BRIAN STEPTOE FRPS INTRODUCES THE RPS PHOTOBOOK EXHIBITION
TAMSIN GREEN ARPS A BOOK MAKING JOURNEY
CAPITAL INTEREST MAY 2016 / VOLUME 2 / NUMBER 5 / WW.RPS.ORG
“It’s important to break boundaries.” Jillian Edelstein Hon FRPS, photographer of stars like Hayley Atwell, on how she operates in different fields
MAY 2016
IN THIS ISSUE Page 2
May weather, Paul Strand, Breathing London
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RPS Photobook Open International Competition 2016 – Brian Steptoe FRPS tells you all you need to know
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Tamsin Green ARPS recounts her photobook making journey
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Reviews: Tulip by Celine Marchbank; Otherworlds: Visions of our Solar System at the NHM
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The London interview: Jillian Edelstein Hon FRPS
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Mike Chopra-Gant ARPS about cropping
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Dave’s Diary: Reviewing the Past
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Useful links
RPS LONDON NEWS
The merry month of May has arrived and I am positive that from now on the weather will improve and we will see a lot more street life in the capital and elsewhere. Other people’s outdoor antics are always a great photo opportunity: Go & capture!
Britta Giersche Capital Interest Editor Image © Barry Hoffman LRPS
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PAUL STRAND A DATE FOR YOUR DIARY To accompany the Paul Strand retrospective at the V&A Museum, the RPS has organised an exclusive one hour talk by Martin Barnes, Senior Curator at the V&A on 17 June 2016, at 18:00. This is a great opportunity to learn more about the master photographer and his world-famous images. The event is open to RPS members and non-members. To book please follow this link. Image: Young Boy, Gondeville, Charente, France © Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation
BREATHING LONDON UPDATE The Breathing London Project is really taking off now and people are making fabulous contributions. Judy Hicks was privileged to attend a talk by David Noton at the Travel Group Spring Meeting. She says: ‘David is doing a project in the UK for a change and produced a series of four pictures of the same tree taken from exactly the same spot in each of the four seasons. That might be something that one or two of you might find interesting/challenging to do!’ There is lots of information on site under FAQ’s and on the FB pages setting out “What’s In” and “What’s Not” and you can always e-mail greenlondon@rps.org for advice.
Image © Wendy Nowak, the winner of the March Competition “Green Shoots”. Breathing London judge Robert Canis: “I was drawn by the delicate green shoots amid the tangle of twigs set against the dark background”
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CAPITAL INTEREST SPECIAL
THE RPS PHOTOBOOK EXHIBITION2016 With plenty of time to still enter the RPS photobook competition, Brian Steptoe FRPS, lead organiser of the exhibition, discusses the phenomenon, gives details about the project and invaluable advice to would-be-photobook-publishers. 4
‘I have decided books are my medium; you can go back and reread them and see something new every time. I must have looked at Walker Evans ‘American Photographs’ over 500 times and I still see something new each time ... Lee Friedlander, April 2014
Once you enter the world of the photobook, you become suddenly aware of how popular they are. The Offprint photobook weekend at Tate Modern in May 2015 had around 150 book sales tables, plus activities organised by SPBH (Self Publish, Be Happy). The attendee age group was notable for the majority being under 40. The digital era, with possibilities of creation of print-on-demand and short print runs has put photobook creation into the hands of the photographers themselves. The three volume Martin Parr & Gerry Badger books on photobooks published since 2004 have raised
awareness and interest and attracted collectors to photobooks. Open international photobook exhibitions have been held annually since about 2007, including in Arles and Paris, in Kassel in Germany, in Vienna and Los Angeles. In the last two years these were joined by exhibitions in Norway, Latvia, Sicily and Guatemala. Between them, these have established the benchmarks for the selection criteria and standards at international levels.
