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

Obituary – Arlene Gottfried, celebrated chronicler of NYC

“Arlene had a unique vision of the world around her,” says gallerist Daniel Cooney. “She was kind and compassionate and she had a wonderful sense of humour, and all of it came through in her work. That’s what made her images so beautiful and unique.” Born in the Coney Island district of New York and growing up in the Crown Heights district of Brooklyn, Arlene Gottfried studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and initially found work with an advertising agency before going freelance for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Life, and Newsweek. But her true passion was for portraits shot on the fly, and often on the street, and it was for this work that she became celebrated.

9 August 2017

Robert Ellis' Proverbs records age-old knowledge in a rapidly-changing Uganda

Uganda’s population is one of the youngest in the world, with 77% of the population under the age of 30, and 52% less than 15 years old. It’s also one of the fastest-growing, with a population grown rate of 3.3%, compared to a world average of 1.2%. It’s a dynamic that, as Irish photographer Robert Ellis points out, means the country is poised for rapid change.

7 August 2017

The lasting allure of Paul Outerbridge

If you type “Paul Outerbridge” into a Google image search it doesn’t take long before work by other photographers turns up – images by contemporaries, such as Edward Weston, but also by successive generations of photographers who’ve been inspired by his work. The feminist Jo Ann Callis explicitly referenced Outerbridge’s nudes in her 1970s work, for example; in contemporary photography, the new wave of still life photography championed by image-makers such as Bobby Doherty and Grant Cornett references his work, especially his lurid use of colour. Outerbridge’s striking photography comes in and out of fashion, as it did in his own lifetime, but, nearly 100 years on, somehow still retains a contemporary edge.

3 August 2017

Show: Minor White, Metaphors

Born in 1908, Minor White lived at a time when being openly gay was risky. He remained in the closet for much of his life, fearful of losing his teaching positions at institutions such as the California School of Fine Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology – a factor which helped shape his aesthetic vision, argues an exhibition of his work currently on show in Madrid, “employing close-ups and cropping to express what couldn’t be shown”.

19 July 2017

Book: Fern by Rosaline Shahnavaz

“I casted Fern for a campaign I was shooting, and we clicked right away,” says Rosaline Shahnavaz. “She showed up wearing thigh-high white PVC boots with about 600 button holes (God speed to the stylist) and she’d texted me the night before to see if she’d need to shave her armpits, because she’d been growing her hair for four months and really didn’t want to. We had a special dynamic straight away and I couldn’t stop casting her after that.” So began a working relationship that turned into a personal project and a friendship, with both women regularly meeting up to hang out and take pictures.

19 July 2017

Arles 2017: Voies Off

Dating back to 1996, Voies Off is the large and well-respected alternative to the official Rencontres d’Arles programme. Now backed by Leica, Voies Off is staging nearly 150 exhibitions from 03 July – 24 September, all of which are free to enter, plus a week of screenings, masterclasses, awards and portfolio reviews in the opening week, from 03 – 08 September, from its base in the Cour de l’Archevêché courtyard. The courtyard also hosts parties, held every night from midnight in the opening week.

6 July 2017