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

Lua Ribeira, Sam Laughlin, and Alejandra Carles-Tolra show new work in Jerwood/Photoworks Awards

Inspired by personal identity, the natural world, and the fear of dying, the three young artists in this year’s Jerwood/Photoworks Awards exhibition are presenting very different work. Picked out as winners in January 2017, all three have received a year of mentoring on their work from industry specialists such as photographer Mitch Epstein, publisher Michael Mack, and gallerist Maureen Paley. They each also received a bursary of £5000 and access to a production fund of another £5000, to make new work which goes on show in London’s Jerwood Space from 17 January-11 March then tours to Bradford and Belfast. 

14 December 2017

The Shadow Archive, vernacular portrait photography at The Walther Collection, NYC

The Walther Collection has kicked off an 18-month exploration of vernacular photography with a show titled The Shadow Archive: An Investigation into Vernacular Portrait Photography. Taken from the 1850s to the present day, the collected portraits depict groups such as ‘migrant laborers’, ‘inmates of an asylum’, ‘criminal photographs’, and ‘G&G Precision Works Photographic Identity Badges’, and, says the organisers, show how “identification photographs have been used to sort, shape, segregate, and select subjects based on occupation, social group, body type, or political affiliation”. The title references a phrase used by writer and photographer Allan Sekula to reference “the entire social field of human representations, comprising both heroes and deviants, within which every portrait takes its place as part of a moral hierarchy”.

13 December 2017

John Davies' The British Landscape on show in New York

“The British Landscape…is a long-term ongoing project about the enormous changes that have taken place in the UK – the world’s first industrial society and the first to de-industrialise,” says John Davies. “Much of Britain’s infrastructure and the rapid expansion of industrial cities were created through the unprecedented growth of the Industrial Revolution. By the early 1980s, when I started this project, many of these large-scale industries and industrial communities were in terminal decline.”

12 December 2017

Collaboration rules at the London Art Fair Photo50

The London Art Fair is back, with its Photography Focus Day on 19 January and the Photo50 group show curated by a collective the first time – the Hemera Collective curatorial group, which currently includes Jaime Marie Davis, Ashley Lumb, Helen Trompeteler and Kay Watson. The Hemera Collective has put together a show called Resolution is not the point. which gathers photography and lens-based media artists from nine countries, including Larry Achiampong, David Birkin, Qiana Mestrich, and James Tylor & Laura Wills. The exhibition also includes work by several collectives, one of its points of enquiry is the way in which photography is encouraging artists to collaborate as it evolves, “as they push conceptual and technical boundaries of image-making, reaching beyond their own specialisms and drawing on the circulation of images, knowledge, and resources”.

11 December 2017

Léonard Pongo wins the 2017 Visura Grant for Outstanding Personal Project

Pongo has won the prize for his ongoing series The Uncanny, which is shot in The Congo. Born in Belgium in 1988 to a Belgian mother and a Congolese father, Pongo started the project as an attempt to reconnect with his Congolese heritage. He first visited the country in 2011, staying with his Congolese family – most of whom he had never met before – and arriving as the DRC held its second ever democratic elections, for both Presidential and Legislative positions.  “I am conscious that photographing in the Congo, as a photographer educated in Europe, reveals my own limitations (in accessing and understanding the environment), bias, and stereotypes,” he says. “However, by turning to a more personal story and documenting my confrontation with my family, the country, and by relying on friends and siblings to introduce me to their visions of this environment, I hope to be able to overcome some of these limitations.

8 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

Shortlist announced for 2018 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize

It’s the 21st year of the prize, and this year the shortlisted projects by Mathieu Asselin, Rafal Milach, Batia Suter, and Luke Willis Thompson all “reflect a shared concern with the production and manipulation of knowledge and systems of representation through visual formats”, say the organisers of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018. Mathieu Asselin (b. 1973, France) has been nominated for Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation, which was published this year by Actes Sud and exhibited at Les Rencontres d’Arles, and which has already won the First Book of the Year in the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards 2017.

28 November 2017

David Hurn's Arizona Trips shows life in the southwestern state

“When you go out into the landscape, frankly if you’re saying I think this a wonderful landscape and you take a picture, why didn’t you buy a postcard?” says David Hurn, in an interview with Christopher Frayling published in his new book, Arizona Trips.
“The people that do postcards have spent more time, they know the light and they get it right,” he adds. “It just doesn’t interest me that much.” His shots of Arizona, which he photographed for 20 years, do something very different, focusing instead on the locals and on their interventions on the natural world in the southwestern US state. From billboards in the desert to paper cups protecting cactus plants from frost, and from rodeo events to Dolly Parton lookalike contests, his is a distinctly anthropocentric, gently humorous, look at life in the southwestern US state. 

28 November 2017