How can art contribute to our understanding of justice in a time of global conflict? Award-winning photographer Edmund Clark considered the question with former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg and human rights lawyer Cori Crider at the IWM London – home to his ongoing show, War of Terror
With a Lebanese-American mother and an Emirati father, Farah Al Qasimi has lived much of her life between the United States and Abu Dhabi, where she grew up. Now completing a Master of Fine Arts at Yale, she is still oscillating between her two home nations, and producing work that explores home, belonging, representation and clarity.
“I’m not based anywhere yet,” says Marco Zanella. Since inheriting his late Uncle Giorgio’s camera collection, the Italian photographer has been on the move and taking pictures every day for the past 11 years. “I do not trust my memory, so I need to record it,” he says.
“My photography is me, my doubts and my hopes,” says Spanish photographer Albert Bonsfills, who has shot major projects in China and Japan. “My camera is a mirror, a tool to help me understand myself as well as a way of showing other people’s lives, even people I have nothing in common with at first – people born 10,000 miles away from me.”
“I enjoy an incredible freedom in how I work, in what I photograph or when I do it,” the 20-year Magnum member tells BJP. “By signing that contract I had the feeling I would lose so much more than what I would gain.”
After eight months of fighting, Iraqi forces are close to retaking the city of Mosul. Photographer Tommy Trenchard has spent much of the last three months documenting the conflict in his project The Battle for Mosul. His photographs cover the bitter street-fighting in the western half of Mosul, as well as the war’s effect on the city’s residents – over half a million of whom have been displaced since the rise of ISIS in 2014.
Magnum Photos is taking outside investment for the first time in its 70-year history, to allow it “to take advantage of new editorial and commercial opportunities afforded by digital technology”.
“There’s no bigger reward than to capture a meaningful photograph from a seemingly ordinary moment,” says Isreali documentary photographer Tomer Ifrah, who has shot a Hindu pilgrimage, an Israeli prison and the Moscow metro
“I believe Turkey is photographed deficiently,” says Çağdaş Erdoğan. “The photographs we see of Turkey are propaganda for the nationalist movement, or they’re Orientalist images for the outer world since these are what they want to see.”Erdoğan, 24, is a Kurdish Turk born in a small town in the east of the country who has established himself as one of the leading young photojournalists in a newly authoritarian and conservative Turkey
Put together on little budget, and without subsidies from the Northern Irish government, Belfast Photo Festival gives heft to the claim that Belfast is a hotbed of contemporary photography. Many of the exhibitions on show are themed around sexuality and gender, but there are also more open-ended group shows – many of which were curated through an international open submission process, moderated by a panel of experts from MoMA, MACK, FOAM, Magnum Photos, The New York Times, and BJP
