Month: December 2017

Laura Pannack: Love and its many mysteries

“I think of most relationships as manifestations of our fantasies. We have an ideal fantasy of who our partner is and we maintain that fantasy”

5 December 2017

Q&A: Alexander Bondar takes on clichés and a Cat's Eye view

Born in 1982, Alexander Bondar grew up on the outskirts of Moscow and studied photography in the Faculty of Press Photographers at the St Petersburg House of Journalists. From 2010-2013 he took part in several workshops organised by FotoDepartment and ROSFOTO in St Petersburg, and in 2013 he started studying Photography and Time-Based Media at Jan Evangelista Purkyne University, Usti and Labem, in the Czech Republic. Bondar has shot four major photographic series, Unfit (St Petersburg, 2010-13), Pavlov’s Dog (St Petersburg, 2008-2015), No Dream To Dream (Czech Republic, 2013-2017), and Cat’s Eye (Warsaw, 2015-2016), plus another project called So Cliché (2009-2013), which uses deliberately heavy-handed retouching. He recently published Cat’s Eye and So Cliché with Zoopark Publishing Collective, a project which he set up with Tatyana Palyga in 2016. Bondar and Palyga have also published two editions of a magazine called Zoopark together, and have presented their work in Paris at Polycopies in 2016 and 2017. Bondar is represented by the FotoDepartment Gallery. 

5 December 2017

Edmund Clark's immersive study of prison life goes on show at the Ikon Gallery

“I hate myself because I am a murderer… You can’t save me… We are a faceless, forgotten part of society…” These are just some of the intimate, often devastating thoughts of the inmates at HMP Grendon, a category B men’s facility in Buckinghamshire and Europe’s only “wholly therapeutic” prison. Their words accompany My Shadow’s Reflection, a series informed by Edmund Clark’s artist-in-residence at Grendon, which forms part of his larger body of work, In Place of Hate, on show at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham from 06 December.

1 December 2017

Magnum Retold goes on show in London, 05-09 December

It’s a commendable milestone by anyone’s standards – for 70 years, Magnum Photos has been at the forefront of documentary photography, photojournalism and visual storytelling, its members reporting on conflicts, crises and changes for humanity the world over. To celebrate Magnum’s long and rich history, the agency has devised Magnum Retold, a huge group project in which current members revisit stories by their predecessors. Photographers were invited to respond to an archival story that had influenced or inspired their practice in some way – a story that meant something to them personally, or a topical subject they wished to revisit. “There is a repository of amazing work, which is the 70-year-old legacy of these incredible photographers,” explains Magnum’s content director, Francesca Sears.

1 December 2017