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Going from Town to Town across the UK, Niall McDiarmid makes a portrait of a place

“The term ‘Britishness’ has changed so much over the last ten years, I don’t really know what it means anymore to say ‘I’m British,’” observes Scottish photographer Niall McDiarmid, who has spent almost a decade photographing people in the street across Britain. In 2011 he started work on his latest series, Town to Town, which has just been published as a book and which will be shown at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, UK from 31 January-12 May. Initially focussing on London, it soon expanded beyond the capital city and ended up covering 200 towns, tracing a journey around Britain and its diverse inhabitants.

19 January 2018

A hallucinatory take on wild desert beauty in Chloe Sells’ book Flamingo

“Seventeen years later and after all that life giveth and taketh away, it is the wildness of the region that attracts me most,” writes artist Chloe Sells of Botswana, the place where she shot her latest book Flamingo. “Botswana is one of the last great completely wild, untouched and quiet corners of the earth.” In particular she was attracted to Botswana’s Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, in the heart of the Kalahari Desert, a strange and harsh, yet beautiful landscape. “I didn’t know that part of Botswana very well,” Sells admits, “but I had visited many times and been amazed by the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans; I knew I wanted to spend more time there.”

19 January 2018

Huge Susan Meiselas retrospective goes on show in Paris on 06 February

Susan Meiselas has been a pivotal figure in photography since her career began in the 1970s, a decade when the ethical discussion surrounding the inspiration, intent and dissemination of documentary image-making was rampant. Perpetually questioning the motivation and perception of her images, the American has spent her life grappling with these issues, practising what it means to document something outside of her own personal experience. This spring (06 February to 20 May), Jeu de Paume in Paris presents Mediations, a retrospective revisiting her vast oeuvre, beginning with early portraits that include 44 Irving Street (1971) and Carnival Strippers (1972-75).

17 January 2018

Anastasia Taylor-Lind shows Rohingya women’s dignity amid horror

“Coming back to photojournalism after a couple years of academic hiatus, I wanted to invest my time in projects that could affect change. Simply telling a story in an editorial doesn’t accomplish that,” says Anastasia Taylor-Lind about her determination to cover the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar for Human Rights Watch. The organisation’s mandate is to gather evidence of crimes against humanity and share those records with governments, international agencies and the public. Doing so means relying on collaborations between a diverse group of professionals, including visual storytellers.

16 January 2018

Arunà Canevascini wins the La Fabrica/Photo London Book Dummy Award

Arunà Canevascini was nominated by Erik Kessels for the richness of her projects, which merge femininity, domesticity and migration. In Villa Argentina, Canevascini examines these themes through elaborately-designed images in which the domestic settings she photographs are disrupted by intrusions from both the history of art and her own family past.

16 January 2018

Foam goes Back to the Future to show cutting-edge contemporary artists alongside photography’s pioneers

“To look ahead we first need to look back in time,” write Kim Knoppers and Ann-Christin Bertrand, curators of Back to the Future: The 19th Century in the 21st Century – an exhibition that presents contemporary artists whose experimental approach to photography echoes that of the 19th century pioneers of the medium.

16 January 2018

Tom Wood’s The Pier Head goes on show at Open Eye Gallery

As a young man in the late 1970s and 80s, Tom Wood regularly found himself among the crowds waiting for the ferry at Liverpool’s Pier Head. Commuters weary after a long day’s toil, elderly couples gazing out at the Mersey in comfortable silence, teenage girls sporting shell suits, hair swept into side ponytails. “There were always loads of people at the Pier Head because it’s a terminus for the whole of Merseyside,” Wood says. “Coming home I’d find I’d just missed a ferry. You’ve got at least 20 minutes to wait for the next one so what do you do? You take pictures.”

12 January 2018

From the BJP Archive – Peter Lavery on shooting Circus Work

As Peter Lavery’s 50-year project Circus Work goes on show, we revisit an interview with him published in BJP in 1997 – when the series was a mere 30 years in the making. “I started Circus Work at college [Lavery has an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art]. I was visiting home in Wakefield, and I took in a a performance of the Winships Minicircus in the Queen’s Hall in Leeds. That’s where it started.”

11 January 2018

Brexit-era Britain in Simon Roberts’ Merrie Albion

Merrie Albion: Landscape Studies of a Small Island is a concise compendium of Britain over the past few years and is an excellent visual survey of the run-up to Brexit. The photographs examine rich and complex variations of Britain that are now even more poignant after last year’s vote. Images of election campaigning in clean and tidy suburbia, protests, the aftermath of riots in London, diamond jubilee celebrations, rock concerts, a family enjoying Brighton beach, computer screens of the trading floor of Lloyds – the list goes on. Roberts has managed to capture all the major events in juxtaposition with minor situations that are large with meaning, from the dead of the Iraq war being saluted by Army veterans through Wootton Bassett to an depiction of impoverished mothers and children at a youth club in Blackburn. Contained within each photograph are mini dramas, cheap-looking high streets with pound shops set against Victorian architecture. Roberts shows a Britain at odds with itself. Rather than a harmonious society, we sense fragmentation and awkwardness and a yearning for a glorious past that never existed.

10 January 2018