From a piano tuner jailed for taking direct-action, to an 87-year-old activist, Rhiannon Adam documents anti-fracking campaigners outside of the protest context
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“Kalidou is 23-years-old and is going blind. I could really see his pain and frustration. Some days, if the sun was too bright, he would not even be able to go outside”
A film commissioned by British Journal of Photography takes a look behind the scenes of its Meet California commission
Rhiannon Adam investigates the UK fracking debate. Her work sheds light on the stories of individuals both for and against the contentious practice
“I felt like I was always playing the same cards. With this project, I wanted to collect the cards and reshuffle them,” says José Pedro Cortes, whose latest book, A Necessary Realism, proposes new ways of seeing old images, gathered from almost 15 years of work and presented in his favourite medium, the photobook.
“The book is always an important moment for me,” says the Portuguese photographer, who is co-founder of the publishing Pierre von Kleist. “They are a mirror into the time I am living in, where I looked for a while in the same area.
“I wanted to fill in the gaps,” he adds. “By trying to break from this idea that images have a connection to a specific geography, and also a specific time, I wanted to take a different look at my archive, as if it were something new.”
“It was a moment where I could step out of my ordinary and rather boring existence, and shape it into something different,” says Federico Clavarino, who’s photographs from his foundational years at Blank Paper in Madrid are now published as a book
Rhiannon Adam spent four months immersed in the UK fracking debate. Her intimate portraits offer a glimpse into life on the frontline of the fracking resistance
Adrienne Surprenant’s portraits of patients at a wound hospital in western Cameroon seek to remove the stigma of chronic wounds
As a medical student specialising in youth and cognitive neuroscience, Claudio Majorana is not a typical documentary photographer. Having grown up with a mother in fine arts and a father in medicine, his attraction to the symbiosis between art and science was initiated at a young age, and his interest in photography – an artistic medium rooted in scientific process – came to him naturally. “Throughout my childhood, I spent tiSme painting in my mother’s atelier, or helping my father develop X-rays in his radiology darkroom. That’s where my interest in images began,” he reflects.
When Majorana was accepted into medical school at 19, he also began photographing voraciously. In the summer of 2011, he encountered a group of kids in the suburbs of Catania, his hometown in Sicily, and began documenting moments in their daily life, rooted in skateboarding culture and the general struggles and raucous habits that colour adolescent life. The result is his series, Head of the Lion.
A hairdresser, Vivienne Westwood and an 87-year-old activist: a photographic series that tells the stories of those for and against the controversial practice