With the fast-rising fashion photographer picked out for BJP’s Ones to Watch issue, we’re posting an article we published on his striking fashion story back in May 2016 – showing Welsh sisters Kyra and Evie sporting high-fashion in the beautiful Welsh valleys
Hadi Uddin grew up surrounded by photography – his father owned a commercial studio and both technical skill and the ways of the darkroom were second nature by the time he took his place by Uddin senior’s side. He’s now found work as a fashion photographer – and a unique vision in his personal work
Khadija Saye’s mentor, Nicola Green, has set up the fund with Dave Lewis and Ingrid Swenson to help “young artists like Khadija to realise their potential” via study, informal training, internships or mentoring
With a Lebanese-American mother and an Emirati father, Farah Al Qasimi has lived much of her life between the United States and Abu Dhabi, where she grew up. Now completing a Master of Fine Arts at Yale, she is still oscillating between her two home nations, and producing work that explores home, belonging, representation and clarity.
Aged just 24, Khadija Saye died tragically young in the horrific fire in West London’s Grenfell Tower on 14 June – a tragedy which has cut short a life already touched by greatness. Having won a scholarship to the prestigious Rugby School at 16, Saye went on to study photography at UCA Farnham and was selected to show work alongside well-established artists such as Isaac Julien and Yinka Shonibare at the Diaspora Pavilion in Venice this summer. Here her colleagues and ex-tutors remember her
Casting from the street and creating near-future looks, South African photographer Kristin Lee Moolman is creating “a new African mythology”, say her fans, which has already featured in an exhibition at Somerset House, and in fashion magazines such as Vogue
“My photography is me, my doubts and my hopes,” says Spanish photographer Albert Bonsfills, who has shot major projects in China and Japan. “My camera is a mirror, a tool to help me understand myself as well as a way of showing other people’s lives, even people I have nothing in common with at first – people born 10,000 miles away from me.”
Fiercely independent, Tom Johnson left school at 17 and dropped out of college, before setting up his own studio and carving out a career for himself in fashion photography. He’s now shooting for titles such as AnOther, SSAW, Buffalo Zine and Man About Town, as well as campaigns for Opening Ceremony and Faye Toogood, and is represented by Mini Title – whose founder first saw his work in BJP.
“As a photographer, you are basically only able to create an image of how you see someone rather than maybe what is really there,” says Jenny Lewis, whose portraiture has been published in two books, and whose work was selected for the inaugural Portrait of Britain show
photography has the power to unite and create empathy, something that we, as photographers, should see as our obligation to the world,” says Ali Mobasser, who was one of the winners of BJP’s Portrait of Britain project last year. “Exhibiting using major advertising space was a brilliant idea,” he said of the initiative, “replacing its capitalist function with a humanist cause is genius. It’s a bit like secretly replacing someone’s cigarettes with carrot sticks, or opening up the Daily Mail to find the poetry of Rumi.”
