Frederik Buyckx has scooped Photographer of the Year at this year’s Sony World Photography Awards, with a series called Whiteout that explores how nature is transformed by winter. "I have chosen a series of landscapes so that we may return to the essence of looking at photography,” comments Zelda Cheatle, chair of judges at Sony’s World Photography Organisation. “Landscape is often overlooked but it is central to our existence. I hope this award will inspire many more photographers to take pictures that do not simply encompass the terrible aspects of life in these troubled times but also capture some of the joys and loveliness in each and every environment,” she continues. Buyckx’s work, which was picked out from 227,00 entries by photographers from 183 countries, was shot in remote areas of the Balkans, Scandinavia and Central Asia, where people often live in isolation and in close contact with nature. "There is a peculiar transformation of nature when winter comes, when snow and ice start to dominate the landscape and when humans and animals have to deal with the extreme weather," ...
By the end of the 19th century, the camera and the car had helped pave the way for a new, more modern perspective – images by freezing time, from multiple perspectives, and automobiles by speeding things up. Now the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris is devoting a huge exhibition to the two, showing how they have altered our lives and our visions of them – and how they continue to evolve. As curators Xavier Barral and Philippe Séclier comment: “Over the last few years we have witnessed an industrial, societal and environmental turning point in automobile history. On the other hand, photography has never been shared so much.” With the automobile and the camera, they explain, everyone can be in action in space and in time – cars providing almost everyone, everywhere, with autonomy and movement, and the photography allowing them to record their presence in history. “It was time to unify these two popular techniques, which have transformed the social bond into an artistic journey,” say the curators. “And this is the first time that a photographic exhibition of this magnitude has been organised on this theme.” ...
"Individually these photos represent the moment that we crossed paths, but collectively they represent my portrait of London – a confident city, a city of the future, a city I call home,” says Niall McDiarmid, who has been shooting portraits on the streets of Britain’s capital for the last six years. McDiarmid is showing a selection of these portraits in an outdoor exhibition at the Museum of London this summer, helping kick off the institution’s year-long City Now City Future programme. Rarely shooting more than a few yards from where he meets his subjects, McDiarmid notes the date and place of each encounter, building an archive of work that stands as a collective portrait of the metropolis. Originally from Scotland, McDiarmid is now based in London but has won acclaim for the street portraits he takes across the UK. His first book, Crossing Paths, A Portrait of Britain, was published in 2013. A second book, Via Vauxhall, followed in 2015. McDiarmid’s show opens alongside two other exhibitions focused on London – a series of newly commissioned interactive films by artist ...
"I like it when you can tell they had fun making it, that they did it for themselves before anyone else,” says photographer Juno Calypso. "That criteria probably doesn't apply well to documentary projects but I take pictures of myself in wigs and tacky lingerie, so what do I know?" She’s a fast-rising star in photography who launched her career with a series of self-portraits playing a fictional character named Joyce, but she’s also helping out as one of the judges of this year’s BJP Breakthrough Awards. She likes underdogs and "a photographer or a subject that isn't already over-represented in the history of photography”, she says but, having been on the other side of the fence, adds that she knows how scary it can be to enter a prize. "I know how it feels to place all your hopes into a single competition,” she says. “I don't want to make lazy decisions [when judging]. What I will say though, is even if you do get rejected – keep applying or just do your own ...
"At Yale University, I found myself in a place of 'double consciousness'," recalls Endia Beal, citing the writer, sociologist and activist WEB Du Bois. Beal was the only black person in the 2013 cohort for the fine arts MA in photography, and also in her workplace – an IT department. "I grew up in one culture and now inhabited another, becoming a mediator between these two worlds," she says. Upon learning that her hair, a red Afro, fascinated her colleagues, she turned the tables on them, allowing them to feel it but recording their impressions. "It felt like I was doing something I wasn't supposed to be doing but wanted to do," admits one of them, while others spoke of the moment being "uncomfortable", "voyeuristic" or "awkward", highlighting the inappropriateness of the question, "Can I touch your hair?" Beal's work since has continued to question and provoke, often challenging the uniformity of corporate culture. In an amusing but no less incisive series, she styled seven white women in their forties with 'black' hairdos, then took head ...
Born in 1987 in Berlin, Paul Hutchinson graduated from the University of the Arts, Berlin in 2012, and from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London in 2014. While in London he assisted Wolfgang Tillmans, and by 2015 he had published his first book – B-Boys, Fly Girls and Horticulture. He has gone on to publish two more, Wildlife Photography in 2016 and Schmetterlinge [Butterflies] in 2017. Hutchinson has won various awards and grants, and has shown his work at Galerie Mansart, the Berlinische Galerie Museum of Modern Art and The Photographers Gallery. The recent exhibition Perfect Storm, at the NRW Forum in Dusseldorf, included Hutchinson's photographs alongside work by other fast-emerging image-makers such as Thomas Albdorf, Andrey Bogush, Vendula Knopova, Maurice van Es and Nikolas Ventourakis. BJP: You were a bit of a tearaway at school, how did you get into photography? Paul Hutchinson: I was never a typical troublemaker or bully, it was always about curiosity and trying things off the beaten track, which obviously hit some borders in the context ...
"If you want to get your work seen and your talent celebrated you should look no further!” says Mimi Mollica, photographer and founder of the Offspring Photo Meet. “Photo Meet has become the hub photographers needed in London. With portfolio reviews, talks, workshops, projections, great offers and our beefed up Best Portfolio Award, the two-day event will be fun and inspirational.” Launched in 2015, Photo Meet returns to Hackney’s Space Studios on 12 and 13 May with a stellar lineup of photo experts, including a portfolio review including experts from Tate Modern, British Journal of Photography, The Photographers’ Gallery, The Observer, FT Weekend Magazine, Vice, and agencies, production companies, galleries, and publishers. Rising photographic stars Juno Calypso and Francesca Allen will join Tate Modern curator Shoair Mavlian on Friday evening to discuss making work in the internet era, plus rewriting the boundaries of the representation of sex, gender and identity. Jörn Tomter and Luke Archer will host the Saturday Beer O'Clock, presenting their self-produced and self-published magazines, Loupe magazine and I love Chatsworth Road. Laura El-Tantawy show her new ...
"With this exhibition, I will reveal something different to what Western and British society has seen about Syria,” says Sergey Ponomarev. “Most of the visual narratives that come from Syria are shot from the rebel side – people suffering from the government shelling, suffering malnutrition or lack of water, and just recently being attacked with chemical weapons. I will show images from normal life.” The Pulitzer Prize-winner is talking about his upcoming exhibition at the Imperial War Museum London A Lens on Syria, in which he’s showing two award-winning series created in partnership with The New York Times – Assad's Syria (2013-2014) and Europe Migration Crisis (2015-2016). His mission, he says, is “to be the eyes of society". Ponomarev has been following the Arab Spring since 2011, when anti-government protests first started to emerge in Syria but he says that from the start, "it was clear that photojournalist with Russian background couldn’t join the rebels". Historically the Soviet Union supported the Syrian government and that remains the case today; "when the Free Syrian army clustered into several Jihadi groups, some ...
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