Image Magazine #04

COMMENT

INDUSTRIAL ART Traditionally, great photography commissions came from the press but, as this year’s World Press Photo awards shows, those days are now truly done and dusted.

Few of the winners picked out for the prestigious prize had shot their projects for newspapers and magazines and many had never even published their work. These days, as the organisation’s director openly admits, World Press Photo is more about rewarding imagemaking excellence than what’s actually published in the mainstream media.

Fortunately, as this issue of Image proves, there are still great commissions out there – you just have to think a little creatively. And tellingly, perhaps, in an era where big corporations have more power than ever before, some photographers are finding that corporate commissions allow them to make great work. Ben Roberts, for example, has an enviable career in photography, regularly working with titles such as the FT Weekend Magazine and publishing one of his projects with the cult publisher Here Press. But what’s got him most excited recently is a series of commisions from in-flight magazines, which he’s finding offer both the budget and the freedom to do what he wants.

“I definitely enjoy the freedom of these assignments,” he tells Image. “You’re sent there to photograph a specific thing, and there are certain shots they definitely want, but I know I am also being sent because they know I’ll find something else too.”

Rising star Ina Jang has also worked with the corporate sector, shooting a series of cover stories for Hanatsubaki. Hanatsubaki has been published since the 1930s by Japanese cosmetics company Shiseido, it’s a beautiful magazine, featuring work by world-class photographers, which is given away free to customers.

“When we had the first meeting about the covers, they Portrait © Jonathan Worth www.jonathanworth.com

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just showed me some of the past issues and said they were open to their artists’ ideas, and that I should explore my own line of thought with the Hanatsubaki woman in mind,” says Jang. “The only thing they requested was that the images had to show a woman’s face in some fashion. Everything was open to interpretation.”

Meanwhile one of London’s major documentary photography agencies, Panos Pictures, has joined forces with Sony, to offer 12 photographers the opportunity to shoot Future of Cities; construction and architecture photographer John Zammit has been commissioned

by Crossrail to document the biggest building project in Europe. For Zammit this hasn’t just offered the opportunity to work on something properly resourced, it’s allowed him the kind of access that would otherwise be impossible. “In 100 years’ time, people will look at these images and think, ‘That’s how it was done, what a place’,” he says.

Meanwhile a judging commitment in Shanghai gave David Partner the opportunity to shoot a project on Chinese tourism students; while one of Here Press’ latest publications, 2041, gives an insight into one man’s very personal fetish for full-body concealment. He’s taken thousands of self-portraits and published them online, where photographer and curator Lewis Chaplin came across them and edited them down into a book project for Here Press. Chaplin and Here Press’ founder Harry Hardie will be on hand to discuss the project in an event celebrating this issue of Image at the Proud Archivist on 09 April; we hope to see you there.”

Diane Smyth Editor

CONTENTS

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6 BOOKS

NEW PUBLICATIONS FROM DAVID HLYNKSY’S WINDOW-SHOPPING THROUGH THE IRON CURTAIN PUBLISHED BY THAMES & HUDSON TO INAKI DOMINGO’S SER SANGRE 16

CAMERAS NEW OFFERINGS FROM CANON, FUJIFILM, PENTAX & OLYMPUS 21

EVENTS THE PHOTOBOOK REIGNS SUPREME FROM BRISTOL TO VIENNA AND HYERES TO KASSEL FOTOBOOK

Cover Image © Ina Jang/Hanatsubaki.

26 PHOTO LONDON PHOTO LONDON AIMS TO CHALLENGE ATTITUDES TOWARDS COLLECTING PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE CAPITAL, AND PROMISES AN EXCITING PUBLIC PROGRAMME. GEMMA PADLEY SPEAKS WITH THE ORGANISATION BEHIND THE FAIR

30 2041 A FETISH FOR FULL-BODY CONCEALMENT HAS LEAD AN ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPHER TO POST A SERIES OF SELF-PORTRAITS ONLINE; THESE IMAGES WERE FOUND BY EDITOR LEWIS CHAPLIN, AND HIS SELECTION WAS PUBLISHED BY CULT LONDON BOOKMAKER HERE PRESS. CHAPLIN SHARES HIS THOUGHTS

49 CORPORATE CULTURE JAPANESE COSMETICS GIANT SHISEIDO PUBLISHES A WORLD-CLASS MAGAZINE THAT’S REBOOTED ITS APPROACH TO PHOTOGRAPHY AND FRONT COVERS OVER THE PAST THREE YEARS, FINDS LUCY DAVIES

65 FUTURE OF CITIES SONY, PANOS PICTURES AND THE WORLD PHOTOGRAPHY ORGANISATION HAVE TEAMED UP TO PRODUCE A PROJECT THAT LOOKS AT THE WAY CITIES ARE CHANGING ACROSS THE GLOBE. GEMMA PADLEY SPEAKS TO SOME OF THOSE INVOLVED TO FIND OUT MORE

85 TUNNEL VISION CROSSRAIL IS THE BIGGEST CONSTRUCTION PROJECT IN EUROPE, AND IT’S BEING DOCUMENTED EVERY STEP OF THE WAY, REPORTS SHANA TING LIPTON

99 TAKING OFF LOVE TOOK BEN ROBERTS TO MADRID BUT, 18 MONTHS LATER, IT’S PAID OFF PROFESSIONALLY TOO WITH A NEW-FOUND FOCUS ON IN-FLIGHT MAGAZINES AND CONTRACT PUBLISHING. DIANE SMYTH REPORTS

117 SHANGHAI SURPRISE DAVID PARTNER GRABBED THE OPPORTUNITY TO SHOOT A SERIES OF IMAGES OF YOUNG CHINESE STUDENTS, AND FOUND THEM TOUCHINGLY OPEN COMPARED TO THEIR SENIORS, FINDS COLIN PANTALL

140 WORLD PRESS PHOTO THIS YEAR’S COMPETITION WAS AS SUCCESSFUL AS EVER – BUT DIGITAL IMAGING AND A GROWING DIVIDE BETWEEN WHAT IT RECOGNISES AND WHAT’S PUBLISHED IN THE PRESS MEANS IT’S AT A TURNING POINT, FINDS DIANE SMYTH

The Association of Photographers (AOP) is a not-for-profit member organisation representing commercial photographers, agents and assistants globally.

Based in London (UK) the AOP supports its members with business and legal advice, workshops and talks, a member forum and an annual Awards programme to spotlight the best in commissioned and noncommissioned photography.

For more information go to www.the-aop.org Contact us at info@aophoto.co.uk Office +44 (0) 20 7739 6669 Image magazine is the publication of the Association of Photographers, UK.

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BOOKS

Window-Shopping Through the Iron Curtain David Hlynksy Thames & Hudson £14.95 www.thamesandhudsonusa.com

A selection of more than 100 images of shop windows shot by David Hlynsky between 1986 and 1990, WindowShopping Through the Iron Curtain is an elegant vision of an imploding empire. The shop windows are sparsely populated, maybe owing to the lack of consumer items - or maybe, Hlynksy suggests, through choice, because the minimal arrangements make for beautiful displays. Pastel curtains sweep past dour uniforms, avant-garde graphics jolly up a lipstick display; this is capitalism at its most creative, free of the mass-produced graphics we’ve all become accustomed to. “The fact that there were three loaves of bread in a window did not mean that people did not have bread,” Hlynksy told The Independent recently.

“It meant that they didn’t advertise bread in the way we did. They did not wrap their bread in consumerist fantasy.

I’m not saying this was a better system, I’m saying I still don’t think we’ve figured it out. As consumption goes through the roof, is our solution right? If this book does anything it should say, let’s look again at what we thought we understood.”

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BOOKS

Bubbles

Ola Rindal Jane & Jeremy £40 plus post and packaging http://jane-jeremy.co.uk

Born in Norway, Ola Rindal lives in Paris and orway, working with high-end editorial clients such as Cos, Apartamento, Dazed & Confused and Self Service, plus galleries across Europe and far beyond. She’s published several photobooks, all in her signature delicate style, and Bubbles may be the most delicate yet - very limited edition and featuring 27 photographs, it shows soap bubbles mid-flight. Rindal has opted to publish the book with artists’ book specialist Jane & Jeremy, which is based in South London and distributes its work through specialist bookshops such as Colette and Yvon Lambert in France, Claire de Rouen, Donlon Books, The Photographers’ Gallery and Louis Vuitton in London, and Dashwood Books, Shutter + Light and International Center of Photography in the US – seemingly as delicate as a bubble, it’s packing in some heavyweight support. The book is hand-sewn, and comes with a signed print.

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BOOKS

Transmontanus

Salvi Danes Ediciones Anomalas €25 www.edicionesanomalas.com

Salvi Danes first came to attention with Dark Isolation, Tokyo, a stark look at lonely lives in the Japanese capital; he followed it up with Black Ice, Moscow, driven by his “eagerness to discover a new world”. Transmontus, by contrast, is more personal, returning to the agricultural region in Catalonia where he grew up. The title references both its direct translation “from the mountains” and a wind that whips through the area and the images are as stark as both these inspirations suggest. Danes’ previous projects used colour to striking effect but this project revels in rich, contrasty monochrome; he used black-and-white to give his images a dreamlike feel, far removed from the world around us, he says, and in doing so evokes the Surrealism of a much earlier period. The book is modestly sized and priced, but marks a sophisticated step forward for an accomplished young photographer.

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BOOKS

Nude Animal Cigar Paul Kooiker Art Paper Editions €45 www.artpapereditions.org

Born in 1964 in Rotterdam, Paul Kooiker is a giant of contemporary Dutch photography – teaching at the prestigious Gerrit Rietveld Academy since 1995, he’s shown his work in venues such as the Maison Europeene de la Photographie in Paris and Foam in Amsterdam. Much of his work focuses on voluptuous nudes and is queasily voyeuristic – his last book, Sunday (published in 2011), was a dazzling collection of such work, at once cutting edge and a nod in the direction of Hans Bellmer. Other previous series have included Black Meat, a collection of shots of swans, and Hunting and Fishing, shots of a woman running away from the camera; Nude Animal Cigar is a retrospective of images taken over the last 20 years but, as the name suggests, it focuses on three subjects – nudes, animals and cigars. Once again it makes the link between hunting wildlife and photographing women, and adds in a good dose of phallic symbols to boot.

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BOOKS

Songbook

Alec Soth, Mack Books, £40 http://mackbooks.co.uk

Alec Soth probably needs no introduction – a member of Magnum Photos, the founder of the Little Brown Mushroom blog and publishing house, and the author of Sleeping by the Mississippi and Broken Manual, he’s one of the most successful photographers of our time. His latest publication, Songbook, started life as a self-published newspaper, The LBM Dispatch, and as an assignment for titles such as New York Times, for which Soth adopting the increasingly obsolescent role of the local newspaper photographer. Travelling from upstate New York to Silicon Valley he shot meetings, dances, festivals and gatherings in search of human interaction; the book strips the images of their original news context to present a vision of a lonely, individualistic culture. Mack Books published Songbook in January and quickly sold out of copies; if you find a copy on sale in a bookshop, you’re advised to snap it up. The work goes on show at London’s Media Space in October.

