The Swiss Magnum member is best known for his post-war photojournalism, but an unearthed archive of colour work may change and enrich his legacy. Rosalind Jana picks over Bischof’s new shades
Tag: black-and-white
Through two graduate projects, Margarita Galandina reinterprets her Siberian heritage – blurring the line between the staged and the candid
Irish photographer Iollann Ó Murchú’s graduate project offers a poetic, black-and-white exploration of his homeland
In her latest book, Some Say Ice, the photographer embarks on a journey through America’s rural Midwest, echoing ghosts of the past and eye-opening realisations
Pairing extracts of pages from her personal diaries with portraits of young women in their teens, the American photographer paints a candid picture around the complexity of growing up.
This article was originally published in issue #7892 of British Journal of Photography. As a free…
A newly edited and expanded edition of Jōji Hashiguchi’s seminal photobook is published this month. Here, the photographer reflects on his past, and the time he spent documenting the plight of youth in the 1980s
Born in Poland in 1985 and based in London, Joanna Piotrowska has had a stellar career so far. Studying photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and then on the prestigious MA at London’s Royal College of Art, she won MACK’s First Book Award in 2014 with FROWST, and then the Photoworks & Jerwood Award in 2015. She’s already shown her work at the Winterthur Fotomuseum, Switzerland, MoMA in New York, Hayward Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Arts and Sadie Coles in London, and now her first solo show has opened at Tate Britain.
Titled All Our False Devices, the exhibition includes both still photographs and 16mm films to consider gestures, relationships, and power. The series Self Defense, 2015 shows young women re-enacting poses from self-defence manuals, for example, while Shelters, 2016-2018 shows makeshift structures Piotrowska invited people to build at home in Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Warsaw, and London.
In the winter of 1988, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, an exhibition opened, triggering outrage. The Perfect Moment, a display of 125 photographs by New Yorker Robert Mapplethorpe, was the most comprehensive show of his work to date – and the most provocative – featuring images he had taken over the previous 25 years, including those of his divisive X Portfolio.
The retrospective came at a difficult time in Mapplethorpe’s life: he was 42, and losing his fight with Aids – the disease that would take his life the following March. Perhaps, for him, this was his final chance to show this expansive oeuvre to the public – most of it shot in his Manhattan loft. But his pristine black-and-white photographs of BDSM scenes, and the sexy, sinewy strangers he met at the Mineshaft sex club, shocked conservative audiences. On a political level, the culture wars in the US were raging.
“For me it is important not to create a story with the pictures,” says Gerry Johansson. “Normally when you edit you try to sequence the photographs. But for me it is important that each picture is considered as a single, individual image.”
Johansson’s photography is largely driven by intuition, but when it comes to making a book, logic and order triumph. Almost all of his 31 photobooks are defined by their geography, if not the subject matter, and their equally-sized photographs are generally organised either alphabetically or chronologically, a bid to encourage readers to interpret them individually.