ABOVE Karen Rangeley page spread, RPS photobook winner 2014
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The photobook now looks the most important change in this century in the way in which photographers are choosing to present their work. It was time for the RPS to become engaged and a ‘pilot’ exhibition was held in 2014, limited to Society members and only shown in Fenton House (see catalogue of the short-listed entries and winners). To follow this start, a proposal by my colleague Rod Fry ARPS in early 2015 led to the RPS Council approving an open international photobook exhibition being held in 2016, open to all. Council called for this to be organised by members of the Contemporary Group. The 2016 exhibition Entry numbers to international photobook exhibitions typically range in the several hundreds and these are selected down to a short-list, in a similar way to competitions for fiction books. Winners and runners-up are chosen from these. The RPS pilot was short-listed by RPS members Ray Spence and myself and winners from these were selected by Gerry Badger. Selections for the 2016 exhibition will be made by independent experts: David Campany, curator, writer and tutor at Westminster University, Lucy Kumara
Moore, Director of Claire de Rouen Books, selector for the MACK First Book Award and for the inaugural Jerwood/Photoworks Award in 2015 and Dewi Lewis, established publisher of photographic books. Short-listed photobooks will be exhibited at the Espacio Gallery, London E2, on 18-23 Oct as part of East London Photomonth, in Plymouth on 29-30 Oct and in Bradford on 12 November. There will be a companion print exhibition at the London gallery. Makings of a great photobook So, what makes a great photobook? Firstly it needs a storyline or an overarching concept. Then it needs photography that supports this, good tight editing and sequencing, plus book design and production. A book of a photographer’s favourites, a book that is a ‘self-indulgence’ rather than having interest for a wider readership, will not make it. Another frequent problem can be a lack of editing down, where later images are similar to earlier ones, often the result of a photographer being unable to face removing some of his or her favourites.
ABOVE LEFT Bristol Photobooks sales table view. ABOVE RIGHT Offprint Tate Modern
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ABOVE Magnum workshop, discussing page sequences and spreads; photos supplied for the workshop by David Alan Harvey, Magnum
Other than the need to remove any favourites that unbalance a panel of photographs, the creation of a good photobook is very different from the steps to creation of a successful RPS distinction. How to acquire these differing capabilities? Immersion in activities that focus on the photobook, reading relevant articles and blogs and acquiring examples of winning photobooks led me down this path. A workshop run by Magnum in June 2013, going to talks at Tate Modern and a hands-on photobook exhibition at the Photographer’s Gallery in July 2012 were a good start. And probably the most rapidly useful was attending the annual Bristol Photobook weekends which were first held in 2014. Making a photobook is about creation of a long-lasting object of value and to needs and to have taken a significant time and effort to make it a success. RPS Photobook competition closing date: 31st July 2016
All images Š Brian Steptoe FRPS 7
CAPITAL INTEREST REPORT
Making and remaking a book called Sleeper In 2014, at the RPS’s Contemporary Group’s inaugural photobook competition, Tamsin Green ARPS was given an honorable mention with her book Sleeper. Here she describes how the project evolved.
ABOVE Different Sleeper-Dummies
© Mike Chopra-Grant ARPS
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I have always been an avid consumer of books; on design, art, photography, but I really started looking at photobooks when I was living in Tokyo doing an MA. I spent a lot of time in bookshops, and discovered the work of Japanese photographers, Naoya Hatakeyama, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and the Provoke era photographers. I was studying architecture at the time and would look at their use of light and texture. I also looked closely at the choice of paper and how the books felt, all references at the time for making architectural images and portfolios. When I started taking photographs some time later books were a natural aspiration.
