RPS Journal July/August 2022

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July / August 2022 Vol 162 / No 4 rps.org

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WOLFGANG TILLMANS HonFRPS

The Journal of The Royal Photographic Society July/August 2022 Vol 162 / No 4 rps.org

Wolfgang Tillmans HonFRPS

The Journal of The Royal Photographic Society

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‘Art was where I could express difference’

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Opening shot KEEP IN TOUCH WITH THE RPS

Contact the editor with your views rpsjournal@thinkpublishing.co.uk

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HOW TO SEE THE WORLD DIFFERENTLY

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Whether you are a photographer or just love photography, it is easy to gravitate towards images that reinforce your view of the world. The challenge is to see life differently and to question assumptions.

It’s the job of a photojournalist to present an accurate account of what they see around them. The power of the image to change minds and alter lives should weigh heavily on their shoulders.

Professor Tara Pixley knows this, not only as a photojournalist, but as a scholar of photography whose work rethinks visual representations of gender, race, class and sexuality in imagemaking. Her insight into visual storytelling from both sides of the camera gives her a valuable perspective.

In her first article for the RPS Journal she explores what impact the racial justice protests of 2020 had on the world of photography. The protests were sparked by the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020.

Pixley asks how the protests were covered by photojournalists in the US, and whether the images that made an impact on traditional and social media platforms were recognised by international photography awards. Her conclusions are startling.

She has selected some of the images by Black photojournalists that reveal the reaction of grassroots communities to the protests. They go beyond simple images of conflict to explore a more complex picture of outrage underpinned by pride and unity. If they make us stop, think and see the world differently, they will have done their work.

Elsewhere in this issue Olivia Arthur, president of Magnum Photos, gives a candid interview as the historic agency marks its 75th anniversary. She has faced major challenges since taking on the role, and acknowledges Magnum has much to do to survive in an ever-changing landscape. “The way to continue to exist is to strengthen what we do and believe in it and stand by it,” she says.

We hope you enjoy this issue – and have a summer full of great photography.

KATHLEEN MORGAN Editor

‘A man carries the Pan-African flag at the Juneteenth festival, Leimert Park, Los Angeles’, 2020, by Tara Pixley

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Known for powerful images of a formidable and fragile planet, Camille Seaman is just as happy documenting the Native American community. The TED senior fellow shares the pictures that make her most proud

With the world of image-making more democratic than ever, eight students graduating from photography courses across the globe share their hopes, fears and dreams

BEST SHOTS

GRADUATES

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As the illustrious photo agency marks its 75th anniversary its president, Olivia Arthur, speaks candidly about the challenges it faces – and the drive to be diverse, relevant and engaging

How much did the racial justice protests of summer 2020 influence the world of photography? Not enough, argues academic and photojournalist Professor Tara Pixley

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INGE MORATH / MAGNUM PHOTOS; CAMILLE SEAMAN; GABRIELLA ANGOTTI-JONES; PETYA BARTOSCH

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DISTINCTIONS

Two Associate successes – Honey J Walker ARPS and Damian Morris ARPS – share work from their submissions in the landscape and documentary genres, and their contrasting journeys to achievement

Cover story WOLFGANG TILLMANS

The RPS Honorary Fellow, renowned for his multidisciplinary work, is being celebrated with a MoMA retrospective.

The show’s curator explains the secret of Tillmans’ success

JIMMI HO; HONEY WALKER ARPS; WILLIAM TILLMANS HonFRPS

384 414 BURSARY

Hong Kong faces an identity crisis as it increasingly loses its autonomy to China.

Jimmi Ho, recipient of the MPB/RPS Postgraduate Bursary, explores how Hong Kongers at home and in the UK have been affected JULY / AUGUST 2022

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THE ROYAL PHOTOGRAPHIC SOCIETY RPS House, 337 Paintworks, Arnos Vale, Bristol BS4 3AR, UK rps.org frontofhouse@rps.org +44 (0)117 316 4450 Incorporated by Royal Charter

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Patron HRH The Duchess of Cambridge

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President and Chair of Trustees Simon Hill HonFRPS

Editor Kathleen Morgan rpsjournal@thinkpublishing.co.uk 0141 375 0509

Honorary Treasurer Tony Cearns

Contributing Editor Rachel Segal Hamilton

Trustees Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, Nicola Bolton ARPS, Gavin Bowyer ARPS, Sebah Chaudhry, Sarah J Dow ARPS, Andy Golding ASICI FRPS, Mathew Lodge LRPS, Mervyn Mitchell ARPS, Dr Peter Walmsley LRPS

Art Director John Pender Managing Editor Andrew Littlefield Deputy Editor Ciaran Sneddon

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Chief Executive Officer Evan Dawson

Advertising Sales Elizabeth Courtney elizabeth.courtney@thinkpublishing.co.uk 0203 771 7208

Directors Development: Tracy Marshall-Grant Finance and HR: Nikki McCoy Programmes: Dr Michael Pritchard FRPS

Client Engagement Director Rachel Walder

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Published on behalf of The Royal Photographic Society

by Think, 20 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JW thinkpublishing.co.uk

Circulation 10,604 (Jan-Dec 2020) ABC ISSN: 1468-8670

The Journal of The Royal Photographic Society

July / August 2022

Vol 162 / No 4

© 2022 The Royal Photographic Society. All rights reserved.

The ‘RPS’ logo is a registered and protected trademark.

Every reasonable endeavour has been made to find and contact the copyright owners of the works included in this publication. However, if you believe a copyright work has been included without your permission, please contact the publisher. Views of contributors and advertisers do not necessarily reflect the policies of The Royal Photographic Society or those of the publisher. All material correct at time of going to press.

CONTRIBUTORS

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Teddy Jamieson (page 362)

Roxana Marcoci (page 384)

Tara Pixley (page 392)

An award-winning journalist based in Scotland, Teddy Jamieson was born in Germany and raised in Northern Ireland. He is the author of Whose Side Are You On? (Yellow Jersey).

Roxana Marcoci is The David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

She is curator of Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear.

A documentary photographer and scholar of visual journalism, LA-based Professor Tara Pixley is interested in gender, race, class and sexuality in image-making.

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Eruption of the Fagradalsfjall volcano

BY PAOLO PELLEGRIN

This powerful image by Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin is part of an inaugural exhibition commissioned to celebrate the launch of a gallery devoted entirely to photography.

The Gallerie d’Italia – Turin opened in May 2022 with two exhibitions, one presenting new global photography and the other locally sourced archival imagery.

Pellegrin’s The Fragile Wonder: A Journey Into Changing Nature considers the elements of earth, water, air and fire, and their house of cards relationship with climate change.

In the second exhibition, From War to the Moon: 1945-1969, visitors can directly interact with images taken from the depths of the Intesa Sanpaolo banking group’s public archive.

Discover more work by Pellegrin as he selects his ‘Best shots’ in the next issue of the RPS Journal.

The Fragile Wonder: A Journey Into Changing Nature by Paolo Pellegrin is at Gallerie d’Italia – Turin until 4 September magnumphotos.com/ photographer/paolo-pellegrin JULY / AUGUST 2022

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COMMONWEALTH GAMES IN THE PICTURE

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THE BEAUTY OF BIRD PHOTOGRAPHY

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FIVE QUESTIONS WITH BIEKE DEPOORTER

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FOOD FOR THE SOUL

From a Kashmiri culinary paradise to a delightful fusion of teapot and flowers, indulge in the Pink Lady® Food Photographer of the Year 2022 KEBABIYANA

by Debdatta Chakraborty, India “Khayam Chowk is an alleyway in Srinagar, which is no different from any other street during the day, but in the evening numerous charcoal ovens are lit by vendors, and the aroma and smoke of wazwan kebabs turn this street into a food-lover’s paradise.”

Take a stroll down Khayam Chowk by day and it is much like any other alleyway in Srinagar, within the Kashmir Valley of India. By night, however, the place is transformed as charcoal ovens are lit and a culinary paradise emerges.

Debdatta Chakroborty captures the essence of Khayam Chowk perfectly in his portrait of a Kashmiri street food chef. The image earned him the title Pink Lady® Food Photographer of the Year 2022.

“The indulgent Kashmiri wazwan is the culinary tradition of the valley, often referred to as ‘Heaven on Earth’,” says Chakroborty. “Traditionally wazwan is a celebratory feast fastidiously prepared by the master chef or ustaad (waza) to herald the beginning of the life of a wedded couple. A cuisine that is reverent in its meat (wan) preparations elevates its local produce and draws from the sublime weather of the valley.”

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BIRD PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR

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Besides the title of Bird Photographer of the Year, the winner of this contest receives £5,000. Entries are accepted from 9 September to 11 December.

Categories include Best Portrait and Birds in Flight.

There’s also a free-to-enter award for under 18s. birdpoty.com

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IAN PARRY SCHOLARSHIP

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This mentorship programme for photojournalists, supported

by Canon, has Sir Don McCullin HonFRPS as its patron. Those selected will receive £3,500 funding, opportunities to participate in Visa Pour l’Image, portfolio reviews and coverage in the Sunday Times. Closing on 15 July. ianparry.org/scholarship

FOOD AFTER WORK

by Faisal Azim, Bangladesah “Brick factory workers in a dusty, unhealthy environment. They get a short break to eat food brought from home in the dusty environment before starting work again. For a full day in this place they earn very a small wage.”

TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR

You have until 25 October to apply for the leading competition for travel photographers, sponsored by the RPS. Selector Eamonn McCabe HonFRPS advises: “The best [travel photographs] make me want to go there.” tpoty.com

‘The Art of motion’ by Nicolas Reusens, recipient of Silver in the Birds in Flight category, Bird Photographer of the Year 2021

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POT OF TEA

by Kim Bainbridge, United Kingdom “A glass teapot with a tea flower blooming in it. The hardest part was to catch the light so only the outline is visible.”

Caroline Kenyon, director and founder of the competition, which has been running for two decades, praised Chakroborty’s picture for its “beautifully captured billowing embrace of the smoke, the golden light, the subject’s expression as he prepares the food.”

UK photographer Kim Bainbridge was named Student Food Photographer of the Year for her picture, ‘Pot of tea’.

Elsewhere in the competition, images celebrated the fantastically multifaceted nature of food as a social experience

and cultural phenomenon, showing individuals from around the globe harvesting, preparing and eating food in different ways. Meanwhile, immaculate still lifes and close-ups of pumpkins or fish scales focus on the details of dishes.

The work by 2022 finalists and winners will be exhibited at RPS House, Bristol, from 19 November to 12 December. pinkladyfoodphotographer oftheyear.com

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Express yourself The RPS is collaborating with Action for Children to give the UK’s 800,000 young carers an opportunity to showcase their experiences using photography

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Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky HonFRPS has received an ‘Outstanding Contribution to Photography’ at the 2022 Sony World Photography Awards. This is in recognition of his work across four decades exploring the changing relationship between humankind and planet Earth.

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worldphoto.org/outstandingcontribution-photography

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A LIFE IN FOCUS

JO BRADFORD; REBECCA FAITH PHOTOGRAPHY

Young carers with an interest in photography are being given the opportunity to express themselves The RPS has launched a nationwide initiative in partnership with the charity Action for Children that will offer photographic opportunities to young carers.

At the heart of the project are online workshops led by photographer Jo Bradford, who will encourage participants to express their thoughts and emotions using any sort of camera – from a webcam to a smartphone.

There will also be a series of video interviews with photographic artists.

Selected entries will later feature in a nationwide exhibition, Young Carers: A Life in Focus.

Evan Dawson, CEO of the RPS, says: “In last year’s members’ survey you told us you’d like the RPS to do more for disadvantaged groups. Using a grant from Arts Council England and other donations

we created a project to support young carers to make meaningful photographs. Led by our Engagement Officer Elise Wootten, we are offering photography workshops for young people with caring responsibilities.

Some of these people have very challenging lives, so it’s difficult for them to find time for themselves.

“We aim to teach them new skills, providing a creative outlet that boosts their wellbeing, and build a collection of images that ref lects the hidden lives of Britain’s incredible young carers.”

An estimated 800,000 children and young people across the UK care for a family member with a disability, illness or mental health issue. rps.org/lifeinfocus

American photographer Deana Lawson received the 2022 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for her exhibition Centropy at Kunsthalle Basel in 2020. Lawson creates staged portraiture which, said the judges, “reframes and reclaims the Black experience”. thephotographersgallery.org.uk

NICE SHOT

Enjoy a cuppa with your photography, as Nice Shot cafe opens its doors in the transformed reception of RPS House. Members receive discounted prices.

Watch out, too, for an area devoted to photobooks, including titles from the Photobook Club Collective, and curated work from the Distinctions and Bursary programmes. All the inspiration you need.

Try Nice Shot at RPS House

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Discover some top photography as Birmingham hosts the Commonwealth Games

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This summer all eyes are on Birmingham for the 2022 Commonwealth Games, which will run from 28 July to 8 August.

There is plenty to discover about the UK’s second largest city – the birthplace of Balti curry and heavy metal music – which has more canals than Venice and the youngest population of any major urban centre in Europe.

Birmingham has also played an important role in the history of photography. In the 19th century George Shaw – who is thought to have made England’s first daguerreotype in 1839 – was pivotal in developing and promoting the new medium.

In the 20th and 21st centuries the late Pete James FRPS, recipient of the 2009 RPS Colin

Ford Award, curated an extensive collection of photography at the Library of Birmingham.

Today this legacy continues: the Birmingham 2022 Festival, the cultural programme accompanying the games, includes a wealth of photography projects. Here are just three of the highlights. birmingham2022.com/festival

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Right FACES OF 2022 “I hope my photographs can inspire South Asians in Britain to pursue photography and express stories that are untold and underrepresented,” artist Maryam Wahid told the RPS Journal in May 2020.

Commissioned by GRAIN and working in collaboration with the Black Arts Forum and the people of Perry Barr, the area where many of the sporting events are taking place, Wahid has been creating portraits and collating stories. These will go on show publicly during the games in July and August. grainphotographyhub.co.uk/portfoliotype/faces-of-2022 maryamwahid.com

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Left PEOPLE, PLACE AND SPORT “Initially I was looking at it from the physical element of sports and exercise,” says photographer Jaskirt Boora. “But once I got talking to people I realised it’s so much more than that.” In partnership with arts organisation Multistory, Boora made portraits of boxers, cyclists, swimmers and others that evoke the significance of sport to individuals and communities. Throughout July and August her pictures will be displayed at Sandwell Valley Country Park and at exhibitions in eight venues around the city. multistory.org.uk/project/people-placeand-sport jaskirtboora.com

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Left GENERATIONS Julian Germain has been photographing four- and five-generation families from across Birmingham and the Black Country, and inviting them to share images from their albums. “The images reflect upon time itself … via their detailed representation of direct lines of genetic descent,” he says. “It’s an ongoing discussion about the life cycle, the ageing process, human biology and characteristics.

