RPS Journal January/February 2021

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The Journal of The Royal Photographic Society

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January / February 2021 Vol 161 / No 1 rps.org

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SERGEY GORSHKOV

The Journal of The Royal Photographic Society January / February 2021 Vol 161 / No 1 rps.org

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“Photography is the reflection of the world I live in. It is my philosophy” Sergey Gorshkov, Wildlife Photographer of the Year

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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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A TIME FOR REGENERATION, REOPENING AND REAWAKENING

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With each new year comes a keen sense of fresh possibilities. The chance to achieve unfulfilled ambitions, to create photographic projects you’ve only ever imagined, or to see loved ones you’ve been meaning to catch up with for too long.

This year, that sense is heightened as the world seems on the cusp of defeating, or at least minimising the effects of, the coronavirus. As I write this, there is a cautious acknowledgement that 2021 will be a very different year from the last – a time for regeneration, reopening and reawakening.

With RPS House in Bristol ready to welcome visitors into its gallery, where it is staging the return of the IPE 162 exhibition, the Society is again looking forward to meeting members, and the public, face to face. It joins other venues across the UK and the globe hoping to return to some sort of normality, while acknowledging the pandemic has transformed what normality means. The surge of innovation that accompanied lockdown will have a lasting impact. The digital world and its evolving toolkit, from Zoom rooms to webinars, has offered opportunities many of us won’t have tried before. If not quite digital veterans, at least most of us will have had a go.

Technology has always been a friend to the photographic community, helping shape our practice as well as our networking and educational resources. This month, 125 years ago, the discovery of the X-ray was presented to the Royal Photographic Society in London. Just weeks earlier, a simple image created by Wilhelm Röntgen showing the bones of his wife Anna’s hand had revolutionised the world of image-making and medicine. Today, the artist Hugh Turvey HonFRPS and others use X-rays to create their own awe-inspiring images.

Who knows what world-changing developments image-makers will achieve in 2021?

As we wish you all the best for the new year, we’d like to share with you one achievement from the last. A panel of leading UK industry figures named the RPS Journal Special Interest Magazine of the Year at the PPA Scottish Magazine Awards.

We look forward to sharing more amazing images – and the stories behind them – in the coming months.

KATHLEEN MORGAN Editor ‘Phototropic’, from the Xogram series Survival Mechanisms (Hidden Garden), by Hugh Turvey HonFRPS. Turn to page 56

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Contents Inside

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Philip Gefter’s new biography of Richard Avedon highlights the American photographer’s long struggle to have his work acknowledged as fine art

One of the founders of Rock Against Racism, Red Saunders’ political engagement now takes the form of large-scale photographic tableaux that recreate moments in British history

HISTORY

BIOGRAPHY

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Experience girl power at its rawest when you take a walk on the wild side with provocative fashion photographer Ellen von Unwerth

Hugh Turvey HonFRPS and Nick Veasey are among today’s photographers making highly creative use of X-ray technology to get to the hidden heart of things

Presenting a selection of intimate, sometimes harrowing, images by the acclaimed recipient of the RPS Centenary Medal, Sally Mann HonFRPS

BEST SHOTS

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SCIENCE

GALLERY

ELLEN VON UNWERTH; WARNER BROTHERS / RICHARD AVEDON / ALAMY; HUGH TURVEY HonFRPS; RED SAUNDERS; SALLY MANN HonFRPS

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We speak to the three winners of Lockdown: Taking a Positive View, a competition for young photographers who saw signs of hope during the pandemic

Jeremy Snell’s image of Ghanaian fisherboys floating in Lake Volta has a fairy tale quality, yet also addresses the harsh reality of child exploitation in the area

POSITIVE VIEW

BACKSTORY

Cover story WILDLIFE

A gallery of images

by Sergey Gorshkov, 2020 Wildlife Photographer of the Year, includes ‘Arctic treasure’, which made the final of the international competition in 2017

FLO HENDRIKS; ADRIAN GIDNEY FRPS; JEREMY SNELL; SERGEY GORSHKOV

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DISTINCTIONS

Police detective turned photographer Adrian Gidney has become the first Fellow of the RPS in the new Landscape Distinction JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

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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 The Duchess of Cambridge ART

President Dr Alan Hodgson ASIS HonFRPS

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

President Elect Simon Hill FRPS

Contributing Editor Rachel Segal Hamilton

Treasurer John Miskelly FCA FRPS

Design John Pender Sub-editor Andrew Littlefield Editorial Assistant Jennifer Constable

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Chief Executive Officer Evan Dawson Director of Education and Public Affairs Dr Michael Pritchard FRPS

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

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Published on behalf of The Royal Photographic Society

by Think, Red Tree Business Suites, 33 Dalmarnock Road, Glasgow G40 4LA thinkpublishing.co.uk

Group Account Director John Innes Circulation 10,963 (Jan-Dec 2019) ABC ISSN: 1468-8670

The Journal of The Royal Photographic Society

January / February 2021

Vol 161 / No 1

© 2021 The Royal Photographic Society. All rights reserved.

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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Tom Seymour (pages 22 and 64)

Teddy Jamieson (page 30)

Gemma Padley (page 56)

A journalist and curator based in London, Seymour was recently named Writer of the Year at the PPA Independent Publisher Awards for his contributions to the RPS Journal.

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

Padley is an editor and journalist who specialises in photography.

She has worked with clients including Getty images, Magnum Photos, the BBC and Photoworks.

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Coffee shop, Abkhazia

BY JONK

The photographer Jonk has triumphed with a series of four images showing abandoned buildings reclaimed by nature.

He was named overall winner in Earth Photo, a competition created by Forestry England and the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) to reward images which highlight the increasing fragility of the natural world.

Joe Smith, director of the RGS, said the pictures “serve as a mournful commentary on the 20th century – but there is also something hopeful in the vivid evidence of the patient and robust capacities of the nonhuman world to ‘re-cover’.”

The exhibition Earth Photo is at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), London, until 31 March 2021. rgs.org/geography/earthphoto-2020/ 6

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In focus NEWS, VIEWS AND EXHIBITIONS

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MIKE DODD’S TURBOCHARGED KIT BAG

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HOW MANISH MAMTANI FINDS FANTASY IN NATURE

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REMEMBERING DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHER CHRIS KILLIP

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‘Paria 2’ by Cody Cobb

PREVIEW 0F 2021 Take a deep breath and indulge in a new year of photography

In 2020 the photographic community found new ways of connecting and being creative at a distance. Now we look forward to the year ahead, with events and awards around the nation that will be staged face-to-face and virtually.

On 23 January 2021, RPS House reopens with the return of IPE 162,

featuring the work of image-makers from around the globe, including Cody Cobb, awarded first prize for his Strange Land series.

And the story continues with the 163rd edition of the International Photography Exhibition, now open for entries. rps.org/opportunities/ipe-163

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BEING INBETWEEN

9 January to 24 April

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For her series Being Inbetween, Carolyn Mendelsohn photographed 90 girls aged between 10 and 12, each navigating the complicated path from childhood to young adulthood. One of the portraits, of Alice aged 10, helped Mendelsohn win IPE 159. Pictured left are 11-year-old identical twins Becca, far left, and Lottie, the last girls to be photographed for the project.

An exhibition of the series is at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, until 24 April and a book, Being Inbetween, is available from Bluecoat Press. Mendelsohn has also been running Through Our Lens, a photography project helping young people in Bradford to document their experience of lockdown, isolation and social distancing, using virtual workshops and mentoring.

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impressions-gallery.com bluecoatpress.co.uk

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TAYLOR WESSING PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT PRIZE

Online until 31 March

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npg.org.uk hackelbury.co.uk

CARRIE MAE WEEMS HonFRPS IN CARDIFF

13 February to 6 June

The acclaimed American artist is in the running for the ninth edition of the biennial Artes Mundi contemporary art prize. Catch an exhibition of the work presented across the Welsh capital by National Museum Cardiff, Chapter and g39. The winner will be announced on 11 February. museum.wales

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CAROLYN MENDELSOHN; CARRIE MAE WEEMS HonFRPS; ALYS TOMLINSON

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With the National Portrait Gallery closed for refurbishment, the prestigious annual portrait prize is this year presented as a virtual exhibition. Images by 2020 winner Alys Tomlinson, who photographed schoolleavers dressed for proms that never took place due to lockdown, will be exhibited alongside a selection of the best entries. Tomlinson’s Lost Summer series is also on show at HackelBury Fine Art, London, until 12 March.

FORMAT FESTIVAL

12 March to 11 April ‘Control’ is the theme for the latest instalment of Derby’s biennial photography festival. It will launch with a huge mosaic of images from FORMAT’s Mass Isolation Instagram project, a response to worldwide Covid-19 lockdowns.

Other highlights include an exhibition of No More Flags – a collaborative project by Clare Strand HonFRPS and Gordon Macdonald – and the launch of Black Country Dada, an autobiography by Honorary Fellow Brian Griffin.

Formatfestival.com

THE PHOTOGRAPHY SHOW AND THE VIDEO SHOW

6 to 7 March

Reinvented as a virtual festival, The Photography Show and The Video Show will offer inspiration and education for professional photographers and filmmakers to explore remotely. A live, face-to-face event is also planned for 18 to 21 September, full details to be confirmed. photographyshow.com

SCIENCE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR

BRIAN GRIFFIN HonFRPS; KAIYU LU

12 February to 7 May

The 2021 Science Photographer of the Year features a new Climate Change category. The RPS will be partnering with Manchester Science Festival to exhibit the shortlist at Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum before it tours the UK and worldwide. rps.org/spoty scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk

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BRISTOL PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

Year-round including Festival Week, 3 to 9 May

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Taking place at different venues around the city, Bristol’s new photography festival includes exhibitions by Stephen Gill at the Arnolfini and Thilde Jensen at the Martin Parr Foundation.

In Progress, a show of five solo exhibitions by RPS Hood Medal recipient Laia Abril, Hoda Afshar, Widline Cadet, Adama Jalloh and Alba Zari, will run at RPS House from 24 April to 3 October.

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DEUTSCHE BÖRSE PHOTOGRAPHY FOUNDATION PRIZE

19 March to 27 June

Photographer and activist Pouloumi Basu, recipient of the RPS Hood Medal, is among the four artists shortlisted for this prestigious award, now in its 25th year. Basu’s project Centralia, about conflict in central India, will be on show with the rest of the shortlist at The Photographers’ Gallery, London.