Sleeper was the first body of work that I conceived as such. The project grew out of a love of travel stories. Stories about people making epic journeys. The stories led me to Central Asia, a place I found fascinating at the border between Europe and Asia. For nearly a century, a secret war was fought in the lonely passages and deserts of Central Asia between two of the most powerful nations in history, Victorian Britain and Tsarist Russia. It's a story of high adventure and courageous travellers without maps setting out to discover little known lands controlled by local rulers who were not always welcoming. The prize they were seeking was India. Inspired by these stories a journey of my own began to take shape, one that would take me overground from home in London to Russia, before heading South through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to India. 9
ABOVE Images from Tamsin’s jourrney from London to Russia, through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to India
I knew that the journey would result in a large body of work but I wanted to create something small in size, that was easy to handle and intense to look at. I knew that the sequencing of the photographs would need to be loosely chronological. Working with physical prints for the sequence and creating a digital dummy, the book began to form. I had collected tickets from each leg of the journey, some of which were quite beautiful with their dog ears and stamps. I tried using them in the sequence but it broke the flow of the photographs too much, so instead I started taking elements from them for the design of the book; information, fonts, colour. I printed several physical dummies along the way to see where I was going. When I reached a point where it was communicating my ideas I signed up for my first portfolio review event and was encouraged to submit the book to competitions, one of which was the RPS. Attending a professional practice event I was exposed to many different opinions. I met a book designer and publisher who saw the potential in the dummy, but thought I was using the wrong photographs. We collaborated on a second edit of around 500 prints. When we knew what we were looking for we returned to the full-edit. We sorted them quite quickly into yes, no and maybe piles before working on the sequence by laying out prints on the floor. He helped me to see the potential in images that were quieter, and to give them their space within the sequence. The final edit has 58 photographs broken up into sections by a map. In the middle of this second edit the original dummy was shortlisted for the RPS photobook competition. It was amazing to have this recognition and the competition gave it exposure as well as enabling me to meet other photographers equally interested in books. I'm a real believer in collaborations making work stronger and know that working with someone I respected and trusted fast-tracked the learning process from the initial edit to making a real book. But beyond that he also taught me things about my own image making that are invaluable for the future.
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I printed and hand bound the second dummy for Sleeper and enjoy the tactile quality of the photo rag paper and hand crafted feel. I’m not yet decided on how the book should find its way out into the world, whether as a small edition artist book or as a larger print run. For now I’m focused on creating new work. After completing Sleeper I challenged myself to shoot and create a book in 3 weeks. Inspired by the writing of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, I drove 2800km through the central plains of Mexico before sequencing and self-publishing a zine. I’m now busy on a longer term project which is a very different creative process. It is using photos from my archive, both from the days of architectural studies through to the more recent conscious photograph making. It is still very much work in progress but I’m looking forward to sharing this work soon.
All images © Tamsin Green ARPS 11
THE REVIEW: book
By Britta Giersche
Tulip by Celine Marchbank A few months back, Captital Interest featured Celine Marchbank’s Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for her photobook, Tulip. The photobook has now been published by Dewi Lewis – it is a moving document of the time she had left with her dying mother. In September 2009, Celine Marchbank’s mother, Sue Miles, was diagnosed with lung cancer and a brain tumour. Celine, a documentary photographer fascinated by the small everyday details of life, decided to document the last months they had together. During that time, she photographed the things that made her mother uniquely her, such as the details in her house. There are photographs of artefacts, bric-a-brac and many of flowers: “Her love of flowers was a beautiful part of her personality; the house was always full of them and, as I photographed them, I realised they were symbolic of what was happening – they represented happiness, love, kindness and generosity, but also isolation, decay, and finally death.” Celine Marchbank also documented her mother’s illness and treatment, with images of hospital equipment, medication on the bedside table and her progressively frailer body. These images are not a graphic portrayal of someone dying but rather necessary clues to the book’s underlying narrative; they too quietly record 12
the beauty in the mundane, reflecting Celine Marchbank’s photographic approach, even though the mundane here consists of white hospital sheets. Celine Marchbank waited five years before she was able to share her photobook. In the accompanying text, she expresses doubt that its publication will bring closure. This is all too understandable: in the end, the book is an intensely personal account of a very difficult time in the lives of two people. But despite its sad ending, there is an optimism to the book which is not least represented by the recurring photographs of food. Her sick mother, a former restaurateur, is even shown preparing a hearty terrine of bacon, back fat, chicken livers, calf livers, duck livers and minced lamb – what could be more life-affirming than the care given to putting a good dish together! From what I have learnt about Sue Miles in her daughter’s book, I think she would have liked that.