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BOOKS

Via Vauxhall

Self-published and is available through McDiarmid’s website or via Amazon £15 plus postage and packing www.niallmcdiarmid.com

A Scottish photographer based in London, Niall McDiarmid has been quietly building up a fantastic portfolio of portraits.

His first book, Crossing Paths, was a collection of street portraits taken across the UK and published in 2013; his follow up, Via Vauxhall is a series of photographs taken in and around the eponymous South London bus station. McDiarmid opts to work on medium format film because of its delicate colour rendition and unthreatening appearance and both of these aspects are evident in his work – his images are often rendered in pastel tones, and often seem to show the lingering long shadows of late afternoon, and his subjects always seem relaxed in his presence, whether looking directly at the camera or apparently unaware of it. Street photography has been popular in the last few years but McDiarmid’s stands out for its gentle composure; resisting one-line gags or in-your-face shock value, his images build up a portrait of London that will only get more interesting with time.

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BOOKS

Lightning Tree

Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, RVB Books, €26 http://www.rvb-books.com

If you haven’t heard of Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs yet then take note – this young pair are rising stars, who won the Paul Huf award in 2013 and who have exhibited their work at MoMA’s PS1 and the Fotomuseum Winterthur. Their big breakthrough was The Great Unreal, which was published in 2009 and played with the cliche of the great American landscape – and the accompanying photographic road trip; this book returns to the natural world but pairs striking monochrome images with trees with colour shots of contemporary suburbs and experimental, slow-exposure shots. Published to accompany the pair’s exhibition The One-Eyed Thief, held at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, it doesn’t follow convention, and is by turns bewildering and dazzling because of it.

It’s published by the well-respected French outfit, RVB Books.

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BOOKS

Ser Sangre

Inaki Domingo Here Press £20 including shipping www.herepress.org

Inaki Domingo is one of the new wave of Spanish photographers currently taking independent publishing by storm – other photographers in this generation include the formidable Cristina de Middel, who self-published the smash hit The Afronauts back in 2012. Born in 1978 in Madrid, Domingo is a professor at IED Madrid and has curated international exhibitions at Krakow Photomonth 2013 and PhotoEspana 2014. Ser Sangre, which is co-published with cult companies RM, Cuadernos de la Kursala and Here Press, is a collaboration between Domingo and his family – the title translates as ‘To Be Blood’. All his relatives took part, creating installations, illustrations and performances which Domingo photographed; the family then joined together to decide how best to present the work.

An off-beat take on the family album, the result is personal yet universal, “a sort of collective definition of ourselves”, says Domingo.

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BOOKS

Experimental Photography – A Handbook of Techniques Ed Marco Antonini, Sergio Minniti, Francisco Gomez and Gabriele Lungarella Thames & Hudson £19.95 http://thamesandhudsonusa.com

Digital photography is now ubiquitous and yet despite this – or maybe because of it – analogue processes are undergoing a revival. This book celebrates the trend with a how-to guide to some of the earliest processes – from colloidal and salt printing to photograms and pinhole cameras; plus guides to contemporary approaches such as camera-hacking. In total it outlines 40 ways to mess with your images, and accompanies the step-by-step instructions with illustrated interviews with photographers who use these approaches – including current hot names Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs. For those inspired by shows such as Salt and Silver at Tate Britain, and Revelations: Experiments in Photography at the Media Space, this encyclopaedic tome is the ideal way in to trying it at home.

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CAMERAS

Canon 5DS

www.canon.co.uk The Canon 5D series is getting a major pixel boost with the introduction of two new full-frame models delivering 50-megapixel resolutions, bringing them in touch with the best that medium format has to offer without significantly increasing the size of the camera body. The 5DS and 5DS R are distinct in that in the latter there are two low-pass filters, delivering extra detail resolution. Otherwise they are largely the same as each other, and are housed in much the same body as the 20-megapixel 5D Mk III. The new sensor employs a new high-speed processor, and 61-point, high-density reticular autofocus array (including up to 41 crosstype AF points), together with an ISO sensitivity range expandable up to 50 to 12,800. Both versions are expected in stores next month, priced ÂŁ3000 and ÂŁ3200 respectively.

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CAMERAS

Fujifilm X-A2

www.fujifilm.eu/uk The maker’s latest, affordable CSC model, complete with obligatory ‘selfie-ready’ flip screen, 16-megapixel APS-C sensor and a new film simulation mode. The latter is a big feature of its upgrade to its raw file converter, EX 2.0. Fujifilm used the recent CP+ tradeshow to reveal its lens roadmap, which includes 16mm f/1.4mm, 35mm f/2, 90mm f/2 primes, and a 120mm f/2.8 macro.

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CAMERAS

Pentax

www.ricoh-imaging.co.uk Pentax lovers still don’t have the full-frame K-mount digital SLR they crave, but it has now been promised.

The new model was announced at the CP+ tradeshow, but very little detail was given other than that it will accept DA lenses. Ricoh, which owns the brand, says it will arrive before the end of the year and, encouragingly, there were two new lenses designed for full-frame capture at CP+, a DFA* 70-200mm f/2.8 DC AW and DFA 150-450mm f/4.5-5.6 ED DC AW. Four further K-mount lenses are in the pipeline, including a 10-30mm, 15-30mm, 25-70mm and 28-110mm, along with a 45-85mm and 92-180mm for the 645 system. Meanwhile, the K-S2 should have arrived in camera stores as you read this. A 20-megapixel, ‘weather-resistant’ digital SLR with APS-C sensor, priced around £650 and available in a wide array of colour combinations, it has a fully articulating screen, wifi, an 11-point autofocus module with nine crosstype points and in-body shake control.

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CAMERAS

Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mk II www.olympus.co.uk

The Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mk II has undergone a pretty thorough revision, though you wouldn’t notice.

Much of the upgrade is refinement, with the video capture getting particular attention, adding 080/60p, focus peaking, a mic input socket and more. The standout new feature of the ÂŁ900 camera (available in silver or black) is a 40-megapixel, multi-exposure mode; the standard resolution is the same 16 megapixels as its predecessor.

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Wimborne House 151-155 New North Rd London, N1 6TA www.snap-studios.co.uk 0044 (0)207 684 7555

EVENTS

Photobook Bristol Festival www.photobookbristol.com

Photobook Bristol Festival takes place from 12-14 June at the Southbank Club, featuring talks by a stellar cast – Tom Wood, Kate Nolan, Eamonn Doyle, Anna Fox, Carolyn Drake, Erik Kessels, Kazuma Obara, Nicolo Degiorgis, Bieke Depoorter, Liz Hingley, Emma Chetcuti, David Solo, Martin Parr, Peter Mitchell, Jeff Ladd, David Chandler, Lewis Bush, Catherine Balet, Daniel Meadows, Hans Eijkelboom, Laia Abril, Ramon Pez, Stephen Bull and Colin Pantall.

The Upstairs Bookroom will include displays

by Mack, Photobookstore, RRB Photobooks, Bernard Quaritch, Café Royal Books, Artist Photoooks, Dewi Lewis, Rorhof, Journal, Akina Books, Bemojake, Einer Books and Beyond Words.

And there will also be music…Tickets cost £95 including four main meals, which the organisers promise will be “high quality grub”.

Ken Grant talking at the 2014 Photobook Bristol event.

Image © Sarah Preston, courtesy Photobook Bristol.

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EVENTS

Vienna Photobook Festival www.viennaphotobookfestival.com

Taking place on 20 and 21 June, Vienna Photobook Festival claims to be the largest festival of its kind in Europe. More than 100 square meters will be opened up to 80 international booksellers, and the programme of talks includes presentations by star photographer William Klein, acclaimed UK publisher Michael Mack, and prominent collectors such as Gerry Badger and Michel Auer. It will also feature photographers such as Nicolo Degiorgis and Olivia Arthur, who have made extremely successful photo books. Vienna Photobook Festival is free, and includes a party on 20 June.

Josef Koudelka signing books at the last Vienna Photobook Festival. Image Š Sandro Zanzinger.

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EVENTS

International Festival of Fashion and Photography www.villanoailles-hyeres.com/hyeres2015/

The International Festival of Fashion and Photography at Hyeres is 30 this year; much smaller than the Arles or Perpignan photography festival, it’s flown under the radar for many but deserves to be much better-known. Held in an extraordinary 1930s Modernist villa, it hosts top-notch talks and exhibitions but its centrepiece is two awards for emerging photographers and designers, which have frequently picked out world-class image-makers before they reached wider recognition. Anouk Kruithof won in 2011, for example, and Lorenzo Vitturi in 2014. This year’s jury included publisher Gerhard Steidl, and the shortlisted photographers were: Jeannie Abert, France; Sushant Chabria, India; Wawrzyniec Kolbusz, Poland; Evangelia Kranioti, Greece; Sjoerd Knibbeler, Netherlands; David Magnusson, Sweden; Filippo Patrese, Italy; Thomas Rousset, France; Polly Tootal, United Kingdom; and Oezden Yorulmaz, Germany. The winners will be announced at the festival, which takes place from 23-27 April.

Melvin Sokolsky’s work on show at Hyeres in 2008. Image courtesy the festival.

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EVENTS

Kassel Fotobook http://fotobookfestival.org/

Of the many photobook festivals that have sprung up with the photobook craze, Fotobookfestival Kassel has probably the most cachet. With Martin Parr, Gerry Badger, Markus Schaden, Jeffrey Ladd and John Gossage on the board (alongside others), it’s been able to pull in extremely high-profile speakers in its seven-year history, such as photographers Daido Moriyama, Stephen Gill, Viviane Sassen, Pieter Hugo, Paul Graham and Alec Soth, and publishers, critics and curators such as Simon Baker, Hans Gremmen and Bruno Ceschel. More importantly, perhaps it also features two well-respected prizes – the Photobook Award, which celebrates a recent publication, and the Dummy Award, which celebrates a book that’s so far just a maquette. 50 books are shortlisted by a pre-jury, and will be exhibited at events in Kassel, Dublin, Madrid, Oslo, Paris, Rome and Sao Paulo. From these 50 titles, one winner will get the chance to realise their project. The closing date for entries is 15 May 2015!

The audience at the 2013 Fotobookfestival Kassel, in front of a wall of images by Daido Moriyama.

Image courtesy Fotobookfestival Kassel.

