“For me, it’s about allowing black men to show a vulnerability that they’re not normally allowed to share”

“For me, it’s about allowing black men to show a vulnerability that they’re not normally allowed to share”
This month we come to the final instalment of the Leica x 1854 Commission Series, which each month provides a single photographer the chance to receive £5000 to create a body of work using Leica’s world-famous equipment. The last of the three themes and the focus of this month’s call for submissions is Witnesses of: Individuality.
Each month, over the course of three months, the Leica x 1854 Commission Series will select one photographer to receive £5,000 to produce a body of work using Leica equipment. Here, we contemplate the second theme in the series: Witnesses of: Devotion.
Over the next three months, the Leica x 1854 Commission Series will select one winning photographer each month to produce a creative body of work using Leica equipment. Here, we introduce the first theme in the series, ‘Witnesses of: The Everyday’.
Mentored by Henri Cartier-Bresson, the ‘Italian-born’ photographer will be remembered for his continual innovation across fashion and documentary photography
It started in the early summer of 2018, when Cole Flynn Quirke’s grandmother passed away after suffering from a long-term illness. “It was the first time I ever lost someone that I adored so much. It affected me in a way that I didn’t really think things could,” he says. “I started to feel – and I know it sounds really cringey but – a kind of overwhelming weight of existing. My life became more important to me than it ever has before.”
A Bird Flies Backwards is an autobiographical project built around the timeless themes of mortality, friendship, love and lust. It includes photographs of Quirke’s family and friends and their surrounding landscape, as well as videos pulled from old VHS footage, and painful images of his grandmother on her death-bed. “I didn’t even want to look at those prints, but I put them in there because they’re important to the narrative,” says Quirke.
This month, we present a small selection of work that will be shown at Format festival, which returns to the Quad Arts Centre in Derby, England for its ninth edition this March. Under the theme Forever/Now, our edit of notable projects emphasises the festival’s slant towards ‘crooked’ documentary practices, where a lack of subject or search for the unknown is filled by fiction and interpretation.
He’s best-known for his work with British and Italian Vogue, but Tim Walker is also a successful solo artist, opening his third solo show at London’s V&A on 07 September (his first two were also in London, at the Design Museum in 2008, and at Somerset House in 2012). The exhibition will feature a “brand new body of work inspired by the V&A’s collection,” stated V&A director Tristram Hunt as he announced the show yesterday, adding: “He will work his magic and come up with a series of photos.”
Starting his career by working in the Condé Nast picture library, where he worked on the Cecil Beaton archive for a year before university, Walker went on to assist Richard Avedon and shot his first story for Vogue at the age of 25. Famous for his use of elaborate sets, Walker is collaborating with celebrated British art director Shona Heath on his V&A show, which will include photographs, films, sets and installations around the museum.
When Polish photographer Wiktoria Wojciechowska first heard about the ongoing Ukrainian conflict she was in China, shooting a project titled Short Flashes, which went on to win the 2015 Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award. “I was cracking the internet but everything was so blocked I couldn’t get any information,” she says. “I was asking all my friends, then I realised not many people knew about it, even though it’s so close [as Ukraine borders Poland]. I was really inspired to go by fear, by wondering how I would react if the same thing happened in my country.”