THE REVIEW: exhibition
By Lynsey Ford
OTHERWORLDS Exhibition Details Dates 15 May 2016 Venue Address Natural HIstory Museum, South Kensington, London Opening Times Sun – Sat 10am–5:50pm Entry Price Adult £9.90, Child and concession £5.40
Man has always had a deep fascination with space, from the great sixties ‘space race’ between the Soviets and the Americans through to Captain Tim Peake’s current six month mission across the hemisphere with The European Space Agency (ESA). So what better time to celebrate the beauty of the cosmos? Artist and Curator Michael Benson’s exhibition Otherworlds, showcases at The Natural History Museum documenting 77 NASA/ESA images taken from space missions. Extracting raw data from space agency material and manipulating these images into vibrant colour, Benson guides us into a monochrome and Technicolor journey across the Solar System in the darkly lit Jerwood Gallery. One can experience a collection of extraordinary geological formations including images of Pluto taken from the New Horizon spacecraft in Summer 2015. Further images from seven successful landers capture the desolate rust red beacon of Mars, and one can also marvel at the splendour of the Sun’s 4.6 billion year old fiery plasma.
Above: Crescent Jupiter & Ganymede 2001 © NASA/JPL/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures, courtesy of Flowers Gallery
The collection benefits from the extensive four year project of the NASA Mangellan Spacecraft, which projected a succession of radar signals through the deep, penetrating atmosphere of Venus. Two of the loveliest images are Moonlight on the Adriatic, a tribute to the glistening view of southern Europe, with the merging of the Italian peninsula into the Mediterranean Sea. Another is Crescent Jupiter and Ganymede, which perfectly encapsulates the mystery of Jupiter’s largest moon, peeking out upon the horizon, formed from water ice. Brian Eno’s original soundtrack of synthesisers blends seamlessly throughout the exhibition, capturing the ethereal quality of the solar system in all its glory. Otherworlds : Visions of our Solar System a fitting legacy to man’s technological endeavour in space exploration, and it is a perfect fusion of art meeting science.
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LONDON INTERVIEW
ABOVE Joyce Mtimkulu, Zwide Port Elizabeth 1997 – an image from Truth And Lies, one of Edelstein’s most challenging projects
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Jillian Edelstein The portrait and documentary photographer explains to Capital Interest’s Peter Parker how alienation, autobiography and authenticity enter into her photography. How do you describe yourself? I’m a portrait and documentary photographer. I come at it from both ends – I started out as a press photographer and did time with both commercial and fashion photographers as studio assistant and darkroom technician
outsider. Finding a camera was like finding the vehicle I needed to make sense of the surreal situation I found myself in. Once I began to operate with a camera, that feeling of isolation eased. It is useful to hold onto that concept of being ‘the outsider’, as a photographer.
What does photography mean to you? To me, ‘framing in the camera neatly defines what I observe around me; it satisfies the endless questioning which necessitates our very small existence, the time and responsibility we share as privileged citizens of the world. Recently I came upon Saul Leiter’s quote - it really resonated with me. He said: “I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities”. I came to photography because I grew up in an environment that made feel alienated. I had a strong sense of feeling like an
What do you want to say with your photographs? Photography is autobiographical. The photography projects I take on, take time; I have to feel passionate about the subject. For me it is your biography – photographs show where you come from and who has inspired, mentored, and influenced you along the way. How do you get what’s in your mind onto the photograph in just the way you want? I see it as a performance. What I bring to and give during the shoot, is what I get back. I act as a director – it is quite subtle. I think it is hard to pre plan.