What do we inherit through our genes and what comes from our culture, our upbringing and the surroundings, which form an essential backdrop to each group portrait?”

The pictures will be shown on posters and billboards in Birmingham and Sandwell, and on the main concourse of Birmingham New Street Station. Generations is accompanied by a vernacular project that invites everyone to share their favourite family photos, as well as a professional development programme for emerging photographers. grainphotographyhub.co.uk/generations juliangermain.com

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From the series Time Don’t Run Here by Liz Johnson Artur ART CLIENT

Liz Johnson Artur PHOTOGRAPHER

Inaugural editions in the new Tate Photography publication series focus on ‘community and solidarity’.

The first is from RussianGhanian London photographer Artur, presenting images of Black Lives Matter protests. shop.tate.org.uk/books/ tate-photography-series 350

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‘Hair majesty’ by Trevor Stuurman, on show at the Doyle Wham Gallery

Imme DattenbergDoyle and Sofia Carreira-Wham CURATORS

Doyle Wham have opened London’s first gallery dedicated to African photography, including work

by Trevor Stuurman, Yanis Davy Guibinga, Morgan Otagburuagu and Angèle Etoundi Essamba. doylewham.com

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‘Dam once beating heart’

by Calvin Chow

Calvin Chow

Colin Wilkinson

PHOTOGRAPHER AND DIRECTOR

PUBLISHER

After winning the WaterAid Climate Commission, run in partnership with British Journal of Photography, Singaporean photographer Chow spent 16 days living on a boat in order to document the ongoing water crisis in Cambodia’s Tonlé Sap lake. wateraid.org calvinchowphoto.com

Colin Wilkinson, owner of Liverpool-based Bluecoat Press, has been recognised

by Amateur Photographer magazine with the Chris Cheesman Award for outstanding contribution to photography. Bluecoat is known for its documentary and photojournalism titles. bluecoatpress.co.uk

PORTRAIT OF DOYLE WHAM BY MICHAEL WALTER

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FIVE HEAD TURNERS TO WATCH

Head turners, 1 From Small Town Inertia by J A Mortram, a collection published by Bluecoat Press

Paul Mitchell FRPS LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHER

Paul Mitchell received a Gold Medal in the 2022 Royal Horticultural Botanical Art and Photography Show for Portraits of Time, his portfolio of woodland scenes. Christine Adams ARPS achieved Gold for The Perpetual Cycle of Life That Includes Death. paulmitchellphotography. co.uk rhs.org.uk

‘Floating pennies’ from Portraits of Time by Paul Mitchell FRPS

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What to see

Catch a selection of the best UK exhibitions

THIS IS NOT A MOMENT BY KHALI ACKFORD SUBS

RPS House, Bristol Until 18 September

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KHALI ACKFORD; JAMES RAVILIOUS / BEAFORD ARCHIVE; STEFANO UNTERTHINER / WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR; MARK NEVILLE; LEBOHANG KGANYE

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The first solo show by documentary photographer Khali Ackford is staged by the RPS and Martin Parr Foundation in a new open-air exhibition space at Paintworks, Bristol. This is Not a Moment focuses on events in Bristol following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

Ackford’s wider work explores heritage and identity, and celebrates his Jamaican roots. rps.org/khali

From This is Not a Moment by Khali Ackford

WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR National Museum Cardiff Until 29 August

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LEBOHANG KGANYE: ‘DIPINA TSA KGANYA’ – LEAVE THE LIGHT WHEN YOU LEAVE FOR GOOD The Georgian House Museum, Bristol Until 31 December

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Awarded the 2022 Foam Paul Huf Award, the work of South African artist Lebohang Kganye is rooted in photography but also draws on sculpture, film and performance. This new installation is part of Bristol Photo Festival. bristolmuseums.org.uk/ georgian-housemuseum

MARK NEVILLE: UKRAINE IN FOCUS The Victoria and Albert Museum, London Until 29 August

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British documentarist Mark Neville started photographing in Ukraine in 2015, relocating to Kyiv in 2020. Ukraine in Focus shows the country as it was prior to the 2022 Russian invasion, with holidaymakers in Odesa, a children’s choir. Such scenes of everyday life seem so poignant now that millions of Ukranians have been displaced from their homes. vam.ac.uk

The 100 images on display here were chosen from 49,000 entries depicting many of the remarkable creatures with whom we share our world. At a time when the climate emergency is more pressing than ever, the competition showcases images that inspire wonder and an appreciation for nature. museum.wales/cardiff

PHOTO|FROME FESTIVAL Various venues, Frome Until 15 July

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Somerset’s new festival, themed around ‘The Independent Eye’, features photographic endeavour from local and international contributors. The exhibitions are free and include images of 1970s Devon by James Ravilious and music photography by Danny North, plus talks, photo walks, workshops and portfolio reviews. photofrome.org

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DANCING WITH MY CAMERA Dayanita Singh Hatje Cantz (£40)

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For many photographers a camera is a tool, but for Dayanita Singh it is more like an extension of her body. Held at waist height, her Hasselblad moves as she moves. Yet as Singh puts it, “photography is just the starting point”.

Ever since Singh started out in the 1980s – drawn to photography for the freedom it offered her from societal expectations of women at that time – the Indian-born artist has built up an extensive archive of black-and-white

pictures of people and places. These she uses to create concertina-like photo books, tiny museums and larger installations.

Singh, who this year became the first artist of South Asian heritage to win the prestigious Hasselblad Award, treats photographs as the raw material from which she can fashion artistic objects and experiences.

Today, we often talk about ‘expanded photography’ as though it’s something new,

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THE MINDFUL PHOTOGRAPHER

Above ‘Mona montage’, 2021

but Singh has been working in this way for decades.

This monograph accompanies a major new retrospective of her work at Gropius Bau in Germany.

As the gallery’s director Stephanie Rosenthal writes in the book’s foreword: “Singh’s universe exists beyond fixity.

It is not singular, but ever moving, looping, folding back into itself; time, space and geography become connected; images interweave and interrelate in a process of revisiting, reshaping, dancing.”

Rachel Segal Hamilton

LOVE BITES

Left ‘Let’s see’, 2021

Tim Richmond Loose Joints Publishing (£43)

ODESA

Sophie Howarth Thames and Hudson (£14.99)

This guidebook-style volume by School of Life co-founder and writer Sophie Howarth invites readers to explore the meditative aspects of taking pictures – a pursuit that places photographers very much in the moment. Images by Saul Leiter, Rinko Kawauchi HonFRPS, Sally Mann HonFRPS and others are presented as inspiration, alongside quotes, stories and anecdotes.

At 23 miles, the Bristol Channel has the world’s longest coastal mudflats.

Documentary photographer Tim Richmond travelled their length with his camera. His work reflects the frustrations of those living in this patch of south west England, while paying tribute to the mystery of the place with images that, thanks to their cinematic style, transcend pure observation.

Since the unprovoked invasion by Russia, Ukraine has rarely been out of the news. Kyiv-born Yelena Yemchuk made this series about 16 and 17 year olds at a military academy in Odesa in 2015, continuing the project for four years in order to capture the mystery of a city that felt to her like a “secret place”. The charity Monstrov in Odesa will receive 20% of the book’s proceeds.

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Yelena Yemchuk GOST (£45)

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‘Egyptian tortoise’ from Extinction CLIENT

My place Marc Schlossman

FIELD MUSEUM OF CHICAGO

An adolescent fascination with a natural history museum in Chicago has evolved into a lifelong passion for Marc Schlossman As a teenager, photographer Marc Schlossman volunteered to work in the mammals collection of the Field Museum of Chicago.

“One summer all I did was label mink skulls with consecutive numbers,” he remembers. “The museum has one of the four biggest natural history collections in the world, and it feels as though its corridors full of cabinets and drawers are endless. You can really feel history in the buildings.”

Years later, in 2008, he would again immerse himself in this unique place, photographing zoological and botanical

specimens of threatened and extinct species for the project Extinction, now published as a book.

Extinction explores humanity’s “changing relationship with the natural world and the drivers of biodiversity loss”, Schlossman explains.

“It is a photography book in which the images lead the reader to the history of each species in the text, the reasons for their decline and stories of conservation successes. We highlight many non-charismatic, lesser-known species to point out that every species in an ecosystem is important.”

Of the 82 specimens he documented he was most captivated by the Egyptian tortoise and the tiny cinnamon screech owl, complete with handwritten labels detailing how and where it was found in the Peruvian Andes.

“We find ourselves stewards of life on Earth yet we are dependent on the health of all other species and ecosystems,” he says. “The book is an exercise in hope – what other choice do we have?”

Extinction is published by Ammonite Press (£30) ammonitepress.com marcschlossman.com

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LOCATION My balcony in Framingham, Massachusetts, overlooked a car park and, beyond that, a field. The tree in the scene is where my husband and I suspended some bird feeders. We’d enjoy the daily scene of birds and other creatures, such as chipmunks, coming to feed. I realised I had a lovely little project to explore from home, one that ended up turning into my final degree show.

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TIME AND DATE It was June 2003.

This was one of the last images I took for the Sustenance series as I was coming towards the end of photographing for the project through the full cycle of months and seasons of the year.

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EQUIPMENT CHOICE I made the image using a large-format Cambo Master PC 4 x 5 paired with a 90mm lens. I imaged on sheets of Kodak Portra 400 NC film and I probably shot around 200 sheets of film to create the whole series.

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‘Sustenance 114’ by Neeta Madahar

HOW I DID THIS Neeta Madahar reveals how she created the stunning images in her Sustenance series While studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, US, British photographer Neeta Madahar would watch the birds that congregated near her apartment balcony.

One of the images she took of them features two decades later in the book Bird, which showcases the wonderful variety and originality of contemporary bird photography. Here, Madahar explains how she took this charming image.

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INSPIRATIONS Although photographed on film, I wanted to create this and the other images in the series as digital iris prints on Somerset Velvet paper. This enabled me to suggest an affinity with the botanical illustrations made by 19th-century naturalists categorising the fauna and flora they came upon in their travels.

Bird by Gemma Padley is published by Hoxton Mini Press, £16.95 hoxtonminipress.com/ products/bird @neeta_madahar JULY / AUGUST 2022

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COMPOSITION The background scene and camera position were fixed. The composition varied according to changes in light, time of day, the movement of the foliage and the birds that visited. My spare bedroom was essentially a hide, as I had a long cable release from my camera that fed through to the bedroom window directly behind. I’d set up from sunrise and stand by the window with the blinds partially drawn, seeing what creatures came, and dismantle the set-up at sunset.

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Magnum photographer Bieke Depoorter is inspired by chance encounters

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Curiosity and the need to understand myself and other people.

Michael is a man I met on the streets of Portland.

After he gave me three suitcases full of books, collages and more, he disappeared.

On the cover of one book is an image of Mount Hood. I’d love to make it to the summit.

What motivates you to keep making photographs?

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What’s been the toughest moment behind the lens?

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Working on Agata, a collaboration with Agata Kay that’s currently on show at C/O Berlin along with another project, Michael. I felt at times that Agata was performing for the camera. There was this situation where she let an older man in Beirut kiss her breasts, for example. It confused me.

I wasn’t sure if she was doing it because she was being looked at. I started to question my role.

Where would you most like to be photographing now?

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Which image makes you most proud?

Working on Michael. I use photography as a tool, almost like a detective, and I’ve found that an exciting way of working.

It’s not about taking the ‘best’ image, but about what you can do with photography. There’s a certain freedom in that.

‘Agata, Paris, France, November 2, 2017’

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What’s next for you?

I have another book out later this year called Carte Mémoire about the power and fragility of memories, how we trust their accuracy and

grapple with the possibility of forgetting. With astronomy as a backdrop I explore the elusiveness of ‘truth’, not just in memories, but also in dreams, photographs and science.

“It confused me. I wasn’t sure if she was doing it because she was being looked at”

‘Agata, Paris, France, November 2, 2017’

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From the series The Divine Feminine by Petya Bartosch

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“It’s not a very glamorous record maybe, but holding things together is an important role”

“Prioritising visuals of violence, fire and conflict are still a central part of photo competition values”

TARA PIXLEY

OLIVIA ARTHUR

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“They didn’t realise how powerful it was to have a camera when you’re an angry teenager in New York City”

“The difference was shocking: on one side of the border there were so many freedoms and on the other hardly any”

CAMILLE SEAMAN

JIMMI HO

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“Tillmans organises the wall as though it were a page layout and makes full use of the architecture of the room”

“The ultimate reward is seeing the images finally go into print and to know the vision in my head has been realised”

WOLFGANG TILLMANS HonFRPS

HONEY J WALKER ARPS

“I wanted to show the elegance of womanhood like a goddess” PETYA BARTOSCH

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‘WE HAVE BEEN CLOSE TO FALLING APART. IT’S A FRAGILE THING’

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As Magnum Photos marks its 75th anniversary, its president Olivia Arthur talks candidly about steering the illustrious agency through challenging times while looking to a more diverse future WORDS: TEDDY JAMIESON

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“I think it probably helps to go back a little bit and think of how it started,” Olivia Arthur begins. “A small group of photographers got together to protect themselves and their photography and their rights, and realised that they could be stronger together.”

This is the story of the origin of Magnum Photos as retold three-quarters of a century later. It is 2022 and Arthur, president of the world’s best-known photographic agency, is reflecting on how it was founded 75 years ago this year. And how it has changed in the interim. In short, how a collective of argumentative photographers forged a reputation and a business that has lasted and evolved into the 21st century.

Arthur has been president of Magnum since June 2020. She has presided over a turbulent, indeed controversial, period of the agency’s history that has seen its reputation take a hit.

But now, in its anniversary year, Magnum remains a talismanic agency. The name itself is a byword for the best in documentary photography. Set up by five photographers – Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert (who quickly dropped out) – as well as Rita Vandivert and Maria Eisner. Magnum photographers have been present at many of the turning points in history over the last 75 years: the Cuban revolution, the Vietnam War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. In short, no agency has a more storied history.

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Magnum 75, 1 Magnum president Olivia Arthur photographed by Bieke Depoorter/Magnum Photos

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But where does the agency stand in the 21st century as the media landscape adjusts to the new reality of social media, cameras in our phones and online fragmentation of traditional media outlets?

Arthur is in as good a position as any to answer that. Born in 1980 and based in London, she began working as a photographer in 2003 and has been published in The New Yorker, Vogue and TIME. She became a full member of Magnum in 2013 and was elected to the position of president in June 2020, right in the middle of the first wave of the pandemic.

“For any documentary photographer Magnum is something that we all look to,” she says.

“And I’d like to think it remains so.”

So what is Magnum? There’s an idea of the agency that we might call the Robert Capa narrative. Capa, who was in the thick of the fighting during the Spanish Civil War and who landed with the Allied troops on Omaha Beach during D-Day, was the war photographer who famously claimed: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” In the end he got too close, stepping on a land mine during the first Indochina War and dying at the age of 40.

