What is photography? Over the past few years contemporary photographers have incorporated sculpture, performance, moving image, analogue processes and digital technologies into their practice, stoking a sometimes-heated debate about where exactly the medium begins and ends. But for Catherine Yass, such experimentation is nothing new. In a conversation with BJP and DACS, the not-for-profit artist rights management organisation, Yass explained that she doesn't, in fact, consider herself a photographer, but an artist who works with photography. Born in 1963, she's noted for her vivid, glowing photographs shown against light boxes, as well as her films and installations. Her subjects are often vacant urban spaces, construction sites, monuments of the modern industrial age and the people and institutions who commission her. "The way we are positioned by and position ourselves in relation to our surroundings both reflects and affects our state of mind and our sense of ourselves in the world," she says. "The built environment is a form of communication and an expression of society." In her Decommissioned (2011) series Yass photographed a car showroom and ...
Arriving in London from Tehran, aged 10, and not having English as a first language, Shaz Madani remembers finding "great comfort in the universal language of images and pictures". That refuge in the visual was probably the genesis of her career, as more than a decade later she graduated from the London College of Communication with a degree in design for advertising. Three years on, she set up her own studio, and soon after, a mutual friend put her in touch with Danielle Pender. Together they founded Riposte, a biannual "smart magazine for women". Now in its seventh issue, the award- winning title, edited by Pender and art directed by Madani, is lauded for its intelligent voice and smart aesthetic. The Iranian-born designer continues with project work, including commissions from MoMA, Wellcome Trust, Elephant magazine, and two books for photographer Giles Duley. This article comes from BJP‘s May issue. Why doesn't Riposte have a front cover image? Riposte came about as a response to the barrage of image-saturated magazines we were seeing on the shelves, ...
The British curator spent 12 formative years working at the V&A. And in the 12 years since, she's done the opposite, moving from post to post either side of the Atlantic, including senior directorial and curator positions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Media Museum and ICP. She has written numerous books, including two notable surveys, The Photograph as Contemporary Art (2004) and Photography is Magic (2015). This article was first published in BJP’s April issue, available from www.thebjpshop.com My first encounters with photography were through my parents, who are furniture historians and had a photo studio at home. I loved the precision and drama of the photo shoot, even when the subject was just a chair! My dad took me to see an exhibition of pre-Revolution Russian photography at Oxford's MoMA when I was a teenager. This was when I fell in love with photography. I look back at my years at the V&A as a time of incalculable learning. I learnt how to communicate, how to be helpful, to ...
Liverpool – home of The Beatles, a passion for football and the unforgettable Scouse accent; Hong Kong – one of the world's key financial centres, towering skyline, exotic cuisine and ongoing violations of human rights. It might seem unlikely, but there are parallels to be drawn. Both are historically part of the British Empire and both brazen a rich maritime past with large trading ports still used today – perhaps one reason why the northwest England metropolitan borough is home to the oldest Chinatown in Europe and some 10,000 Chinese residents. It comes as no surprise, then, that Liverpool's biennial International Photography Festival, curated by Hong Kong-based Ying Kwok, hones in on this complex, age-old relationship for its upcoming edition – which opens on 07 April. Sarah Fisher, the executive director of the Open Eye Gallery, the central venue for a number of specially-commissioned exhibitions at the festival, explains that today's 10,000 residents are a fusion of two communities – the second and third generation Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong, "whose parents established Chinatown", and those ...