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ABOVE Campaign: Framing Hope, Burundi-Bujumbura
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ABOVE Personal: left: Gabriel-seagulls, right: Dad’s 80th
What do you think makes a memorable photograph? It’s important to break boundaries. I think a critical voice is vitally important. I’m not easily satisfied. I don’t think memorable photographs come from a formulaic standpoint – they make me want to respond to the atmosphere, the location or the mood of the situation. And of course, they feel authentic. How do you get yourself inspired for a photoshoot? Well, for my Olympic series, I did a lot of research, interviews beforehand and reading of course. Then in the moment you go into a state of intense concentration – I try not to have any distractions. When you are shooting - how much of it is instinct vs planned? It’s very different in the field compared with in the studio. It’s a different way of operating. Do you have any unfulfilled photographic ambitions? Always – there are masses of people I still want to photograph. Icons who would be both a pleasure and a challenge. And of course there are projects to finish… What’s been your most challenging assignment? Truth and Reconciliation – because I knew I had to keep it going – to earn enough financially to keep it going and to not miss anything during the process. Some of the situations I witnessed were profound and confronting at the same time….in challenging situations and environments– Rwanda, Burundi, Kosovo, El Salvador. Especially when you have to appear in the community and depict humanity.
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ABOVE Icons: left: Quentin Crisp, right: Marianne Faithful
What do you think the future looks like for photography and photographers? Well things are a bit of a mess in the world really, socially and politically. So we need to make sense of it and pray that sanity will prevail politically and culturally. Photography means that artistic expression is strengthened – maybe there will be more self expression through photography – protest photography which can drive positive change rather than generic bad taste photography. Is there life outside photography for you? Yes – I enjoy swimming, walking ,film, theatre, gallery visits, and last but by no means least, being with my family.
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All images Š Jillian Edelstein Hon FRPS
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CAPITAL INTEREST EXPERIENCE
KEEP ON or: What CROPPING Elliott Erwitt IN THE Taught Me About the Shot Within the Shot FREE WORLD
By Mike Chopra-Gant ARPS
There is a powerful mythology at work among photographers, particularly those working in Street and Documentary genres. It derives largely from the personal enigma of Henri Cartier-Bresson, especially the well-rehearsed truism that he did not crop his images. Following on from the example set by the charismatic Monsieur Bresson, many contemporary photographers adhere with an almost religious zeal to the belief that an image that has been cropped is somehow inferior, somehow emblematic of the photographer’s inadequacies in framing and composition. For years I believed this myself; even while recognizing how disabling the belief can be, I still felt bad about even minimal cropping of my pictures. What changed this way of thinking for me was this picture by Elliot Erwitt. It is a great image, with a lovely sense of humour and a perfectly balanced composition that tells us a story about the place (there is enough context to decide it is a big American city) and about the relationship between the rather pampered dog and its elegant female owner. It is an image that also speaks eloquently of the skills of the master photographer who created it, particularly the compositional skill necessary to recognise, frame and capture the image. It was a surprise, then, when Magnum released its book of contact sheets, including the contact for this image (below). The final image is heavily cropped from the original, occupying perhaps a fifth of the area of the original 6x6 negative. My initial disappointment at what I saw as a form of photographic trickery was quickly replaced by a sense of liberation from what I now see as the tyranny of the dogma that insists on the “purity” of composition in the viewfinder. As an experienced professional photographer surely one of the reasons Erwitt shot medium format was the potential it offered to crop heavily to obtain the best image while retaining similar resolution to his fellow photographers using 35mm. 20
After all, what matters is the final image. If the image is good enough, nobody cares too much how it was achieved. In the context of modern digital photography, resistance to cropping becomes truly absurd. We shoot with cameras of 20, 36 or even 50mp. Cameras that can produce enormous printed images, notwithstanding that most of them will spend all their time on the web. With high resolution sensors and a requirement for relatively small images, the potential to use the crop as a creative tool is vastly increased. Now, more than ever before, we can see the tripping of the shutter as just one stage in a creative process that extends from the moment we raise the viewfinder to our eye, through the editing and processing that all make an important contribution to the final image. And, at the end of the day, as Erwitt’s example demonstrates, the final image is the only thing that matters.