WIDLINE CADET; BENJI REID; ALEJANDRO CARTAGENA

thephotographersgallery.org.uk

WELLCOME PHOTOGRAPHY PRIZE

Summer, dates TBC

This year’s contest invited submissions about inspiring ways that individuals and communities are tackling three big issues of our time: mental health problems, infectious diseases and global heating. The shortlisted and winning images will be on show at the reopened Wellcome Collection, London, summer 2021. wellcome.org

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PHOTO LONDON

13 to 16 May

The UK’s biggest photography fair returns as a hybrid event featuring events, shows and talks taking place virtually and at Somerset House in London. Included will be a special exhibition dedicated to Master of Photography Shirin Neshat HonFRPS. This year’s Discovery section is curated by Emma Bowkett, director of photography at the FT Weekend Magazine.

photolondon.org

PRIX PICTET

Opens 16 December A major exhibition of work by the shortlisted Prix Pictet photographers will be held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Chosen by a panel chaired by Sir David King, the winner of the 100,000 Swiss francs (£85,000) prize will be named at an awards ceremony on 15 December. prixpictet.com

SHIRIN NESHAT HonFRPS; LAURA DICKEN; ROSS McDONNELL

COVENTRY UK CITY OF CULTURE 2021

Various dates from May

There’s much for photography lovers in Coventry this year. Photo Archive Miners present a joint show by two chroniclers of post-war Coventry, John Blakemore HonFRPS and Richard Sadler HonFRPS. And Coventry Biennial, from 8 October to January 2022, features Laura Dicken’s collaborative portraits and Alan Van Wijgerden’s archival housing images. coventry2021.co.uk photomining.org coventrybiennial.com

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‘Romanian blacksmith’

by Judy Ford LRPS

BURSARY RECIPIENT NAMED

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The £2,000 Joan Wakelin Bursary 2020 has been awarded to Judy Ford LRPS who will finish her project documenting women in Romania’s peasant communities. “The bursary will allow me to explore what makes this society work, and what underpins the strength and resilience of the women that hold these communities together,” said Ford.

From my kitbag Canon 5D Mark IV (main workhorse), Canon 1D Mark II (backup and for action), Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS (main action workhorse), Canon 24-105mm f/4.0 IS (tracking – car to car), Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 (reportage), Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 (rarely used), Canon 50mm f/1.2 (studio/static), Canon 85mm f/1.4 IS (reportage and studio/static), Canon Connect phone app, Gitzo GT5563GS, polarising filters, colour checker, Profoto B10 Plus lights, Profoto phone app, head torch

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IN THE BAG

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Mike Dodd is an automotive and commercial photographer whose clients include Jaguar

ILLUMINATING HISTORY

The 2020 Historic Photographer of the Year is Michael Marsh for his foreboding image of Brighton Palace Pier exposed to the elements.

Ron Tear ARPS was shortlisted for ‘Wreck on the shore of Loch Linnie’, which shows a decaying fishing boat with Ben Nevis in the background.

STEPHEN DALTON HonFRPS / FIREFLY BOOKS LTD

Anything in your bag besides photography gear?

There are many other things I use, such as triggers, remotes, clamps, suckers, rigs, light stands and backgrounds. I always carry suncream, sunglasses, deodorant, mints and a Leatherman multi-tool too.

Tell us about the image, ‘A sustainable future of exquisite luxury mobility’ (right), that won you Advertising Photographer of the Year at the 2020 International Photography Awards?

This shoot had all the elements I thrive on.

Rarity – the car is a one-off prototype [where] exquisite detail is mixed with sustainability. This was about saying we can have luxury, beauty and excitement, along with wonderful technology, and still be caring to the planet.

What makes a great car image?

It depends. Sometimes extreme detail and product representation are required so it’s about attention to detail and technical skill. Other times it’s about creating an atmosphere so you may have to see how

ronandmaggietear.co.uk

HUNDRED+ HEROINES

the light plays on the lines of a vehicle to make the product look dark and menacing or bright and approachable, for example.

Sometimes it’s about a story or lifestyle: a family day out, a luxury lifestyle in the mountains, or a hardcore racetrack or off-road situation. The skill is to be able to cater for all the variations. mikedodd.co.uk

An extra 50 names have been added to the Hundred Heroines list that celebrates women working globally in photography today. Now known as Hundred+ Heroines, the list includes RPS 2020 Centenary Medal recipient Sally Mann HonFRPS, as well as Lola Dash and Poulomi Desai. hundredheroines.org

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‘Red palm weevil’ by Luminar Bug Photographer of the Year Mofeed Abu Shalwa

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FIVE HEAD TURNERS TO WATCH

‘Signs’, 2016, by Deana Lawson

‘Reopening the Monaghan-Fermanagh border crossing’, 1993, by Tony O’Shea

Deana Lawson

Tony O’Shea

Mofeed Abu Shalwa Dean Freeman

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PHOTOGRAPHER

MACRO PHOTOGRAPHER

New York-based Deana Lawson, who shoots intimate, constructed portraits exploring Black identity using medium or large format, has become the first photographer to win the Hugo Boss Art Prize. The recipient gets to stage a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum during 2021.

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Ahead of a major retrospective at Gallery of Photography Ireland, a selection of images by Tony O’Shea, now 73, is to be published by RRB Photobooks. Shot across four decades between 1974 and 2019, the images show everyday life in Dublin and beyond.

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This Saudi-Arabian macro photography specialist started documenting insects to overcome a childhood phobia. Ten years on he is grand prize winner in the inaugural Luminar Bug Photographer of the Year competition. instagram.com/mofeed. abu.shalwa

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Best known for photographing the Spice Girls, celebrity portrait photographer Dean Freeman has launched an online shop selling limitededition fine art prints, with 20% of sales going to the National Autistic Society in memory of his son, Dylan. shop.deanfreeman.com

Head turners, 1 ‘Contemporary dancer, Havana’, 2015, by Dean Freeman

Zora J Murff PHOTOGRAPHER

Artist Zora J Murff is the first recipient of the Next Step Award, a new prize from Aperture and Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York.

The award aims to bolster inclusivity in the photography industry through a $10,000 grant, the publication of a photobook and an exhibition. zora-murff.com

‘Terri (talking about the freeway)’, 2018, from the series At No Point In Between by Zora J Murff

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My place

By Melanie Friend

Salisbury Plain

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Above and below From the series The Plain by Melanie Friend

Covering some 300 square miles, Salisbury Plain in rural Wiltshire is the largest area of chalk grassland in north-west Europe. About half of it is owned by the Ministry of Defence, making the plain the most extensive military training site in the UK. “It is a rich, multi-layered landscape with ancient tumuli and barrows overlaid by the more contemporary signs and symbols of military occupation,” says Melanie Friend, who photographed there between 2015 and 2020 for her latest book, The Plain.

Her previous volume, The Home Front (2009-12), was a study of air 18

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shows in the UK, “with a particular focus on the uneasy space of the beach, temporarily militarised by the fleeting roar of fighter jets”.

Working at Salisbury independently, Friend was occasionally stopped and questioned by the army. “But close-ups of military hardware or military personnel don’t interest me,” says Friend, a former photojournalist. “I was interested in how the soldiers appeared as small figures within the expanse of this landscape – for me this felt more timeless, and yet also suggested how the landscape might outlive these human preparations for war.”

The Plain by Melanie Friend is published by Dewi Lewis Publishing. melaniefriend.com

PORTRAIT OF MELANIE FRIEND BY FRÉDÉRIQUE DELACOSTE

The former photojournalist explains why she is drawn to a military training ground and haven for wildlife in rural Wiltshire

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MING SMITH: AN APERTURE MONOGRAPH Aperture (£50)

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A trailblazer in the history of photography, the self-taught Ming Smith became the first African American woman photographer to have her work in MoMA’s collection.

Born in Detroit and raised in Columbus, Ohio, Smith began taking pictures at five years old, inspired by her beloved grandfather, a postman who also painted the exteriors of houses and “had a thing about color”.

This detail of the photographer’s early influence emerges in the book Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph, as part of an ‘in conversation’ with its editor Jane Hill Talbert. Hans Ulrich Obrist and Namwali Serpell are among the book’s other contributors.

After studying microbiology at Howard University, Smith moved to New York, working as a model before becoming the sole woman member of Kamoinge, the pioneering

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‘America seen through stars and stripes (painted), New York City’, 1976, by Ming Smith

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black photography collective, in 1973.

Her black and white images have a distinctly dreamlike feel, due partly to her experimental approach, using double exposures, slow shutter speeds, collage, tinting or painting on the surface of her prints.

APERTURE / DOCUMENTARY ARTS, 2020 / MING SMITH / APERTURE

GINGERS

“I do a lot of night shooting, and even in the dark I look for the way light comes in,” she explains. “In all my work I improvise with light, with what’s there. I feel my way through things. I think photography is mystical, spiritual, magical. It really is.”

Rachel Segal Hamilton

CONGO IN CONVERSATION

HOW CHANGE HAPPENS: PHOTOGRAPHY, EDUCATION AND SOCIETY

Kieran Dodds Hide Press (£30)

Finbarr O’Reilly Fondation Carmignac and Reliefs Editions (£35)

Red is the rarest of all hair colours, with only one to two per cent of people worldwide blessed with it. Across time and culture, red hair has provoked everything from mockery to fear.

For this project, former TPA/RPS environmental bursary recipient Kieran Dodds photographed fellow gingers across the globe to assemble a celebration of the magic of copper hair and the surprising workings of genetics.

After winning the Carmignac Photojournalism Award, BritishCanadian photographer Finbarr O’Reilly adapted his project proposal in response to coronavirus restrictions.

He became the curator of a collaborative platform, presenting images, words and video by Congolese journalists on the ground.

Brought together in book form, this is a multifaceted view of the country.

A survey of photographic education in the UK, this book offers insights into theoretical and aesthetic principles, early feminist studies, and the formation of camera clubs, societies and photocooperatives. It explores the foundation of The Photographers’ Gallery and the V&A photo collection, as well as the shift from analogue to digital photography, and shows how changes in the world of photography can influence wider society.