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Photo London aims to challenge attitudes towards collecting photography in the capital, and promises an exciting public programme to boot. Gemma Padley speaks with Michael Benson and Fariba Farshad of Candlestar, the organisation behind the fair, to find out what’s in store

EVENTS

We already have Paris Photo, Paris Photo Los Angeles, Aipad in New York, Amsterdam’s Unseen, and Photo Shanghai, which debuted in 2014, but now there is a new kid on the photography fair block. From 21 to 24 May 2015, London will host Photo London, a new venture that hopes to celebrate photography, and the collecting of it, in the capital. The fair is produced by consultancy and curatorial organisation Candlestar, led by co-directors, Michael Benson and Fariba Farshad whose aim is to “harness the passionate, growing audience for photography in the city and nurture a new generation of collectors”.

“We take inspiration from Unseen, but we’re not Unseen; and from Paris Photo, but we’re not Paris Photo; and from Frieze Masters and Aipad, but we’re also neither of those,” says Benson.

“Photo London is really a synthesis of everything we like about the art and photography fairs we’ve been to over the last few years. We want to create something special for London.”

Candlestar is not new to organising photography events; its track record is strong. Founded in 2003 and based at Somerset House – the venue for Photo London – the organisation is responsible for the creation and direction of the Prix Pictet photography award, a prize that champions sustainability through photography which includes an annual touring exhibition of the shortlisted and winning work.

Just shy of 70 international galleries are due to take part, heralding from Tokyo (Taka Ishii Gallery and G/P Gallery) to New York (Yossi Milo), Sydney (Michael Reid Gallery), Beirut, and Dubai, (Ayyam Gallery). There will be 58 galleries in the main section, say the organisers, including 30 from the UK – among them, Grimaldi Gavin, James Hyman Gallery, Atlas Gallery, Ben Brown Fine Arts, Flowers, Michael Hoppen Gallery, HackelBury Fine Art, Purdy Hicks Gallery, The Photographers’ Gallery, The Wapping Project, and Timothy Taylor Gallery. A specially invited curatorial committee, which includes the Candlestar directors, selected the galleries that will feature.

“It’s been a long but interesting process, and we’ve had to work hard to convince galleries to come,” says Benson. “We started [the selection process] in June 2014 and we’ve been surprised by the number of galleries that applied. We’re really happy with the quality of the work that is being proposed, and the international mix. We believe visitors will be excited by what they see as they move around the fair.”

The roster includes established galleries that will show vintage photography works, as well as contemporary fine art galleries that will be showing photographic works by artists, say the organisers.

Work by established photographers and lesser-

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known names will sit side-by-side, and in short, visitors can expect to see photography in all its forms. “We wanted to encourage galleries that cross the space between photography and contemporary art,” says Benson. “We had a fairly light touch in terms of the curatorial brief, but we made it clear we didn’t want to see work that has been shown at another group of art fairs; we also wanted to encourage work by emerging photographers.”

An important part of the fair will be the ‘Discovery section’, which aims to offer a platform for emerging international galleries with “a strong creative visio..” Among them are: London’s Edel Assanti and Tiwani Contemporary, Tokyo’s G/P Gallery and PUG Gallery from Oslo; in addition, a new prize sponsored by the John Kobal Foundation will be awarded to “the most outstanding emerging photographer” from the fair. “There are a lot of young people who are making really interesting work,” says Benson. “And there’s a real energy in the city towards photography that we haven’t seen before. A lot of small galleries and exhibitions are popping up all over the place because of people’s enthusiasm, and people are setting up photography blogs… photography seems to eclipse everything else.”

Public programme While the fair is a commercial venture of course, Photo London will also include a public programme that seeks to “engage as wide an audience as possible with the world’s finest photography”. Funded by Maja Hoffmann’s LUMA Foundation, the public programme will feature a varied and in-depth series of talks, including lectures, tours and demonstrations on the theme of collecting photography, to be curated

by Francis Hodgson, photography consultant and critic for the FT (a media partner of the fair). There will also be screenings, and the organisers hope that music will play a part via live performances.

Photo London has commissioned two exhibitions that will take place in the Embankment Galleries at Somerset House, one featuring work

by Iranian photographer Kaveh Golestan, “one of the most celebrated documentary photographers in Iran,” says Farshad. Photo London will be showing Prostitute, a collection of his portraits from the red light district of Tehran, the first time it’s been shown in the UK. The second exhibition, Beneath the Surface, presents a selection of largely unseen prints from the V&A’s photography archive.

Curated by Martin Barnes, the exhibition will run until 24 August 2015. There will also be a specially commissioned installation by Rut Blees Luxemburg in the courtyard at Somerset House, and a showcase of work by graduates from the Royal College of Art’s prestigious photography MA. Offsite, Tate Modern is marking the weekend

EVENTS

with a book fair in its Turbine Hall, run by Paris’ successful Offprint organisation.

“There’s a lot going on,” says Benson. “The hope is that people will spend much longer in this location than they might at a normal art fair. It really helps that Maja Hoffmann is on board, as without her help we could not do a lot of these things – the installations, and so on. We really wanted to make a major statement about photography in London, plus we know we have to work hard to get people to come here, which means mobilising all the avenues we can. So the idea of the public programme was to engage people who are coming from a long way away, to give them more reasons to come.”

The challenge will be to balance the public programme with the commercial side of the fair, Benson and Fashad admit. “We don’t want to lose sight of the commercial aspect,” says Farshad.

“That’s always been our main focus. [The aim is] to make the fair the heart, and to create a buzz so that any collector anywhere in the world will think, ‘If I don’t go now, I’m going to miss out.’ The exhibitions we’re showing are partly to do with that – [to attract] serious players in photography.”

Benson agrees. “Nothing has been done on [a whim] – it’s not self-indulgent. For instance, the education programme with its long strand on collecting photography is there because we’re picking up on intelligence that says there are a lot of people who are collecting photography for the first time. Everything [we do] will be connected to the business of selling art. The installations, exhibitions and so on have a purpose; to encourage people to collect photography.”

Logistics and design Two years in the planning, Photo London will fill most if not all of Somerset House on London’s Embankment – allegedly the building in which Sir John Herschel coined the term ‘photography’ in 1839. It will be the biggest takeover of Somerset House ever, says Benson, even bigger than London Fashion Week. This venue placed some limitations on the fair – limitations that the Candlestar directors welcome, as it offers them the ability to create a series of interlinked rooms rather than a large marquee-style event. They wanted to create “a well-structured and inviting fair of manageable dimensions”, says Benson, with “a campus-type atmosphere”; they are offering each gallery its own exhibition space, and the fair as a whole is divided into six zones, which can be entered from either side of Somerset House – the entrance from The Strand, or by the River Thames.

www.photolondon.org

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Somerset House, venue for Photo London. Image © Jeff Knowles.

“We wanted to have a boutique feel and for the fair to not be grid-like, which can be overwhelming,” he explains. “But our business at the end of the day is to help the dealers sell.”

Candlestar “cobbled together” the funding for the fair with help from sponsors, says Benson, but, adds Farshad, “without the support of our friends and colleagues, who’ve given us confidence, courage and resources, we probably wouldn’t have dared to do it on our own.” Benson and Farshad believe London’s photography community is pulling together, and point to the auctions that will be held at Christies and Sotheby’s while its on as evidence of the fact. They hope it will be enough of a success to keep going indefinitely, becoming a major destination for collectors and an important date in the photography calendar. “There is a sense of, ‘Hey, this is new and interesting’,” says Benson. “We’re pulling together and trying to make something work; it would be great if in three or five years’ time people say, ‘London in May – photography week’. That hasn’t quite arrived yet, but this first year is far more advanced than we thought it would be.

“There is a lot of interest in and enthusiasm for photography [in the capital],” he continues.

“Why now? Well, I guess a lot of collectors of contemporary art have turned their attention to photography slightly later than in Paris or New York. We want people to take away a renewed enthusiasm for collecting photography.

Photography is a credible artistic medium but this isn’t the case in many people’s minds. I want them to be convinced by photography.”

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A fetish for full-body concealment has lead an anonymous photographer to post a series of self-portraits online; these images were found by editor Lewis Chaplin, and his selection was published by cult London book-maker Here Press. Chaplin shares his thoughts on the images, the project, and what turning them into a photobook does

2041

A few years back, a retired electrical engineer from London started to publish images of himself on Flickr, ‘fully veiled’ in clothes found across the Muslim world, hoodies, headscarfs and more. “This new idea translates the idea of perfect coverage as understood in Afghanistan and Pakistan to the English high street, for anyone who enjoys anonymity, luxury and a sense of drama,” he writes. “It’s easy; all it needs is a sense of adventure and courage.”

Now some of his images have been published by Here Press, the small publishing house behind Edmund Clark’s Control Order House, David Moore’s Pictures from the Real World, Ben Roberts’ Occupied Spaces and Seba Kurtis’ Drowned. Working with the photographer, editors Lewis Chaplin and Ben Weaver have picked out a small selection of the 60,000+ images and published them in a slim but thought-provoking book – called 2041 in reference to the author’s online identity. Image asked Chaplin more about the project.

IMAGE: How did you come across the 2041 images?

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or so, but then we got access to his whole hard-drive. It’s funny being asked what we ‘chose to show’ seeing as there is actually very little to show in the images! The edit was guided by a mixture of points; some purely aesthetic and compositional, others that have emphasise the performativity of this gesture, some that have more of ‘him’ in them. Obviously these images are very oblique, but it was important that we kept making the imagery kept throwing you curveballs – be that the addition of other people into the frame, his movement outside, or going from humorous to more sinister compositions.

IMAGE: How did you sequence the images?

LC: Very, very slowly. We spent almost a year on it. As I

said above, it was important to try and actually narrativise this work, it isn’t supposed to be a typology or a catalogue raisonné, it’s a photobook. There is a rhythm that hopefully flows through the book, mainly this move from the images being at once extremely normal and domestic in their execution, but also surreal and quite confusing.

LEWIS CHAPLIN: I came across 2041’s images four years ago when I was idly researching how Flickr was being used by people with highly specific or marginal fetishes or obsessions.

Many of these fetishes, it seems, did not have anywhere near the coherence or precision we now see post-internet, and the idea of the communicative and anonymising powers of online communication actively boosting or facilitating the psychological or impulsive nature of fetish really gripped me. While doing this research I came across many groups dedicated to the art of full coverage, entire bodily cloaking, being ‘fully veiled’. As is I suppose the intended effect, these images can be very difficult to work out in terms of intention, or the pleasure point in them. However 2041’s pictures stuck with me, I kept returning to them again and again – it was not only his meticulousness but the skill of composition, and the real performativity that seemed to come with the act of sharing online that was quite different.

IMAGE: How closely was the author involved?

IMAGE: Why did you want to publish them as a book?

them off the web and publishing them as a book? If so, how?

LC: The thing I kept coming back to about 2041’s photographs

was this compositional quality, and the idea that while they were made for quite a specific purpose, they actually reveal much more about the dynamics of photography – as performance, about visibility and concealment, or the constitution of identity through physical essence. To publish them in a book allowed me to acknowledge the authorship and artistry at work in these images but it also changes the context, which hopefully gives more conceptual space for some of these other statements about photography to become a bit more selfevident.

