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Setting the Stage in Pyongyang, North Korea

Documentary images of North Korea have trickled steadily into the media landscape since the late 1990s. Since those granted access to the region are afforded little freedom to be creative, their main depictions are usually of totalitarian dictatorship, state-sanctioned ideologies, normalised militarism, and colossal architecture, all of which have become over-familiar in images of the country. This documentary déjà vu is what prompted Eddo Hartmann to pursue a multimedia project about North Korea, to act as a record for what many of us cannot see. The photographer visited Pyongyang, the country’s capital, four times between 2014 and 2017, creating thousands of large and medium format digital images of the city’s architecture and citizens. “I kept seeing images in this World Press Photo kind of style,” he explains. “I knew that if I were to go there, it would not be the way that I would take pictures, because it wouldn’t be interesting.”

30 November 2017

Shortlist announced for 2018 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize

It’s the 21st year of the prize, and this year the shortlisted projects by Mathieu Asselin, Rafal Milach, Batia Suter, and Luke Willis Thompson all “reflect a shared concern with the production and manipulation of knowledge and systems of representation through visual formats”, say the organisers of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018. Mathieu Asselin (b. 1973, France) has been nominated for Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation, which was published this year by Actes Sud and exhibited at Les Rencontres d’Arles, and which has already won the First Book of the Year in the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards 2017.

28 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

Regimes of Truth at LagosPhoto Festival 2017

Back for its eighth edition, the theme of this year’s LagosPhoto is Regimes of Truth. It’s exploring divisive events such as the Nigerian Civil War and its representation, and the influential Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture held in 1977; it’s also including Kadir van Lohuizen’s Where Will We Go? – Rising Seas, an exploration of climate change that shows how the world’s less wealthy will disproportionately suffer its effects.

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

The founding father of Iraqi photography gets his first London show

“I lived there, I grew up there, and I loved it very much,” Latif Al Ani has said of his home, Baghdad. “All of it has been devastated, and most of it has vanished.” Known as the founding father of Iraqi photography, Al Ani captured the country in its cosmopolitan Golden Age from the late 1950s to the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980. Employed by the Iraqi Petroleum Company in the 1950s, he went on to found the photography department in the Iraqi government’s Ministry of Information and Guidance in 1960, and to become the head of photography at the Iraqi News Agency in the 1970s. 

16 November 2017

Raphaela Rosella wins the first PHmuseum Women Photographers' Grant

“You’ll Know It When You Feel It feels rooted in a fundamental desire to understand members of her family and her immediate community – and to allow her audience to see these individuals in the same empathetic light.” Rosella has won first prize and £5000 in the inaugural PHmuseum Women Photographers Grant for a shot in her native Australia; the £2000 second prize went to Egyptian photographer Heba Khamis, whose project on breast ironing, Banned Beauty, was shot in Cameroon.

15 November 2017

César Dezfuli on his Taylor Wessing-winning portrait of Amadou

“This image documents a transcendental fact in the life of the person portrayed: Amadou had just been rescued from the sea by a European vessel,” says Dezfuli. “Apparently his dream is fulfilled. However, fear, mistrust and uncertainty are present, as well as determination and strength.” For his series, Passengers, photographer Cesar Dezfuli took a sequence of 118 photographs in 120 minutes as a boat load of refugees were rescued just off the coast of Libya. These people had journeyed from different countries looking for a better future in Europe.

14 November 2017

Dan Wilton is getting away from it all with Crane

Dan Wilton wants to slow down. That’s all. The London-based photographer is best known for his intimate portraits, having shot world-famous musicians and recording artists from Stormzy to James Blake over the years. In 2015, he travelled to Los Angeles’ Runyon Canyon with writer Josh Jones to photograph and interview the characters they found there, turning the result into a book. But for his new publication Crane, he wanted to rein it back, taking a step away from the lives of others and creating something more distant, quiet and reflective.

14 November 2017