Rachel Segal Hamilton

Rachel Segal Hamilton

Andy Golding ASICI FRPS

May McWilliams (Maymac Books, £28)

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LOCATION “Many of Iceland’s beautiful natural attractions, such as mountains, volcanoes, glaciers, rivers and geothermal areas, can be found in the Highlands. Away from crowds and tourists, the Highlands offer untouched majestic landscapes, serenity and peace.

For these reasons, the Highlands are favoured by photographers and nature lovers, and are accessible mostly from June to September.”

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TIMING “Golden hour – the hour just after sunrise or before sunset – is the best time for photography. The sun’s close to the horizon, the light is soft, directional and warm. While my initial plan was to get to this place and rest, the early morning light tempted me to fly my drone and explore first. The steam from the geysers, combined with the beautiful light, created a perfect canvas.”

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POST-PRODUCTION “I shoot in RAW and the RAW file captures all the details, but the image is usually flat. I process the file using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop to bring back the contrast, colour and light to make the image look exactly like how I saw the landscape.”

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COMPOSITION “The morning light was hitting at all the right places and highlighting not just the emerald colour of the pool, but also the little streams coming out of it. It appeared as though I was looking at the eye of a dragon – it was breathtaking. I tried a couple of shots and finally settled on this one.”

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AERIAL VIEWPOINT “I used to wonder how birds see the world and wished I could do the same. Although my drone doesn’t allow me to fly like birds, it allows me to see the way they see. I used a DJI Mavic 2 Pro Drone for my trip to Iceland, and for this image. I also used Polar Pro polariser to cut through the reflection of light and see the details and colour of the pool.”

HOW I DID THIS Nature photographer Manish Mamtani explains how he created a landscape worthy of a fantasy tale You’d be mistaken for thinking you were gazing at some kind of mythical creature, its iridescent emerald eye staring back at you from rough, reptilian skin. In fact, what you’re looking at is a geothermal pool in the Highlands of Iceland.

Titled ‘Dragon eye’, this extraordinary aerial image won Indian-born, USbased nature photographer and accountant Manish Mamtani the Digital Art Prize in the 2020 Epson International Pano Awards. manishmamtani.com JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

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‘Simon being taken to sea for the first time since his father drowned’, 1983

A QUIET GIANT OF BRITISH PHOTOGRAPHY An appreciation of the life and work of Chris Killip, the groundbreaking image-maker who documented the subtleties of working class life WORDS: TOM SEYMOUR IMAGES: CHRIS KILLIP

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‘Youth on wall, Jarrow, Tyneside’, 1976

Chris Killip, the British documentary photographer who died from lung cancer on 13 October 2020 at the age of 74, has been celebrated by leading figures in the world of image-making.

His friend and contemporary Martin Parr HonFRPS calls Killip “groundbreaking” and “one of the most significant postwar British photographers”. Renowned photography specialist Simon Bainbridge describes Killip as “extraordinary”, and his photobook In Flagrante as “the high watermark” of British documentary photography.

Mark Haworth-Booth HonFRPS, who shared a friendship with Killip dating back to 1974, remembered him as “a remarkable talent and a very special human being who will be much missed”.

Killip was born in Douglas on the Isle of Man in 1946.

His parents, Molly and Alan, ran the Highlander, a pub in Greeba, and the young Chris helped with its day-to-day running in the years directly after the Second World War. At 16 Killip left school without qualifications apart from an O level in art, and began working as a trainee hotel manager on the Isle of Man.

By the end of his life, Killip was recognised internationally as a documentary photographer. Until his retirement in 2017, he was also a tenured professor of visual and environmental studies at Harvard University.

In 1964, at the age of 18, he made a pivotal change in direction when he left his family and island of birth for London. There, he pounded the pavements searching for photographic work, eventually securing a job as an assistant to Adrian Flowers, a London-based advertising photographer.

Over the following half-decade, Killip learned his craft as a jobbing commercial photographer. Yet, inspired by a Paul Strand and Walker Evans exhibition he saw at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, he began returning home to his parents’ pub, and the island he knew intimately, to take photographs. He later wrote that he took the decision to “purposefully photograph the place I knew and loved”.

In doing so, Killip would pioneer a visual movement barely recognised at that time as a legitimate art form.

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to focus entirely on his personal practice resulting, in 1974, in an Arts Council commission to photograph Huddersfield and Bury St Edmunds. Then, in 1975, came a two-year fellowship from Northern Arts to photograph England’s north east.

Killip moved to a small terraced house in Bill Quay, in the economically depressed town of Gateshead, Greater Newcastle, remaining there for 15 years. His engagement with the lives and landscapes of Tyneside, just as the area was buffeted by a historic period of industrial decline, will go down in photographic history.

“He captured working class life as it really was, photographing at a key moment in his country’s history,” says Bainbridge, a former resident of Newcastle, with the work encapsulating “the brutal dismantling of industries and the communities that depended on them”. For Parr, Killip “produced iconic images that speak of the last breath of the industrial Britain that was quietly fading in this period”.

These images include the 1976 photograph ‘Youth on wall, Jarrow, Tyneside’, showing a skinhead boy on a brick wall, his face contorted in frustration. Then there’s the elegiac sadness of a bereaved child on a fisherman’s boat, in the 1983 image ‘Simon being taken to sea for the first time since his father drowned’. Mark Haworth-Booth, the V&A’s senior curator of photographs from 1977 to 2004, helped ensure ‘Youth on wall’ was included in the museum’s collection in 1978.

From the series The Station, 1985

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“I would have seen it in Creative Camera magazine in May 1977 when a complete issue was devoted to Chris’s work in the north east of England,” Haworth-Booth wrote for the V&A at the time of Killip’s death. “I vividly remember seeing, later that year, Chris arriving for a John Szarkowski lecture at the Hayward Gallery with (his then partner, the Czech photographer) Markéta Luskačová and, in a sling, their baby Matthew (now an award-winning film-maker in New York).

Both fine and distinguished in looks, they seemed like photographic royalty.”

In 1980, Haworth-Booth included Killip’s signature Jarrow image in Old and Modern Masters of Photography, an Arts Council-funded exhibition drawn from the V&A collection.

“The boy, with his punk hair and boots, seems to be a study in bravado and insecurity, recorded with magnifying glass clarity by a 5×4 camera,” Haworth-Booth writes. “Chris later told me he had captured this unlikely picture by putting a false lens on the side of his view camera, à la Paul Strand, and wearing a hazard jacket, like a council surveyor.”

Killip’s remarkable abilities were in part born of his technical accomplishment. Parr draws attention to his ability to use a “large format 5×4 camera” while “coming in close and using some fill flash”. Bainbridge recognises that Killip’s distinctive use of such an unwieldy camera “not only caught astonishing detail, but also made him unmistakably present”.

‘Helen and her hula-hoop, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumberland’, 1984

“Killip was no casual observer. He would spend months and years with the people he photographed, telling it like it really was” The work, though, was primarily defined by Killip’s willingness and ability to forge “strong alliances with the people he photographed,” Parr says. “Killip was no casual observer,” Bainbridge agrees. “He would spend months and years with the people he photographed, telling it like it really was … He’s very much a photographer’s photographer.”

Killip’s legacy lives on in Newcastle. In 1977, he co-founded Side Gallery, a photography-specific space that has remained open and free to the public ever since. In Flagrante, his collection of photographs of Tyneside, published in 1988, “remains to this day the most compelling British documentary photography book published in the last 50 years,” Parr says.

In 1989, Killip received the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award and made what would be his last major series in Britain, when he was commissioned to photograph the Pirelli factory in Burton-on-Trent, Derbyshire. The following year the V&A hosted an exhibition of the work, Working at Pirelli.

Killip is survived by his wife, Mary Halpenny-Killip (née Halpenny), whom he married in 2000 in Cambridge, Massachusetts; son Matthew; stepson Joshua; granddaughters Millie and Celia; and brother Dermott.

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Five questions

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Rankin HonFRPS, a photographer and film-maker on the cutting edge of fashion and pop culture

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‘Spice Girls’, The Big Issue, 1996

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What makes you get up in the morning?

My dog Mavrix the Hooligan. He jumps on me and stays there to let me know it’s time for a walk.

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What’s been your toughest moment behind the lens?

It’s never too tough behind the lens, I love it so much.

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[for the 2013 exhibition Alive: In the Face of Death], which was very moving and tough.

What now for fashion photography?

Don’t ask me, I take portraits. However, if you’re asking me about photography in general, it’s going to go through a renaissance. As people get more sophisticated with their phones, we’ll find they become more interested in proper photography.

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Where would you most like to be photographing right now?

In the makeshift studio in my spare room at home, shooting portraits of flowers.

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Which image makes you most proud?

The next one.

‘Marilyn Manson’, Blender, 2003

Rankin: Play is published by Rizzoli. rizzoliusa.com and rankin.co.uk

RANKIN HonFRPS

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'Kiss me quick, Paris', 2015, by Ellen von Unwerth

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“My portraits are much more about me than they are about the people I photograph”

“I am … overwhelmed by history. I make imagery to give new life to important episodes of working people’s history”

RICHARD AVEDON

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“A good photo taken with a hidden camera is aerobatics in the world of natural photography”

“To be able to take my pictures I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about”

SERGEY GORSHKOV

SALLY MANN

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“Science and art are part of the same pursuit of the betterment of humanity and dissemination of knowledge”

“I literally photograph everything, from my phlegm to the sky, from graves to people, and the list goes on”

HUGH TURVEY

FELIX ZEIGLER

“My goal was to show women as glamorous, larger than life, powerful” ELLEN VON UNWERTH

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Her images are infused with mischievous sensuality and colour.

But what lies behind the glitter for Ellen von Unwerth, recipient of the 2020 RPS Editorial, Advertising and Fashion Photography Award?

WORDS: TEDDY JAMIESON

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Bath tub, Paris, 1996 “That was a picture taken for American Vogue. We were shooting in the hotel doing haute couture. The girls were so fantastic and then the stylist was like, ‘Oh, but we don’t have any clothes left.’ I saw these amazing hats and said, ‘Put them in a bubble bath and shoot them like very eccentric ladies with their hats and their glasses of champagne.’ And that’s how this picture came about. They were really good friends – they were partying all the time – and I think you feel that intimate moment. You can see how close they were.”

“I think being a photographer makes you young,” Ellen von Unwerth suggests near the end of our conversation.

