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

Ones to Watch: Leonard Suryajaya

Growing up surrounded by oppression in a country where violent religious and ethnic clashes were commonplace and close at hand, Suryajaya was constrained by strict traditional and conservative values that condemned homosexuality. He needed to get out. He turned 18, alone, on a flight bound for the United States, leaving behind his family and his old life in Indonesia.

28 June 2017

Awards: Five finalists for the ING Unseen Talent Award 2017

The ING Unseen Talent Award is one of the most generous prizes out there for young photographers, with a €10,000 fund to make new work up for grabs, plus mentoring from Nadav Kander and a group show at Unseen Amsterdam for all the finalists. This year, the five shortlisted artists are: Alexandra Lethbridge (b. 1987, UK); Tom Callemin (b. 1991, Belgium); Andrea Grützner (b. 1984, Germany); Robin Lopvet (b. 1990, France); and Stefanie Moshammer (b. 1988, Austria).

26 June 2017

Obituary: Khadija Saye, fast-rising artist killed tragically young in Grenfell Tower

Aged just 24, Khadija Saye died tragically young in the horrific fire in West London’s Grenfell Tower on 14 June – a tragedy which has cut short a life already touched by greatness. Having won a scholarship to the prestigious Rugby School at 16, Saye went on to study photography at UCA Farnham and was selected to show work alongside well-established artists such as Isaac Julien and Yinka Shonibare at the Diaspora Pavilion in Venice this summer. Here her colleagues and ex-tutors remember her

20 June 2017

kennardphillipps on the power of political photomontage

“Through putting together an image – either digitally and/or with scissors and paste, with or without text – people get to feel a sense of empowerment, an empowerment that communicates to the viewer, be it via a placard, a street poster, or an image on social media. The act of re-using existing images and re-presenting them through juxtaposition is inherently subversive, and showed up in the countless images of Theresa May that came thick and fast in direct response to the official election campaigning day-to-day.”

12 June 2017

Now Then: Chris Killip and the Making of In Flagrante

“The working class get it in the neck basically, they’re the bottom of the pile,” says Chris Killip. “I wanted to record people’s lives because I valued them. I wanted them to be remembered. If you take a photograph of someone they are immortalised, they’re there forever. For me that was important, that you’re acknowledging people’s lives, and also contextualising people’s lives,” says key British documentary photographer, Chris Killip

6 June 2017