“The point is not to work out what it is, but to show how weird and wonderful the world can look from above”
Features
Frenchman Antoine de Beaupré has been collecting vinyl for almost 30 years and has amassed…
Anna Alix Koffi realised that the issue of women in photojournalism was so big that it warranted a publication of its own, and started thinking out a framework for a second edition of Visa Paper focusing on work by women. “I realised I could do this because there are women artists everywhere I go,” she says. “Most of the time publications don’t focus on women, but I knew that Woman Paper Visa would be special because women in photojournalism is a strong thing. It’s much more difficult than any other form of photography.”
It’s a spectacularly beautiful early morning in December and the traffic is rolling past indifferently on one of North London’s less than silent streets. I’m standing in front of a large red door, having come to visit David King and his world-famous collection documenting the extraordinary visual history of the Soviet Union. King has been assembling the collection for almost five decades and now it is in the process of being transferred to the archives of Tate Modern. The collection has always run in parallel to his work as a graphic designer, photographer and author – work, it is fair to say, that shows influence from the Bolshevik-era material he has discovered on his many visits to the former USSR, and which he has often drawn from in his books, posters, photographs and graphic work.
Marking the 800th anniversary of the Charter of the Forest signed by King Henry III, and corresponding with the launch of the 2017 Charter for Trees, Woods and People, the V&A’s new display Into The Woods: Trees in Photography, celebrates the significance of trees in the work of photographers across the world and throughout history.
The exhibition is comprised of works from the V&A’s permanent collection as well as photographs recently transferred from the Royal Photographic Society ahead of their rehousing in the museum’s new Photography Centre in 2018. Curated by Martin Barnes, senior curator of photographs at the V&A, Into The Woods began as an impulse – “I just like trees!” – but gradually revealed itself to be the germ of a great idea.
In Money Must Be Made, Lorenzo Vitturi’s latest photobook, the photographs address the question of how, not merely where. It is not exceptional to visit a market in Lagos with a camera, especially if, as white, you are working within a tradition of photography that depicts Africans in despair and as NGO-needy. What distinguishes this work is the complexity suggested, an indication that the market – one of the largest in west Africa – is connected to its people and products in many, many ways.
Famously elusive, and unwilling to to discuss his work, the only way to get to…
Luce Lebart has hopped across the Atlantic Ocean to take the helm of the newly-minted Canadian Photography Institute (CPI), which fills the large gap left by the abrupt and permanent closure of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in 2009, thanks to the support of Scotiabank, the Archive of Modern Conflict and the National Gallery of Canada Foundation
In his series, Unequal Scenes, photographer Johnny Miller uses a drone to shed light on the extreme poverty that lives on the doorsteps of some of society’s most privileged
French documentary photographer Elliott Verdier’s A Shaded Path highlights the endless paradoxes of a region fossilised by its longstanding history of being forgotten. Kyrgyzstan is a peculiar place, completely landlocked by mountain ranges – a feature that has preserved its culture while simultaneously reinforcing its susceptibility to external domination. Since its official relinquishment from Soviet control in the early 1990s, the country has returned to its resting state of self-sufficient isolation. From October 2016 to February 2017, Verdier photographed Kyrgyzstan’s industrial factories, embedded in sprawling landscapes that are populated by the touching subjects in his accompanying portraits. Shortly after settling into his daily routine, the photographer began to notice a marked difference between the collective nostalgia of the country’s older and younger generations