“It keeps you very active in your mind. And you’re always with young people. I feel like one of them.”

She pauses for a moment and then adds, “I don’t feel like the mum. I hate it when people say, ‘Are you the mum of this girl?’ I feel like one of them. For the moment I have a lot of energy and I love what I do.”

Ellen von Unwerth is 66 years old but she’s not settling into comfortable old age just yet. Why should she? It’s possible that no one enjoys their job more than von Unwerth. Apart maybe from the people she photographs, maybe. To enter von Unwerth’s world is to enter a world of pop stars, film stars and supermodels; of beautiful, self-confident men and women (mostly women), all of whom appear to be having more fun than is humanly possible, often in high-end, exotic locations.

A von Unwerth photograph is a window into a world of impossible colour and glamour. Perhaps the most obvious word to describe them is playful. Play is a word von Unwerth uses herself time and again in conversation.

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Boooh!, New York, 2018 “The idea was that it was like a Hollywood premiere and the movie sucks, so … I love the popcorn out of focus and all the energy and the emotion of the people. Also, I love the casting. Peyton Knight, the model, and the drag queen. We talk about diversity now, but I always cast lots of funny, different characters in my pictures. I love that, especially in New York. There’s such a variety of interesting people. And, actually, I created my own magazine [Von, launched in March 2018] to be able to shoot these people and print them on paper because it’s very rare that you can do this. I don’t know what’s going to happen now but even in the last years it’s been difficult with magazines. It’s all about the advertisers. It’s very restrictive in a way.

That’s why I created my own magazine, so I could have fun and do what I wanted. And this is one of the pictures.”

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Two German girls (Diane Kruger and reflection of Ellen), Paris, 2017 “We had shot all these pictures in the hotel. We were running around, and it was just that moment when the sun hit the Eiffel Tower, almost like a Caspar David Friedrich painting. I love the silhouette. She’s like a goddess. And when you look to the right you can see my reflection in the picture, so I call it ‘Two German girls.’”

Rated R, Berlin, 2009 “I’ve worked a lot with Rihanna. That was a picture for her Rated R album.

She’s amazing. She’s super-beautiful, super-talented, super-sweet and always pushing the envelope. In this one she’s tied up with barbed wire, but she looks very strong and she looks in control.”

“Because of the coronavirus I’m going back to working on my own again.

I really enjoy it. It’s nice to be more intimate with the person you shoot” “It’s fun to play. The way I shoot it’s very fast, it’s very engaging. I work with the input of the girls. I work with their personality and also with the crew’s influence; the stylist, the hair and make-up, the lighting.”

Von Unwerth is in Paris – which is home these days – when we speak, shortly after hearing she is to receive the RPS Editorial, Advertising and Fashion Photography Award.

But she’s been travelling. “I went to New York for the first time in six months, which was very strange obviously with all the restrictions. It’s weird seeing New York so empty and everybody really being cautious. But I kind of felt quite safe, actually, I have to say, with the mask.”

How has the pandemic affected her? “Because of the coronavirus I’m going back to working on my own again.

It’s complicated. You cannot have many people in the room and, actually, I really enjoy it. It’s nice to be more intimate with the person you shoot.”

How many people are on set with you normally, Ellen?

“It depends. Sometimes when you do a commercial shoot it can be up to 50. But when I started I had only my little camera and a little box. Then I added an assistant who would carry that little box for me.”

Shooting during a pandemic must be a challenge. “I can shoot, but everything is complicated. People are waiting and nobody wants to spend money, so it’s a difficult time.

But it’s good to think about new projects and concentrate on projects you did before. I’m preparing some new books.

It’s also good to take more time and think about things other than work.”

Von Unwerth’s photographs offer an escape from this age of the pandemic, of course. They are a portal to a world where strong, self-confident, wilful women are never victims. Women like Madonna, who, I suggest to the photographer, might qualify as the ultimate von Unwerth woman.

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You (Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel), Paris, 2004 “That was when they were a real couple. Often, I make up couples. But they were a real couple at the time and just fooling around, playing La Dolce Vita movie stars like Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren. They were perfect for it. It is important to give people a role to play because then they play the character, and they are less worried about the way they look. They play more. They have fun. Especially with actors. I always feel they’re better when they have a role to play. Of course, we also say ‘Let’s do La Dolce Vita’ for the people who do the styling and hair and make-up to have a direction.”

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“The circus was a big influence – the magic, the glitter, the dance” “Yes, she is in a way. But funnily enough we never worked together a lot. We worked together only two or three times.

I guess it’s difficult. Two blondes in the room,” she says laughing. “I wish we had the occasion to work together more.

“And she is amazing to photograph. She is exactly what I love … She’s living in front of the camera. She’s moving, she’s dancing, she’s singing, she’s naughty and she’s pushing it.”

With someone so famous, is that fame in the room when you take the photograph, Ellen? “To be honest, I have shot a lot of celebrities and I’m usually quite unimpressed. But with Madonna, I was a little bit nervous. But then, you know, we get along. We had so many things in common.”

True enough. Like Madonna, von Unwerth is in many ways her own creation. She came through a difficult beginning and found her own way to where she wanted to be.

“I grew up an orphan,” von Unwerth says simply and without any drama. “I had lots of foster parents. I was in all these schools and orphanages. When I was 16, I was living on my own. And then I was living in the mountains in a hippy community.”

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This was in Bavaria at the start of the 1970s, where the presence of a hippy commune wasn’t always welcomed.

“We thought Bavarians were too traditional and too conservative. They didn’t like us. We didn’t like them. It was actually a very strange time. It was a little bit like Easy Rider.

But I had some of my best times there. Very good memories.”

One of her earliest jobs was as a magician’s assistant in a circus. And you have to wonder sometimes, looking at her photographs, if von Unwerth has ever quite left.

“I was always inspired by the circus,” she admits. “When I was little I was living in a dream world because my home wasn’t so comfortable. But when I was in the circus it was a big influence and it always comes back – the magic, the glitter, the dance. The circus world, it’s always something that reappears in my pictures.”

Von Unwerth’s route to photography came through being photographed. She entered the fashion industry as a model.

Modelling, however, didn’t quite give her what she wanted.

“I was actually not that happy being a model because I was not really so exhibitionistic. And I was feeling that I couldn’t be

Kate Moss and David Bowie, New York, 2003 “That was a really incredible shoot for an English music magazine. I did the story a bit like the movie Blow-Up, you know? And so, David Bowie was the photographer and Kate Moss was the Veruschka character and we did lots of fun pictures. They were the most incredible couple to shoot together. Kate Moss had just started, but she was already exploding. David Bowie was just so much fun.

He was such an actor and playing around and joking and so sexy at the same time.

He was almost like an old friend. It was so comfortable to be around him. And then, at the end, this picture happened. He was hugging her. It was like a paparazzi moment: ‘No more pictures.’

I love how he is so protective of her and she looks up at him. It was just a really special moment. Especially now. It was always a nice picture, but now he is not with us it takes on a different meaning.”

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Gargoyle of the Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles, 2017 “This is the balcony of my favourite hotel in Los Angeles, the Chateau Marmont. It’s an actress called Sofia Boutella. She was very brave to do this. I was like, ‘Are you sure?’ She’s an acrobat and an amazing dancer, but I was a little bit worried. I just love how she sits there soaking up the sun. But, at the same time, it looks like she is watching over Los Angeles, almost like the gargoyles at Notre Dame.”

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PROFILE

Ellen von Unwerth The recipient of the 2020 RPS Editorial, Advertising and Fashion Photography Award, German-born von Unwerth was a model before becoming a photographer and director. She has created campaigns for such brands as Chanel, Jimmy Choo and Rolex, while her editorial work has featured in Elle, Vanity Fair and American Vogue, among other magazines.

creative. Photographers would always say, ‘Stay still. Don’t do anything. To the left. To the right. Pose.’ And I always wanted to do silly things. But I still modelled for 10 years, which is a really long time. Especially as I wasn’t that happy.”

Moving behind the lens was the answer. Yet picking up a camera for the first time, she says, was a totally casual thing.

“I wasn’t that interested in photography to be honest, but I was a model, and I was living with a boyfriend who was a photographer and we also had a lab in our tiny apartment.

So, he would always take pictures of me and then just develop one picture. But I wanted to see all the other ones.

“He taught me how to print and that was my first step into photography. Learning how to print was super-fun and interesting and magic. When my boyfriend gave me the camera he told me, ‘There is a plus, a circle and a minus, and when the circle lines up we shoot.’ That was my crash course in photography.”

When she began to take photographs she was finally free to ask models to do what she had always wanted to do herself.

“I asked them to live in front of the camera and have fun and express yourself. And the wilder, the more outrageous the better. People were not used to seeing that. They saw a lot of posed photography and I wanted to make my pictures look like documentary pictures. Captured moments.”

She found her feet quickly. In 1989, just two months after she picked up a camera, the designer Katharine Hamnett hired von Unwerth to shoot her latest campaign. But it was her work with model Claudia Schiffer that really established her name. And Schiffer’s.

“We kind of started our career together. I discovered her.

Elle [magazine] asked me to do some pictures of her and when I looked at the pictures I thought, ‘Wow, she really looks like Brigitte Bardot.’ And then we enhanced that look. I did pictures of her in my tiny Parisian apartment at the time.”

Those pictures led to Guess hiring Schiffer and von Unwerth to shoot an ad campaign in the United States.

“It was a story about a country and western singer in Nashville. The campaign had such an amazing response from the public and it kicked off both of our careers.

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Bitch!, Paris, 2007 “Well, you know, I always love to put a bit of drama and tension in my pictures. Women can be very bitchy with each other. I love in this picture the red. It has a link to blood and fighting, but at the same time it is very glamorous – the high heels, the nail polish. The message is that girls can be really strong and fight each other. They can be glamorous and sexy and no angels. The last time I was in a fight? It was a long time ago.

I’m very diplomatic. You have to be very diplomatic when you’re a photographer.”

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“Girls can be really strong. They can be glamorous and sexy and no angels” “I really do love to shoot with people when they’re starting.

It’s incredible to really discover somebody. There’s a certain innocence and freshness that is really super-fun.”

She uses that word super a lot, too. It is one you can apply to her work, I think. A von Unwerth image is superstylised, super-charged, super-glamorous. “I love to have a creamy skin tone where you don’t have too much detail,” she says at one point. “Who wants to see wrinkles, pimples?”

