“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.”
This fascination with the familiar isn’t a new phenomenon, says Phillip Prodger, head of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery and a former judge of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize. “We live in a world of the free exchange of imagery and social media and perhaps the photographs that once were considered more private aren’t considered so private anymore. I think people have been making those photographs all along but perhaps not sharing them in that way.”
“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,” said Magnum Photos co-founder Robert Capa, famously. This week Magnum Photos is revisiting Capa’s concept with its Square Print Sale, part of a cycle of four print sales it’s running to celebrate its 70th anniversary.
The winners of the third BJP Breakthrough Awards will showcase their work in a special exhibition in East London
How do you shoot a great portrait? It’s all about connection, says Dan Wilton, one of the Portrait of Britain winners last year. “Sometimes that can be hard – especially with very short shoots – but that’s one of the challenges and one of the reasons I love it so much.”
The Dutch photographer’s epic Imperial Courts project, which was shot over 22 years, impressed the judges with its “affirmation of photography’s power to address important ideas through pure image”
The ten winners are: Carl Bigmore, Georgs Avetisjans, Kazuma Obara, Lua Ribeira, Martin Seeds, Matthew Broadhead, Michael Vince Kim, Monica Alcazar-Duarte, Sam Ivin and Sian Davey.
