Photo London 2018

Photo London: Thomas Mailaender at Michael Hoppen

Known for his offbeat experiments with printing processes, Thomas Mailaender is an artist constantly pushing the limits of the medium. He’s worked with found images for 10 years and, as a consequence, tells me that: “I don’t think of myself as a photographer.” Often sourcing images from the internet, but equally happy to raid car boot fairs, flea markets, and charity shops, Mailaender says he is interested in “reproducing images rather than making them myself”. He is, he says, “a compulsive collector of photographs”.

10 May 2018

Palm Photo Prize at London’s House of Vans

Work by 120 young photographers from around the world is on show in London’s House of Vans from 10 May – 03 June. Selected from an open call for the Palm Photo Prize, the show features one image per photographer and, say the organisers, “places an emphasis on raw, engaging work”. The winners will be announced online on 04 June, having been picked out by a judging panel comprising: Karen McQuaid, senior curator at The Photographers Gallery; Joshua Coon, director, content marketing & production at Kodak; Jack Harries, editor at The Heavy Collective; and Andrea Aurland, editor in chief at Huck Magazine.

10 May 2018

Victorian Giants Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, Oscar Rejlander and Clementine Hawarden at the NPG

“When people think of Victorian photography, they sometimes think of stiff, fusty portraits of women in crinoline dresses, and men in bowler hats,” says Phillip Prodger, head of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. “Victorian Giants is anything but. Here visitors can see the birth of an idea – raw, edgy, experimental – the Victorian avant-garde, not just in photography, but in art writ large. The works of Cameron, Carroll, Hawarden and Rejlander forever changed thinking about photography and its expressive power. These are pictures that inspire and delight. And this is a show that lays bare the unrivalled creative energy, and optimism, that came with the birth of new ways of seeing.”

10 May 2018

Antony Cairns on electronic ink and contemporary cities

“Photography is endlessly linked to technology, it’s always moving forward with it. There are lots of ways you can reproduce a photograph, ways that are often forgotten about,” says Anthony Cairns, describing the technology behind his electronic ink images. Since realising he could freeze the display on his kindle book reader by disconnecting its power, Cairns has acquired over 500 second hand e-readers, mostly from eBay. By hacking into the e-readers he’s is able to upload his photographs, suspend them within the screen, and then remove the screen from the device’s casing. “I’m not a computer whizz kid hacker,” he says, “I just watched a lot of YouTube!” 45 of these screens are now on show at Tate Modern in Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art, showing abstract images of global metropolises.

9 May 2018