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Capa’s name – his legend, if you will – has sometimes been lazily mapped onto the Magnum story itself. In this model the agency is primarily associated with war and disaster, dictators and revolution.

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‘Brooklyn, New York, USA, September 11, 2001’ by Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos

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‘Romania, 1968’ by Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos

That was never the whole story. The quietness and intimacy of Henri Cartier-Bresson has been as much a model to Magnum photographers as Capa. Arthur’s own work can be located in this strand of the agency’s story.

In projects such as Jeddah Diary or her work with young Muslim women in Cairo, she has investigated issues of identity and the space between public and private.

Typical of Magnum, her work is not about the single image, but about a body of work and what can (and cannot) be represented in an image. “The one rule I set for myself is if you know exactly what pictures you are going to take, then maybe there is no point,” she says.

“There needs to be an element of discovery.”

And ethical issues are just as central to the work Arthur does as they are in war photography. She says, “I have photographed people that I have made friends with and have a relationship with, and I’ve found myself in a situation – I think all photographers have – of trying to understand where those barriers are. At what point does the friend end and the photographer start? Do they have to be differentiated?”

This seems as good a moment as any to discuss the challenges Magnum – and Arthur – has faced over the

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last couple of years. Almost as soon as Arthur became its president, the agency was hit by two connected controversies that threatened to derail it.

Back in 2011 the agency had taken the decision to open up its archive to the public by making it available online. In the summer of 2020, not long after Arthur had been elected, it faced accusations that the archive contained photographs that might involve the sexual exploitation of minors. This was in relation to images taken more than 30 years ago of sex workers in Thailand

by Magnum member David Alan Harvey. Shortly after, Harvey was suspended by Magnum when allegations emerged that he had been accused of harassment of a female colleague.

Then in December 2020 the Columbia Journalism Review reported that it had spoken to 11 women who accused Harvey of sexual harassment and abusive behaviour. Harvey resigned from Magnum in March 2021 following a vote by the agency’s board to permanently remove him.

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The agency came in for severe criticism as a result and some of it was directed at Arthur. How does she feel the agency dealt with the controversy?

“I think there was a moment – and it’s not finished yet – in photography ethics that forced everybody to reflect a little bit and forced us to look harder at some of these things. They were important conversations. It was good for us to do that.

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“There was a moment – and it’s not finished yet – in photography ethics that forced everybody to reflect a little bit ... They were important conversations”

‘Kunar Province, Afghanistan, March 2010’ by Moises Saman/Magnum Photos

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‘Moscow, USSR, 1947’ by Robert Capa/International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos

“The way that it was done I would question. The way my name was brought into it, I would suggest, was unnecessary and maybe came about because I’m a woman. I can say that. I would not have been talked to in the way that I was if I was not a woman. If you change my name for one of the older male photographers who had been president in the previous period, I don’t think it would have been done in the same way.”

Arthur was clearly bruised by the experience.

“My name was put into it very publicly. The call to Magnum to address some of the images in the archive were made in the form of open letters to me questioning my ethics. I was somehow put on the spot for things that had been going on in the agency throughout its history.

“And I’m not questioning this was an important moment for us to think about this because it was, and it is, and it is ongoing.”

Magnum undertook a review of its entire archive, some 800,000 images and counting, a task that caused, quite rightly, much self-reflection at the agency, Arthur says.

“We’ve had to think about the way we were sharing images. If I’m really honest about it, no large debate had taken place inside Magnum about whether the archive should be made public online. It was just made public.”

So, has Magnum learned lessons?

“I think we learned a lot. But I really emphasise the fact that this is not done. I think the conversation has probably not evolved as far as it will evolve in terms of where we go with photography and what the rights of subjects are as we move forwards. I think there is a lot more to be done there, for sure. And it’s a balance between protecting subjects and protecting JULY / AUGUST 2022

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freedom of speech and the right to make images or share images. There is a lot that remains to be discussed.”

These controversies compromised the agency just as it was attempting to become more genderbalanced and diverse. In Arthur and Caitlin Hughes, it had a female president and CEO, and was beginning to see more and more women becoming members. Not enough, Arthur suggests, but she also points out it takes time for an organisation as large and wellestablished as Magnum to change direction.

“If you look at the next generation, there is more diversity, there are more women. There could be more. If you see us sitting in a room together, we’re a largely male, largely white organisation.”

There are external challenges to deal with too.

With the rise of digital technology, is there still a call for the kind of work Magnum does?

“This is the key question really,” Arthur says.

“As a business we represent photographers for assignments, we have our licensing business.

But we also sell prints. We sell books. We have diversified the business.”

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‘A couple photograph themselves on their mobile phone in front of the Caspian Sea, 2007’ by Olivia Arthur/Magnum Photos

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‘A Llama in Times Square, New York City, USA, 1957’ by Inge Morath/Magnum Photos

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So, what does Arthur see as Magnum’s legacy?

“Since the end of the Second World War, Magnum photographers have both documented world events and delved into the quieter stories that directly and indirectly influence them,” she explains. “The approaches have always been varied and the ways that stories have been related have often been both unusual and iconic.

“Take for example Gilles Peress’s work from the Iranian Revolution where he sought to express the layers and the confusion around the unfolding situation, or Alessandra Sanguinetti’s series of playful portraits of two young girls growing up together in Argentina, which continues until and beyond the moment that they reach adulthood.

There is also Paul Fusco’s series of Bobby Kennedy’s funeral train, where he turns the camera around and show us only the crowds amassed alongside the route of the train. Whether quiet and intimate, dramatic, serious, playful or stark, the photographs made by the photographers of Magnum continue to chronicle the spectrum of life and events across the globe.”

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Magnum, though, remains fundamentally about documentary photography and telling stories. Is there still a marketplace for such work?

“There are not many people who have worked out how to do that,” Arthur says. “It’s a difficult thing. Yes, we can charge for the use of our images online and the decent publications will respect that, but our images are also

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“The way to continue to exist is to strengthen what we do and believe in it and stand by it ... not try to be something we’re not”

‘Playing around, Fryeburg, Maine, USA, 1975’ by Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

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Magnum 75, 5 ‘Ophelias, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2001’ from the series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda by Alessandra Sanguinetti/Magnum Photos

everywhere in all sorts of places for all sorts of reasons without asking. And I think the way to continue to exist is to strengthen what we do and believe in it and stand by it. I think that is really important, and not try to be something that we’re not.”

When she steps down as president of Magnum what legacy will she hope to have left?

“I feel I spent a lot of my time firefighting, but I’d like to think that I have helped us through a really difficult period,” she says. “I think at the end of the day that is all I have done. But we have been close to falling apart. It’s a fragile thing. Magnum famously for 75 years has been on the brink, businesswise. That’s one thing, but it’s also the collective. So, I’d like to think I’ve helped us stay together. It’s not a very glamorous record maybe, but holding things together is an important role.”

Important because the story of Magnum is not just about the past. It’s about the present and the future too.

In other words, this is a story that is not over yet.

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‘I THOUGHT PHOTOGRAPHY WAS SOMETHING OTHER PEOPLE GOT TO DO’

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She is captivated by the power of nature and has charted climate change almost by accident. Camille Seaman selects the images that make her most proud WORDS: GRAEME GREEN IMAGES: CAMILLE SEAMAN

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Icebergs and glaciers, Elephant Island, Antarctica, December 2019 “I love this photo for the perfect pyramid shape in the mid-foreground and the glacier with that little bit of light on Elephant Island. There’s something about the layering of the wave, the blue of the sea, the details of the tiny penguins, the iceberg and the glacier, not to mention that you have the beautiful wisp of low cloud across the tip. It’s one of those moments when you’re making the photo where you’re like, ‘Oh yeah!’”

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“My high school recognised I was at risk, so they put me in an after-school programme where they gave me a camera”

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“I was 32 years old when I decided to become a photographer,” says Camille Seaman. “Even though I’d always been making photographs, I never thought of myself as a photographer or that it was something that was a possibility for me.”

Seaman has made up for any lost time. She has been recognised with a TED senior fellowship and a John S. Knight Journalism fellowship, and her work over the last two decades, focused on big scenes from nature, has appeared in National Geographic, TIME, the New York Times and Newsweek, among other titles.

She puts her late start down to a lack of role models.

“This is where representation matters,” Seaman explains.

“In the States at the time, I couldn’t name a female photographer whose work I knew – it was all men. With publications like National Geographic, I couldn’t think of a single woman from that period. That’s where role models are really important. In my family, it just wasn’t the expectation they had for me either. I thought photography was something other people got to do.”

Born in Long Island in New York State, Seaman started taking pictures when she was a teenager.

“I left home when I was 15 and was sleeping on friends’ couches. My high school recognised I was at risk, so they put me in an after-school programme where they gave me a camera and said: ‘Go out and document your experiences.’

They didn’t realise how powerful it was to have a camera when you’re an angry teenager in New York City. It gave me something constructive and positive to do at a time when I was feeling quite lost.”

Oddly, it’s the terrorist attacks of 2001 that inspired her career. “One of the things that really shifted me towards being a photographer was 9/11,” Seaman says. “I knew those buildings in a unique way because when I left home I worked as a New York City bike messenger – I’d go up all the time to deliver parcels. I was 29 when the World Trade Center fell.

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Stranded polar bear, Lower Savage Islands, Canadian Arctic, August 2008 “I’m about to go back to the Arctic. I haven’t been back to Svalbard in 11 years – I’ve just spent time in the Canadian Arctic. I remember when I took this photo thinking I had no idea bears were such good climbers.

Something about the steep face of the rock and this little bear on it, I thought was telling – that this is the situation for polar bears, that there is no snow. The reality is he will spend months and months on this rocky base looking for birds and things to eat, waiting for the ice to return.”

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A trio of tabular icebergs reflected at sunrise on the solstice, Weddell Sea, Antarctica, December 2021 “This photo is very recent, from this past December in Antarctica, on the solstice. I don’t know if it’s intuition or experience, but I just knew this was going to be the night to stay up until 4am.

Because it was the solstice and because of our position in terms of latitude, the sun set only slightly and then came up less than an hour later, so it never got dark – it was always a sunset or sunrise colour. Then the wind died and it just became super-trippy. You’re not sure what you’re looking at is real.

It’s so dreamlike.”

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Yolanda, near the Cannon Ball River, Standing Rock, October 2016 “Yolanda Blue Horse is a professional Navajo model from Arizona, New Mexico. She came to the protests in Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline. I thought you’re not going to get a much more beautiful protester there than a model. It was a lovely moment. The Cannon Ball river has significance for the tribe. It’s also one of the places that could’ve got polluted by the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Cannon Ball river feeds into the Missouri river. It’s called the Cannon Ball river because it has such a powerful stream that it would roll rocks into balls. You can still find massive stones that are perfect spheres because they were in the Cannon Ball river.”

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“Arctic light is not a postcard idea of what beautiful is. It’s stark and brutal and then you get something sublime”

use the camera to show there’s something beautiful about this life and our planet.”

Determined to leave school, Seaman phoned photographers whose work she admired, including Steve McCurry HonFRPS. “Steve was top of the list,” she says. “I said: ‘I’m curious how you create soulful portraits using available light.’

He said: ‘If you want to know, you have to come to Tibet with me.’ We ended up going to Tibet for four years in a row.”

McCurry wasn’t always an easy mentor, says Seaman, but educations don’t come much better. “He was tough on me. I had all my different cameras and formats, and he was yelling at me, ‘Why are you dragging this stuff around?’ And he’d see me out in horrible blue-sky light and he’d ask: ‘What the hell are you doing in this light?’ I didn’t understand why he was being so hard on me. I asked Alison Wright, who was on the expedition, and she said: ‘Because he thinks you have potential.’ It was Steve who set me the challenge of ‘one fixed lens, one body and one year’. It changed everything.”

Seaman’s work does contain portraits, including We Are Still Here, a series of images of Native Americans, and her reporting from the Standing Rock protests against the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline. She describes We Are Still Here as being the antithesis of Edward Curtis’s early 20th-century photographic work, where tribal people were told what to wear and how to pose.

It’s the call of the wild, though, that has directed most of Seaman’s work, especially pictures of icebergs, glaciers and wildlife from the polar regions.

“When I began it wasn’t like I thought this would be a hot topic,” she says. “I was just curious about these places.

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Supercell thunderstorm in Minnesota, near Browerville, June 2014 “This was a supercell, not a tornado. We normally don’t chase in Minnesota because there are so many trees. Trees mean potential for not seeing what’s coming and potential for being hit by debris.

But here it was open enough and the structure of the cloud with that chartreuse green with sunlight across the bottom.

This was taken as we were driving – we didn’t stop, I took it from the car as we were moving. I just leaned out of the window. Going to the ‘Fame’ High School of Music and Performing Arts as a teenager meant we were required to visit the many museums NYC had to offer weekly.

The light of the baroque paintings, and even earlier work

by Rembrandt and Caravaggio, always inspired me and stayed with me.

When I see that light in any situation I get excited. It’s amazing to me how many people don’t have a sensitivity to that special light.”

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Above Pow Wow dancer, Crow Fair, Montana, August 2016 “This was in the middle of my We Are Still Here project.

I’d been going to Crow Fair since my early 20s.

I’m always mesmerised. I like to walk around just before it gets dark, so you get this twilight, blue light.

I just said: ‘Excuse me, can I make a photo of you?’

This is a specific thing to the Crow people where they have this fringe covering the eyes. They do something called a grass dance, and he’s dressed specifically for that style. I love the blindfold aspect of it, with those soft florals, which are also very Crow Indian.

They’re known for floral beadwork. I just felt he was really wearing it.”

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Opposite page Stranded iceberg, Cape Bird, Antarctica, December 2006 “Having a child and being away during her birthday or Christmas was always difficult. My daughter, even at the age of seven, seemed to realise how important being in Antarctica was for me. She had told me before this trip that I had to go, because it made me happy, and, besides, she said: ‘If you do not go, you will drive us crazy.’ I always tried to be fully present when I was home with her and when I was away I honoured my family’s sacrifice by doing the best work I could. This photo was taken on Christmas Day. I was out in a small Zodiac. The iceberg was caught on the shallow floor of the sea. I love the triangle that gives it stability, but you have three wedges that look like the three sails of a ship that are leaning, so it has stability and instability at the same time.”

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and brutal, and then you get something sublime. Over 20 years, documenting the changes was just a side effect.”

More recently, she has been chasing storms around the US. “The light and colour is epic,” she says. “With storms and big clouds, similar to icebergs, they’re all unique. You’ll never get one that looks or acts the same. You get to witness such incredible power.”

Her interest in nature comes from her roots. “My mother is African-American, descended from slaves, and Italian, and my father is Shinnecock Montaukett, which is a small whaling tribe from the tip of Long Island,” she explains.

