Subscribe
Eva Clifford

Great British Welcome highlights refugees and their hosts across Britain

Shot in peoples’ homes, these intimate portraits and their accompanying captions show how refugees and their hosts in Britain have learned to live together – and how both have benefitted from the arrangement. From a Syrian teenager who found a new home in Epsom to a 72-year-old Eritrean who evaded life on the streets thanks to a Birmingham couple, the collection shows acts of compassion – but also the human face of a refugee crisis so often portrayed in negative stereotypes. These refugees have brought warmth and happiness to their new homes, say the hosts involved in the project. “Even after everything he has been through he is such a gentle soul and such a lovely, positive person,” says Shoshana of Faraj, a devout young Muslim forced to flee Aleppo and now living with her and her family in Cambridge.

24 January 2018

Synthesising existential ideas in Alexander Mourant’s Aomori

“It is peculiar how forests have such an affect on us,” observes Jersey-born photographer Alexander Mourant of his latest project Aomori, which was shot in Japan’s ancestral forests. “As temporal dimensions crumble, objectivity leaves us. We are found in a still, oneiric state, contemplating our own accumulation of experience.” His series is going on show in London as part of the Free Range FR Awards

22 January 2018

Looking for Lenin in contemporary Ukraine

On 08 December 2013, the Bessarabska Lenin statue on Taras Shevchenko Boulevard in Ukraine was demolished in the midst of the Euromaidan revolution. What followed was a wave of symbolic violence that came to be known as Leninfall [or ‘Leninopad’ by Ukrainians]. Seeking to erase all traces of the Ukraine’s Soviet past, the government launched an official decommunisation process, outlawing communist monuments. Prior to these events around 5500 statues of Lenin stood in former Soviet state; today, not one remains. Fascinated by the fate of these statues, Swiss photographer Niels Ackermann and journalist Sébastien Gobert went on a quest to find them, documenting the results in the series Looking for Lenin. Published as a book last year, the series now going on show at Espace Images, Vevey.

19 January 2018

Going from Town to Town across the UK, Niall McDiarmid makes a portrait of a place

“The term ‘Britishness’ has changed so much over the last ten years, I don’t really know what it means anymore to say ‘I’m British,’” observes Scottish photographer Niall McDiarmid, who has spent almost a decade photographing people in the street across Britain. In 2011 he started work on his latest series, Town to Town, which has just been published as a book and which will be shown at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, UK from 31 January-12 May. Initially focussing on London, it soon expanded beyond the capital city and ended up covering 200 towns, tracing a journey around Britain and its diverse inhabitants.

19 January 2018

A hallucinatory take on wild desert beauty in Chloe Sells’ book Flamingo

“Seventeen years later and after all that life giveth and taketh away, it is the wildness of the region that attracts me most,” writes artist Chloe Sells of Botswana, the place where she shot her latest book Flamingo. “Botswana is one of the last great completely wild, untouched and quiet corners of the earth.” In particular she was attracted to Botswana’s Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, in the heart of the Kalahari Desert, a strange and harsh, yet beautiful landscape. “I didn’t know that part of Botswana very well,” Sells admits, “but I had visited many times and been amazed by the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans; I knew I wanted to spend more time there.”

19 January 2018

Foam goes Back to the Future to show cutting-edge contemporary artists alongside photography’s pioneers

“To look ahead we first need to look back in time,” write Kim Knoppers and Ann-Christin Bertrand, curators of Back to the Future: The 19th Century in the 21st Century – an exhibition that presents contemporary artists whose experimental approach to photography echoes that of the 19th century pioneers of the medium.

16 January 2018

Photography, motherhood and time in Lisa Creagh’s Holding Time

“Holding Time is sort of a play on words,” says Brighton-based artist Lisa Creagh of the title of her latest work, which revolves around themes of motherhood, photography and time. “Motherhood is a very unique kind of work that sits outside of the normal systems of economic activity that have determined our methods of measuring and representing time. I think motherhood requires a new way of thinking about time, if we are thinking about motherhood as having validity and status in a modern society.”

16 January 2018

Peter Dench travels the length of Britain up the A1

In 1981 Paul Graham published A1 – The Great North Road, a book of photographs taken along Britain’s longest road. Connecting London with Edinburgh, the road passes through North London, Peterborough, Doncaster, Leeds, York, Durham and Newcastle upon Tyne; Graham chose to photograph it in colour, at a time when black-and-white dominated, and his work made a big impression on Peter Dench. “Since viewing Graham’s book, I knew it was a journey I would make one day,” says the British photographer. “36 years after he made it, Brexit seemed a good time and reason. Plus I only live one mile from the A1; it’s a convenient tendril to the nation, a road that connects as much as it divides, through a nation on the verge. It is towards Britain that I consistently point my lens – it’s my home and my passion, and the people are the ones I want to understand most. Brexit is the next significant chapter, and I was inspired to get out as soon as possible to explore the mood of the nation.”

15 January 2018