Von Unwerth’s women are beautiful and desirable but usually also in control. That matters to her. “From the beginning, when I was a model, I was frustrated not to be able to show my personality. That was always my goal; to show the women as glamorous, larger than life, powerful, fun, exuberant and in control of what they do and how they portray themselves.”

But can you take a picture of a woman in a sexualised situation, I ask her, and not objectify her? Does the gender of the photographer make a difference?

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see a picture and think, ‘This is a woman who took this picture. There is something maybe a little more romantic, maybe a bit more emotional.’ But you cannot generalise.”

It may be also worth remembering the hippy girl von Unwerth once was. That and the fact that she grew up in a culture not quite as buttoned up as the UK or the US. “When I was little, nudity for us was something very normal.

Magazines like Stern always had a naked girl in the pictures.

There were a lot of nudist beaches. I never had a problem with it, never thought it was something you couldn’t show.

“But, of course, lately, it’s something more delicate.

A lot of people are afraid of it. On Instagram it gets your account shut off. There’s lots of censoring. People are more scared now.”

The world is changing. It always is. As are we. Von Unwerth too. Looking ahead, she says, “I think I’m going to do more pictures about the environment. I think it’s an important thing to do. Fashion is moving in that direction. There are a lot of sustainable brands. I think it’s really important to show that in pictures. I think it’s important to look at these problems.

“But still in my style, still in a glamorous, sexy fun way.”

Gisele, Saint-Tropez, 2004 “We were doing a shoot in Cannes in the south of France. It was a picture taken in between shoots. I love to grab spontaneous moments and she was pretending to do the cooking for us. I love how nonchalant she is standing there drinking in a skimpy bikini in high heels, the opposite of the surroundings.

Even her pose. Not trying to be sexy. She is just living her life. I love that moment.

Did she cook the burgers?

She cooked the burgers, but I think they were burnt.

Nobody was interested in them. ‘Let’s stay with the rosé.’”

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Richard Avedon’s pared-back portraiture changed perceptions of photography forever – but its acceptance as art involved a lifelong struggle, argues his biographer Philip Gefter

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the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Marilyn Monroe, Truman Capote or a drifter in the American West, he rendered a specimen of our species to be contemplated in the context of his ongoing catalogue of humanity, prompting us to consider ourselves over and over again, as if in mirror image: Who are we? What are we? Why are we? And, yet, in Avedon’s lifetime, he was dismissed as a “celebrity photographer” – an intellectual slur that stuck to him as gum on his shoe, and to which he was often quick to reply: “Don’t think about who they are; just look at their faces.”

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On the occasion of her starring role as King Lear on Broadway, the great British actor Glenda Jackson, by then 82 years old, asserted that Shakespeare remains the most contemporary dramatist in the world “because he really only ever asks three questions: Who are we?

What are we? Why are we?”

These same existential questions underscore the body of portraiture produced by Richard Avedon in the second half of the 20th century.

We are all of the same species, he was saying, and with each portrait he made, regardless of whether it was of

Avedon, 1 ‘Marilyn Monroe in the film The Prince and the ShowgirlÕ, 1957, by Richard Avedon

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Avedon’s 1957 portrait of Monroe is one of his most recognisable images.

If all his portraits are self-portraits – “My portraits are much more about me than they are about the people I photograph,” he said on more than one occasion – then the question of how to refer to this photograph presents an additional anomaly about the nature of portraiture: do Andy Warhol’s silk-screen multiples of ‘Marilyn’, for example, or ‘Jackie’, or ‘Liz’, constitute portraits of legendary icons, or are they Warhols first?

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A comparable example might be John Singer Sargent’s bravura portraits of society figures of the late 19th century that depict a class and an era with accomplished brushwork and daunting spontaneity.

We recognise the exquisite Sargent style before identifying the woman in his risqué portrait, ‘Madame X’, as Virginie Gautreau.

No anecdote better epitomises this paradox than the one recounted about Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. When confronted by someone who claimed that the portrait didn’t look anything like Stein,

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‘Richard Avedon with Dovima following the shoot at Cirque D’Hiver, Paris’, 1955, by Sam Shaw

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‘Richard Avedon with Carmel Snow and Marie-Louise Bousquet, Dior showroom’, ca 1946, by Henri Cartier-Bresson

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“His signature was the formality of a straight-on figure against the white nuclear backdrop”

Picasso said with imposing confidence: “It will.”

The same could be said of Avedon’s portrait in which Marilyn Monroe appears ‘unmasked’. It may not represent the public image of the radiant movie star, but it has fallen in place historically as Avedon’s ‘Marilyn’.

That is true of all his portraits. They are recognisably Avedons first, even before the viewer identifies his subject.

Today, in the pantheon of portrait photographers, Avedon stands alongside Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), who photographed in his Paris studio the significant artists, writers, musicians and thinkers of 19th-century France; Julia Margaret Cameron, who photographed the artists, poets, philosophers and aristocrats of 19th-century Victorian England; August Sander, who made a chronicle of societal archetypes in early 20th-century Germany; and, of course, Avedon’s own contemporary, Irving Penn.

All of them photographed the significant figures of their time, each one inscribing a distinct visual signature that defines the artist as well as the period in which they lived and worked. Avedon’s signature was the formality of a straight-on figure against the white nuclear backdrop, with a proscenium frame composed of the edges of the film printed as part of the image – the ID picture taken to its apotheosis.

In his fashion work, he brought a native poetic impulse and youthful exuberance to his discovery of Paris after the Second World War and transformed the representation of women’s fashion in photography into the defining look of an era. “He knew that ‘women are a foreign country’,” Judith Thurman writes in her essay in Richard Avedon: Made in France.

“He also knew, like every other precocious young aesthete raised among philistines … that Paris is the capital of that foreign country.”

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In his lifetime, Avedon endured personal, as well as professional, prejudice. He was brought up in New York between the world wars, when antiSemitism and homophobia forced him to make decisions that shaped the course of his life. His father, Jacob Israel Avedon, anglicised his name to Allan Jack Avedon, and his son grew up believing that, as a Jew, assimilation and aspiration were the same thing.

Avedon had his nose surgically altered in 1941, at the age of 17, to appear less Jewish.

Several years later, he began psychoanalysis to try to cure himself of unwanted homosexual feelings.

He married (twice), a necessity in mid20th-century America for anyone who wanted to have professional options and societal standing. By sheer force of will, and not a little talent, he rose to become the most successful fashion photographer in the world and one of the greatest portrait photographers – along with Irving Penn, to whom he would become tethered in history as Picasso is to Matisse, Pollock to de Kooning, Roth to Updike.

As an artist, Avedon found that the world of fashion did not satisfy the breadth of his curiosity and creativity.

“Avedon was like Fragonard,” one colleague said about him. “Like many decorative artists, he despised his gift.”

His ‘gift’ became a noose around his neck (albeit one that was perpetually lucrative and made him very rich).

He wanted to be taken seriously as an artist but was foiled by the bastard medium he embraced – photography – which made the struggle to be seen as an artist that much more encumbered.

In his final years, Avedon witnessed a respect for his chosen medium that had been long overdue in the art world and that he had had a hand in bringing about: his own tireless efforts to have his work shown in galleries and museums throughout his career tracked simultaneously with the rise in stature of the medium of photography itself.

In Avedon’s lifetime, two other luminaries had instrumental roles in garnering respect for photography

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‘Richard Avedon planning his retrospective exhibition at New York’s Marlborough Gallery’, 1975, by Jack Mitchell

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in the art world: the curator John Szarkowski had the institutional platform of the Museum of Modern Art on which to make his eloquent case for photography as an art form of equal consequence among its fine art peers; and Sam Wagstaff, an institution all by himself, and one of the very first photography collectors who almost single-handedly established the art market for the medium.

Avedon was third in this triumvirate, despite the fact that the curator and the collector refused to take his work seriously.

Yet, in 1978, when Avedon’s fashion work was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it broke photography out of its circumscribed ghetto, unfurling his name on a huge banner in front of the most august museum in America and landing him on the cover of Newsweek, still then a pillar of journalism and an oracle of cultural significance. No other living photographer had situated himself so prominently in the public eye. For better or worse, Avedon became a household name.

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“He is one of the major photographic artists of the 20th century, and one of the most influential,” said Mia Fineman, co-curator of his exhibition of portraits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2002. “Practically every day you’ll come across an Avedon imitation.

The portrait style he established has become part of the vocabulary of photography.

That work is seminal, and his fashion work, too. He was groundbreaking in both.”

I wrote [his] biography because of my belief in Avedon as one of the most consequential artists of the 20th century, closer – in his sweeping art-historical gesture toward flattening out the image on a twodimensional surface – to Andy Warhol than to Diane Arbus. While his fashion work was revolutionary in its time, his portraiture was radical in its formal simplicity, monumental in its existential purity.

Avedon advanced the genre, falling in place after August Sander. I set out to explore the combination of qualities and circumstances that formulated Avedon’s

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Richard Avedon discusses his Chicago Seven portraits of Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and David Dellinger at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 1970

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Avedon, 4 EARL STEINBICKER

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‘Avedon on the set of the CBS TV special The Fabulous Fifties’ by Earl Steinbicker

“Avedon lived a most remarkable life ... he straddled glamour and pathos in equal measure”

unique sensibility, which carried the allure of international glamour and, along with it, something profoundly sexy that was hard to define.

In the riddle of that examination was my own quest to understand how the culture of the second half of the 20th century evolved from a particular nexus in New York and Hollywood, in the years of my own youth, the 1950s and 1960s: Avedon was at the centre of a profoundly influential group of individuals – Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Harold Brodkey, Sidney Lumet and Mike Nichols – who shaped the cultural life of the American century and whose music, books and films clarified my own understanding of my time. Avedon’s world was a nourishing one to get lost in while I researched, contemplated and laid out the story of his life. It was an exercise that confirmed a guiding belief of mine, one exemplified by Avedon himself: know thy culture; know thyself.

Finally, my goal was to make a case for Avedon’s place of achievement alongside his peers in the pantheon of 20th-century arts and letters. He lived a most remarkable life – he knew everyone; he went everywhere; he lived well; he worked hard. He straddled glamour and pathos in equal measure.

