Diane Smyth

Diane Smyth is the editor of BJP, returning for a second stint on staff in 2023, after 15 years on the team until 2019. She also edits the Photoworks Annual, and has written for The Guardian, FT Weekend Magazine, Aperture, FOAM, and Apollo, plus catalogues and monographs. Diane lectures in photography history and theory at the London College of Communications, and has curated exhibitions for The Photographers Gallery and Lianzhou Foto Festival. Follow her on instagram @dismy

NEW: DEFENCE at Essex’s Coalhouse Fort pops up on 28 April

With its dungeon-like chambers, ghostly corridors, and casemates on which guns would have stood, Coalhouse Fort in East Tilbury, Essex, is an unlikely art gallery. But on 28 April 2018, the 144 year fort on the edge of the Thames Estuary will open its doors to the public for a pop-up exhibition, featuring artists such as Felicity Hammond, Dafna Talmor, and Corinne Silva. Caught between a military past and its current use as a tourist attraction, the fort’s identity is shifting. The building is deteriorating and being reclaimed by nature – the antithesis to its original role as a robust military base. A team of volunteers is working with the local council to restore it, and keep it from falling into obscurity. But while it may be ramshackle, it is a space full of artistic possibility, and that is what captured my imagination when I was invited by artist and lecturer Michael Whelan to curate a pop-up exhibition there. Whelan had been working with Thurrock Council to digitise its rich archive of photographs, documents, and military-related artefacts and, noticing the site’s potential as a space to show art, decided to put on an exhibition.

23 April 2018

Q&A: Ronaldo Schemidt, World Press Photo of the Year winner

“Normally people don’t get set on fire during the protests, but there were many barricades on fire and the demonstrators use Molotov bombs,” says Ronaldo Schemidt. “I got the photo when a National Guard motorcycle exploded during a clash between demonstrators and government forces. It was lying on the floor, on fire, surrounded by young people. One of the protestors hit the tank, generating an explosion. Then the guy in the photo caught fire. I was standing a few meters away with my back to him, but when I felt the heat of the flames, I got my camera and turned around to start shooting whatever had just happened. It all took just a few seconds, so I didn’t know what I was shooting. I was moved by instinct, it was very quick. I didn’t stop shooting until I realised what was going on. There was somebody on fire running towards me.”

13 April 2018

Hit the North!

In 1972, while studying photography at Manchester Polytechnic, Daniel Meadows took over a disused shop in Moss Side’s Graeme Street and turned it into a ‘free photography studio’. Shooting people for nothing, and sending them their portraits or putting the prints in the shop window, Meadows was able to keep going for eight weeks before he ran out of money. Troubled by the fact that those whose images were in the shop window could no longer see the photographs, he laid out the remaining prints on wooden boards and nailed them to trees in the local park. He later realised this had been his first exhibition.

29 March 2018

25 artists shortlisted for Contemporary African Photography Prize

Founded in 2012 by Swiss artist Benjamin Füglister, the Contemporary African Photography Prize aims “to raise the profile of African photography and encourage a rethinking of the image of Africa”. Open to photographers from anywhere in the world whose work engages with the African continent or its diaspora, it picks out five winners every year and shows their work at major photography festivals around the world. This year 800 photographers entered, of whom 25 have made it to the shortlist.

28 March 2018

Man’s best friend and his own worst enemies on show in Dougie Wallace’s exhibition

If you caught the documentary What Do Artists Do All Day on him on BBC Four a year ago, you’ll have an idea of what Dougie Wallace is like – upfront, funny, and very, very energetic. You could say the same for his photography too, which though it’s been shot in a variety of places ranging from Mumbai, to East London, to outside Harrods, always bears his trademark wit and momentum. Now Wallace is showing his five book projects to date at the Bermondsey Project Space in London –  Stags, Hens & Bunnies, Road Wallah, Harrodsburg, Shoreditch Wildlife, and a new title, Well-Heeled. A dogs-eye view of pampered pets, it’s now being published as a book by Dewi Lewis.

28 March 2018

Fay Godwin – on show and on film

Born in 1931 to a British diplomat and an American artist, Fay Simmonds married publisher Tony Godwin in 1961, and was introduced to the cream of literary London. Already a keen amateur photographer, by the 1970s she had started taking portraits of the writers she met and by the end of the 1980s had shot almost every significant figure of the period – including Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow, Angela Carter, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, and Tom Stoppard. But Fay Godwin was also a keen walker – in fact she led the Ramblers’ Association from 1987 to 1990 – and it was for her landscape photography that she became best known. Informed by a sense of ecological crisis, she shot books such as Rebecca the Lurcher (1973), The Oldest Road: An Exploration of the Ridgeway (1975), and co-authored Remains of Elmet: A Pennine Sequence with the poet Ted Hughes.

23 March 2018

1000 Words 10 Years – the respected online photography magazine goes into print

Back in 2008, Facebook was just four years old, Twitter was just two years old, and the iphone had just been released. Instagram had not yet been invented. A decade is a long time in internet years, and yet one online photography magazine launched into this unpromising landscape has survived and thrived – 1000 Words. Set up and still run by  editor-in-chief, Tim Clark, it includes long-form essays, interviews, and reviews, and has included contributors such as David Campany, Susan Bright, Gerry Badger, Charlotte Cotton, Wolfgang Tillmans, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Vanessa Winship and Lieko Shiga. Now, to celebrate its 10th anniversary, Clark is publishing a special print edition, 1000 Words 10 Years, designed by respected photography and art specialist Sarah Boris and featuring newly-commissioned content. The annual will be 200 pages long, and will feature 10 portfolios from influential artists such as Jose Pedro Cortes, Laia Abril, Edmund Clark, and Esther Teichmann, as well as a series of photo-centric city guides, profiles on curators and collectors, opinion pieces on the art of photobook publishing, and reflections on a decade’s changes in photography. It will also include a selection of memorable and talked-about articles from the 1000 Words back catalogue.

20 March 2018

Çağdaş Erdoğan speaks out

“I was not surprised at all at being arrested,” Çağdaş Erdoğan tells BJP. “It’s enough to say that as we speak there are still 170 reporters in prison in Turkey.”

The 26-year-old only recently regained his freedom, after being arrested on 02 September 2017 for taking photographs in Yoğurtçu Park. Officially he was taken into custody for photographing the Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı (MİT) building, the home of Turkey’s answer to MI5, the National Intelligence Organisation. “But it is entirely fictitious,” he tells BJP, “because the place where I photographed is just a park and there isn’t any building, or even signs that show the presence of a restricted area where you cannot take pictures. Shortly after, the main reason of my arrest became the fact that I didn’t share any information about the contacts I used for some of my reportage as a journalist.

19 March 2018