IMAGE: Did you publish all the images or make a selection? If

the latter, how did you choose what to show?

LC: Ben [Weaver] and I edited down around 60,000

photographs by 2041 into the selection you see here. Initially we were working with his uploads to Flickr, numbering 2000

LC: He has been completely involved at all stages. He gave us

the completely freedom to work his images as he saw fit, but oversaw all the edits of the book. He also contributed three texts to the book, some of which we commissioned and some already written. It was really important to me that this book didn’t fall into the distanced and postmodern trap that a lot of artists working with vernacular imagery hit – where using irony or reappropriation is a way to avoid some of the trickier questions of permission or, for that matter, the relevance of the work beyond a simple, flat visual punchline. He is the author of this book, they are his works. 2041 is a slight alteration of his online name, as he wanted complete anonymity. His actual online name is similar, and is from his WWII army conscription ID.

IMAGE: Does the meaning of the images change by taking

LC: Yes, enormously – this is really the purpose of making

these into a book. Publishing this book removes 2041’s images from a very context-specific visual economy, where the transmission and showing of images was to gratify the peculiar desires of an online community. We still try and acknowledge this subtly in the book, as I think the fact of this work existing at all is due to an obsession like this being one where likeminded individuals can actually form community around it now – which is purely down to the internet. As an artist I am constantly trying to find out how subtle shifts of context can alter the perception of imagery, and books are context-making machines, I guess that is why I’m drawn to them. Publishing this work enters it into a visual dialogue with art and other books that allows so many other meanings to flow out of the images.

IMAGE: Do you see the use of Muslim items of dress, by a

man, and by a man with a self-confessed fetish, as provocative

2041

in any way? How does this book intersect with contemporary politics?

LC: It is important to clarify first of all the nature of 2041’s

fetish. Freud spoke about fetishism as being an irrational desire or association with something, and in anthropology, which I have a background in, the fetish is an object bestowed with supernatural powers. I guess the point I want to make is that a fetish isn’t necessarily erotic or perverse. It is an irrational obsession through which he derives pleasure as it allows a supernatural transcendence beyond that of corporeality. For me that is sort of a meeting point between these two definitions of fetish. Secondly it’s important to see that his fetish is for anonymity and concealment; it isn’t a fetish for Muslim women, for subverting cultural norms or an expression of some Orientalist desire to deflower the nonwestern female body. Of course we are aware of how these images could be provocative, which is why the way in which we contextualised this work in book form was of such importance. I think it is impossible to not speak about politics when speaking about photographs, but the politics at work here are more ones relating to identity and portrayal, and also about the hijacking of cultural symbolism, and how as an audience we confront this within the image.

2041 is published in an edition of 500 by Here Press, priced £30 (including shipping).

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Image Š 2041, from the book 2041, edited by Lewis Chaplin and Ben Weaver and published by Here Press

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Image Š 2041, from the book 2041, edited by Lewis Chaplin and Ben Weaver and published by Here Press

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Image Š 2041, from the book 2041, edited by Lewis Chaplin and Ben Weaver and published by Here Press

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Image Š 2041, from the book 2041, edited by Lewis Chaplin and Ben Weaver and published by Here Press

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Image Š 2041, from the book 2041, edited by Lewis Chaplin and Ben Weaver and published by Here Press

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Image Š 2041, from the book 2041, edited by Lewis Chaplin and Ben Weaver and published by Here Press

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Image Š 2041, from the book 2041, edited by Lewis Chaplin and Ben Weaver and published by Here Press

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Image Š 2041, from the book 2041, edited by Lewis Chaplin and Ben Weaver and published by Here Press

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Image Š 2041, from the book 2041, edited by Lewis Chaplin and Ben Weaver and published by Here Press

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Image Š 2041, from the book 2041, edited by Lewis Chaplin and Ben Weaver and published by Here Press

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Image Š 2041, from the book 2041, edited by Lewis Chaplin and Ben Weaver and published by Here Press

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Image Š 2041, from the book 2041, edited by Lewis Chaplin and Ben Weaver and published by Here Press

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Image Š 2041, from the book 2041, edited by Lewis Chaplin and Ben Weaver and published by Here Press

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Image Š 2041, from the book 2041, edited by Lewis Chaplin and Ben Weaver and published by Here Press

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Image Š 2041, from the book 2041, edited by Lewis Chaplin and Ben Weaver and published by Here Press

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Japanese cosmetics giant Shiseido publishes a world-class magazine that’s rebooted its approach to photography and front covers over the past three years, finds Lucy Davies

CORPORATE CULTURE

Named after the camellia flower that’s been Shiseido’s trademark since 1915, Hanatsubaki magazine is one of the most forward-thinking and imaginative commercial publications in the world. Predominantly a culture title, it’s carefully designed to promote the polished lifestyle of the typical Shiseido woman. Fashion makes a regular appearance, but so do poetry, fiction and even essays. In amongst this, and kept cleverly in the minority, is information about the beauty and cosmetic products that have kept Shiseido in business for the past 143 years.

Founded in 1924, when the company launched its camellia loyalty club, Hanatsubaki set high visual standards from the get-go thanks to the sons and heirs of the company founder, who were both talented artists. In amongst regular how-to features on keeping fit, pouring coffee and styling your hair like a Parisian, they included snippets of surrealist photo-montage or snapshot street photography of Tokyo’s Ginza district, where the most fashionable modern women would congregate, to stroll and take tea.

And Hanatsubaki has maintained its reputation for first-class art direction and photography – not least because it had the same art director for more than 60 years. Joining Shiseido’s design department in 1949, Makoto Nakamura soon took a leading role in communicating the brand to Japan and the world beyond.

He favoured “emotional elements that defy quantitative expression… moods… feelings…” writes Shiseido; he also persuaded the management that photography rather than illustration was the future. Under his guiding hand – and with the assistance of other talented art directors such as the almost equally long-serving Masayoshi Nakajo – the magazine has featured work by designers including Vivienne Westwood and Stephen Jones, stylists Simon Foxton and Carine Roitfeld, and photographers such as Jason Evans and Mark Borthwick.

Nakamura died in 2013, shortly before Katsuhiko Shibuya, who had served as creative director under him, took over as art director.

As 2012 was also the 140th anniversary of the magazine, the team took the opportunity to revamp its approach, refreshing its stable of photographers with names such as Anni Leppala, Viviane Sassen and Ina Jang, who are as at home in the gallery as in fashion editorial.

The magazine also started a new concept for its front covers, giving a single photographer responsibility for all the covers in the 10 issues published per year. Leppala and Sassen shot the 2012 and 2013 series, for example, while fastrising Jang took over in 2014, and Ukrainian duo Synchrodogs have been given the 2015 commission.

The process is flexible enough to accommodate

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each artist’s working practice and commitments, says Saori Kajiura, who edits the Hanatsubaki covers. She sent Leppala a theme each month and they worked on the ideas together, for example, while Sassen came to Japan for two extended trips over the course of her tenure. She wanted her subjects to be non-models, which made the opencall auditions “a challenge” for the Hanatsubaki team, “but she came up with many refreshing ideas, such as using Japanese chopsticks and origami”.

Since then Sassen has also shot a one-off beauty feature for the April 2015 issue, this time in Kyoto.

“They commissioned me specifically because of my personal work,” Sassen told me earlier this year.

“They know me, my style and my vision, and that is important for the relationship.”

With Jang, the process was more gradual. “They had seen my work in an exhibition in Tokyo in June 2013 and asked me to shoot a one-off story for them for their January issue,” she tells me by phone from her Brooklyn studio. “It worked out really well, so they came back and commissioned me for the 2014 covers. Once my ideas had been approved it was very fast; I came to Tokyo for two days and we shot all the covers in those 48 hours.”

Jang-style Jang, whose highly distinctive work blends photography with paper cut outs and threedimensional objects, was given near carte blanche.

“When we had the first meeting about the covers, they just showed me some of the past issues and said they were open to their artists’ ideas, and that I should explore my own line of thought with the Hanatsubaki woman in mind. The only thing they requested was that the images had to show a woman’s face in some fashion. Everything was open to interpretation.”

“We try not to limit our photographers’ creativity,” says Kajiura. “But at the same time we try not to make them responsible for everything.

Beforehand, we communicate what they should avoid. For example, beauty can sometimes be expressed in a negative or unsettling way in art, and we don’t want that. We want to enrich the minds of our readers by communicating a kind of beauty that blends art with intelligence. Shiseido’s motto is ‘Art and Science’, so we want photographs that convey beauty combined with esprit and humour. It’s about being as forward-thinking and experimental as science is, and delightful rather than unsettling.”

Given this free hand, Jang approached the commission in the same way as she does her personal work. “I usually sketch my ideas over and over again until it feels as if I need to photograph them rather than draw them,” she says. “It’s only then that I pick up a camera.

“Once I had some ideas, I sent them the sketches and they said yes to everything. They gave me a

CORPORATE CULTURE

shoot date in Tokyo, and because I couldn’t be there beforehand, the creative director and editor sent me some suggestions for models and I chose the ones I wanted to photograph. They were really helpful.”

Born and educated in Korea, Jang started out sketching long before she knew she wanted to be a photographer. “I had these journals full of drawings and I would write down a lot of random words, like ‘sponge’, ‘porcelain’ and ‘lamp’,” she says.

“I honestly didn’t have any idea about fine art or photography at that point – I wasn’t really exposed to it when I was young. Photography was just something in magazines or advertisements.”

She first began experimenting with a camera in 2001, and moved to Tokyo at around the same time with her sister, when she was 20 and her sister 16.

“My parents moved around a lot for work, so from a young age the two of us lived together by ourselves so we could stay at the same school,” Jang explains.

“It was natural she would come to Japan with me.”

Jang was drawn to the Japanese capital because she’d studied Japanese at high school, but says that in retrospect she was a little naïve: “After a year of that I thought I knew enough of the language to move to Japan,” she laughs. “I told my parents I wanted to do something different and creative.

Everyone said that you can’t make money making art, or keep a steady job, but I wanted to try.”

Without any real agenda, photography became a way to get through the day. “I guess at that point I was more interested in the food than the architecture or what was going on around me,” she says. “But slowly that changed. My sister wanted to become a model, so every day I took her out and we would come up with all new things and outfits to try with my camera. I had so much fun with it, but I think she got fed up after a while.

“Eventually, it got to the point where I was sketching my ideas obsessively, and going to all the bookstores to try to find out how other people did it. I guess then I knew I wanted to study photography properly. I looked out for a book on David LaChapelle – he was the only photographer I had heard of – and read his biography at the back; it said he had studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York, so I applied there and was accepted.”

Jang moved to New York by herself at 24, staying one night in her cousin’s house in Queens and a few

www.shiseidogroup.com/culture/hanatsubaki www.inaphotography.com

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days in a hostel in Chelsea before renting “what was essentially a cupboard space in this woman’s apartment in Manhattan”. “I did it for three months, and I have to say I don’t think I could do the same now,” she says. “Back then I was fearless and didn’t know what I was getting into.”