Behind the glossy name, though, or in spite of it, he was an individual with crackling intelligence, unbounded curiosity, originality and vision.

Of course, it is a fine line between ambition and delusion on which the artist is so precariously, if steadfastly, balanced, and Avedon walked that line in a high-wire act that would leave almost anyone in a perpetual state of vertigo. What makes a legend most, indeed.

What Becomes a Legend Most: A Biography of Richard Avedon

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THE WILD FRONTIER

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He was in his forties before waking up to his talent for taking pictures. Now, after winning Wildlife Photographer of the Year, Sergey Gorshkov shares some moments from his incredible journey

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‘The duel’, Commended, Behaviour: Birds, Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2012

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He might have been named Wildlife Photographer of the Year in one of the biggest competitions in the photography calendar, but Sergey Gorshkov keeps a healthy dose of modesty in his kit bag.

He comes across as genuinely appreciative of the attention he has garnered since being named overall winner in a contest that attracted more than 49,000 entries from professionals and amateurs across the world.

The former businessman spent much of his childhood outdoors in his native Siberia, engendering in him a love of nature – and of hunting.

Gorshkov’s biography tells of a pivotal trip to Africa as an adult, during which he found himself mesmerised by a leopard and unable to shoot it. He took up

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‘The embrace’, Grand Title winner, Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2020

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photography and began taking pictures instead.

“Right now it sounds strange, but when I grew up we didn’t have a TV in the house and I spent most of my time at one with nature,” he has said. “It was my only entertainment.

Many years later, when I lived in the north, I had some free time, so I took a Nikon and my life changed. I sold my business and gained the freedom of creativity.

“I can’t call myself a professional – I still use trial and error. I’ve made mistakes but I’ve learned to analyse them and gain knowledge.”

The image that earned him the Grand Title in this competition, which is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, is titled ‘The embrace’.

It shows an Amur, or Siberian,

‘Wolverine’, Highly Commended, Animal Portraits, Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2009

“I sold my business and gained the freedom of creativity”

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“Through the emotive power of photography we are reminded of the beauty of the natural world”

tigress rubbing her cheek against the bark of an ancient Manchurian fir to leave secretions from her scent glands.

Gorshkov took the photograph remotely, in the Land of the Leopard National Park, Russia, using a hidden camera-trap system. It took 10 months to achieve the image – hardly surprising when you learn that this subspecies, which once roamed the Russian Far East, northern China and the Korean peninsula, was almost extinct by the 1940s. The Amur was only saved from the ravages of uncontrolled hunting when Russia became the first country to grant the tiger full protection. There are now an estimated 450 in the wild, according to WWF. Dr Tim Littlewood, executive director of science for the

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Natural History Museum, was on the jury which selected Gorshkov’s image. “Hunted to the verge of extinction in the past century, the Amur population is still threatened by poaching and logging today,” he commented. “The remarkable sight of the tigress immersed in her natural environment offers us hope, as recent reports suggest numbers are growing from dedicated conservation efforts. Through the emotive power of photography, we are reminded of the beauty of the natural world and our shared responsibility to protect it.”

Gorshkov explains he began using hidden cameras so he could show nature at its most raw, without human

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involvement. The photographer installs his mirrorless camera in a box and turns the sound of the shutter off to ensure there are no distractions for his subject.

“Tigers and leopards are so rare that it is almost impossible to see them in the wild, so I decided to try using hidden cameras,” he notes.

“For many of you it might seem that everything is simple – you just set the camera, go home and drink beer and wait for the animal to cross the line of the motion sensor.

The camera shoots and the whole masterpiece is ready.

I thought the same way at the beginning, but everything turned out to be much

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“It might seem simple – you just set the camera, go home and drink beer”

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‘The cauldron’, Winner, Wildscapes, Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2013

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‘Bear glare’, Winner, Animal Portraits, Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2007

more complicated.

“Shooting with hidden cameras is exactly where I can give free rein to my director’s imagination. A good photo taken with a hidden camera is aerobatics in the world of natural photography.”

Gorshkov has used his success as a wildlife photographer to raise public awareness about the plight of his beloved Amur. “Photography is a powerful tool in the wider conversation about nature,” he says. “Photos affect the consciousness of people and they begin to look at nature in a different way. This is a much greater contribution than saving one fish from a drying pond.

I hope this photo, which shows

the beauty of the wild nature of Russia, will contribute to this.”

So after winning one of the most coveted titles in the world of photography, what will Gorshkov’s next move be?

“While taking wildlife photos doesn’t make me rich, the opportunity to communicate with wild animals brings me happiness,” he has said.

“Right now photography is the reflection of the world I live in.

“It is my philosophy.”

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‘SCIENCE AND ART BOTH BEGIN WITH CREATIVE IMAGININGS’ From the first medical X-ray to a world of hidden art, discover how a scientific discovery 125 years ago has changed the way we see the world WORDS: GEMMA PADLEY

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It was a game changer. A revolutionary scientific process that was to change the way we saw – and treated – the human body. Today, many of us take an X-ray for granted as a routine part of medical and dental diagnostics – a method of investigating whether we’ve broken a bone or have something sinister lurking beneath our gums. But, as with many forms of technological innovation, there was a time when the X-ray was novel and yet to be fully understood.

It was discovered by German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen just over 125 years ago, on 8 November 1895.

Röntgen (1845-1923), who was born in Germany and grew up in the Netherlands, made the discovery while carrying out tests to see whether cathode rays could be passed through a glass vacuum tube.

Working in a darkened room, Röntgen noticed a mysterious faint light on nearby screens. This turned out to be caused by a hitherto unknown penetrating type of high-energy electromagnetic radiation. The rays, Röntgen went on to discover, passed through most substances including human tissue, leaving solid objects, such as bones, as shadows.

He called the rays ‘X’ because they were unknown, and the name stuck.

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Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, January 1900

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Röntgen used X-rays to make the now well-known image of his wife Anna Bertha’s hand, with her wedding ring clearly visible. It was the first so-called ‘Röntgenogram’ ever made.

It is difficult to imagine what seeing such an image for the first time must have been like. “I have seen my death!” Anna reportedly cried. Indeed, such a sight must have been astonishing and surely more than a little alarming.

Röntgen embarked on several weeks of carefully controlled experiments, amassing and analysing further data. He submitted the paper ‘On a New Kind of Rays’ on 28 December 1895 to the Würzburg Physical-Medical Society and went on to give a lecture and demonstration of the technology the following month, which involved creating an X-ray image of his friend Albert von Kölliker’s hand.

Röntgen’s findings spread rapidly across the world and he received much attention and acclaim for his groundbreaking work, most notably, in 1901, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery of the remarkable rays subsequently named after him”.

X-rays were soon being used to diagnose fractures and detect foreign bodies in patients, although it would be many

PICTORIAL PRESS LTD / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

The first medical X-ray was created by Röntgen of his wife Anna’s hand on 22 December 1895

“Röntgen made the discovery while carrying out tests to see whether cathode rays could be passed through a glass vacuum tube”

more years before they were routinely used in medical care. In the United States, Professor Edwin Brant Frost was among the first to use X-rays clinically when in February 1896 he made a plate of a patient’s fracture.

Then in January of that year, Austrian physician Leopold Pfaundler von Hadermur used X-rays to locate a needle in the hand of a 12-year-old girl.

By August 1896, German neurologist Albert Eulenburg had successfully made X-rays of bullets in the brain.

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diseases. In turn, treatments for all kinds of diseases gradually began to improve. Just a couple of months after Röntgen’s discovery, a Chicago-based electrotherapist called Emil Grubbe used the technology to treat a woman with breast cancer. Further research was conducted in the field of cancers in the months that followed.

The world’s first hospital radiology department was founded at Glasgow Royal Infirmary in Scotland in January 1896 by Dr John Macintyre (1857-1928). He achieved several firsts, including producing the first chest X-rays and the first cinematic radiograph of a moving frog’s leg.

The use of the technology in the early months and years was not, for the most part, regulated, although some scientists raised concerns about possible side effects as a result of exposure to radiation. Largely, however, any risks were left unchecked, although the consequences of even brief exposure to radiation could be severe. As time.com reported in 2016, technicians would frequently suffer from burns, sexual sterility and even death after just a few seconds or minutes of exposure.

The Royal Photographic Society expressed an interest in the new technology early on, hosting lectures and producing articles on the subject in the RPS Journal.

“The RPS meetings were places where developments in photography were discussed and demonstrated,” says Dr Michael Pritchard FRPS, RPS director of education and public affairs. “These were usually technical improvements to processes, optics or chemistry, so X-rays were quite distinctive in that sense.”

James Gifford, owner of a lace-making business, amateur scientist, keen photographer and astronomer, gave a presentation at the Society within a month of Röntgen’s experiments being published, says Dr Pritchard.

“It’s not totally clear whether Gifford gave a practical demonstration or simply read his paper, [but] he certainly showed an example [of an X-ray] and the RPS Journal reproduced one of his X-rays of a hand.”

“Exposure times to X-rays could be long – 10 minutes plus – causing darkening of the skin and burning sensations”

Scottish electrical engineer Alan Archibald CampbellSwinton (1863-1930), one of the early pioneers of the new technology, is credited with making an albumen print from the first X-ray negative of a human hand to be produced in England, in early 1896. At the bottom of the print, which is kept in The RPS Collection at the V&A, London, it reads: “Exposure: 20 minutes through an aluminium sheet.”

Campbell-Swinton, who opened the first radiographic laboratory in Britain that same year, gave a lecturedemonstration of X-rays at the Royal Photographic Society on 11 February 1896. “Both the reading of the paper and demonstration prompted questions and suggestions for improving what had been shown,” says Dr Pritchard.

“It was seen as a scientific phenomenon.”

Dr Pritchard further draws attention to the Society’s involvement in reporting on the technology as it developed by pointing to this statement from the RPS Journal (29 Feb 1896, page 160): “If this discovery is to be of much use in medicine, it is most important that the exposure should be short.”

X-rays continued to be reported on in the RPS Journal in 1896, says Dr Pritchard, and comments on hazards were also made. “Exposure times to X-rays could be long – 10 minutes plus – causing darkening of the skin and burning sensations,” he observes, pointing to another quote from the RPS Journal (21 Nov 1896, page 69), which reads: “The appearance of his hands was as though he had had a bad skin disease for many years.”