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ABOVE Today, resizing images is easily done in Adobe Illustrator as this YouTube video demonstrates CLICK PICTURE TO VIEW VIDEO ON YOUTUBE
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DAVE’S DIARY
HISTORY Photographer of old; child of the darkroom; reborn to digital FAVOURITE GENRE Street; people; life around me PHILOSOPHY Always looking; snapper; grab the moment CAMERA Nikon D750 14-120mm; Olympus Stylus 1 A regular column about a photographer’s CAMERA CLUB South London Photographic Society life in London by Dave Harris LRPS LRPS April 2015
REVIEWING THE PAST
In recent weeks, Dave has been dealing with his parents’ family snaps. It got him thinking about his own photographic legacy. Did he start mouse clicking some of it away? There was a really good drama on TV, years ago, with Timothy Spall and Lynsey Duncan. By Stephen Poliakov. ‘Shooting the Past’. Kind of British Photographic History Noir. Looking on Wikipedia, I see that there was a complex, deep plot that either I’ve forgotten, or has passed me by completely (probably the latter). But essentially it deals with a photo library of 10 million prints that are to be disposed of to make way for a new business school. The play questions the value of these images. Eventually a buyer is found and the collection is saved*. Happy ever after.
ABOVE Some of Dave’s parents’ photo albums I’ve been shooting my own past recently, with my brother. My parents have moved to a nursing home, and we had to sell their flat, and get rid of all their possessions.
No problem. A man in a shining white van did the deed, and all we were left with in the corner of the empty flat were over 200 photo albums. Despite my father being an RPS member in his youth, the images are all ‘snaps’. For no-one else but family and friends. No arty stuff. We needed a strategy to handle such a large number of images. Ok, not 10 million, but probably 20,000. Neither my brother nor I wanted to keep them all. We hadn’t looked at them in 30 years, and probably wouldn’t do so in the next 30. 22 22
But there were memories there. Images of relatives and friends from our past that had to be kept. For us, and for the next generation. So we agreed: their holiday snaps bin. Photos of them - bin. Photos of the grandchildren - bin. Photos of people we don’t know who they are - bin. A couple of all family members and friends - keep. Really good photos of them - keep. And any memory stirring images for whatever reason keep. Rules of thumb only, but it gave us a working plan. We sat down (on the floor - all the chairs had gone) and worked through the albums. Not quick. Umpteen methods of holding the images in place. Some had labels with location and date; most just the images. We recognised most of the people from the past. We had a great afternoon, down memory lane. We salvaged about 300 images, which we’ll keep, label, and place in an album or three. For posterity. Or at least the kids. The whole thing got me thinking about how my digital images would be dealt with when my kids go through them in 30 years time. One click of a mouse, and ‘no more’. They certainly won’t want folders and folders of pedestrians on Brick Lane. Will Cheung FRPS touched on this in an article a year or two back. He trawled through his archive and isolated those pictures which he imagined his family would want. And he backed them all up on a single disk, clearly labelled as family images to be kept. All his others, he imagined, would be mouse clicked away. Great advice. I’ll need to do that at some point. In the meantime, it’s back to Brick Lane. ALL IMAGES © DAVE HARRIS LRPS
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USEFUL LINKS
RPS LONDON GROUPS RPS LONDON BLEEDING LONDON BREATHING LONDON LONDON, CINE LONDON, NATURALLY LONDON, STREET LONDON, URBAN FIRST TUESDAY
Have you got a story to tell? Or pictures to show? Have you been on a trip, at a workshop or to a fair? Are you working on a project or preparing an exhibition? Have you met a photographer who your fellow RPS London members should know of or visited an exhibition they should see? We love to hear from you. Get in touch with Capital Interest to share your experience. Click here.
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