The idiosyncratic character of her images, in which certain elements are cut away or covered up, came from her frustration with New York’s built-up, graffiti-cloaked environment. “It got to the point where it was really stressful to find quiet, empty, plain spaces,” she says. “I was complaining about it to my tutor and he said that it was OK to get rid of something I didn’t like in the background, like with Photoshop or something.

“I was shooting film and printing in a darkroom, so initially I was against that, but he said, ‘Just try it, see if you like it.’ So I started using paper to cover things over, cutting things out, making shapes and collages.”

For the Hanatsubaki commission, Jang was initially concerned about having to show her models’ faces. “That was something I specifically avoided in my personal work,” she says. “A big part of me thought that showing someone’s face in my work would take away from it. Having to find a way around that was really good for me.”

Jang’s solution turned out to be in her journals.

“I went back over the ones from years ago to see if I had missed any good ideas,” she explains. “This is always where I start, because during this stage of my research I try not to look at anyone else’s work, only at my own. One of the things I found led me to thinking about covering just parts of the face.

“So we tried one where my assistant threw leaves into the air in front of the model, which didn’t quite work, but when the model threw them herself, it looked great. In another we put cotton thread on the model’s face in the studio, and in another I had a model floating in water. They really enjoyed it I think, working on something a little out of the ordinary. I try to be selective and I make sure I am working with a team who will leave me room to explore my ideas. I find that they usually do – they come to me because they understand I can do something fun and interesting. I really appreciate that.”

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April/May 2014 front cover of Hanatsubaki, featuring the model Hanna Image Š Ina Jang, courtesy Hanatsubaki

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April/May 2014 front cover of Hanatsubaki, featuring the model Hanna Image Š Ina Jang, courtesy Hanatsubaki

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August 2014 front cover of Hanatsubaki, featuring the model Vivienne Miyabi Image Š Ina Jang, courtesy Hanatsubaki

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August 2014 front cover of Hanatsubaki, featuring the model Vivienne Miyabi Image Š Ina Jang, courtesy Hanatsubaki

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September 2014 front cover of Hanatsubaki, featuring the model Yuumi Image Š Ina Jang, courtesy Hanatsubaki

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September 2014 front cover of Hanatsubaki, featuring the model Yuumi Image Š Ina Jang, courtesy Hanatsubaki

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October 2014 back cover of Hanatsubaki, featuring the model Minammi Mitsuhima Image Š Ina Jang, courtesy Hanatsubaki

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October 2014 back cover of Hanatsubaki, featuring the model Minammi Mitsuhima Image Š Ina Jang, courtesy Hanatsubaki

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December 2014 front cover of Hanatsubaki, featuring the model Yu Kano Image Š Ina Jang, courtesy Hanatsubaki

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December 2014 front cover of Hanatsubaki, featuring the model Yu Kano Image Š Ina Jang, courtesy Hanatsubaki

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Hanatsubaki covers by (top to bottom) Anni Leppala (April 2012), Synchrodogs featuring the model Hanae (January/ February 2015) and Viviane Sassen featuring the model Kumi Kaneko (April/May 2013)

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Sony, Panos Pictures and the World Photography Organisation have teamed up to produce a project that looks at the way cities are changing across the globe. Gemma Padley speaks to some of those involved to find out more

FUTURE OF CITIES

When a camera manufacturer and a group of photographers join forces, great things can happen.

It also helps if there is an organisation such as the World Photography Organisation (WPO) involved to facilitate the process. Such is the case with Future of Cities, an innovative nine-month long social documentary project between Sony and photographers from Panos Pictures.

Spearheaded by Sony’s Global Imaging Ambassadors programme, which was officially launched in April 2014 and champions storytelling by supporting photographers worldwide, the project explores how cities around the world are adapting and changing to accommodate rural migrants. Fifteen photographers from Panos have been invited to contribute, including Guy Martin, Carolyn Drake and Justin Lin. All the photographers are shooting individual projects; in particular, on subjects such as urban farming, ecohousing, green spaces and technological innovation in cities.

Produced by the WPO on behalf of Sony, and entirely funded by the camera company, the project features nine bodies of work to date, shot in China, the US, the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Africa, Asia and Northern Europe. They’ve been released online in several tranches, with projects by Adam Dean, Abbie Trayler-Smith, Drake and Martin the first to be published. Dean’s project saw him take to the Beijing subway, while Trayler-Smith explored beehives set up on London rooftops. In the US, Drake documented life on the river channel between the Sepulveda Basin and downtown Los Angeles, while Martin took a trip to Bristol to see the UK’s first ‘Hot Tub Cinema’.

“I spend a huge amount of time working away from the UK, but this was a chance to do a project in my own country,” says Martin. “The outdoor Hot Tub Cinema was a small idea under a bigger umbrella of ideas, which was to document UK cities at play by finding groups of people and scenarios where urban spaces are being used for community programmes. It was an opportunity to study the way people interact with each other.”

Corporate partners The idea for Future of Cities emerged from a discussion between Francesca Sears, director of Panos, and Astrid Merget Motsenigos, creative director at WPO, which has collaborated with Sony for years. “We’d been looking for a camera brand to partner with for some time, so I put it to Astrid to see if Panos could become ambassadors for Sony,” says Sears. “This got the discussions going and we started a formal partnership with Sony in 2013.

“In that first year, five Panos photographers

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became Sony ambassadors, trying out the brand’s new professional compact camera, the RX1,” she adds. “Each photographer produced one or more stories to showcase the camera.”

These individual stories worked well, but garnering enough editorial coverage for them was a challenge, and Sears realised a more coordinated approach was required. In spring 2014 she proposed the photographers work together on a themed project – “something close to the photographers’ hearts and that we as an agency would want to cover” – and they agreed.

Sony was happy for Panos to suggest possible subjects and eventually both organisations settled on the theme of cities and migration. “We all felt it was topical and encompassed a huge range of subjects that could be covered in lots of countries – both serious subjects and more light-hearted, solution-orientated stories,” says Sears.

It was a project that had the potential to get good traction, socially and publicly, Merget Motsenigos adds, a subject “that anyone, of any age, and of any culture, could identify with”. With this in mind, she and Panos were keen to ensure there was a good geographical spread of locations. More photographers were invited to join the five original Sony ambassadors – Espen Rasmussen, Zackary Canepari, Karla Gachet, Sanjit Das and George Georgiou – and asked to pitch projects within the overall theme. Once their project was agreed, they were free to shoot how they wanted.

Personal projects Dean, who is based in Beijing, China, chose to explore the city’s metro system, which, at 465km of track, is the world’s second largest. Opened in 1969, it has 17 lines and transports an average of 9.5 million commuters every day.

“I tend to avoid the subway as it’s really crowded and not a pleasant experience,” he says. “But a lot of investment has been made as part of a countrywide drive to bring more people to the cities.

Beijing is also famous for its pollution and traffic, and one way the local authorities have dealt with this is by investing in a mass transit railway system.

It’s huge and is growing fast.”

Adopting a street documentary photography style, Dean made several trips to the subway during October 2014. “I spent three or four days cruising around without an agenda,” he says.

“With editorial assignments you’re given specific requirements from the client and have a set deadline, but this was more creative in that there were no stylistic constraints. I could go off and explore and enjoy it.”

Elsewhere, Zack Canepari embarked on two

FUTURE OF CITIES

projects: the first is a series shot in Bangkok that looks at the city’s “modern cultural eccentricities…

Elvis impersonators and ladyboy cabaret shows, neon lights and gigantic electronic billboards – manufactured realities”. The second is a series of portraits and interviews with people affected by the housing crisis in San Francisco. “This project is more issues-based,” he says. “I really enjoyed the opportunity to interact with these people. It’s very easy to think that homeless people are addicted to something or are mentally unstable, which has caused them to be living on the street. But the cost of living in the Bay Area is so high that these people may have a job but just can’t afford to stay in their home.”

Money matters Funding for Future of Cities came in two instalments, says Sears, and it was up to Panos to distribute it among the participating photographers. Neither Sears nor Merget Motsenigos will be drawn on the exact figure, but they say it was “substantial” and “sizeable for Sony’s camera division”. In fact, Merget Motsenigos estimates that the funding for Future of Cities amounted to approximately 25 percent of the Global Imaging Ambassadors’ annual budget.

“The programme as a whole is extremely important for Sony,” she says. “It’s not a commercial campaign, it is about the stories… Sony is putting a lot of marketing behind this, and has activated the campaign socially.”

This partnership is a first for Panos, but the concept isn’t new or particularly unusual – Nikon Europe is Noor’s main sponsor partner, supplying the agency with grants to realise projects such as the Climate Change by Noor group project in 2009 and 2010, and its Brazil by Noor group project in 2011 and 2012; Magnum Photos and Leica have a shared history; and VII agency (and others) have worked with Canon in the past. “It’s not unusual for camera manufacturers or other organisations to link up with individual photographers or an agency to produce images, but the difference with Future of Cities is that we’re a group of photographers who are shooting and showing the work as we go along,” says Martin. “The project is perfect for a social media generation that wants to see how professional photographers work in the field.”

The benefits to the photographers involved are obvious – funding to shoot a project, freedom to shoot it the way they want, and the chance to try out new camera equipment, but Panos also benefits from the scheme because of the publicity it brings the agency. Sony gets to show off its kit and what www.panos.co.uk

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it’s capable of, in the best possible light, meanwhile, and it also gets to hear feedback from professionals at the top of their game. Everyone, it seems, gets something out of the arrangement, but the creative freedom it offers is key. “If you want to get press coverage, you’ve got to do real stories,” says Sears.

“You can’t just cover lightweight or easy subjects.”

“It’s really important for the photographers to have the autonomy to do projects that mean something to them,” says Merget Motsenigos.

“The Sony Global Ambassadors programme is all about supporting and promoting photographers and their work, so it’s fantastic that Sony has allowed us at the WPO to run with the project and not turned it into something corporate. The headline isn’t, ‘These images were taken on Sony cameras.’ Of course that message is there, but it’s a just byline that’s buried within.”

“It’s great to see companies like Sony supporting photographers,” adds Dean. “This is a different way of approaching and financing projects – perhaps one we’ll see more of in the future.”

There are more series to come, says Sears, but the next landmark will be an exhibition at Somerset House, part of the annual Sony World Photography Awards show in April. Beyond that, Sony has to decide whether to continue funding the project for another year, but even if it drops out Sears is confident it will continue in one form or another.

“We’re hoping to meet with organisations that have been exploring this theme of cities around the world and how they are facing all sorts of social, political and economical pressures, and to offer to shoot for them,” says Sears. “We all agree it’s an interesting project, which is only just getting going.”

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#FutureofCities – Made in Bangkok A man stands with his self-built Thai Airways replica plane in an abandoned lot on the outskirts of Bangkok. Thailand. 2014.

