Month: June 2017

kennardphillipps on the power of political photomontage

“Through putting together an image – either digitally and/or with scissors and paste, with or without text – people get to feel a sense of empowerment, an empowerment that communicates to the viewer, be it via a placard, a street poster, or an image on social media. The act of re-using existing images and re-presenting them through juxtaposition is inherently subversive, and showed up in the countless images of Theresa May that came thick and fast in direct response to the official election campaigning day-to-day.”

12 June 2017

Mathias Depardon is released by the Turkish government

One month after French photographer Mathias Depardon was first detained by the Turkish police, he has finally been released. It took pressure from the French government and Reporters Sans Frontiers, and a hunger strike by Depardon, but this evening he was on his way to Paris. And yesterday, after a month of only being allowed meetings with his lawyer, Emine Şeker, the 37-year-old was allowed to meet his mother, Daniele Van de Lanotte. “It was very emotional for both sides,” she told AFP. “I saw my son crying because he was so moved. I am relieved to see him, it is quite a gift.”

9 June 2017

How to shoot a perfect portrait: tips from Ali Mobasser, a Portrait of Britain 2016 winner

photography has the power to unite and create empathy, something that we, as photographers, should see as our obligation to the world,” says Ali Mobasser, who was one of the winners of BJP’s Portrait of Britain project last year. “Exhibiting using major advertising space was a brilliant idea,” he said of the initiative, “replacing its capitalist function with a humanist cause is genius. It’s a bit like secretly replacing someone’s cigarettes with carrot sticks, or opening up the Daily Mail to find the poetry of Rumi.”

8 June 2017

Ones to Watch: Çağdaş Erdoğan

“I believe Turkey is photographed deficiently,” says Çağdaş Erdoğan. “The photographs we see of Turkey are propaganda for the nationalist movement, or they’re Orientalist images for the outer world since these are what they want to see.”Erdoğan, 24, is a Kurdish Turk born in a small town in the east of the country who has established himself as one of the leading young photojournalists in a newly authoritarian and conservative Turkey

8 June 2017

Festival: Belfast Photo

Put together on little budget, and without subsidies from the Northern Irish government, Belfast Photo Festival gives heft to the claim that Belfast is a hotbed of contemporary photography. Many of the exhibitions on show are themed around sexuality and gender, but there are also more open-ended group shows – many of which were curated through an international open submission process, moderated by a panel of experts from MoMA, MACK, FOAM, Magnum Photos, The New York Times, and BJP

8 June 2017

The look of love: when photographers take pictures of their families

This fascination with the familiar isn’t a new phenomenon, says Phillip Prodger, head of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery and a former judge of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize. “We live in a world of the free exchange of imagery and social media and perhaps the photographs that once were considered more private aren’t considered so private anymore. I think people have been making those photographs all along but perhaps not sharing them in that way.”

7 June 2017

Now Then: Chris Killip and the Making of In Flagrante

“The working class get it in the neck basically, they’re the bottom of the pile,” says Chris Killip. “I wanted to record people’s lives because I valued them. I wanted them to be remembered. If you take a photograph of someone they are immortalised, they’re there forever. For me that was important, that you’re acknowledging people’s lives, and also contextualising people’s lives,” says key British documentary photographer, Chris Killip

6 June 2017