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"Culturally rich, economically poor" inner-city life shapes Omar Khaleel's work

For Omar Khaleel, fashion is personal. Using his native Birmingham as a backdrop for his editorial commissions and portraits, he shapes his work according to the details and textures of British urban life. From the streetwear his models are styled in, to the musicians he photographs and the local streets he uses as locations, Khaleel’s photographs pay tribute to the many facets of inner-city identity and are steeped in the environment that shapes it. As a British-Yemeni, representing cultural diversity plays an important role in Khaleel’s approach to photography. “I am bicultural and live in a culturally rich but economically poor inner-city environment,” he says. “I have been blessed enough to have grown up with and be around people from all walks of life.”

24 November 2017

Drip, a new platform from Kickstarter, offers access to ongoing funding

Kickstarter has arguably revolutionised photography, allowing image-makers to source crowdfunding for big projects, and therefore help bring trends such as self-publishing to life. It’s now commonplace for photographers to announce they’re making a book and start a Kickstarter campaign to fund printing it, for example – but the platform only launched in 2009, and Arnold van Bruggen and Rob Hornstra were very early adopters when they used it to fund the first book in The Sochi Project (which was published in early 2010). Now Kickstarter has announced a new initiative allowing artists, collectives, and communities to seek funding on a more ongoing, subscription-like basis, rather than for one-off projects. Called Drip, it was soft-launched on 15 November and, so far, is only open to creatives invited by the platform – though of course anyone who wants to fund a project is now welcome. Drip is scheduled to open up to more creatives at the start of 2018.

24 November 2017

Woman Paper Visa journal celebrates female photojournalists

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.”

23 November 2017

World-class collector David King talks work, life, and left-wing history

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.

23 November 2017

Into the woods at the V&A’s exhibition of trees in photography

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.

22 November 2017

Q&A: Luce Lebart from the AMC-backed Canadian Photography Institute

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

21 November 2017

Little-known Kyrgyzstan through Elliott Verdier's lens

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

16 November 2017

In The Ward, Gideon Mendel started his career-spanning battle against the stigma of HIV/AIDS

“The central thing is that the images are humanising and affectionate,” says Gideon Mendel says of his series The Ward. “They are life-affirming pictures, even though everyone they focused on did sadly die within a year of me taking them.” Originally from South Africa, Gideon Mendel is a committed photojournalist who has spent much of the last 20 years raising awareness of the global HIV/AIDS crisis, publishing numerous books on the subject shot in various countries. Now, as part of the Fitzrovia Chapel’s Lineage Programme, he’s showing his first-ever work on it.

16 November 2017