“I had a strong connection to my father’s family. We’d go fishing or go out in the woods. It was all about respect – respect the trees, respect the water, respect food, respect clothes. It’s about understanding the interconnectedness of everything. We, as humans, can’t do what we want without consequences to nature. That’s the way I was raised.”

Seaman has more Arctic voyages planned. When we speak she is still living in Ireland, where she has been working on a novel. But she is set to relocate again, this time to Denmark.

“We just bought a house last week,” she says. “My partner is originally from Norway. We looked for something very specific and we found it. It had to be somewhere close to the sea,” she says. “And it had to have good light.” camilleseaman.com

PROFILE

CAMILLE SEAMAN Born in 1969 to a Native American father and African-American mother, Camille Seaman began taking pictures when she was given a camera at school to help channel teenage anger. In 1992 she graduated in photography at the State University of New York, where she studied with Jan Groover and John Cohen. Her work has been published in National Geographic, TIME and the New York Times among other titles. She is a TED senior fellow.

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‘Blue self-portrait shadow’, 2020,

by Wolfgang Tillmans HonFRPS

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WHO IS THE REAL WOLFGANG TILLMANS?

From the gallery wall to magazines, video to sculpture, the RPS Honorary Fellow is renowned for democratising art.

With a major retrospective of his work at MoMA, curator Roxana Marcoci unravels the secrets of his success The potential of the ‘wandering image’ – the migrant, incessantly decentralised image, which moves and performs across communication platforms – has been critical to Wolfgang Tillmans since the beginning of his artistic practice.

The unfettered circulation of images plays an important role in his embrace of mobility, diversity and the variety and mutability of sexual identity in the world. By transmitting, sharing and setting images free, by multiplying their lives, he proposes a fully democratised experience of art.

Such a notion of photography’s potential role is not entirely new. As early as the mid1930s, writer and politician André Malraux praised the medium’s capacity to encompass the globe (a forecast of the digital age). For Malraux, photography offered a way to understand the human condition, enabled cross-cultural analysis, and democratised the experience of art by freeing original objects from their contexts and relocating them ‘closer’ to the viewer. In his 1947 book Le Musée Imaginaire, he advocated for a pancultural ‘museum without walls’, postulating that art

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history has in fact become “the history of that which can be photographed”.

His thesis, forward-thinking as it was, has been challenged recently by scholars who note that Malraux – a player in France’s political sphere in the 1950s and 1960s – indiscriminately brought together works of art from all periods and regions, ruthlessly deracinating them from their history and heritage, and repurposing them in service to the ideological interests of colonialism.

In his practice, Tillmans offers an alternative, even inverse proposition: he links the wandering image to a politics of equality and historical consciousness. The photograph’s

reproducibility, its ubiquity across media, counters the aura attributed to the original – and to the ideals of uniqueness and specificity. Photography actualises art’s potential itinerancy and multiplicity.

Indeed, Tillmans’s work raises a number of questions. Might the mediated image at times be more impactful or enduring than a direct experience of the work? Might it be equally significant, even if different? How to see and how to communicate seeing are at the crux of photography’s capacity to articulate the world in relational terms – decentred, nonhierarchical, open to differences. Making connections between images seen for the first time or images

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Opposite ‘Tukan (toucan)’, 2010 Left ‘The cock (kiss)’, 2002 Above ‘Lüneburg (self)’, 2020

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looked at again in new configurations or across a spectrum of platforms as if for the first time – all this constitutes the evolving knowledge of the visible.

Tillmans has distributed his photographs and ideas across the pages of magazines and books, postcards and newspaper inserts, music videos and records, posters, billboards, nightclubs, architectural contexts and the theatrical stage.

“His various tactics of distribution,” critic Johanna Burton notes, “enable various permeations, recognising that there are multiple kinds of cultural repositories, all with different logics and dimensions.”

Yet each context also invests Tillmans’s peripatetic images with additional meanings. And – paradoxically, but perhaps inevitably – the artist brings light to these meanings through

his attentive engagement with the singular image within each singular installation.

The most often used of his platforms is the gallery installation, but even in a familiar space such as this his unorthodox display strategies defamiliarise viewing habits.

Sidestepping museological conventions of material, scale and subject matter, he organises his installations in relational montages inspired by the aesthetics of cinema and magazine layouts, eschewing a uniformly linear display logic. He activates the images’ latent effects through nonverbal yet resonant associations.

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glossy chromogenic prints fastened with Scotch Magic Tape.

Tillmans organises each part of the wall almost as though it were a page layout and makes full use of the architecture of the room, hanging photographs in a corner, above a doorframe in the vicinity of the exit sign, on a freestanding column, next to a fire extinguisher.

There are also table-based configurations, and crumpled or folded monochrome pictures whose sculptural volumes are encased in acrylic frames. The decisive logic of his practice is the visual democracy he brings to each installation, best summarised by his phrase “If one thing matters, everything matters”.

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Entangled with humanist ideas, Tillmans’s value system revolves around some central questions: What can pictures make visible? What can one know at all? Who deserves attention? How can one connect with other people? How might we foster solidarity? In what do art’s political potential and its ethical worth reside? As he notes: “For me art was the area where I could oppose. Express difference.”

This desire to observe the world with intention is matched by an empirical openness to nontraditional formats and alternative venues. Operating on the basic premise that all motifs and platforms are worth investigating, Tillmans subjects his own photographic vision to perpetual recontextualisation.

Opposite ‘Smokin’ Jo’, 1995 Right ‘Aufsicht (yellow) (view from above [yellow])’, 1999 Above ‘Frank, in the shower’, 2015

This openness to a range of forms and spaces can be seen in his earliest efforts. In February 1988 Tillmans had his first show, at Café Gnosa in Hamburg. There he presented Approaches (1987-88), a group of photocopied triptychs made with a Canon laser photocopier, which he utilised like a stationary camera. His exercises with enlarging xerographic images up to 400% demonstrate his aspiration to expand the limits of materials and techniques used in making works, and are aligned with his near-contemporaneous experiments with mechanically-produced electronic music.

In September 1988 a second exhibition of Tillmans’s work took place, at the Fabrik Fotoforum in Hamburg, where he showed a new selection of Approaches: a sequence of

progressive enlargements of vacation shots and newspaper images, together with photographs of video stills of close-up self-portraits he had made with a portable VHS camera. This body of work was featured again, later in the same year, at the Stadtteilbücherei Remscheid-Lennep.

Tillmans’s intensive observation and engagement with technology can be traced back to his childhood passion for astronomy. His earliest photographs – from 1978, when he was ten years old – were of celestial bodies, captured by holding his father’s camera up to the eyepiece of his first telescope.

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of expression, from writing song lyrics to making clothes to painting and drawing to scientific studies and explorations.

In November 1992 Tillmans presented a large picture printed on fabric, ‘Lutz and Alex sitting in the trees’, at Maureen Paley’s Interim Art stand at the UnFair in Cologne, an event organised by young galleries in a disused factory – an alternative to the city’s official art fair. In the same month, ‘Lutz and Alex’ was published as part of an eight-page photospread titled ‘Like brother like sister’ in i-D – a British magazine covering anti-high fashion, music and youth culture – to which he had recently started contributing.

Two months later, in early 1993, he had his first gallery exhibition, at Daniel Buchholz’s two spaces in Cologne. In the back of an antique bookshop run by Buchholz and his father

Tillmans mounted a completely nonhierarchical installation, interspersing hand-printed chromogenic prints, magazine pages and laser photocopies. Large-scale inkjet prints mounted on fabric were appended directly to the walls in Buchholz’s second space. In the bookshop itself he showed photocopies pegged on clotheslines among the antiquarian prints that were already hanging.

The exhibition also included a display case holding four magazines from different countries, all featuring the same photograph by Tillmans of two men kissing at a EuroPride rally in London, each printed with a slightly different tonality. In the shop window he stuck a grid of techno club pictures from 1991, made in Ghent, London and Frankfurt, which had been published that year in i-D.

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Opposite ‘Freischwimmer 230 (Free swimmer 230)’, 2012 Left ‘Headlight (f)’, 2012 Above ‘Eclipse, self-portrait’, 2017

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The wide ambit of Tillmans’s installations was thus established in his first exhibitions. As artist and curator Julie Ault observes: “Taken together the installations reflect the artist’s parallel tracks of interest in the singular self-sufficient image and in relationships between images and production types.” They also highlight Tillmans’s wide-eyed interest in image networks and the potentials of spatial dynamics. A pioneer of the photographic exhibition itself as spatial medium, he created the conditions with which to communicate his ideas about social and political realities while intensifying visitors’ viewing and sensory experiences.

As we consider the many platforms, media and display strategies Tillmans has engaged to articulate his work, the larger principles of his worldview become clear.

His relationship to reality is, he points out, always “above all, more ethical than technical, or purely aesthetic”.

This is an extract from the chapter ‘The wandering image’

by Roxana Marcoci, in Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear, edited by Roxana Marcoci and published

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A SUMMER OF RECKONING

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It is two years since the murder of George Floyd sparked global racial justice protests. Why were so few Black photojournalists recognised for their work, asks Professor Tara Pixley

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A Black fist is raised defiantly in the air against a backdrop of protesters gathered by the hundreds.

A young Black child rides atop a white horse in a pink cowboy hat, while a poster decreeing ‘Black Lives Matter’ hangs across the horse’s flank. Protesters of all ages and ethnicities hug and hold hands, heads bowed as they pray together in the streets.

These are just a few of the most recognised images of 2020 racial justice protests made by Black photojournalists, their attention specifically attuned to the solidarity work of civil unrest. These photographs, and many others like them, were extensively featured by dozens of mainstream editorial outlets that highlighted Black photographers’ work on the protests during the summer of 2020, including NPR, Wired, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, CNN, the Guardian, People magazine and many more.

Yet, when the 2020 photojournalism awards season premiered its winners, no Black photographers had received the major news photo awards for their work documenting racial justice protests. Instead, World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International (POYi), NPPA Best of Photojournalism (BoP) and the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar had all paid homage to the largest civil rights protest movement in US history by awarding images of the momentous event taken primarily by white photographers.

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From Fire Next Time, a series by Vanessa Charlot that charts the lives of Black residents in St Louis, Missouri, during summer 2020

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An oft-cited goal of the news photo award is to present a culminating review of the year in pictures for the historical record – “connecting the world to the pictures that matter”, as the World Press Photo motto states on the organisation’s website.

The competition selectors I speak with echo the sentiment that every year the photo awards show us something important about the world, about journalism and about photography. The awards are a statement of who is making work in the news photography industry and what kind of work is valued.

Journalism professor and former photojournalist Kyser Lough summarises the main benefit of photo awards, saying they “help recognise excellent photojournalism and show the world what excellent photojournalism looks like. It’s about being able to say this is an important picture and this is why.”

When photo awards opened for entry in winter of 2020, a few – such as POYi and the Atlanta Photojournalism Contest – offered special categories for both Covid coverage and visual reporting on civil unrest. Lough identifies a few different benefits of topical categories such as these. “The value and rationale for these photo awards for specific topics is that they allow you to elevate excellence in that specific coverage,” he says. “We can reflect on how different

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photojournalists covered it and show best practices in covering it.” Lough also discusses with me how these categories operate as visual archives of this time in history and as resources for future research on how journalists documented the news events.

Photojournalist and POYi 2021 News Panel juror Laylah Amatullah Barrayn agrees with this sentiment, finding value in the competitions introducing separate categories. “These were groundbreaking events that happened – you had global international coverage and you had people of colour being disproportionately affected by both of these instances. Also, you had many Black photographers … covering these events … I think it warranted a spotlight on how these events were covered.”

If the goal of photo awards is to reflect on how photographers covered important news events, recognising excellence while elevating best practices, and with so much of the lauded visual reportage of the protests coming from Black photographers, why wasn’t more of that work represented in the 2021 photo awards? Barrayn expresses frustration at how Black photographers covered the movement thoroughly across the country, from the solidarity of street protests to more nuanced storytelling well beyond the marches, yet were absent from the awards.

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“These were groundbreaking events ... You had global international coverage and you had people of colour being disproportionately affected”

‘Black Lives Matter protest with the Compton Cowboys’ by Gabriella Angotti-Jones

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‘Graduate Louis Michael, 22, raises his fist in solidarity during a protest in honour of George Floyd, 29 May 2020’ by Sarahbeth Maney

“All of us were out there, every city we were out, and look at the awards – that’s a slap in the face,” she says. “Nothing recognised.”

For the better part of a century, the majority of photo award juries have reflected the photo industry itself by being primarily white, male and from the Global North. This year, an overview of the World Press and POYi competition selectors indicates a considerably wider array of ethnicities, nationalities and genders than previous years, suggesting a shift has occurred where more attention is being paid to curating diverse juries.

Barrayn underscores the importance of having a diversity of perspectives on every photo jury, pointing to all of the knowledge she is able to bring into the room when she’s on a competition panel.

“All of the lenses that I’m bringing as a Black woman, as a woman of African descent, as someone who is Muslim, as someone who is in a specific generation of photographers too – all of those lenses and experiences are valuable …” she says. “Especially when the photographs that are

coming in often reflect those experiences that I have. I’m able to read the photographs and stories in a particular way, and I think that’s valuable … but depending on the mix of everyone who is on the jury, those perspectives and that lens can either be elevated or not.”

That caveat of how diverse perspectives are engaged or not on the jury is a critical one. Photo juries, much like the photo industry itself, still reflect the dominant paradigm of implicit power dynamics often along lines of gender, age, ethnicity and nationality. Photojournalist Marie D De Jesús was part of the 2020 POYi panel of jurors reviewing the special category Impact 2020: Protests and Movements. She expresses a sense of wanting more from the set of images the panel reviewed – of hoping for photos that went beyond “fires and violence” – while simultaneously feeling conflicted about conveying that desire for something different to her fellow jurors.

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‘The All Black Lives Matter rally in Los Angeles on 14 June 2020’ by Tara Pixley

perceived perhaps as a woman who might be inclined toward those images of the sense of community and sense of family?” says De Jesús.

She worried that her perspective as a woman might be devalued or scoffed at, and fellow jurors might have thoughts along the lines of, “Oh well, it’s very predictable that Marie might go for that type of iconography of identity and community.”

What De Jesús describes might not have been explicitly stated by fellow jurors that day, but it’s a reasonable concern given the often hyper-masculinised rhetoric and practices of photojournalism that reward photographers who take personal risk and elevate dramatic imagery over other approaches to storytelling.

Prioritising visuals of violence, fire and conflict are still a central part of photo competition values that have for decades retained the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ mentality.

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choices that prize danger and conflict over complexity and community. A sociopolitical issue, which has its origins in American chattel slavery, racial subjugation and segregation over 400 years, is condensed to a series of stereotypes – American flag and Black man in silhouette against blazing fire; young Black face in closeup, mouth wide in a scream. Looting, fires, police violence, tear gas and arrests are prominently featured in each of the five photo stories awarded in the Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar competition Racial Justice category, and in all but one of the photo stories awarded in the POYi Impact: Protest Movements category.

