Reading Time: 6 minutes Pixy Liao interviews her favourite artist, Elina Brotherus, about her influences, creativity during lockdown, and the performative elements of their self portraiture
Reading Time: 2 minutes Discover 108 photographs in the running for the annual prize, and a print sale with 100 per cent of profits going to the artists
Reading Time: 6 minutes Luvera has collaborated with individuals experiencing homelessness for over 15 years. His latest exhibition, presented within a public space in central London, aims to shift the narrative
Reading Time: 4 minutes Quentin Lacombe uses photograms, 3D renderings and digital collage to construct an alternate universe in his series Event Horizon, now on show in an immersive installation at 180 the Strand
Reading Time: 5 minutes The photographer spent three months on the remote island, home to only 43 people, creating an in-depth look into a community with a troubled past
Reading Time: 5 minutes “Assume the form of a golden deer and lure Rama away. Meanwhile I will run…
Reading Time: 8 minutes Taking its title from a leaked CIA manual from the 1950s, George Selley’s collages – now the subject of a new photobook – tell a surreal story about leaked CIA documents, government propaganda, and bananas
When he found out about these documents, George Selley was instantly captivated, and his new project, A Study of Assassination, combines pages from the manual with archival press images, banana advertisements and Cold War propaganda. BJP caught up with the recent London College of Communication MA graduate to find out more about this project and his approach to images.
Reading Time: 3 minutes “My aim is not to make PHOTOGRAPHS, but rather CHARTS and MAPS that might at the same time constitute photographs,” writes photographer and prolific writer on his craft, Luigi Ghirri in his 1973 essay, Fotografie del periodo iniziale. Trained as a surveyor, the iconography of maps and atlases prevail Ghirri’s photography. “But what if you map his work?” asks curator James Lingwood. “He was, in a way, mapping the changing topography of modern life in Europe in the 1970s and also the change in the relationship between people and images.”
Reading Time: 6 minutes “How to fill the gap between politics and art? This is both an old and a new problem,” writes Takuma Nakahira, in the afterword to PROVOKE no.1, published 50 years ago this month. Led by some of Japan’s best-known photographers and art critics – including Takuma Nakahira, Koji Taki, and iconoclast Daido Moriyama, who joined from the second issue – the magazine stemmed from the anger and discontent that they felt towards the post-war world. Though it survived only three issues, and was criticised at the time, it is now widely recognised as a ground-breaking publication in the history of contemporary Japanese photography.
The magazines were printed in 1968 and 1969, both turbulent years for politics which featured the May 1968 riots in Paris; the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr and the anti-Vietnam protests in the US; the end of the Prague Spring. In Japan, 1968 was the year that a string of violent student uprisings forced many of the top universities to close.
Reading Time: 5 minutes Last year, after 10 years of creating hundreds of images for a project about her relationship, Pixy Liao decided it was finally time to create a book. “I’m not a very productive photographer, so I always felt like I didn’t have enough images” she says, “but ten years felt like the right time”.
As a woman brought up in China, Liao always thought she would end up with an older man who would look after her and protect her. But while studying for an MFA in photography in Memphis, Tennessee, she met Moro, a Japanese musician five years her junior. Being with Moro challenged her own views on how a man or woman should behave in a heterosexual relationship, and so she began to explore this through photography with a project titled Experimental Relationship.