Image Š Zackary Canepari/Panos Pictures

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#FutureofCities – Made in Bangkok Halloween Night. Bangkok. Thailand. 2014.

Image © Zackary Canepari/Panos Pictures

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#FutureofCities – Beijing Subway Commuters walk through a tunnel in a subway station on the Beijing Subway in Beijing, China in October 2014.

Image © Adam Dean/Panos Pictures

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#FutureofCities – Malaysia Boleh?

A RapidKL train (local tube) approaches a train station in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Image © Sanjit Das/Panos Pictures

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#FutureofCities – Malaysia Boleh?

A cleaner walks along a pond at the KLCC park in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Image © Sanjit Das/Panos Pictures

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#FutureofCities – L.A. River A film shoot beside the river encasement in downtown LA. Image Š Carolyn Drake/Panos Pictures

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#FutureofCities – L.A. River The Army Corp of Engineers carried out an ambitious plan to encase the Los Angeles River in concrete after catastrophic floods in the 1930s led to calls for flood control. Except for a few places where the muddy bottom was impossible to replace, the river was turned into a concrete drainage channel. The ecology of the river disappeared, making room for development and a flood-free city.

Image Š Carolyn Drake/Panos Pictures

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#FutureofCities – Some Like it Hot! Hot tub cinema viewers watch the Disney film ‘The Lion King’ at the Bristol Paintworks, on the 10th of October 2014. The event was held over four nights with a cross section of people attending, but mainly the city’s young student population.

Image © Guy Martin/Panos Pictures

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#FutureofCities – Some Like it Hot! Hot tub cinema viewers watch the Disney film ‘The Lion King’ at the Bristol Paintworks, on the 10th of October 2014. The event was held over four nights with a cross section of people attending, but mainly the city’s young student population.

Image © Guy Martin/Panos Pictures

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#FutureofCities – The “Big Pool” A view of the TransCarioca Bridge from Piscinao de Ramos. The bridge is part of a larger transportation system under construction which will link Rio’s international airport with Barra da Tijuca, the main site of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games.

Image © Lianne Milton/Panos Pictures

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#FutureofCities – The “Big Pool” Bathers enjoy the artificial pool of Piscinão de Ramos, or “big pool of Ramos”, in the north zone of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Saturday, November 1, 2014. Thousands of people who live in the surrounding favelas go every summer. The pool, which opened in December 2001, holds 30 million liters of filtered, chlorinated seawater.

Image © Lianne Milton/Panos Pictures

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#FutureofCities – Robocops Kinshasa, the capital and largest city of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is a bustling megacity of more than 10 million people, but traffic congestion and police corruption are rife. In order to combat both, a Congolese cooperative called Women’s Tech created eight-foot tall robotic traffic police. They are also immune to bribery, incapable of assaulting motorists and work 24/7. And some of them have sunglasses.

Image © Brian Sokol/Panos Pictures

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#FutureofCities – Robocops Therese Kirongozi, the Mother of Robots and president of Women’s Tech, poses above a half-completed humanoid robocop in her workshop. A talented and tireless entrepreneur, Women’s Tech is just one of Therese’s businesses. The workshop sits behind her third restaurant, which features a swimming pool oft-crowded with bikin-clad Kinshas teens, a bouncy castle for the kiddos, and a creepy, cartoonesque, life-size statue of Michael Jackson.

Image © Brian Sokol/Panos Pictures

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#FutureofCities – London Honey Beekeeper Chris Barnes of Barnes and Webb inspect their hives on top of The Red Gallery, Shoreditch, East London. This is the final hive inspection to check for disease or problems before the hives are shut up for winter for the bees hibernation. 4th October 2014.

Image Š Abbie Trayler-Smith/Panos Pictures

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#FutureofCities – London Honey Beekeeper Paul Webb of Barnes and Webb inspect their hives on top of The Red Gallery, Shoreditch, East London.

This is the final hive inspection to check for disease or problems before the hives are shut up for winter for the bees hibernation. 4th October 2014.

Image Š Abbie Trayler-Smith/Panos Pictures

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Due to complete in 2018, Crossrail is the biggest construction project in Europe, and it’s being documented every step of the way, reports Shana Ting Lipton

TUNNEL VISION

As Londoners go about their daily lives above ground, construction workers below ground are excavating, navigating and building a network of tunnels for the much-anticipated Crossrail. “You pop out of a hole in the middle of Oxford Street and no one knows where you’ve come from,” says John Zammit, one of the photographers documenting its progress. “It’s a different world down there.”

Transport for London subsidiary Crossrail has spent £14.8bn building that world, which will add a capacity of 10 percent to London’s railway network when it opens in 2018, and will be the most extensive addition to the city’s public transport system since World War II. Spanning east to west from Shenfield and Abbey Wood through central London and out to Heathrow and Reading, the subterranean network measures 100km. Zammit has followed the entire route, carrying an 80lb camera bag and kitted out in safety gear – hard hat, protective glasses, industrial boots – and toting an MSA self-rescue breathing unit and a carbon monoxide monitor, “just in case there’s dangerous gas”.

Crossrail is publicly funded, so the organisation in charge requires each of its tendered contractors to have their work professionally photographed, supplying the images on a monthly basis. The organisation has also worked directly with photographers to shoot PR images, which are used to promote the project and keep the public informed.

Head of photography at London’s Absolute Photography, and with experience of shooting projects such as the London Olympics, Zammit was an obvious choice for both. “Visual imagery is at the heart of Crossrail and plays a critical role in demonstrating our continued progress below ground,” says Will Parkes, Crossrail’s external affairs director. “The construction of the new tunnels and stations has generated some fantastic imagery, whether that be the lowering of a tunnel-boring machine down a 40m shaft in the Docklands, or the excavation of a future station platform under Oxford Street.”

Some of these images are currently on show in a multimedia exhibition at the London Transport Museum, which will stay open until August. “Crossrail commissioned the exhibition because it realised there is a beauty to the construction process,” says Zammit, but the show also includes portraits of some of the people working on it. The finished project will include photography in its very fabric, too, because Crossrail is working with galleries such as Gagosian and White Cube to include work

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by artists like image-maker Douglas Gordon in its eight central stations.

At the coal face The sheer scope of the new line, the noise, the dust and the danger it involves, have made it a difficult project to shoot, says Zammit. He’s been working on it for nearly four years but still describes the site as “a completely alien environment”, and every moment he spends in it is “a culture shock”. Working with a Canon 5D Mk III, he’s found that the best approach is to go back to basics. Reducing “all your photography to its simplicity – space, juxtaposition, lighting – you get an amazing composition from it. It’s an important piece of social documentary,” he adds.

Zammit describes the people working on the project as a close-knit mining community; including nearly 10,000 workers across 40 sites, this community has links back to decades of London building projects, through their fathers and even grandfathers.

James O Jenkins, another photographer working on the project, says these people add an important human element to an environment he also sees as an alien place – like Star Wars or a moonscape.

Generally commissioned direct by Crossrail when they reach a breakthrough point, he nearly always includes people in his shot, be it workers going about their business or visiting corporate leaders or politicians. “My aunt worked on the Eurotunnel,” he says. “I remember her showing me photographs of when the French and English tunnellers met.

“It’s important to document a project such as this because Crossrail is a new transport system for London and will change the way Londoners travel across the city,” he adds. “The full collection of photographs will be an amazing set of images that needs to be looked after and archived properly.”

“Crossrail has now accumulated an extensive library comprising thousands of images,” says Parkes. “On completion of the project, responsibility for the Crossrail photography archive will transfer to Transport for London and the London Transport Museum, so the images we have captured will be available for generations to come.”

It is also believed the British Library will have some involvement in the archive, and while this is yet to be confirmed, Laurence Ward, principal archivist at the London Metropolitan Archives, says the documentary nature of the project, and its historical significance, will be of interest to many. “There won’t be any shortage of organisations or museums looking at the collection.”

TUNNEL VISION

Crossrail used the London Metropolitan Archives’ own resources to research the origins of 25 skeletons discovered under Charterhouse Square in Farringdon, which shows “they already had a sense of the impact of the project on history”, says Ward. The skeletons turned out to date back to the 14th century and are thought to have been buried in a plague pit.

Ward likens the documentation of Crossrail to that of Metropolitan Railway, which is held at London Metropolitan Archives – a collection that includes images of workers standing on the tracks they had built. “When we look at those photographs today, it brings the past to life,” he says.

Zammit says that one of his best moments was seeing a 1000-tonne boring machine being lowered into a tunnel by one of the biggest cranes in Europe: “That was something to witness,” he says. “It’s maybe my best shot.

“I like to look back at anonymous photography from the turn of last century, which captures a world we can only imagine, giving us a glimpse of what life was like,” he adds. “In 100 years’ time, people will look at these images and think, ‘That’s how it was done.’”

Breakthrough: Crossrail’s Tunnelling Story is on show at the London Transport Museum, Covent Garden, London.

Admission to the museum costs £16 for a year pass.

www.crossrail.co.uk

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Bond Street platform tunnels. The 260 metre long platforms run parallel to and around 100 metres to the south of Oxford Street.

Image Š John Zammit, courtesy Crossrail

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Platform tunnels at the new Crossrail Bond Street station.

Several hundred tunnellers have been working 24/7 for two years, constructing the platform tunnels beneath Oxford Street.

Image Š John Zammit, courtesy Crossrail

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Machinery in the new platform tunnels for Liverpool Street station. More than 1.5 kilometres of platform and pedestrian tunnels are being created over 40 metres below ground level Image Š John Zammit, courtesy Crossrail

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Hanover Square August 2013 Image Š John Zammit, courtesy Crossrail

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Completion of eastbound cavern at Stepney Green shaft, 14 May 2013 Image Š John Zammit, courtesy Crossrail

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Construction of Crossrail’s Western tunnels, concrete segment being installed in tunnel Image Š John Zammit, courtesy Crossrail

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TBM Elizabeth breaks through into Liverpool Street station, January 2015 Image Š John Zammit, courtesy Crossrail

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TBM Elizabeth breaks through into Stepney Green cavern, November 2013 Image Š John Zammit, courtesy Crossrail

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Tunnel gang celebrate as Elizabeth – one of eight, 1000-tonne tunnel boring machines being used in create Crossrail tunnels – breaks through into Whitechapel Station. 20 January 2014 Image © John Zammit, courtesy Crossrail

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TBM Jessica breaks through into Stepney Green cavern, February 2014 Image Š John Zammit, courtesy Crossrail

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Love took Ben Roberts to Madrid but, 18 months later, it’s paid off professionally too with a new-found focus on in-flight magazines and contract publishing gigs. Diane Smyth reports

TAKING OFF

“I used to live in zone 6 in Teddington [in southwest London] and it was £650 per month plus bills for a room in a shared house,” says Ben Roberts. “Now I live in a city centre apartment with two bedrooms with a rooftop terrace, and it’s €750 a month. And the weather’s warm!”