The only photo essay from the POYi special topic selection not featuring the US depicts Lebanese street protests that would be virtually indistinguishable from the US protest imagery were it not for the racialised difference within the frame.

Eye-catching coverage that quickly signifies concepts such as war, violence, crime, poverty or addiction continues to be the coin of the photojournalistic realm. Complex concepts like

community, collaboration, environmental injustice and systemic racism are far more difficult to depict in single images, making them less likely to be recognised as worthy of journalism industry attention, publication and awards.

The news event of 2020’s summer of racial reckoning, with its deep and expansive historical roots, cannot be accurately rendered via a collection of visual tropes of Black rage, American flags, burning buildings or police clashes. By emphasising screaming faces of protesters, violent interactions with police or the simplistic fire juxtaposed with American flags, the iconography of photojournalism awards flattens news events and fails to provide a nuanced narrative, underscoring the tendency of photojournalism to represent Black and Brown people primarily through this lens.

Looking at the racial justice protest images that received awards, Barrayn shares a frustration that the images are indicative of an insidious ideology where this is all some people can imagine happening to Black bodies, and so that is what resonates and feels most powerful to predominantly white photo juries and audiences.

“I feel like people think that we are supposed to have violence inflicted upon us, so if someone sees a photograph of us – people of colour, Black people, Indigenous people – and violence, then

they feel like it’s accurate,” she says. “It feels familiar, it feels authentic to them. Anything else, they think: ‘Oh, that doesn’t make sense. Look at those folks thriving over there and building. No, that’s not right, that’s not correct. Oh, but [Black people] being arrested, that’s about right.’”

This point is reflected in recent research on the POYi Feature category, where journalism studies scholars found white Americans were most often depicted in feature photography living simple, comedic or beautiful lives, but people of colour were primarily featured as overcoming or experiencing adversity. The photo awards, news publications and larger arenas of visual life tend toward favouring photos that constantly frame Black and Brown people in relation to strife, whether living through it, succumbing to it or struggling against it.

Davina Jogi, a photojournalist from Zimbabwe, has served as a World Press Photo competition selector twice. She acknowledges there can be a tendency among photo juries to be drawn to images that fit with constantly repeated tropes.

She says she worked hard to push back against that within herself and to point it out to other selectors, noting it’s important to be critical of the work and the approaches of judges in assessing the work. “If you keep awarding [tropes], you’re going to keep coming up with that same

“The news event of 2020’s summer of racial reckoning with its deep historical roots cannot be accurately rendered via a collection of visual tropes”

‘A mother and daughter at a Los Angeles racial justice demonstration on 2 June 2020’ by Tara Pixley

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Tara Pixley is a visual journalist and professor based in Los Angeles, with an MFA in Photography, a PhD in Communication, and two decades of experience as a media producer, editor and photographer. Her image-based and scholarly work focuses on rethinking visual representations of borders, gender, race, sexuality and other marginalised communities in visual journalism.

perspective, that same story,” says Jogi. “It was a challenge to say yes this is a strong emotion, yes this is telling a story, but is it something new, is it really a direction we think we should go in?”

Despite a visible increase in the racial, ethnic and gender diversity of photo competition juries, and an apparent willingness to discuss issues of representation among the imagery, there is still not an increase in people of colour (and specifically women of colour) winning photojournalism awards.

Associated Press photojournalist John Minchillo’s work on the Black Lives Matter protests received multiple awards across various competitions and seemed to resonate time and again with disparate juries. His winning photo story on 2020 racial justice protests in Minnesota includes a single image of St Paul Police walking in riot gear through a neighbourhood with their guns drawn. A small group of mostly Black people stand outside a home watching the parade of police officers, with Black Lives Matter posters taped to the house windows behind them.

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‘Protesters watch as police in riot gear walk down a residential street, Minneapolis, 28 May 2020’ by John Minchillo/AP/Shuttertock

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‘Residents watch from their homes as protesters march through Detroit’ by Sylvia Jarrus

“This image is a testament to ... the community support that manifested in different forms as some took to the streets while others cheered them on” This particular image is cited by De Jesús as one that stands out in her mind from her time judging the Impact: Protest and Movements category for PoYi 2020.

“It’s just a contrast between the warrior-like with domestic life, this sense of family and humanity and that nucleus versus this other type of force,” she says. “I think I was hoping for more of that type of imagery, that type of photography … two worlds contrasting, not just that urban setting where you see police and protestors clashing. [The spaces] where people enjoy their families and memories … our neighbourhoods form who we are.”

When I saw this impactful image receiving accolades across several competitions I immediately thought of the work of Sylvia Jarrus, a Black woman photojournalist who has an incredibly similar photo taken during her reporting on the Detroit protests in 2020.

Her photograph also features a neighbourhood street scene where people march into the frame from camera left as residents watch from their house porch. This image, however, is a testament to community solidarity between Black and Brown people, to the community support that manifested in different forms as some took to the streets while others cheered them on.

The person entering this frame is a Black protester and the children in the front garden smile

in his direction, presumably at others just out of the picture. Here, audiences are invited to witness not the alarming vestige of armed police disturbing the space of beloved family memories, but rather new memories being made of what civic action can look like. Just to the right of the frame, a single white ribbon hangs in the window signalling this household as perhaps one that stands with survivors of domestic violence, or symbolising purity and innocence. It’s a neutral icon that takes on the chosen cause of the holder.

In the context of this moment, it aligns the family supporting from the stoop with the implied demands for racial justice.

Both Minchillo and Jarrus have made compelling, well-composed images that are accurate depictions of what happened in their respective cities, but only one angle and perspective on the story is consistently singled out as award-winning. Over and over again, it is the frames of insinuated or actualised violence, incursion and violation that win out over frames of community, solidarity and resilience.

Ultimately, as Kyser Lough says, “An awardwinning image is only as good as the collection it was selected from.” When work from a more diverse set of photographers is not included in the original pool for selection, the quality of the entirety of the competition is lessened. There are JULY / AUGUST 2022

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various limitations of access and gatekeeping occurring at multiple levels of the photo awards space that weed out a more diverse selection pool and shift the possibilities of what is immortalised in the historical record. From the entry fees, and the time and mentorship resources required to craft a successful submission, to the overall sense that photo awards aren’t given to the stories valued and told by non-white photojournalists, there are many gatekeeping methods that limit contributions from photographers of colour.

When I asked Sylvia Jarrus if she had entered her photograph of Detroit protesters marching through a neighbourhood to any of the major photojournalism awards, she said no and cited “a mixture of burnout and imposter syndrome” as being responsible for that choice. There’s no way of knowing for certain whether her work would have risen above others to claim an award, had she elected to enter, but it is clear from the type of images awarded that her approach to making photos is not what gets valorised. To know that as a Black photographer and to still force yourself to go through the extensive, timeconsuming and sometimes costly process of entering your work is no small feat.

Sarahbeth Maney, another Black woman photojournalist who documented Black Lives

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Matter protests, did enter her coverage of the protests to the 2020 BoP and POYi awards – to no avail. She was working as an intern for the San Francisco Chronicle at the time, but Maney has since been awarded a Pulitzer Center grant and is the first Black woman New York Times Photography Fellow working at the news organisation’s Washington, DC political bureau.

One of Maney’s photographs of the Bay Area racial justice protests depicted a 22-year-old Black man, a recent college graduate who wore his blue cap and gown to a protest, and stood – fist raised, eyes downcast – before a line of police. The image, speaking to Black joy, triumph and resilience in the face of state violence, resonated so deeply with members of the local community that a mural was commissioned to commemorate the moment.

In March 2022, during Maney’s visual coverage of Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, the photojournalist captured an incredible photograph where the judge’s daughter smiled lovingly at her mother, a young Black girl witnessing the first Black woman to be considered for the highest court in the US. The image, published on the NYT website, went viral as it received extensive public support and appreciation for its obvious poignancy. Maney then tweeted out the image herself, signalling her

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“The image, speaking to Black joy, triumph and resilience in the face of state violence, resonated deeply with members of the local community”

‘Oakland Police Department protest, 10 June 2020’ by Sarahbeth Maney/The San Francisco Chronicle

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‘Leila Jackson, right, on day one of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for her mother, Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson, centre’ by Sarahbeth Maney/NYT

relationship to the photograph and adding another touching layer of Black female firsts to the already much-beloved moment. Her tweet received more than 120,000 likes (as of this writing) and her story was covered in numerous outlets, including the NYT, TeenVogue and The Today Show.

It’s evident from the virality and wide-ranging resonance of this heartwarming image of Black love, family and success that the viewing public has an appetite for such photography.

So, where is that value system reflected in the photo awards that pay homage to an intersection of photojournalistic work, value and public interests?

Award-winning news photographs take on a life beyond the news wire/front page/ homepage for which they were originally intended. Through their circulation and shifting contexts across textbooks, gallery exhibits, photography books and other compendiums of historical and news referents, some awarded images become iconic records that define global cultural memory.

As visual culture scholar Michael Griffin astutely summarises when writing about news photographs: “… the iconic photograph is not about informing the public; rather it offers a performance of social relationships that provide a basis for moral comprehension of and response to what is already known.”

How will the racial justice protests of 2020 be recalled by present and future societies? Through the hundreds of images published to social and news media by Black American photographers painfully and painstakingly documenting their communities and struggles against a racist legacy with which they are intimately familiar? Or through the award-winning images of the protests taken primarily by white photographers, who frequently crafted stereotypical images for audiences that subscribe to the racial ideologies implicit within the frame? We must constantly question whose version of events is ultimately transcribed into the historical record through the space of photo awards. tarapixley.com JULY / AUGUST 2022

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BRAVE. BOLD. BEAUTIFUL. Whether inspired by human rights, the environment or underwater art, we celebrate the work of eight students preparing to graduate from courses across the globe JULY / AUGUST 2022

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Previous spread From the series The Divine Feminine Above ‘Protectors of the Mundari’ Below ‘The Mundari mother’

Petya Bartosch (21) Institution Stellenbosch Academy of Design and Photography (BA), South Africa See more @petyaphotography Photography gives me the space to celebrate the beauty I see around me. I am humbled to share stories about hidden gems around the world and connect with different cultures.

Photographs are powerful in bringing social change and shedding light on injustice. That is why photography plays a big role in the Bartosch

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Foundation, a nonprofit empowerment programme for Masiphumelele youth, which I run alongside studying for my degree.

Two recent projects I enjoyed were an underwater fine art series and a documentary of the Mundari people in South Sudan. I had never photographed underwater before so it was challenging. I wanted to show the elegance of womanhood like a goddess. Underwater photography was the perfect way to achieve this. Living with the

Mundari and documenting their special bond with their cattle was magical. This series forms part of an ongoing book based on African cultures and traditional healing.

Next year I plan to work as a photographic guide for Frost Photo Safaris. A dream of mine is to travel to the world’s most isolated places and build a unique portfolio.

I hope to grow the Bartosch Foundation and continue to uplift underprivileged communities in South Africa.

Above ‘Magnesium pollutants collected from the Yamuna River’

Below ‘A soil sample 15cm deep’

Above right ‘A surveyor with an auger’

Kush Kukreja (27) Institution National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India (MDes) See more kushkukreja.cargo.site; @kushkukreja My work is more ‘reflexive’ than traditional social documentary. My project Only In Good Taste looks critically at the idea of imagemaking, especially social documentary, and tries to re-evaluate the ways in which we have been looking at a super-urgent climate crisis, focusing on the pollution of the Yamuna River.

I try to use more democratic imagemaking strategies. For example, I collect water

samples, extract the pollutants and collect them over a negative film. I later translate these negatives into darkroom prints.

Elsewhere, I use interventions to create illusions that debunk the reductive and superficial nature of the image-making process.

I also use self portraiture to challenge the evidential quality of photography.

The project gave me freedom to question photography. Working with chemicals makes the process very chance based. I think that’s fascinating. I’d also like to explore virtual reality as a way of exhibiting my images considering the amount of reach it could give me.

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Elizabeth Woodger (41)

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Institution Open College of the Arts, UK (Online BA) See more elizabethwoodger.com; @elizabethwoodger

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As a geologist I can’t visit a new landscape without wondering about how it formed or why it’s changing, and my photography reflects those questions. I’ve come to think of my

photographs as being a starting point for investigation.

Creating images is how I make sense of my surroundings.

Most of my projects start life with me asking ‘what if?’ and then embarking on a lengthy process of experimentation and transformation.

I’ve been working on my Diagenesis series for three years.

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Of all my projects this most closely ties together my geological background and my photographic practice.

It involves folding physical prints then rephotographing them in the landscape.

It’s essentially an allegory for the complex relationship between humans and the environment.

It’s proving difficult to let go of because

there always seems to be another landscape to photograph or another pattern to fold.

I’d love to install my Diagenesis project outdoors somewhere, perhaps as huge prints or tactile sculptures.

It would be fascinating to see how other people interact with my photographic objects when they encounter them in the landscape.

Sarah ChambersTonner (38) Institution Falmouth University, UK (Online BA top up) See more @sarahchamber stonner

Above From the series How the Light Gets In

Below left From the series Sixteen

Below right From the series Sixteen

For my final major project at Falmouth I collaborated with my then-16-year-old son, Ashton. I hoped that in the process of working together our photographic research might reveal something about each other, our relationship and life in general.

Early in the project Ashton told me he didn’t recognise himself in the way teenagers are represented in the media. We aimed to challenge these representations by encouraging viewers to think more critically about young people. The result was a box of photographs

we made – sort of like a sentimental memory box most people have at the back of a cupboard.

It included a photo conversation between us, carried out over WhatsApp and printed in a little handmade booklet.

There were various other photos that Ashton then drew over or edited to better represent his own subjectivity, plus a series of portraits of him in his bedroom, which we got into the habit of doing each day. It was important to me that he could represent himself.

I’ve realised that I want to inspire others to be creative so I’m starting teacher training in secondary school art and design in September.

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Left ‘A mare in the grass’ from the series Do Brumbies Dream in Red? Right ‘Catherine wilting’

Tom Goldner (38) Institution Photography Studies College, Melbourne, Australia (MA) See more tomgoldner.com.au; @tomgoldnerphoto I find photography is a way to ask questions and process the world around me.

One of the greatest joys of photography is its ability to change and evolve alongside my understanding of the world.

Over time my practice has become more introverted. What exists in front of my camera largely reflects something personal.

My master’s project Do Brumbies Dream in Red? looks at the ecological collapse suffered by Australia during the bushfire season of 2019-2020.

The project considers

a second catastrophe that runs in parallel to the bushfires – the Snowy Mountain brumby. These Australian feral and wild-roaming horses are a destructive force on the Australian environment and an example of how colonisation continues to create a sort of violence in this country.

I presented the series as a photobook and an exhibition.

More recently I’ve been looking through archival imagery from my family and for the first time I started taking pictures of the people who are closest to me. It is a project that is still in its early stages, but considers ideas of immigration, home and the use of photography as a way of holding on to those around us.