Other highlights from the history of X-rays include: the use of so-called X-ray vans, and radiological equipment in field hospitals, during World War One; the efforts of pioneering doctor Florence Stoney (18701932), the UK’s first female radiologist; the introduction of radiographic film by Eastman Kodak in 1918 (glass plates were previously used); and in the 1940s, the somewhat surprising use of X-rays in a shoe-fitting fluoroscope machine. X-ray technology also laid the groundwork for other imaging technologies, such as MRI, CT and ultrasound.

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As monumental as X-rays have been within the fields of scientific research and medicine, and latterly in the manufacturing and aerospace industries, their application goes beyond even these areas. Radiography has been used by conservators and historians to examine and date paintings, and artists including Hugh Turvey HonFRPS and Nick Veasey have embraced the technology for creative ends.

Turvey has been a photographer and X-ray artist since 1994. Since 2009 he has been permanent artist in residence at the British Institute of Radiology.

Using X-ray equipment from the medical and security industries to create his ‘Xograms’, a combination of an X-ray and a photogram, Turvey has worked across the worlds of fine art, public art and advertising. His subjects include everything from flowers to musical instruments and everyday objects such as suitcases, shoes and gift-wrapped presents. At once aesthetically pleasing – he sometimes uses colour to enhance his creations – and informative, Turvey’s images are a blend of art and science.

“Without the pursuit of knowledge through science, the artist would not have the tools to work with,” he says. “Just think about the creation of pencil lead, paints, papers, audio, photography, video and AI. You could also hypothesise that science and art are part of the same pursuit of the betterment of humanity and dissemination of knowledge.

“The application and output may differ, but both disciplines begin the process with creative imaginings.”

Turvey is especially passionate about helping improve healthcare environments. His large-scale art installation projects have been erected in hospitals in the UK, Germany and USA, and he is committed to using his art to educate, engage and stimulate dialogue with the public. He has also been exploring changes to the Earth. During the first phase of the pandemic, Turvey partnered with international conservation charity Fauna and Flora International, the

“The thing about an X-ray is it’s honest. It shows how things are made, from the inside out”

Cambridge Conservation Initiative and research support network Algae-UK, to produce a touring exhibition.

The result, Hidden Garden (2020-2025), “invites visitors behind the scenes through the visual metaphor of X-ray to help to promote our responsibilities as global ecological custodians”. An exhibition of the work, created during the pandemic, is to tour in the UK and Europe, and will include the Edinburgh Science Festival. “X-rays are synonymous with ‘health checks’,” Turvey adds, “and we hope to reiterate and promote Earth health through this exhibition.”

Nick Veasey has also built a successful career across art and commerce using X-rays. A photographer turned X-ray artist, he began working with the technology in 1998. More than 20 years later Veasey has a reputation for producing eye-catching and sometimes humorous works of art, many of which he exhibits at his contemporary art space, Process Gallery, in Kent. Cars, buses, motorbikes, dresses, superheroes, speakers, mushrooms, flowers, handbags and more have all had the Veasey treatment. Notably, he was commissioned by the V&A to create an artwork to mark the opening of the Photography Centre in October 2018.

For this, he X-rayed a camera, revealing its inner workings.

“I like to push it, to see what you can do with it,” says Veasey of X-ray technology. “It’s interesting using the human form because there are lots of limitations to what you can and can’t do. By bringing a skeleton into an animated pose, it’s as though you’re bringing it back to life.”

Since X-ray technology literally and metaphorically allows us to go deeper, reflecting on who we are and how we live, the argument is that it can help us to build a better future.

“The thing about an X-ray is it’s honest,” says Veasey.

“It shows how things are made, from the inside out. So much of what we see is retouched to death. An X-ray is a different way of looking at the world. It actually shows what the world is made of.” x-rayartist.com nickveasey.com

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‘Iris’, 2015, by Hugh Turvey HonFRPS

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He sheds light on Britain’s hidden histories using members of the public to create performance art epics.

So what drives the cultural activist Red Saunders?

WORDS: TOM SEYMOUR IMAGES: RED SAUNDERS

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‘The agreement, Treaty of Utrecht, 1713’

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The suffragettes are now a staple of British cultural history. They are lionised in popular culture, idolised in statues in our parliament, taught in our school curriculum. But what about the Leveller Women, a group of radical British feminists who should be considered the rightful historical forerunners to the suffragette movement?

During the English revolution of 1640 to 1660, the Leveller Women met with insurgent supporters of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army at an encampment near Malton in North Yorkshire, deep in the forests of northern England. There, gathered around fires, they would debate the new England they were in the process of creating; they would argue 66

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‘Building the resistance, Peterloo Massacre, 1819’

for the advancement of gender equality, for the right of women to be heard, for religious tolerance and an elected judiciary. These acts of political dissidence were also acts of profound physical bravery – if caught, the women faced torture and execution.

For that matter, have you been taught much of the story of William Cuffay, the black son of a slave, who signed the ‘People’s Charter’ of 1842? Or how about Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a foundational text for modern feminism? Then there’s the rebel leader Wat Tyler, whose peasant army seized London in 1381, and the roving

“hedgerow priest” John Ball – “the intellectual leader of the Peasants’ Revolt”.

Such moments have been overlooked, the London-based British photographer Red Saunders suggests, precisely because they are the extraordinary actions of ordinary men and women. The monarchy, the aristocracy and the landed gentry tend to dominate our histories, he argues, since it is their narratives that have been carefully curated and perpetuated by successive governments and states.

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‘William Cuffay and the London Chartists, 1842’

run this country for many years – their class interest doesn’t really need you to know that information, or doesn’t want you to know that information. The ideology of the ruled is that of the rulers.”

Saunders, a former freelance photographer for the Sunday Times Magazine, co-founded the grassroots movement Rock Against Racism, which staged marches, festivals and concerts from 1976-1981. A response by musicians to the electoral threat of the National Front, Rock Against Racism mobilised such incendiary acts as the Clash, Tom Robinson Band and Aswad.

With similar levels of passion and commitment, Saunders started his project Hidden in 2008 and has since worked on 68

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one image a year. The latest will be unveiled in late spring 2021 at Format Festival, Covid-19 restrictions permitting.

The giant tableau will feature three stories of innovation and disruption from Derbyshire’s past – the Enlightenment, the Silk Mill Lock-Out of 1833-34, and the advancement of technology from 1880 onwards. It will be exhibited at the new Museum of Making at Derby’s Silk Mill, recognised as the world’s first factory. “Derby’s history can only be understood through its people,” says Saunders.

The images were made in June 2019 after Saunders gathered at least 150 volunteer cast and crew from across Derbyshire following a series of casting calls. Derby, Saunders

‘Hild of Streonshalh (Hilda of Whitby), 614-680’

says, was the “birthplace of the Enlightenment” – an area that became synonymous with technical advancements that “created new ways of understanding and living in the world”.

The idea for Hidden initially came from Marxist historian Sheila Rowbotham, who has made a career of telling a different version of Britain’s common heritage than the one taught in schools and universities. Saunders, then, is interested in the events, stories and characters that took place beyond the official telling of history. Orienting his work as an alternative, and in some ways antithesis, to such official histories, he uses photography to shed light on a parallel narrative. For each image, he positions and

photographs his actors as they perform imagined and halfdocumented scenarios from the history books.

“I am a photographer who is overwhelmed by history and the knowledge and curiosity it gives you,” says Saunders.

“I make imagery to give new life to these important episodes of working people’s history.” Saunders views such events as decisive, pivotal moments in a more than 800-year struggle for democracy and liberty in the British realm – moments that, in the age of the Black Lives Matter and #metoo movements, continue to resonate. Yet these events were never eternalised by the photographic medium, and have since become obscured by a plutocratic public discourse.

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‘Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt, 1381’

“The people in control, who have the keys to the gate, who have the keys to history and learning and education, they teach the history they want you to know,” he says. “The history we have – of ordinary people, of working class history – you really have got to dig it out. They don’t want you to know that information because they don’t know where it could lead, and it could lead to all sorts of things.

“So these photographs come from a wish to shine a bit of light on these great matters of struggle to establish freedom and democracy in this country that have been hidden away.”

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itself. He sees his photographs as modern versions of the Victorian tradition of ‘tableaux vivants’, or ‘living pictures’, and believes they can help us to remember and debate such obscured moments in our shared cultural history.

Many of the events occurred before photography had been invented, and in a time when artistic portraiture was the preserve of the ruling class. By reimagining scenes that have only been documented through word of mouth, Saunders hopes to provide a form of photographic ‘evidence’.

The final images are meticulous, atmospherically lit and, as far as possible, historically accurate, with many of the costumes overseen by long-term collaborator Maria Price.

“The Victoria idea of the tableau photograph would involve a mix of work on the glass negative, combination printing, cutting out and splicing of prints, and re-photographing,” Saunders says. “We’re doing the same thing they did in the old days, but with the technology available to us today.”

Saunders also spent time looking at the Northern Renaissance artistic movement of the 15th and 16th centuries, particularly Rembrandt van Rijn and Pieter Bruegel, and Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Each master craftsman had an ability to create scenes that seemed to roil and move of their own accord; the painter spending months and years to create something resembling JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

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‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Newington Green dissenters, 1781’

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a photographic snapshot of a chaotic jumble of characters, micro-dramas and emotions.

With these influences in mind, Saunders’ photographs are full of dramatic detail. They are steeped in the principles of community engagement and group creativity, with each historical moment recreated by volunteer, nonprofessional models.

There’s a biographical element to this approach. As a young man working as an apprentice in a London advertising agency, Saunders remembers being taken by an older colleague to a London underground folk club – “full of really early days beatniks. I was a sharply dressed mod and they were a bunch of old scarecrows.”

Towards the end of the evening, Saunders witnessed a 20-minute long ‘agit prop’ performance about the Vietnam War. “It was an incredibly aggressive piece of theatre,” he says.

“It was done using mime, and at screaming volume. A totally physical experience. It was a Road to Damascus moment.”

After the performance, Saunders approached the troupe and congratulated them. Soon enough, he started attending rehearsals and was moonlighting as an agit prop performer.

“That’s how I became political,” he says. “It’s how I began to understand what underground culture is. I was like someone feeling my way through the dark, trying to understand what socialism was. From my experiences as a younger man, I realised that the archetypal nature of theatre was really starting to influence my photography.

