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Disney’s Fantasia Resorts by Arnau Rovira Vidal

Born in Barcelona in 1984, Arnau Rovira Vidal first learnt photography from his father, a keen amateur with a darkroom set up at home. Initially studying film-making at university, Vidal devoted himself to still images two years ago when he moved to Madrid, taking courses at EFTI Centro Internacional de Fotografía y Cine and LENS Cursos de Fotografía y Cursos de Vídeo. He now specialises in shooting fantastical buildings and architecture, and is already making a name for himself, showing his abstracted series RE-FORM at Spanish festivals such as Pa-ta-ta and Mirades, and publishing his series on the new wave of building in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan in titles such as Wired and GUP.

His new project, Fantasia Resorts, was shot in Orlando and shows the cartoonish holiday resorts of Disney World, a theme park which covers 65 square km and includes 33 different resorts.

14 August 2018

Tom Roche: Black Blood

Growing up, photographer Tom Roche learned about his Romani Gypsy heritage only through fragmentary stories and speculation. “My great, great uncle was stabbed in the heart with a wooden stake because he owed money for land,” says Roche, a recent University of the West of England graduate. “Then I had one aunt, aunt Liz, who used to pick crops, one aunt that made baskets, and another who sold pegs – or so I’m told; I don’t have any images, records, or concrete facts of my ancestors.”

14 August 2018

Women’s Perspectives star in this year’s Organ Vida

“In the EU today, we take women’s rights for granted,” says Marina Paulenka, director of Organ Vida, a three-week international photography event held annually in Zagreb. Founded in 2008, the festival has always been driven by political context, and this year, for its 10th edition, its all-female team have chosen to emphasise female-identifying perspectives from around the globe.

“In a time of post-capitalist global turmoil, technological advancements, with the strengthening of rightwing extremism, the growing influence of religion that limits women’s rights again, and the semblance of democracy in the 21st century, we are facing a situation in which women must fight anew for the rights that had been won long ago,” Paulenka insists.

13 August 2018

Michał Siarek on Alexander the Great and Macedonian national identity

Pasko Kuzman wears four watches because he believes they help him travel through time. He’s an archaeologist who works in an office called Troy, searching for the burial site of Alexander the Great, and other elements of Macedonia’s Classical past.

Kuzman is one of the many characters Michał Siarek met while photographing Alexander, an exploration of Macedonian national identity by way of ‘Skopje 2014’. Set up in 2010 (and originally slated to end in 2014), the Skopje 2014 project hopes to make Skopje a tourist attraction by drawing on its history – Macedonia was once part of Ancient Greece, and shares its name with a Northern Greek province, but is now so far removed from its heritage that its neighbour lobbied for it to be called the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

13 August 2018

Peter Kennard among creatives reclaiming their artwork from London’s Design Museum

Photomontage artist Peter Kennard is among 40 artists who have demanded their work be removed from London’s Design Museum after discovering the institution had hosted a private event associated with the arms trade. The museum complied with the requests to return work by 01 August, but defended its curatorial independence from its need to raise funds and sponsorships.

In an open letter, the artists said that they are “appalled” that the London institution arranged for Italian aerospace company Leonardo to hold an event on 17 July, during the Farnborough International Airshow. A demonstration outside the museum also took place on the same day (02 August) in which several artists arrived to collect their works.

10 August 2018

Vice: The Privacy and Perception Issue

As the apps we use become a bigger part of our daily routines, the line between our digital and real lives is increasingly blurred. “But there’s a tension point where privacy comes in which makes everything even more complicated,” says VICE editor in chief Ellis Jones. How much of ourselves do we share publicly and how do we decide which pieces to share? Which labels do we use to describe ourselves? And how do we avoid others imposing labels onto us? These are a few of the questions posed in “The Privacy and Perception Issue”, VICE’s annual photography magazine.

9 August 2018

Q&A: Jason Fulford, photographer, book-maker, and educator

In adopting the photobook as his primary medium, using complex sequences as well as free ranging associations to create what’s been described as ‘open metaphors’, Jason Fulford is more interested in questions than answers. He invites readers to become active participants in his work, presenting an open enquiry in which the various interconnecting layers are often cryptic and complex, and the meaning is less important than the experience of looking and thinking.

3 August 2018

Dafydd Jones’ The Last Hurrah

“I had access to what felt like this secret world,” says Dafydd Jones, who has worked as a social photographer since the 1980s for publications such as Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New York Observer, The Sunday Telegraph, and The Times. “I was taking pictures of elites that nobody had seen before. It was Thatcher’s Britain, a period of celebration for those that had money. People described it as the ‘last hurrah’ of the upper classes.”

In 1981 he won a photography competition run by The Sunday Times magazine with a set of photographs of “Bright Young Things”, named after the earlier group of hard-partying aristocrats immortalised by novelist Evelyn Waugh and photographer Cecil Beaton. Tatler editor Tina Brown hired Jones off the back of it, commissioning him to photograph the Hunt Balls, society weddings, and debutante dances that were a mainstay of the upper-class publication. Now Jones has put together a collection of his work for Tatler from 1981-89, titled The Last Hurrah and currently on show at The Photographers’ Gallery and put out as a publication by Stanley Barker. 

3 August 2018

Photobooks of the year (so far)

Foam founder Marloes Krijnen, curator Yumi Goto, and photographers Rob Hornstra, Mark Power and Mariela Sancari highlight the photobook that have impressed them most so far in 2018 – including Senta Simond’s Rayon Vert, Christian van der Kooy’s Anastasiia, and John Myers’ The Portraits

2 August 2018
In this collection, we discover the concepts behind new and ongoing work by both emerging and leading practitioners.