Hackney has long been celebrated as London’s creative hub, but soaring rent increases are pushing the painters, illustrators, filmmakers, jewellers, ceramicists and fashion designers out of their studios. Jenny Lewis spent four years shooting these creatives in their workspaces and her new book, Hackney Studios, stands as a celebration – and perhaps a commemoration – of a very special time and place. Hackney Studios is published by Hoxton Mini Press, priced £20. www.hoxtonminipress.com
"If you are on the lowest rung of society, if when you get on a bus people turn away from you, it’s nice to be noticed," says Louis Quail. "It’s nice to be seen." We’re talking about his project Big Brother, which recently won the portfolio review prize at Format International Photography Festival and will soon be published as a book. Shot over the last six years, it’s a portrait of Quail’s older brother Justin, who is now 58 and has suffered from schizophrenia for his whole adult life. Quail doesn’t shy away from the obvious effects of his brother’s illness, showing his wrecked shoes and chaotic flat, and including police notes and medical records that speak of medication, sectioning and arrest. But his project also shows another side to Justin – one less familiar, perhaps, in our conception of the mentally ill. It includes Justin’s excellent drawings and paintings, his poetry, and his love of bird watching; it also shows his girlfriend Jackie, who also has mental issues and is an alcoholic, but who ...
Julia Fullerton-Batten has often trained her camera on women. Her first series was a semi-autobiographical look at the transition from adolescence to womanhood; Unadorned looked at the concept of beauty; Korea at traditionally dressed women in ultra modern cities. Now, “after a year’s preparation”, she has completed The Act, a study of women who voluntarily undertake sex work in the UK. The project stems from a personal curiosity about what drives these women, some of whom are university educated but risk social stigma and family disapproval to pursue their chosen career. "Although the subject matter was clear in my mind from the outset, having little knowledge of the sex industry I wasn't at all sure how to go about the project, how to find models, what settings and how to shoot the scenes," says Fullerton-Batten. She enlisted a casting agent to help and found nearly 100 women prepared to get involved. "A self-professed sex worker defines her profession as consensual and breaks it down into two categories: sex work where direct contact is involved in a private setting, ...
Designed by David Kohn Architects, the new centre will open in Autumn 2018 and more than double the V&A’s current photography exhibition space. The opening will be accompanied by a museum-wide photography festival, a new digital resource, and a new history of photography course run with the Royal College of Art. The V&A plans to run events and activities in the new centre, and will continue to expand the facility. Phase Two will see the museum add more gallery space, and create a teaching and research facility, a browsing library, and a studio and darkroom which will enable photographers' residencies. The new centre comes as the V&A transfers the Royal Photographic Society’s collection from the Science Museum Group, which was formerly held in the National Media Museum in Bradford. The transfer adds over 270,000 photographs, 26,000 publications, and 6000 pieces of equipment to the V&A’s holdings – which was already one of the largest and most important in the world, including around 500,000 works collected since the foundation of the museum in 1852. The RPS collection includes ...
Five years ago David Gaberle went through “a really rough time” after moving to London. A friend suggested he pick up a camera to help process his experience, and he found that photography “really eases the experience of the sensory overload that comes with living in a big city”. By 2015 he was ready to embark on an ambitious new project inspired by this work, and invested all his savings in travelling to the world’s biggest cities to shoot them. On the move for eight months and changing location every few weeks, he covered over 3600km. “The constant search was the happiest time of my life," he says. Originally from the Czech Republic, Gaberle studied anthropology back home and has a researcher’s perspective on the modern metropolis. “In the big cities, people spend less time with other people which means they have more time to become different, developing themselves,” he says. “There are more interesting personalities in the cities.” At the same time, though, he finds big cities can be “really dehumanising”, because “they have an effect on how ...
“Photography is an expression of power,” writes Charlotte Jansen in our cover feature this May. “The photographic act is often viewed as an assertion of masculine dominance; a predatory point-and-shoot action.” She argues that social media and the sheer power of the number of women getting behind the camera is changing all that, and affecting how we see things. Though it’s a contentious issue, Jansen confident that the female gaze is different to the male – that “they see the world differently – in just as much colour and nuance. We are beginning to see that world, everywhere we look.” Is she right? One magazine issue isn’t big enough to answer – but we have followed up her hypothesis by interviewing three women about their work. Endia Beal taps into the unwritten codes of the corporate ‘look’ in her work Am I What You’re Looking For?, for example, interrogating what it means to look ‘professional’ and the extent to which black women can fit those maxims. “At Yale University, I found myself in a place of ...
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