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Institution Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, the Netherlands (MA) See more sumianjuman.wixsite. com/sumianjuman; @sumi_anjuman

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In Bangladesh, my home country, the LGBTQI+ community is heavily suppressed as the mass populace of the state believes homosexuality is

forbidden according to the Quran, which mentions that homosexuals are liable to punishments including stoning and the death penalty.

Moreover, the Bangladeshi Penal Code – Section 377, a British colonial law also criminalising sexual acts ‘against the order of nature’ – is still in existence, which made this community illegal

PRODUCTION CLIENT

Above From the series Somewhere Else Than Here

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Right From the series Hope Has Let The Light Remain

through colonial legacy as well.

For three years I’ve been working on a project about LGBTQI+ individuals in Bangladesh and the injustice they face. I believe art creates the possibility to change at least one individual’s perspective, who can then change another person’s perspective, and so on, which can create a humane world.

My work is not orthodox documentary: it is more poetic, often verging on the abstract.

My collaborative methodology echoes the ideas of inclusivity, while my photographs invite onlookers to be curious about what they see. After graduating I want to go back to Bangladesh and continue my practice there. I feel it is my responsibility.

Georgios Chatzkis (21) Below From the series Journeys, Roaming Deep in Lands

Above left From the series Discarded

Above right Photobook of Journeys, Roaming Deep in Lands

Institution Coventry University (BA) See more georgioschatzakis.com; @georgios_chatzakis I’m interested in the photographic image as a material object and the power of the medium to record the physicality of an experience. Towards the end of my degree I worked on a project that documented my walking journeys in the north and south west of England. Journeys, Roaming deep in lands focuses on the spiritual connection of my mind with the environment, viewing hiking as a healing process for my mental health.

The work was documented in black-and-white, medium-format film and includes a series of images that guides the viewer through their own journey, and a photobook allowing them to engage with the materiality of the space through touch and smell.

While producing this work I was able to find the style and the aesthetic of photography that I want to work on.

I feel like Journeys, Roaming Deep in Lands is not completed, as I want to carry on hiking and document more landscapes to expand my photographic practice.

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Opposite page ‘Breanna Carson: Saint Models’, 2019, for i-D

Above right ‘Sabah and Aminat: Girls Next Door’, 2020, for Dazed

Above left ‘Untitled: Girls Next Door’, 2020, for Dazed

Below ‘Shantae Leslie: Growing up and Living in Jamaica’, 2019, for Dazed

Amber Pinkerton (24) Institution University of Westminster (BA) See more amberpinkerton.com; @ambercashmere I have a multifaceted approach. Some projects – specifically my work in Jamaica – are influenced by sociopolitical concerns.

Because I’m so inspired by colour and clothing the projects often feel as if they’re in-between fashion and documentary.

I think and hope I give my subjects agency.

They are always present, looking straight into the camera. I like to remove them from their original surroundings to avoid preconceptions while allowing them to

be who they want to be.

My fashion work plays more on colour and representation. It’s a lighter and more playful area to create work in.

With my physical works there is a focus on materiality, conceptualism and cultural reference. My favourite projects are Growing Up and Living in Jamaica and Jamaican Style. There was no pressure – I could approach everything with complete freedom, which is scarce in the commercial world of photography. These projects were intimate, with small crews. This is the best kind of work because there is more space for spontaneity, which I love.

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‘Clark, one month, 2021’

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‘Kit Lau and Annice Wong, four and half months, 2022’

With tensions in Hong Kong rising as it comes increasingly under China’s shadow, MPB/RPS Postgraduate Bursary recipient Jimmi Ho explores the impact on its citizens IMAGES: JIMMI HO WORDS: LUCY DAVIES

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‘Dick Lau, 24 months, 2021’

‘Jim Wong, 14 months, 2021’

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“Hong Kong was this beautiful, neon-lit, international city. Now it’s filled with graffiti and young people who no longer believe the government” He has made a habit of crossing borders. Jimmi Ho, who is half Hong Konger, half Chinese and now resident in London, grew up in Guangzhou, a vast city in southern China where his mother is from. Then at age 14, he chose to go to school in Hong Kong, where his father ran a business.

This relocation wasn’t too daunting, since he’d journeyed between the two territories his whole childhood.

“I was able to see both sides from a young age,” he says, “whereas most of the people who live there only ever see one. But still the difference was shocking: how on one side of the border there were so many freedoms and on the other hardly any.”

His experience has made the recent unrest in Hong Kong, together with the discord between the former British territory and mainland China, feel especially poignant. In 2019 – the year anti-government protests ignited in the city and anxieties over the pandemic surfaced – he began a body of work 416

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exploring these tensions, for which he has just been awarded an MPB/RPS Postgraduate Bursary.

The series, So Close And Yet So Far Away, is divided into various individual ‘chapters’, each of which examines aspects of the conflicts that have arisen in the area following the SinoBritish joint declaration of 1984. The declaration set out the conditions under which Hong Kong would be returned to Chinese control in 1997, after more than a century of colonial rule.

Ho’s photographs primarily survey the border between the two territories, and the “identity crisis” many Hong Kongers are now grappling with as their homeland slips under Beijing’s shadow and their democratic freedoms are slowly eroded. The grey tones of So Close And Yet So Far Away convey Ho’s “frustration and sadness at what Hong Kong has become”.

“For me it’s shocking,” he says.

“When I was a child Hong Kong was this beautiful, neon-lit, international city.

Now it’s filled with graffiti and young people who no longer believe the government, and who use their Saturdays and Sundays to come out onto the street and fight against the police because they need their voices to be heard.”

Ho, who is 28, took up photography while he was studying cinematic design and digital art at the Open University of Hong Kong. In those early years he was drawn to the architectural landscape, specifically the ingenious places that Hong Kongers find to hang their washing out to dry. “I liked the idea of people converting public space to their private needs,” he says.

A move to London in 2019, to complete a master’s in photography at the Royal College of Art, brought with it a mental distance from the tensions in Hong Kong that encouraged him to address some of it in his work. Returning for a period of a few weeks, he travelled back and forth between the city and the Chinese border, about 18 to 20 miles away, and

‘K

‘KiKi Wong, 15 months, 2022’

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‘Shari and Stephen, one and a half months, 2021’

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‘Migration, 2021’

‘Mr Pan, RC plane player, 2020’

“They miss Hong Kong and they still care about it. They watch the Hong Kong news all the time. It was all they wanted to talk about” along its route, making richly descriptive pictures of both the landscape and people he came across.

These included an elderly man, pictured holding a remote-controlled aeroplane. He recalled for Ho the bloodshed and chaos of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) – Mao Zedong’s disastrous attempt to use the masses to reassert his control over the Communist Party, which crippled the economy and ruined the lives of millions of Chinese people. Ho has his own Cultural Revolution story: his Chinese grandmother, who had been a teacher in the city, was sent to a village to work on a farm, although she did not like to speak of the experience.

A photograph of a person in a mask and holding flowers, meanwhile, was taken in one of the cemeteries along the border where unidentified men and women who have lost their lives in the anti-government protests in Hong Kong are sent to be buried. “There are at least 10 or 11 people in this cemetery that no

one knows who they are,” Ho explains, “but people come all the time to memorise their dying.”

These mourners wear masks to echo the masks that the protesters wear to protect them from tear gas. “While I was there [the mourners] told me so many terrible stories,” Ho says.

Some of the pictures in this set show how littered the landscape near the border is with crumbling villages and old abandoned farms. “The area used to be used to grow rice and corn,” Ho says, pointing out other images that demonstrate how on their side of the border, and as close to it as possible, China is building high-rise housing and offices. “It’s as if they are trying to intimidate the villagers into leaving,” says Ho, “trying to represent the power of China.”

The photographs taken along the border form chapter one of So Close And Yet So Far Away. Chapter two takes a different tack: portraits of Hong Kongers who have upped sticks and

moved to the UK. “When I met them, all were struggling,” says Ho, “not just because it’s difficult to live in a totally different country – in many ways Hong Kong and the UK are quite similar – but because they miss Hong Kong and they still care about it. They watch the Hong Kong news all the time. It was all they wanted to talk about.”

A small number of the subjects were people who had been involved in the protests and who had used their British passports to escape jail time in Hong Kong. Some seeking asylum in the UK were concerned that officials in China might see Ho’s portrait of them.

“For every 10 people I found, only one was willing to show their face in a photograph.”

Ho is not at all surprised: the National Security Law that China passed in 2020, criminalising any act of secession, subversion, terrorism or collusion with foreign forces, has made it easier to punish protesters and so reduce Hong Kong’s autonomy.

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‘The Hong Kong flag, 2022’

“Where is the playground used to be near my home? Where are the noisy kids? Have they disappeared? No ... I am the one who has disappeared” The law, Ho explains, “isn’t only affecting people involved in the protests, but also the creation of art and film, because if they sense you are doing something they consider ‘dangerous’ to China, they can arrest and torture you.

They use these ‘soft arrests’, where they put you in jail and wait four or five years to charge you. There are activists in jail right now under this policy.”

Does he worry that he faces arrest for making the photographs?

“I wouldn’t say I am completely safe,” says Ho, “because the law means you can be arrested anywhere, but whereas in Hong Kong I would be the first target, in Taiwan or here in the UK I am maybe third or fourth.”

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When parts of chapter one were exhibited at the Hong Kong Festival last year, the organisers removed some of the pictures for Ho’s safety.

And when he exhibits the portraits, each is accompanied by a short interview.

They make for harrowing reading.

“I look through the window, where is the playground used to be near my home? Where are the noisy kids used to play there? Have they disappeared? No ... I am the one who has disappeared.”

And: “To all the Hongkongers, bide our time patiently. Never regret yesterday.”

So Close And Yet So Far Away has a third section, but it is hidden from view on Ho’s website. Chapter zero consists of pictures that he has taken from

livestream footage of the antigovernment protests in Hong Kong that he watches on his computer every single day.

“I feel uncomfortable that I cannot do anything from here,” he says, in explanation, but he has no plans, at least currently, to go back to Hong Kong. As for the future of his homeland, “It’s only getting worse. They are saying the head of the police, the one who used so much force to push down the teenagers, will be the new chief executive. I think there is no hope.”

The MPB/RPS Postgraduate Bursary is open for entries. bursaries.rps.org jimmi-ho.com

‘Kelvin, six months, 2021’

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mpb.com

Buy. Sell. Trade. Create.

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Photography can

MPB puts cameras and lenses into more hands, more sustainably.

MPB. The platform to buy and sell used photo and video kit. mpb.com #ChangeGear

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the bigger picture.

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LANDSCAPES IN ABSTRACT

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OF THE BEST SOCIETY EVENTS

ART

INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION 163 Until 21 Aug The world’s longest-running photography exhibition demonstrates the breadth of contemporary image-making. On display are 105 works by 60 artists including French-Polish photographer Tim Franco and KyeongJun Yang from South Korea.

RPS Gallery, Bristol. Free

3 PRODUCTION

UNDERWATER PHOTOGRAPHY – DAVID KEEP ARPS Sun 10 Jul, 10.30am Diving into the world of large marine creatures, including crocodiles and sharks, David Keep explores the complexities of photographing underwater life. He will also unpick the story of his FIAP World Cup gold medal image of diving gannets.

Online via Zoom. Free

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4 ‘Envy’ by Simon Ellingworth

YOU CAN’T TAKE YOUR EYES OFF IT

GO TO rps.org/whatson for the latest updates

Discover the art of compelling images with Simon Ellingworth

1

This six-week workshop is designed to make you pause and consider one thing: what makes a brilliant image brilliant?

Award-winning Simon Ellingworth, who has run several workshop series for the RPS including Creative Composition and Natural Light Portraiture, is returning with an interactive course that looks at the theory behind successful photography.

Each week participants will look at some of the best examples of street photography and dissect the techniques and concepts that make them so engaging.

Between sessions there will be practical assignments to widen your understanding and awareness of global photographers and their work. The course, suitable for all photographers from beginners to experts, is being held entirely online.

The first two-hour session is on Monday 25 July at 2pm, followed by five weekly sessions.

Tickets are £108 for RPS members and the course will be capped at 10 places. rps.org/street-25jul

JOURNEY TO ROMANIA – JUDY FORD LRPS Sun 17 Jul, 2.30pm Judy Ford LRPS received the 2020 Joan Wakelin Bursary, run by the RPS in partnership with the Guardian. Her project focused on a rural community in Romania and she will share the secrets of her successful series.

Online via Zoom. Free

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HOW TO USE INSTAGRAM – JENNY SOWERBY Wed 20 Jul, 10am Aimed at Instagram novices, this two-hour session will cover the basics, from setting up an account to using analytics. You’ll receive a series of tutorials before the session and the workshop will be recorded for you to refer to afterwards.

Online via Zoom. Tickets £35

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CONTEMPORARY SANDPIT – WHO I AM, WHO AM I Sat 15 Oct, 2pm Consider Sandpits a show-and-tell, of sorts, where individuals submit six contemporary images taken on the them of ‘Who I am, Who am I’ and a 150-word explanatory paragraph.

Then the facilitator and participants discuss the collection. Submissions must be received by 31 August.

Held in person at York as part of the F2F Contemporary meet-up

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Enjoy the results of the bimonthly online members’ competition, themed around ‘People and place’

NEXT COMPETITION

Watch out for information about member photography competitions in the September/October issue of the RPS Journal

SUBS

WINNER ART

My dad and the greedy gull

By Lorraine Poole LRPS

PRODUCTION CLIENT

I had taken my parents on holiday to Scotland and we had stopped to visit the seaside town of Girvan in Ayrshire. What better way to savour the local cuisine than to enjoy freshly prepared fish and chips while sitting in the car looking out to sea?

As I was sitting in the driver’s seat I turned around to see if my dad was enjoying his lunch when I noticed a huge, imposing seagull sitting on my car roof eyeing up my dad’s fish and chips. I grabbed my phone and took some photographs only to catch my dad looking up and noticing the hungry bird himself. His expression was priceless as he had no idea he was being watched.

I always have my phone handy in case I need to grab a quick photo, and when I am out I always have my Canon EOS 6D with me. I see photo opportunities wherever I go and love to capture anything and everything that catches my eye. The only problem is I am a nightmare to go for a walk with as it’s stop, start, stop all the way.

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HIGHLY COMMENDED

Potatoes

By Paul Kilgallon

THE SELECTOR

Carolyn Mendelsohn on ‘My dad and the greedy gull’ A photographer and filmmaker who has lived and worked across the UK, Mendelsohn’s passion is personal work, including the series Being Inbetween “This photograph leapt out at me, and although I spent much time deliberating and going back and forth on a strong shortlist, I kept on coming back to this portrait. ‘My dad and the greedy gull’ is a great colourful, well-balanced image, full of charm and humour. It really doesn’t need an explanation: the photograph contains all that is

needed to tell the story, to show character and place. It is well composed and beautifully photographed. I love the characterful dad looking warily upwards at the seagull with his fork poised as the seagull spots the bounty. I also love the little details we can see through the car windows, setting the image strongly in its location.”

