Explore Stories

Archival

"Healthy, positive representations of women" from Katie Burdon

Katie Burdon’s ethereal fashion images make no secret of a childhood spent outside in the English countryside. A Cornish native, the 20-year-old first began taking photographs when she was 14, using her friends as models and the picturesque fields, woods, and seaside of her surroundings as her backdrop. Now a graduate of the University of Bournemouth, her practice has evolved into an intimate and considered portrayal of femininity through fashion photography. With a rich yet hazy 1970s-inspired palette and surreal undertones, Burdon’s photographs are elegant in their composition, yet still capture something of the raw and playful nature of youth. Determined to counteract the impossible beauty standards of the imagery she grew up with, the young photographer prefers being real and “celebrating women”, choosing models with big personalities.

5 October 2017

Time and the unreal in the work of David Infante

“In this series, I dissolve images and fragments of time,” says French photographer David Infante. The monochrome ‘portraits’ that make up Mirror without a memory certainly feel as if they are unfixed, spanning time as they shift and melt under a fragmented surface. Triggered by a period of solitude in London, he resurrected images from his archive, reprocessing his memories by selecting photographs, cutting them up and combining snippets to give them new forms. For Infante, slowing down time or wrestling many layers of it into one frame takes us into what he calls “parallel worlds”: a space to reflect and search for new meanings beyond the surface of the everyday. The photographer, who has just completed an MA at the Royal College of Art in London and is based in southern Portugal, ascribes his meditative approach to his early experience with analogue photography. “It brought me concentration and contemplation,” he explains.

3 October 2017

Photography and loss in Veronica Viacava's Palinopsia

When Veronica Viacava moved to London, straight out of high school in Milan, she had never studied photography. But she had developed an interest in the concept of the photographic image, beyond the physicality of manually taking pictures, and seeking independence from her family, who didn’t approve of her desire to study the arts, enrolled at the University of Middlesex. Viacava has just graduated, and her work has been deeply personal throughout. When she was 17, her mother passed away, which led to intense musings on old family photo albums. By the end of her second year at Middlesex, she had begun to think about the materialisation of memory and “the idea of photography turning the past into an object”, she says. “So that you can look through it.”

2 October 2017

Ewen Spencer's vision of Young Love

“The Face had a different theme every issue and were planning an issue on sex, so Graham Rounthwaite [the art director] said ‘Can you photograph in clubs and sixth form parties and get an idea of young kids’ idea of love?’”says Ewen Spencer. The feature became a regular spot, sometimes shot by Spencer and sometimes by another photographer, a writer going along each time to talk to the kids they found. But it became an ongoing interest for Spencer, who started to pursue it in his own time as well as on commission, and images from the series have now been published as a book by Stanley Barker

21 September 2017

Martin Parr's Foundation opens to the public

Martin Parr has found a permanent home for the foundation he set up in 2014, giving visitors access to his archive and to his formidable collection. “I’ve been very lucky,” he told BJP’s Gemma Padley. “I have secured a very good living from doing this, and so the foundation is a great way to feed some of that back into the system.”

18 September 2017

Golden Days in Vienna's classic old 'brown' bars

“They are places you go to when you’ve lost everything – but not before,” says Klaus Pichler of the Viennese bars that feature in his latest book, Golden Days Before They End, released in June and now in its third reprint. It’s one of two books Pichler shot in 2016. The other, This Will Change Your Life Forever, currently in the design stage and due to be published in October, is a sarcastic critique of the esotericism industry and the photography that feeds it. Pichler collaborated on Golden Days with journalist Clemens Marschall, who was familiar with Vienna’s rapidly disappearing old dive bars and the often ‘colourful’ patrons that clung to them. “Clemens has always gone to these bars,” explains Pichler. “He doesn’t like to go to fancy places. Five years ago he noticed that these bars are beginning to close down because of increased regulation, an inability to adapt to a changing city, and a dying clientele.”

4 September 2017

Any Answers: Christian Caujolle

The chief picture editor of Libération between 1981 and 1986, Christian Caujoulle left to co-found Agence Vu’ and, a decade later, Galerie Vu’. He has curated and edited countless photofestivals, exhibitions, and books, and is associate professor at the ENS Louis Lumière school

21 August 2017