Roberts didn’t plan to settle in Spain – fate intervened when he stayed in an AirBnB and fell in love with his landlady – but it’s turned out to be a canny career move. 18 months into his new life in Madrid and he’s working with a raft of new clients; his Spanish is now “good enough to get by on a job”, he says, but paradoxically, the bulk of his new work has come from London. Repositioning his portfolio towards travel photography, he’s picked up commissions with publications such as Monocle and, especially, with in-flight magazines.

“It’s taken a while to make it work, but now that people are aware [that he’s in Madrid] it’s given me a new lease of life,” he says. “I’ve made an effort and repositioned my portfolio towards travel-style photography – it just made sense because I’m there in Spain and surely I could be a resource.

“About three years ago I went for a meeting with Adrian at Panos [Adrian Evans, director of the Panos Pictures photo agency] and one thing he said which really stuck with me was that he didn’t need any more photographers in London, but if I were somewhere else and producing good work, it would be interesting for him. I’m not with Panos now, but that was definitely something I had in mind when I left London.”

In-flight magazines The in-flight magazines were something Roberts actively pursued – before moving to Madrid, he was taking a lot of flights to see his girlfriend, he says, and he soon realised that the magazines on board were carrying interesting work. “I’d see photographers whose names I knew and think ‘This is really good, man!’” he says. “If you look at news and journalism there’s a perception that print is under pressure, and the fees aren’t as high, and the audiences are dwindling, but in-flight magazines are thriving. They’ve got captive audiences and they reach a stupid number of people per month – if you go on a flight, everyone is reading the in-flight magazine. If you put a brilliant piece together, you’ve got no idea who’s going to read it, and what might come of it, and they’re obviously selling advertising space too.”

Inspired by this revelation he contacted the editorial teams of several different titles, but made little headway until he was recommended to a picture editor by fellow photographer Greg Funnell. “He had a job he couldn’t do a week

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before it was due to be shot, so he recommended me to the picture editor of EasyJet Traveller,” he says.

“I was lucky – it was a football match in Spain, and I’d already shot a football story for the FT that was on my website, so she could see how it might work.

Plus it was so close to the deadline she just said ‘Right you’re doing it’.”

All went well and, three weeks later, Roberts happened to be in London, and was able to set up a meeting with them. “I was able to go and see them with my book, already having done a job for them,” he says. “That was so nice, to have a meeting where there really wasn’t any pressure, because I’d already worked for them. Since then I’ve been passed around the company a bit and the various airlines they work for, so I’ve worked for American Airlines and Iberia, as well as more work for EasyJet.” As Roberts discovered, in-flight magazines are usually put together by third party companies – in EasyJet’s case by a contract publisher called Ink. Pitching itself as “The world leader in travel media”, Ink also makes magazines for American Airlines, German Wings, United, Jetstar, Norwegian, Brussels Airlines and PrivatAir, among many more, plus Thomas Cook and Eurostar. Get in with them and you can get in with many possible commissions, which may even be put together by the same teams. Initially Roberts didn’t realise this, “but as I read more magazines it became a bit more obvious”.

“I’d be flying with EasyJet and Norwegian and Ryan Air and seeing some of the same names popping up, and then you just have to read the small print and it’s all there,” he says. “But the quality is really high, and even though the same staff work across various titles there are definitely different identities. Norwegian has a really quirky, quite journalistic style, for example, while EasyJet features more classic weekend travel breaks. It reflects the different people who use these airlines, and how they’re using them.”

And if Roberts likes the way these stories look, he’s also enjoyed shooting them, because of the freedom they offer. Once he’s got to a place he’s usually just free to wander for a day or two, he says, shooting whatever catches his eye.

“The assignments suit the way I work, which is effectively reportage but including a good mix of portraits, landscapes, still lives, candid portraiture,” he says. “It’s really varied.

“I shoot a lot – over two days I might shoot over 1500 pictures, then narrow it down to about 100, organised into different folders labelled ‘portrait’, ‘landscape’ and so on. The magazine will then typically run about 15. It’s really full-on, but if there’s something going on, I might as well shoot it.

TAKING OFF

For the Oviedo shoot, for example, I was there to cover a football match, yes, but it was also the same weekend as asturias, the biggest fiesta of the year.

So there were bands, crowds, people in traditional dress – I thought I might as well photograph everything and give it to the team.

“It’s really nice when a photograph that wasn’t part of the initial brief ends up being used, and I feel that with this kind of travel work, there is the opportunity to explore and bring your own creativity to the job,” he continues. “That’s probably true of every editorial job, but I definitely enjoy the freedom of these assignments – you’re sent there to photograph a specific thing, and there are certain shots they definitely want, but I know I am also being sent because they know I’ll find something else too.”

There is also an unspoken understanding that the images will present the places positively but, despite having shot projects such as Occupied Spaces (inside Occupy London tents) and Amazon Unpacked (inside a controversial Amazon warehouse), Roberts is sanguine about this. “I’ve travelled a lot – I travelled for two years before I became a photographer – and I’ve always been kind of positive about places,” he says, adding that he also feels he might help Spain more by emphasising its positives – and helping attract tourists – than drawing attention to its current economic woes.

He met his fiancé while shooting a long-term project on the crisis, for example, but after five years even he “started to find a bit depressing”.

“There was definitely part of me that thought, you know, it’s not like every time I go to Spain I have a negative time,” he says. “The people are great, the food’s amazing, the hospitality is incredible, it’s such a beautiful country – it’s not all bad. It’s still a good place to be, and maybe that’s also a good message to get out there.

“And while I’d love to be shooting the Podemos movement, there is the question of what I can add,” he continues. “Then you really do need the Spanish – there’s no point photographing a story if you don’t fully understand what’s going on, especially a story like that. The work that I did [documenting the start of the crisis] – after five years I reached the point where that was it. As someone not from there, not immersed in Spanish culture, I couldn’t take it any further. The more I shot the more I became

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aware how big it was, and I felt I wasn’t qualified to do it. There are lots of Spanish photographers who are really on it, and they will do a great job.

I’m currently shooting a personal project that’s in the light of the crisis, but it’s something I can really take ownership of. Deeper, more political stories will have to wait.”

Market contractions Shooting this kind of work has also been good for his own economic situation, he adds, because it’s much better paid than straight editorial. And while he’s keen to continue his straight editorial career – working with prestigious titles such as the FT Weekend Magazine, Der Spiegel, Newsweek International and The Fader, and syndicating the work he makes for them afterwards – this has encouraged him to seek out more contract publishing jobs. He recently published a story with a magazine made for Revelation luggage, for example, by Mammal Design creative agency in London; he’s also working with one of the other big inflight magazine publishers, preparing for an all-expenses paid shoot in South America. “The opportunities and the access that the FT Weekend, in particular, has given me is amazing,” he says.

“And the exposure is incredible. That kind of work is a shop window I would never turn down, but it’s hard to make a living out of it.

“I shoot in a more simple, natural style, and I don’t want to change that, but it feels like they [the contract publishers and clients] have realised that an editorial style can be just as effective as glossy, staged photography, in terms of selling a product,” he continues. “And it’s fun! Travel is inherently interesting, and obviously I love taking photographs, so I feel like I can effectively go on holiday with my fiancé for four days, have a break and shoot a story, working quite quick and free and loose. You’d be stupid to write it off.”

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The city of Oviedo is nestled in between dramatic mountains. The town prides itself on it’s food, hospitality and traditions Image Š Ben Roberts

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Crowds gather in Plaza Alfonso II el Casto, the city’s main square, in anticipation of the San Mateo parade.

Image Š Ben Roberts

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Asturians, dressed in traditional costume, prepare to march through the city’s streets to celebrate the Feast of San Mateo.

Image Š Ben Roberts

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Oviedo has an official marching band, with the city’s crest emblazoned on each members waistcoat. The costumes feature bold blue trims, the authentic colour of the city that also features on the Real Oviedo football uniforms. Image Š Ben Roberts

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The Real Oviedo supporters set up a beer tent in Plaza Porlier for the duration of the San Mateo festival. It’s staffed by fans, with the party going on till the early hours.

Image Š Ben Roberts

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Matias Garcia is the leader of ROST – The Real Oviedo Shareholders Trust. He welcomes shareholders from overseas, and liaises with the club to ensure that visitors receive great hospitality.

Image Š Ben Roberts

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A Real Oviedo fan shows his custom made keyfob, made in the style of a club shirt with his name on it.

Image Š Ben Roberts

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Sunflower seeds (pipas) are the snack of choice for Spanish football fans – the husks are discarded onto the terraces.

Image Š Ben Roberts

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A wall mural inside the stadium pays tribute to the global spread of Real Oviedo shareholders.

Image Š Ben Roberts

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A ballboy looks on as Real Oviedo substitutes keep limber.

Image Š Ben Roberts

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Real Oviedo striker Miguel Linares C贸lera celebrates scoring the teams third goal in front of the home support!

Oviedo went on to defeat Guijuelo by 4-0.

Image 漏 Ben Roberts

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After a decisive home victory, Real Oviedo remain on track to be in the promotion mix in 2015. Bathed in the warm evening sunshine, satisfied fans leave the stadium, ready to celebrate long into the night.

Image Š Ben Roberts

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Ben Roberts’ Saving Oviedo story in the EasyJet Traveller magazine. “It’s really nice when a photograph that wasn’t part of the initial brief ends up being used, and I feel that with this kind of travel work, there is the opportunity to explore and bring your own creativity to the job,” says Roberts. “That’s probably true of every editorial job, but I definitely enjoy the freedom of these assignments – you’re sent there to photograph a specific thing, and there are certain shots they definitely want, but I know I am also being sent because they know I’ll find something else too.”

Images © Ben Roberts

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David Partner grabbed the opportunity to shoot a series of images of young Chinese students, and found them touchingly open compared to their seniors, finds Colin Pantall

SHANGHAI SURPRISE

In his commercial work, David Partner has photographed everything from cars to nuclear power stations but in recent years, it is his personal work that has helped him develop his photographic voice. These personal projects range from Heads of Government, a series of portraits of government ministers to Shanghai Students, his recent portrayal of Chinese tourism students. Both are series that exemplify Partner’s need to extend himself both personally and professionally in his time off from commercial assignments.

“I got into doing corporate stuff from doing editorial stuff for the business press,” says Partner in a Skype interview from his Somerset home. “So the business press and I ended up doing corporate work and I photographed power stations and planes and trains and I did Landrover, but at the end of the day you’re only as good as your last job.”

Partner wanted more, both in terms of who he worked with commercially, but also in how he expressed himself. “If you look at the US statistics for photographers, they have their peak years in their thirties and in their forties their earnings drop off a cliff,” he says. “So if you think of a profession where in your forties you are basically finished, unless you have a point of difference that you can develop and take to market, whether it’s commercial, fine art or whatever, it’s a pretty brutal environment.