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Jeff Vickers MBE FRPS (1937-2022)

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Jeffrey ‘Jeff’ Vickers MBE FRPS has died aged 84 after a short illness. He was a photographer, a pioneer of large-format display graphics and a prominent supporter of the RPS, gaining his Fellowship in 1998.

Born in 1937, Jeff started work at the age of 16 in fashion, entertainment and editorial photography. He was official photographer to the Television and Screen Writers Guild, and was one of the official photographers at the 1966 World Cup Final, capturing the England football team in their new kit.

These images found a new audience when they were shown in 2016 as part of the launch by the Football Association of its 1966 exhibition at the National Football Museum.

In 1980 at Photokina, Jeff began his involvement with Ilford’s owner, International Paper, and the development of a Cibachrome copying machine, which became Chromacopy.

He was also instrumental in encouraging the company to invest in inkjet technologies, stable inks and papers suitable for inkjet processes. Jeff established Chromacopy franchises in the UK and abroad.

As customers began asking for larger sizes, the company opened a photo lab and bought a 50in processor for producing Cibachromes. The business evolved into one of the pioneers of modern graphics and display imaging for exhibitions and point-of-sale for the retail sector, becoming one of the largest companies of its type.

Jeff’s company became Genix Imaging Ltd, with extensive

premises in London’s Soho.

It was an early adopter of digital printing processes and was used by leading brands.

Jeff was an active supporter of the RPS and the RPS Journal.

He funded two RPS bursaries for under 25s which were awarded to Philip Volkers and Clare Pepper, and Genix sponsored the 150th RPS International Print Exhibition. He was awarded the Society’s Fenton Medal in 2009.

Working closely with myself, Jeff took on an ambassadorial role and was responsible for recruiting more than 100 new members to the RPS. It was with Jeff’s encouragement that I offered honorary membership of the RPS to the Duchess of Cambridge in 2017, recognising her passion for photography and as a role model for women interested in photography. She is now the RPS’s Patron.

‘Cycle of life: women taking offerings to the temple, Burma’ by Jeff Vickers MBE FRPS

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Acclaimed music photographer Gered Mankowitz, whose subjects include the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, was among Jeff’s notable recruits to the RPS. Remembering Jeff’s influence on his early career, Gered says: “I first went to work for him at his studios in Hanover Square, London, in 1962. He immediately took me under his wing and guided me through the fundamentals of commercial photography as it was at that time.

Jeff was immensely creative and entrepreneurial, and had strong ideas about every aspect of how the business should be managed.

I was particularly interested in the theatrical side of his portraiture business, and it wasn’t long before I began shooting my own sessions with young actors under his guidance.

“Unfortunately, we had to move due to the building being redeveloped in 1963, and with some backing from my father, we finally settled on 9 Mason’s Yard just off Jermyn Street, London.

Jeff immediately oversaw the transformation of the building into an efficient lab with a studio on the top floor and offices on the ground floor together with a small reception. Jeff’s client list was rapidly expanding, and I began to take on my own assignments as well. Within about six months Jeff had outgrown our little establishment and decided to move on, opening a much bigger operation in Soho where he stayed for many years, building an astonishing career as one of the UK’s leading commercial photographers.

“I stayed at Mason’s Yard until 1969 and amongst many other subjects photographed the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix there.

“Jeff and I remained firm friends and he never missed an opportunity to offer guidance,

SIMON HILL HonFRPS President, The Royal Photographic Society

VOICEBOX

Celebrating our royal connections

ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST / © HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II 2022

‘Austria’ by Jeff Vickers MBE FRPS

something that he continued to do until quite recently. He never stopped involving himself in various projects that revolved around his precious world of photography and the Society to which he was devoted.

“Jeff continued to offer his advice to me and successive presidents. He remained passionate about the Society with the RPS Journal a particular interest and a tool to encourage new members.”

Kathleen Morgan, editor of the RPS Journal, says: “Jeff would call shortly after each issue had dropped on to his doorstep to give his feedback. His enthusiasm was infectious and his experience much appreciated.”

Jeff was awarded a Prince of Wales Award for Industrial Innovation and Production and received an MBE in 2011 for his services to the creative industries.

He is survived by his wife, Barbara, and his children.

Dr Michael Pritchard FRPS

A few days before the nation celebrated the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, I was delighted to accept an invitation from RPS Thames Valley Region to a private viewing of some of the 450,000 photographs in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were early supporters of photography and began the collection during the 1840s when photography was in its infancy.

Under the subdued lights of the print room it was wonderful to see so many original works from the early great names of photography – including Roger Fenton and Julia Margaret Cameron, both of whom were members of the Royal Photographic Society.

Such was their interest in photography, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert became the first in a long line of royal Patrons of the RPS, which also includes Queen Alexandra and Queen Elizabeth II. All were accomplished photographers, with Queen Alexandra the most celebrated royal photographer of her time.

Inspired by the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Photographic Society of London was founded on 20 January 1853. From these Victorian beginnings the Society grew from strength to strength. Today, though, when membership of formal

organised societies appears less attractive than in previous decades, we must work harder than ever to retain our existing members and attract new members.

Through our internationally respected Distinctions, our Photography for Everyone strategic programmes, and plans to provide ever greater opportunities and experiences for our Group, Regional and International members, we are striving to ensure all members feel proud and excited about their Society. It remains a great personal honour to be President of the RPS during these times of change while we reimagine the wide range of services the Society can provide to its members and the wider public.

While Trustees, staff and volunteers together work on meeting this challenge, over the next three years we can all look forward to enjoying our own ‘royal’ anniversaries.

In 2023 the Society celebrates its 170year birthday and in 2024, having been granted the prefix ‘Royal’ by Queen Victoria in 1894, we mark 130 years as the Royal Photographic Society. Then, on 27 July 2025, exactly 21 years after Queen Elizabeth II granted the RPS a Royal Charter, we celebrate our ‘coming of age’ as a Chartered royal society. rps.org/about/president-news

Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, 30 June 1854 (detail) by Roger Fenton (1819-1869)

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SOCIETY

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ADVERTORIAL VERSION REPRO OP SUBS

‘The old railway line’ by Richard Draper ART PRODUCTION

OPEN COLLEGE OF THE ARTS SHORT COURSES WITH THE RPS Want to take the next step on your photographic journey? These short courses with the Open College of the Arts supported by the RPS could be the inspiration you need.

CLIENT

Each ten-week online course can help you to express your ideas using photography and other media, and to create a portfolio. Study alongside a small peer group and discover ways to make and interpret images.

The courses can help enhance confidence in your practice, build a portfolio for curators or magazine editors, help with an RPS Distinction submission or strengthen applications for BA and MA study. Each course is accredited by the CPD Certification Service.

What skills do I need?

Bring curiosity and a willingness to experiment, share ideas and engage. You will need basic camera skills and computer literacy so you can access a learning platform, and participate in live discussions in a supportive online learning environment with a course tutor and peers.

PHOTOGRAPHY AS LANGUAGE

Boost your confidence in expressing photographic ideas through the use of a camera, in conversation and in writing.

What does it mean to engage with photographs? How often do we look at or take photographs without fully seeing or understanding what they are saying?

You will be introduced to key theoretical approaches to thinking in and through photographs. You will make images

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in new ways, and expand your understanding and ability to articulate ideas. You will apply theory and ideas combined with creative and technical skills to develop the meaning of your photographs and the confidence to explore and discuss them.

“This course has changed the way I engage with photography. It made me think differently about the connection between the photographs I see in my everyday life, photography as a cultural practice and art form with a long history, and also my own photography.”

– former student

INVESTIGATING PLACE WITH PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY

How do places make us feel and behave, and in what way can this be conveyed to an audience? Learn about psychogeography – the effect of a geographical location on emotions and behaviour – explore ‘place’, and work towards a final group show online.

“One of the things I have found incredibly valuable during the past 10 weeks was the comments and notes from fellow classmates that in some cases completely shifted my feelings and focus on a photo or approach.”

– former student Sign up for either course by: 2 September Access to materials: 19 September Courses start: 3 October for 10 weeks Price: £305 per course Apply: rps.org/oca

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Clifford Morris FRPS (1942-2022)

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Clifford Laurence Morris, who has died aged 79 years, was a former Regional Organiser and maintained the RPS Joint Entry Scheme for many years.

Born in Leeds, Clifford was given a camera for his 21st birthday, beginning a lifelong interest in photography. He joined his local club in Walsall and won many awards in exhibitions.

Joining the RPS in 1969, he gained his Associate in 1971 and Fellowship in 1974.

He became Midland Regional Organiser and along with John Podmore organised many meetings over 16 years with notable guests including Sir Tom Hopkinson and Bert Hardy.

Clifford had many acceptances in international exhibitions and in 1973 he encouraged UK photographers by volunteering to run the RPS Joint Entry Scheme.

He despatched members’ prints all over the globe and ran the scheme until 1981, by which time he had sent 5,254

prints to 155 exhibitions.

Between them the members of the scheme received 147 trophies and awards. Selected work is now deposited with the RPS in Bristol.

Clifford also sat on the RPS Council. In 1981 he was awarded the Fenton Medal for services to the Royal Photographic Society.

When the RPS moved to the Octagon in Bath there was no lift to allow disabled people access to the upper floors and an appeal was launched. Clifford raised more than £2,000, much of this through catalogue sales of his exhibition Moments of My Time, which was shown at the Octagon in 1987. Clifford held several other exhibitions, including The Hand of Time which combined his photographs of abandoned industrial sites with words by poet Semba Jallow-Rutherford.

Clifford turned his attention to former military sites. His exhibition Their Finest Hours was shown at the RAF Museum in Cosford and at the Imperial War Museum Duxford.

‘Mr Clay on the Croft, Aldridge, West Midlands’

‘Hooray Henleys, Henley-on-Thames regatta’

‘Northern town’

This was to be one of his final projects. The exhibition of abandoned industrial and military sites was taken by Historic England, which also took several of his early street scenes, including all 18 of his prints that

made up his successful Fellowship portfolio.

Clifford was inspirational, with his photographs shown all over the world and his exhibitions seen across the UK. Keith Brown FRPS

Notice of the Annual General Meeting of The Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain Notice is hereby given that the Annual General Meeting of the Society will be held at RPS House, 337 Paintworks, Arnos Value, Bristol BS4 3AR on Saturday 24 September 2022 at 10am BST.

The business of the meeting will be: • to receive the minutes of the 2021 Annual General Meeting • to approve the Trustees’ report and accounts for the

year ended 31 December 2021 • to announce the appointment of the Honorary Treasurer and appointed Trustees as required

by Bylaw 26.3(d)

• to authorise the Board of The Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain to appoint and agree a fee for the Society auditors • to vote on any qualifying motions

All documentation relating to the above and details of how you might participate in person or online can be found at rps.org/AGM-2022 By order of the Trustees

The Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain is a company registered in England and Wales no RC000798 and is a registered charity no 1107831.

The registered office of The Royal Photographic Society is RPS House, 337 Paintworks, Arnos Value, Bristol BS4 3AR.

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Learn from two successful Associate portfolios that explore the world through Landscape and Documentary genres

Working for a Distinction takes you on a personal journey which will improve your technical skills, develop your creativity and broaden your understanding of photography

Associate Landscape Honey J Walker ARPS

LICENTIATE (LRPS)

Applicants must show photographic competence in approach and techniques

My initial eureka moment for the project happened some years ago on a flight to San Francisco. As we came into land I saw some incredible coloured ponds near the airport. They were salt pans and the colours and patterns really excited me.

What was supposed to be a family holiday turned into a rapid search to find a helicopter pilot and a window of opportunity to photograph the salt pans from the air.

I’d never done any aerial photography so had no idea what I should be using regarding lenses, shutter speeds and so on. Luckily, my friend – talented photographer Carla Regler – had done an aerial shoot and sent me a basic checklist, which was helpful.

That initial flight was so impactful. The patterns and

ASSOCIATE (ARPS)

Requires a body of work of a high standard, and a written statement of intent

FELLOWSHIP (FRPS)

Requires a body of work of distinctive ability and excellence, plus a written statement of intent

textures that were revealed from a bird’s-eye view were unique. I felt privileged to have that experience.

I knew I wanted to capture glacial melts and shorelines in Iceland and in 2017 I felt ready to take the photos after nearly a year of preparation.

The glacial melts are invariably remote – a good 75 minutes’ flight from the airport – so even a drone wouldn’t be a possibility.

Considerable preparation and research were the bedrock of this project. I researched everything including seasonality of glacial melts, weather patterns, terrain and finding a good pilot, which is vital.

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we only had one opportunity to refuel.

In addition to the challenges I have mentioned, I needed a lot of luck. The date booked for the shoot was the only date my pilot had available for that month and it also turned out to be the only day he managed to take off, as the weather either side of our flight was relentless.

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My interest was abstraction of the landscape, the unique patterns and forms that are completely secret unless you are a bird. I am looking for the unseen. Within my photography there exists a converging of two scales: the physical world (things in themselves as they are) and the interior world (lying hidden in all things). A synchronism of the eternal and the everyday.

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“My interest was abstraction of the landscape, the unique patterns and forms that are completely secret unless you are a bird”

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Statement of intent Landscapes can be vast in their grandeur, three dimensions giving a sense of scale and place.

I have always been fascinated by an alternate view, that of a bird, looking directly down.

The patterns within the landscape that can’t be seen from a vertical perspective become completely abstract.

A two-dimensional plane.

My panel of images are all of water and ice melt, taken from a commissioned helicopter over remote regions of Iceland.

This required detailed planning and execution. I investigated the terrain, seasonality of ice melts and movement from the ground, [and] using Google Earth and geological maps.

Patterns are revealed that

form their own intimate landscapes, otherworldly, with no sense of place, other than the immediacy of now.

By the very nature of the substrate, they are constantly changing, evolving and disappearing, creating textures and patterns.

In essence they are abstract, impermanent landscapes.

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I can be hard on myself. I have zero confidence in my abilities, but I do have a gung-ho attitude and will give anything a go, even if I fall flat on my face doing it. I think that is probably my motto – whatever life throws at you, try to find the fairy dust and make magic.

The ultimate reward is seeing the images finally go into print and to know the vision in my head has been realised.

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From inception to submitting the project for the Associate was seven years. It was never undertaken as a specific project for an award or accreditation, and I think that’s a good thing.

It was a passion project and hopefully that is evident in the work.

It is a real honour to have achieved the Associate. It was hard work, but also incredibly rewarding.

