Twenty-three-year-old Johanna-Maria Fritz has been photographing the circus since she was 17. First, in her native Germany, then Iceland, next the Middle East. More attracted to the familial communities that circuses create than the public performances, her work looks at the troupes’ relationships to their surroundings, inside and outside the big top.

“The beginning of everything,” says Fritz, was photographing a small circus in eastern Germany called Zirkus Rolandos. It’s closed now, and Fritz keeps this early student work tucked away in a private portfolio. With a craving to immerse herself in another circus community, in early 2014 Fritz swiftly boarded a plane to Iceland the day after a friend living there called to tell her about a new circus on