“The days of when you were a commercial photographer, or an art photographer or a journalist are gone,” he adds. “To sustain a career in photography you have to straddle the spectrum and to be able to express the narrative of your work in terms of fine art as well, because otherwise nobody is going to take you seriously as just a hack commercial photographer. It is a message which needs to get out there to some of the more dinosaur like photographers who think the world owes them a living because they have some technical skills.

That’s no longer enough.”

Heads Partner’s point of difference began with his first major personal project, Heads of Government. “I’d always shot portraits but I’d found myself doing more and more commercial work that sometimes involved portraiture but mostly didn’t,” he says.

“So I wanted to go back to that. By chance, I started photographing politics and government ministers.

It seemed to be a good subject because although they’re photographed a lot, most of those pictures are just news photographs. It’s Ed Milliband eating a bacon sandwich or whatever.”

“I did it over about a year between 2004 and 2005. I was shooting around commercial

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assignments, driving up to Westminster at 5am to be in someone’s office at 7am, so I would always go where they were. I effectively took a studio set up with me, with a 5×4 camera that extended like that so it was quite imposing. It gives an air of seriousness to a portrait that a sitter can’t escape.

If you put them against the wall and bring out a Canon, they’re ‘Well, so what!’ Whereas when you have a camera that is two feet long, it commands attention. They basically submit to your will because they know you’re serious.”

The pictures were exhibited at the old AOP Gallery in Leonard Street, and as a result Partner sold half his prints and got a show at the National Portrait Gallery, a prestigious profile-raising event that also had unexpected consequences. “It was a validation for me but I don’t think it was a validation in terms of commissions because as soon as that happened I lost all my clients!” says Partner.

“And I think that’s not unusual. They think, ‘Oh, this guy’s successful so we can’t afford him’, or ‘He’s too grand’. I’ve talked to other photographers who’ve had similar experiences with success.

“For myself it made me look at my own photography and say, actually there’s something in this, I’m actually quite a good photographer.

From not having acknowledged that to myself, from thinking I was techinically good and could get stuff done, the typical commercial photographer profile, to seeing that there’s more to me than that, that I can hold my head up high with any photographer working in the UK… just because that didn’t equate to commercial success didn’t mean anything.”

With a new confidence behind him, Partner has continued to seek out personal projects; following the Heads of Government series, he was commissioned to shoot behind the scenes at the House of Commons and following this he photographed Kenyan schoolchildren in the Rift Valley.

The relaxed nature of these Kenyan portraits, and the use of the environment as a device to frame the subjects, is echoed in Partner’s portraits of the Shanghai students, a project that came about thanks to his role as a judge at a competition run by the Shanghai Photographic Association.

“We think of our organisations [such as The RPS, the AOP, the BIPP] as member-funded but the Shanghai Photographic Association is staterun,” he says. “Not having been to China I didn’t understand any of this, but when I went there it was a real eye-opener. I turned up at Shanghai Airport having not really realised what I’d let myself in for. But what I did do was pack a Hasselblad and two lenses because I thought, well if I’m going to

SHANGHAI SURPRISE

go to Shanghai I might as well take some serious photography kit, you never know.

“What I didn’t realise was that where the judging was going to take place wasn’t in Shanghai.

Instead all the judges got shipped off to this Communist Party school [near Suzhou] where we were billeted for three days. Not being in Shanghai meant we couldn’t do anything. There were no bars, there was nothing except for a canteen. There was a lot of grumbling amongst the international judges but I thought, ‘Well, I might as well make the most of this’.”

“One of the things that had struck me was these young students, who were tourism students from Shanghai, who had been assigned as guides to the international judges to make sure that we showed up on time for judging. I had two of these kids outside my door at 7am saying ‘Come on then, time for breakfast’. They turned up on the first day in this school uniform which was a militaristic type of uniform, so I thought, ‘Ok, during my lunch break, why don’t I photograph them? There are only nine of them’.

“I find that photographing kids can be difficult because their faces don’t necessarily tell the story you’re looking for, they are so open and blank,” he continues. “I’m always looking for an emotional narrative in pictures, using photography as a bridge of understanding.”

In China The clinical design of the gounds provided a counterpoint to these apparently emotionless faces and tidy uniforms; then, after the first day of shooting, the students turned up in their own clothes. “I did the pictures the first lunchbreak and thought it was the beginning of something; the next day they turned up out of uniform, so I thought let’s do the same kids but instead of having them looking to camera, I’ll have them looking away from camera looking out to the future.”

The result is a strangely charming portrayal of Chinese youth in two kinds of dress – the formal white of a uniform that looks like something out of South Pacific, and the informality of shorts or skirts and t-shirts. Some of the students ‘join up’ with the uniforms, becoming one with the de-individualised identity of the white jacket and peaked cap, but most of them don’t. Rather, the uniform is almost

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rejected by little acts of rebellion, by the openedtoed sandals that don’t quite match, the inelegant fold of the trousers or the hat worn top of the head, anime style. These sparks of individuality combined with a lack of artifice that touched Partner, and were something he found poignant especially when compared to the closed approach of the judges.

“Some of the judges were Chinese photographers and newspaper people who were much less willing to communicate,: he says. “These people had been brought up in Cultural Revolution conditions where they didn’t give anything away. That was the impression I took away from my generation of Chinese; they don’t say very much. But the kids are like kids here. There was no artifice with them.”

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David Partner went to Shanghai to judge the 12th Shanghai International Photographic Art Exhibition, which took place at a Municipal Party School in QuingPu District. Eight students were assigned to look after the judges, and Partner photographed them in his breaks over the two days. “They represent the youth and future of China to me,” he says. “I hope they will look back on this as an opportunity to get to know a different kind of visitor to the country.”

Image © David Partner.

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This year’s competition was as successful as ever – but digital imaging and a growing divide between what it recognises and what’s published in the press means it’s at a turning point, finds Diane Smyth

WORLD PRESS PHOTO

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First Prize Contemporary Issues, Singles Mads Nissen, Denmark, Scanpix/Panos Pictures St. Petersburg, Russia Jon and Alex, a gay couple, during an intimate moment. Life for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) people is becoming increasingly difficult in Russia. Sexual minorities face legal and social discrimination, harassment, and even violent hate-crime attacks from conservative religious and nationalistic groups.

Mads Nissen was announced winner of World Press Photo this year, with a sensitive shot of a gay couple in Russia that proved “you don’t necessarily have to go around the world to a war zone” to take a world-class shot, according to photographer and WPP judge Donald Weber.

“We really felt like, ‘Let’s be inclusive’,” he added. “We wanted to find and take in all of those who tell stories, regardless of how they tell them or where they come from… We debated who we are as photographers, what we are saying, and how we are saying it. I was not necessarily looking for where we are now, but what we can be, and how we can get there. That was the debate, and we were all somewhere on that spectrum, and the Picture of the Year is a perfect example of that. You can walk across the street and take a domestic scene – it’s about storytelling and finding the right voice for the subject.”

In fact the human scale figured large in this year’s results, with the judges also singling out a shot of

an abandoned kitchen table as the General News Singles winner. Sergey Ilnitsky took the photograph after a mortar attack in the country’s ongoing war, but by showing a domestic scene rather than the injured or the fighting soldiers, says Weber, he created an image anyone could relate to. Tomas van Houtryve’s series, Blue Sky Days, meanwhile, won third prize in the Contemporary Issues Stories because it broached the issue of drone attacks by photographing the kind of gatherings that are targeted with an airbourne camera, but shooting them in the UK not, for example, Pakistan. and photographing them with an airborne camera, but doing so in the US rather than, for example, Pakistan.

Glenna Gordon’s Traces of the Abducted Schoolgirls, Nigeria, meanwhile, which won second prize in the General News Stories, showed three school uniforms rather than anything direct about the fate of the group of young women kidnapped

by Boko Haram. “Ilnitsky’s image caused some

EVENTS

debate but we liked the photograph and we liked the fact that it showed something universal or domestic, that it showed that these issues could affect you,” says Weber. “We wondered, do you always need to see a bloody body? Or, is there room for stories that work on a more intellectual level, as well as more visceral images? Glenna Gordon’s image is the perfect example of how can you show an [apparently] unphotographable story. How do we talk about Boko Haram when we can’t take a picture of them? Gordon found another, very elegant, way around it.”

Image manipulation The competition was rocked by doubts over image veracity, however - with Contemporary Issues Story first prize winner Giovanni Troilo seeing his award revoked when it emerged that one of this shots had not been taken where he said it had, and a fairly staggering 20% of images in the penultimate round removed when World Press called in the raw files and negatives and deemed they’d been overprocessed. The Sports Stories category was so badly affected by over-processing, in fact, that the jury wasn’t able to award a third prize. “I don’t want to say it is just sports photography because in every category was affected,” Boering comments. “But after the penultimate round, after we had awarded the first and second place, there was nothing left.

All the other images had been removed.”

“We found a lot and that was very disappointing,” adds Boering. “It is about trust, about the basic ethics of journalism. These images should be genuine and real; we have to be able to trust the photographs they put in front of us ...

Of course we all know that photographs never show everything that’s going on, they are always an interpretation, but we have to know that photographers are showing what’s going on in the world.”

Controversy has raged since about what is “acceptable” retouching – with even the distinguished sports photographer Bob Martin, who served on World Press’ specialist sports jury in the first round, raising the question. “To have this many images disqualified is terrible and unacceptable,” he stated. “But we need to come together as a community of editorial people and decide what is acceptable. My view is that if something is added that wasn’t there, or something is removed, then clearly that’s not on. But if the contrast is increased, or the corners darkened, or areas are dodged and burned – what then? We used

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to do all that in the darkroom, and now Photoshop is our darkroom.”

As Martin’s comments suggest, this problem also opens up another issue for World Press – whether they consider the photography actually used in the press, or choose to lead the debate on best practice. The sports photography actually published in newspapers is widely manipulated, it seems – so much so the sports photographers who make it saw no problem in submitting it.

By rejecting this work, then, WPP is setting up a different set of standards to what’s actually used in the field. In fact though, this debate has already been and gone for the organisation – as Weber states, it is now “not necessarily looking for where we are now, but what we can be, and how we can get there”, and that’s reflected in the results – only a handful of the recognised photographers were working on commission for a newspaper, and in many cases they went on to show their work in books and exhibitions rather than publishing it in the mainstream media.

As Boering recently told Olivier Laurent in Time Lightbox, the organisation is now moving towards being a thinktank rather than a straight competition, organising education programmes and even grants to help promote what it sees as excellence in photography. “We should be an organisation people go to for information and debate,” he told Image. “It is important because photography in general, and photojournalism in particular, are changing so rapidly. If we can debate the issues and share that information then we all have a lot to gain.”

Pioneers in making the move from print to pixels.

Interested? Say hello.

Contact Jamie Fricker on 020 3239 3866 or tap here to email him jamie.fricker@apptitudemedia.co.uk

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PPA Publishing Innovator of the Year 2013

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