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“That is probably my motto – whatever life throws at you, try to find the fairy dust and make magic”

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WHY THIS PORTFOLIO WORKS Joe Cornish HonFRPS Landscape Panel Chair This portfolio was made from a helicopter over Iceland’s remote and raw landscape. We see ice melt and mineral-rich braided rivers, glacial edges and ocean shores, with common characteristics of texture, and intense yet subtle colours and tones.

The images are abstract, removed from familiar points of reference and shot straight downwards. This challenges and disturbs the viewer’s sense of subject and perspective, while dazzling with the design and texture/colour content of each image.

Although a familiar theme, especially in a world where drone photography has become commonplace, this portfolio stands out. The confidence of the compositions and bold, distinctive use of colour and texture have all the hallmarks of an individual vision.

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Originally from Lancashire, I now live in Berkshire where I work for Thames Water. I’m a former chairman of the Overton Photographic Society, but it wasn’t until a 2013 talk by Leigh Preston on the importance of photographic qualifications that I got involved with the RPS. I was so inspired that I achieved my Licentiate the following year and encouraged camera club members to go for their Distinction qualifications too. We quickly became one of the most qualified small clubs in the UK. I achieved my Associate in November 2021 and thoroughly

enjoyed exploring the creative cul-de-sacs it opened up. I love environmental photography and documentary photography.

I’m continually drawn to how people shape their environments and how they in turn become a product of their surroundings. It’s ironic, then, that I came across the subject for my Associate completely by accident.

I was walking in North West Wales and while reading up about the area’s history I saw an image of Dinorwic Slate Quarry – the second largest in the world – and knew I had to visit.

“I’m continually drawn to how people shape their environments and how they in turn become a product of their surroundings”

In operation from the 1770s, the 35,000-acre estate employed more than 3,000 people at its height, positioning Wales at the forefront of the global slate industry throughout the 19th century. Even though the quarry closed in 1969, it remains vital to Wales’s cultural identity and was designated a Unesco World Heritage Site in July 2021.

When I first explored the quarry it took my breath away.

Everything that’s been left behind remains untouched, making it eerie, but still so surreal and captivating.

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this site, becoming immersed in its solitude and reflecting on the generations who built lives for themselves in such a harsh but striking environment. I last visited in October 2021 with my wife and son, who both loved exploring it. It’s the best location I’ve photographed and it feels like a completely forgotten world.

I’ve spent many a 12-hour day exploring its hidden pockets, but it can be a hostile environment, with light conditions and weather the main challenges.

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It gets dark quickly so you have to work against the clock. Photographing during driving rain showers is nearly impossible and you’re often soaked, which can be a real endurance test. Nonetheless, my curiosity for this place has always proved stronger than inclement weather.

Originally I wanted to shoot this project in black and white in the style of Ansel Adams’s landscapes, but I felt this approach wasn’t honest enough in evoking the

quarry’s beauty. Colour better captured the emotion I experienced when visiting it.

For me, I’ve got to feel every image. If I can’t feel it, viewers won’t either.

After viewing my Associate portfolio one of the panel members said they were going to visit the quarry. That’s the main aim of all my photography – for people to experience the emotions I felt when capturing my photographs. And for me there’s no greater praise than this.

ART

“I’ve spent many a day exploring its hidden pockets, but it can be a hostile environment, with light conditions and weather the main challenges”

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Statement of intent In the shadow of Mount Snowden, Dinorwic Quarry scars the landscape of North Wales.

As you climb through the quarry galleries and abandoned skeletal remains, you see the scale of what was once one of the largest slate quarries in the world.

The further you ascend the more you are immersed in the solitude and isolation of this forgotten world. You are left wondering how the quarrymen endured and forged a life out of the mountain. [And] how generations of quarrying have left an impression so haunting and destructive, yet now filled with its own surreal beauty.

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“The work is cohesive, and through a sense of individual vision the author creates a mood of bleakness and isolation”

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WHY THIS PORTFOLIO WORKS Simon R Leach FRPS Documentary Panel Chair While this work might be seen as a potential Landscape or Travel submission, the statement of intent sets out the objective of creating a narrative visualising how this environment shaped the lifestyle of those who once called this place home. The work is

cohesive, and through a sense of individual vision the author creates a mood of bleakness and isolation that the mining community must have experienced in this imposing scenery.

Looking at individual narratives, such as the image showing the staircase and the precipice beyond, gives us that sense of ever-present danger.

DISCOVER more about the Distinctions one-to-one portfolio review service at rps.org/advice

Distinctions successes

Congratulations to these RPS members ASSOCIATE DOCUMENTARY March 2022 Alan Cameron, Lancashire Christine Cormack, France Kevin Freeman, Surrey Carl Goodwin, London Nicholas Kitto, Hong Hong Steven Mackay, Kirkcaldy Trish Roberts, Nairn Janet Tierney, Lincolnshire FELLOWSHIP DOCUMENTARY March 2022 David Collyer, Gwent Nick Hodgson, London Brian Morgan, Tyne and Wear Marissa Roth, London

ASSOCIATE TRAVEL March 2022 Ching Ching Chan, Hong Kong Hansa Tangmanpoowadol, Bangkok FELLOWSHIP TRAVEL March 2022 Paul Hassell, Walsall LICENTIATE April 2022 Christopher Bell, Aberdeenshire Jon Cruise, Buckinghamshire Maxim Dobres, Surrey Matthew Gordon, Surrey Harvey Grenville, Somerset Wendy Howard, Kent Gary Hurdman, Birmingham

Hui Jin, London Jian Jinying, China Brij Lal, India Warren Martin, Essex Eve Milner, London Chris Moncrieff, Kent Marios Pittas, Singapore Helen Shaw, London Pat Simmons, Middlesex Zhu Qing, China LICENTIATE EXEMPTION April 2022 Anita Ashworth, Powys Antonio Augusto De Oliveira Reis, West Sussex Callia Dew, Hampshire Kathryn Hall, Merseyside

ASSOCIATE CONTEMPORARY April 2022 Iain Blake, Essex Neil Goodwin, Fife ASSOCIATE EXEMPTION April 2022 Tim Beale, Somerset Helen Crute, County Durham Jacob Manchester, Staffordshire ASSOCIATE PHOTOBOOK April 2022 Daz Smith, Avon FELLOWSHIP CONTEMPORARY April 2022 Aneesa Dawoojee, London

William Gleeson, Co Tipperary Terence Lane, Nottinghamshire Prabir Mitra, Norfolk Holly Stranks, Suffolk LICENTAITE EXEMPTION May 2022 Zoe Meadows, Scottish Borders Ozgun Ozer, Manchester Mark Pollitt, North Yorkshire Kirsty Wilson, Merseyside ASSOCIATE EXEMPTION May 2022 Andrew Fitzgibbon, North Yorkshire

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Report of a Meeting of the Board of Trustees 23 May 2022

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Present: Simon Hill (Chair), Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, Nicola Bolton, Gavin Bowyer, Tony Cearns, Sebah Chaudhry, Sarah Dow, Andy Golding, Mathew Lodge, Mervyn Mitchell, Peter Walmsley Attending: Evan Dawson (CEO), Tracy Marshall-Grant, Nikki McCoy, Michael Pritchard

CLIENT

Simon welcomed Tony as the recently appointed Honorary Treasurer, and Mónica, Sebah and Mathew as the newly appointed Trustees. The four new members of the Board will serve for three years from the date of their appointment.

The Board considered the role of the Investment Committee and agreed to expand the role. It is proposed that the committee becomes the Finance and Audit Committee and, subject to ratification of amended Terms of Reference, will include financial management, investments and audit within its expanded scope.

Evan presented his CEO Report to the Board and highlighted improvements to governance arrangements, staff and volunteer structures, and financial outcomes over the past 18 months. He also reported the positive news that the RPS had achieved an improvement in profitability for the first time in several years.

Evan reported on progress with the CRM project, describing how the project team was addressing some significant data migration issues. He also provided greater insight as to how the

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benefits of the CRM system will allow the RPS to deliver a segmented membership offer and a more personalised online experience for members.

We reviewed several initiatives including the successful limited edition print sale of work by Fellows and Honorary Fellows, with proceeds supporting humanitarian work in Ukraine.

The sale raised more than £12,000 for the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC). Simon thanked the entire project team for their work on this. Gavin asked the Board to monitor resource costs for this and similar initiatives in the future.

Other achievements of the past two months include the RPS partnership with Action for Children to create a ‘Portrait of Britain’s Young Carers’ and the new ‘Portraits of Care’ project made possible by grant aid from a local Jubilee fund. The Board also recorded its appreciation of Alison Webber who has launched the ‘Spotlight’ feature on the RPS website, showcasing a range of photography and wellbeing stories, resources and evidence.

We reviewed the rate of recruitment of new members, which is slightly above the attrition rate and which nets a slight increase in total membership. Various initiatives were discussed to improve recruitment and reduce attrition so that we can achieve a larger net increase in total membership.

The Board heard of the success of IPE 163, with 20 different countries represented in the final exhibition.

The Board recorded its appreciation

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of Billy-Jay Starling for her work on delivering the final exhibition.

Facilitated by Peter, the Board then spent some time looking at risk and how risks are categorised, ranked and mitigated.

Nikki presented the management accounts and confirmed that there is an improvement in profitability. The Board congratulated the finance team for their work and specifically mentioned Nikki’s expertise in leading the Society’s finances during the extended transition period between outgoing and incoming Honorary Treasurers. Tony provided some interpretation of the financial reporting and identified ways in which the Board might in future have greater oversight and influence on financial strategy.

In April, Simon asked Trustees and the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) to attend an ‘away day’ to consider a single topic: the suitability of the existing structure and organisation of Groups, Regions and International Chapters. The intention of this event was to begin the process of overhauling the operational structure and management of the RPS to enable an improved benefit and more opportunities for engagement for members. Simon will look at the outputs of the away day and propose a mechanism for taking this further including, in the first instance, gaining the views of the Members’ Committee and the Representatives’ Committee. The Board will then decide on how to move forward with development proposals.

The Board considered the CEO Objectives for 2022-2023. It asked that these be re-tabled with more

specific metrics for each objective and the inclusion of personal development targets in addition to the organisational targets.

Trustees considered a paper from Nicola, Andy, Sarah and Evan (with input from the Nominations Committee) on the matter of Presidential succession. After some discussion, the Board agreed that additional consideration should be given to the matter and a fuller proposal

Sink or Swim by RPS film Fellowship recipient Zac Macaulay FRPS. Director: Louis-Jack; choreographer: Charlotte Edmonds; dancer: Francesca Hayward developed for Board review. It was proposed by Tony and seconded by Nicola that, under provision of Bylaw 11.3, the Board supports the re-election of Simon as President to serve from the close of the AGM 2023 to the close of the AGM 2025.

The Board felt that, to ensure continuity and stability during a time of great change, it is in the best interests of the Society for Simon to remain as President until the close of the AGM 2025.

This will bring Simon’s Trusteeship to an end, having served the maximum allowed six years on the Board of Trustees (Bylaw 9.4). The proposal was carried unanimously by the Board of Trustees and it was agreed that a Motion be prepared for the AGM in September.

The role of Deputy Chair of Trustees was also discussed and Simon asked for informal expressions of interest from

Trustees. The Nominations Committee will oversee the election.

The Board received from the Awards Committee the recommendations for recipients of RPS Awards 2022. All were ratified and the Board thanked Sir Brian Pomeroy, Chair of the Awards Committee, and the members of the committe for their diligent work.

The Board received nominations for the Members’ Award for 2022 and agreed the recipient.

The final business of this meeting was to consider a draft paper produced by Nicola and Andy on a process for committee Chair appointments. Simon thanked both for their input to this and the Board requested that the proposals be given further consideration prior to development of a final draft.

Simon Hill HonFRPS President and Chair of Trustees

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Council report, 1

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THE COLLECTION VERSION

An image by photojournalist Larry Burrows conveys the horror of conflict with the last moments of two young soldiers, writes Sandy Jones

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This dramatic image of a US helicopter crew in the Vietnam War, by renowned British photojournalist Larry Burrows, was featured on the cover of LIFE magazine on 16 April 1965.

Published under the headline ‘With a brave crew in a deadly fight, Viet Cong zero in on vulnerable US copters’, the picture is part of Burrows’s photo essay ‘One ride with Yankee Papa 13’. It focuses on the experience of 21-year-old American Marine Lance Corporal James C Farley, a gunner on the helicopter Yankee Papa 13, as a sister helicopter is taken down by the Viet Cong during a mission to transport troops.

In a single shot Burrows captures the cramped panic that ensued when comrades James The RPS Collection is at E Magel and Billy the V&A Photography Centre, London Owens of Yankee vam.ac.uk Papa 13 lay critically wounded in Farley’s helicopter. Shouting urgent instructions, his hand on a machine-gun, Farley’s body is in motion as a horrific scene unfolds at his feet.

Burrows’s image shows Farley plunged into the brutal chaos of this war and, by implication, all wars.

Burrows first went to Vietnam in 1962. LIFE published many of the harrowing images he made as an embedded photojournalist, bringing the actualities of the Indochina conflict into American homes at a time when the anti-war movement was gaining momentum. He died in 1971 at the age of 44 when the helicopter carrying him to the invasion of Laos crashed.

This photograph, and other renowned war images by Burrows, are available to view in the V&A’s Prints and Drawings Study Room.

CLIENT

VISIT

‘Helicopter crew chief James C Farley shouting to crew as wounded pilot Lt James E Magel and Billy Owens lay dying, Vietnam, 31 March, 1965’ by Larry Burrows

“Burrows’s image shows Farley plunged into the brutal chaos of this war and, by implication, all wars”

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THE RPS COLLECTION / V&A MUSEUM, LONDON

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‘Gin and tonic’ from the series My Still Life by Sue Oakford

THE MORNING AFTER

With her roots in environmental law, photographer Sue Oakford LRPS finds an allegorical beauty in society’s leftovers You might miss it at a glance, but the vases in this painterly floral arrangement are in fact empty gin bottles.

The image was made in June 2020 at the tail end of the first Covid-19 lockdown by Sue Oakford LRPS, who used some leftover bottles to display peonies.

“I created this image with humour and nostalgic thoughts of the ‘morning after the night before’,” Oakford says.

“We see some wilted blooms craving the light, while others skulk in the shadows – reminiscent of missed fun times.”

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Oakford had a career in environmental law and started a business scanning old slides and snapshots before taking up photography herself in 2017 and joining the RPS two years later.

Today she specialises in family, newborn and maternity portraiture, although during the pandemic she also developed a passion for still life.

“I discovered areas of light I had never seen before – particularly at my kitchen window with sunlight flooding through,” she says.

Since then, Oakford has won accolades such as the 2021-22 AOP Emerging Talent Award, and was selected for the Best of Show at the International Photography Awards.

“My images are meant as symbolic representations of events, feelings and thoughts during those recent extraordinary times,” she says.

“I wanted to bring together the beauty of light, colour and nature in an allegorical sense to communicate my wonder and despondency.” sueoakfordphotography.co.uk

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