

A collection of photographs taken between 2016 and 2019 along the coast of Northeast Japan documents the environment years after the 2011 tsunami on the southern coast of Iwate prefecture.

Landscape and daily life scenes are accompanied by letters written to those who untimely passed away offering us to get deep into the journey from grief, suffering the loss of loved ones to acceptance and recovery.