“Hidden was a series of vast epics that traded on my socialist ideas. I realised I didn’t need to raise £50,000 to create an image. I organised people, and got them to buy into the idea, so they were happy to work on the project voluntarily.”

He speaks about volunteer cast and crew being inspired by an idea and a feeling of “solidarity”. Students from the Royal 72

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‘First in the fray, Peterloo Massacre, 1819’

College of Art or the London College of Fashion might become involved as part of their studies, working on costume, hair, makeup and production.

“From that point of view,” he says, “Hidden was like staging a play, or creating a piece of performance art, in which lots of people came together who were enthusiastic about the work.”

Without the budget to orientate the participants in the actual backdrop – such as, for example, the modern-day Tower of London – Saunders instead imposes and layers a selection of digital portraits onto facsimiles of the landscapes and architecture that would have been evident at the historical event. The tableau of the Leveller Women, for example, is a recreation of an encampment near Malton, North Yorkshire. The clothes the figures wear, and the fauna and flora of the woods, are carefully researched to make them as authentic as possible.

Perhaps the best example of Saunders’ work is his imagining of the events of 16 August 1819, when Manchester’s Yeomanry Cavalry rode into hundreds of protesters who, unarmed and peaceful, were

campaigning for political representation. Eighteen were killed and more than 650 injured. It became known as the Peterloo Massacre, named after Waterloo, where four years earlier British forces had won a famous battle against Napoleon.

“Peterloo was the war on the home front – it was a war on the emerging working class movement,” Saunders says. “The protestors at Peterloo were depicted as mad anarchists who were going to bring down the king and destroy Britain. A false history was created around the event, and it required a huge struggle to gain the recognition that Peterloo was a massacre. That people who were totally innocent and peaceful demonstrators had been killed.”

Peterloo, then, is a microcosm for Saunders’ wider understanding of how history works. “There’s a temptation sometimes to see history as a process of gradual, seamless change,” he says. “But, in fact, there’s been a life and death struggle for the last 800 years to get to where we are now. If these images might help reveal that a little bit, then I will be a happy man.”

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A deep attachment to the American South seeps from intimate family portraits and haunting landscapes created by Sally Mann HonFRPS over four decades. Discover a gallery of work from the 2020 RPS Centenary Medal recipient

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“To be able to take my pictures I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. And I must do so with both ardour and cool appraisal, with the passions of eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice.”

Sally Mann HonFRPS, reflecting on her work, was referring to the deep connection she feels to her subjects – and her ability to distance herself from them with the eye of a consummate professional.

Born in 1951 in Lexington, Virginia, where she still lives and works, Mann has always remained close to her roots. She has photographed in the American South since the 1970s, producing series on portraiture, architecture, landscape and still life.

Alongside her evocative and resonant landscape work, she is perhaps best known for intimate portraits of her family, her young children and her husband. This work has attracted controversy at times, but it has always

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‘Picnic’, 1992, from the series Immediate Family

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‘Sheet changing day’, 1994, from the series Immediate Family

been influential, and since the time of her first solo exhibition, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, in 1977, Mann has attracted a wide audience.

She explored various genres as she was maturing in the 1970s, but truly found her métier with her second publication, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (Aperture, 1988), a study of girlhood.

Between 1984 and 1994, Mann worked on the series Immediate Family (Aperture, 1992), which focuses on her three children, who were then all aged under 12. While the series touches on ordinary moments in their daily lives – playing, sleeping and eating – it also speaks to larger themes such as death and cultural perceptions of childhood.

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In her most recent family series, Proud Flesh (Aperture, 2009), taken over a six-year interval, Mann turns the camera on her husband, Larry, who has late-onset muscular dystrophy.

The results of this rare reversal of photographic roles are candid, extraordinarily heart-wrenching and touchingly frank portraits of a man at his most vulnerable.

Mann has produced two major series of landscapes: Mother Land, exhibited at the Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York City, in 1997, and Deep South (Bullfinch Press, 2005). In What Remains (Bullfinch Press, 2003), she assembles a five-part study of mortality, with pictures ranging from the decomposing body of her greyhound to the bodies at the forensic

“To be able to take my pictures I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. And I must do so with both ardour and cool appraisal, with the passions of eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice”

‘Memory’s truth’, 2008, from the series Proud Flesh

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‘Ianna and doom’, 1983-1985, from the series At Twelve

study facility commonly known as The Body Farm. She also includes a meditation on the site where an armed fugitive committed suicide on her property, segueing into a series of stirring, brooding images of the battlefields of the American Civil War. While Mann has experimented with colour photography, she has remained most interested in black and white, especially photography’s antique technology. She has long used an 8×10 bellows camera, and has explored platinum and bromoil printing processes. In the mid-1990s she began using the collodion process to produce pictures that almost seem like hybrids of photography, painting and sculpture.

Many of these processes were used in

her 2016 show, Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington.

Mann was awarded the RPS Centenary Medal in November 2020 for her sustained contribution to photography spanning five decades.

A Guggenheim fellow and three-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she was named ‘America’s Best Photographer’ by Time magazine in 2001. In May 2011, Mann gave the William E Massey Sr Lectures inthe History of American Civilisation at Harvard University, with a series entitled If Memory Serves.

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“In the mid-1990s Sally Mann began using the collodion process to produce pictures that almost seem like hybrids of photography, painting and sculpture”

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‘Was ever love’, 2009, from the series Proud Flesh

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‘Untitled (Fontainebleau smokestack, Louisiana)’, 1996, from the series Deep South

and won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

She has been the subject of two documentaries: Blood Ties (1994), nominated for an Academy Award, and What Remains (2007), which premiered at Sundance and was nominated for an Emmy for Best Documentary in 2008.

Mann’s photographs can be found in many public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both New York, and the V&A Museum, London.

In 2018, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings premiered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, before touring internationally. It is the first major survey to investigate how Mann’s relationship with her native land – a place rich in literary and artistic

traditions, but troubled by history – shapes her work.

A Thousand Crossings brings together 115 photographs which explore the overarching themes of existence: memory, desire, death, the bonds of family and nature’s magisterial indifference to human endeavour. What unites this broad body of work – figure studies, landscapes and architectural views – is that it is all bred of a place, the American South. Using her deep love of her homeland and her knowledge of its historically fraught heritage, Mann asks powerful, provocative questions – about history, identity, race and religion – that reverberate across geographic and national boundaries.

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A photography competition dreamed up in response to the pandemic has helped transform young lives. Rachel Segal Hamilton hears how the three main winners have coped with lockdown

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If the pandemic has proved challenging for young people – horizons narrowing during months of uncertainty, just when they should be broadening – many have responded with innovation and creativity.

You need only look at the results of the competition Lockdown: Taking a Positive View, which ran for four months on social media, offering young people across the UK an outlet for constructive self-expression. The awards were organised by Positive View Foundation, a charity that supports 16 to 25-year-olds in the nation’s most deprived areas, in partnership with the RPS. Positive View normally delivers its photography-based ‘empowerment’ programme face-to-face in youth clubs on London estates. The charity switched its activity online when the UK went into its first national lockdown in March 2020 to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

The result was impressive. After a social media campaign that attracted more than 1,700,000 openings, 3,500 young people from across the country each submitted a portfolio of five images representing their positive take on the experience of lockdown.

The competition’s selectors – Nadav Kander HonFRPS, Simon Roberts HonFRPS, Lucy Mohr and Richard Young – chose three winners and 10 commended photographers.

Building on the success of this competition, Positive View is now launching an annual UK Youth Photography Awards – supported by the Arts Council and the RPS. “It’s ever harder to be seen as a young artist now; to have your work published in a meaningful way,” says Kander, a London-based photographer, artist and director known for his portraiture and large-format landscapes.

“These awards will become an important voice for young people, and I’m proud to be part of that.”

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First prize Alma Rosaz

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Lockdown in a London flat couldn’t be more of a contrast to Alma Rosaz’s early life.

The 25-year-old fashion photographer lived in Venezuela, Indonesia, Nigeria, Norway, the US, France and the UK before she was even out of her teens.

“I’m originally from France but have been an expatriate all my life,” says Rosaz, whose father’s job in the oil industry took her family around the world. The image, which attracted the £1,000 first prize in Lockdown: Taking a Positive View, is certainly escapist.

‘Dreaming of the beach’ shows Rosaz and her partner hanging out their flat window, all dressed up for the seaside.

Nadav Kander HonFRPS, who was on the judging panel, appreciates the appealing sense of “happiness and dreaming” that the image conveys.

“It’s very difficult for young people, more so than older people, during this period.

I think this was a really positive picture and it took everybody by surprise,” he says, adding, “You really see the personality of the artist, the photographer.”

‘Dreaming of the beach’ is part of a series of staged selfportraits and videos Rosaz created during lockdown as a way to stay stimulated and develop her creativity.

“The first lockdown was tough for me as I really enjoy moving

around and interacting with people, as many of us do,” she says. “I started reaching out to brands, offering my services to them by photographing myself.”

Looking ahead, Rosaz intends to build on the style she has honed while working on her lockdown projects – influenced by the photography of Tim Walker HonFRPS and Nadia Lee Cohen – and hopefully to get an agent.

“What motivates me as a photographer is the neverending extent to which I can expand my creative vision and imagination,” she says. almarosaz.com

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Second prize Felix Zeigler

Nothing is safe from 19-year-old Londoner Felix Zeigler’s smartphone. “I literally photograph everything, from my phlegm to the sky, from graves to people, and the list goes on,” he says. “It annoys a lot of my family and friends when I turn a five-minute walk to the bus into a 15-minute walk to the bus as I have to stop and photograph everything I see.”

Felix, who is studying for an art foundation degree at Kingston University, remembers the lockdown as a surprisingly restorative and productive time. “I actually really enjoyed 84

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lockdown as I had quite a difficult two years prior to it, and ended up dropping out of school,” he says. “With everyone around me moving forward, I found lockdown was a time for me to catch up while the world was just on pause.”

It was en route home after a daily walk around Paddington Old Cemetery that he captured this comical display of Barbies in someone’s window.

Nadav Kander HonFRPS says: “Street photography as a genre is about noticing the details.

If you walked past this, you’d definitely have a chuckle.”

Zeigler entered the Positive View competition on the recommendation of a former teacher and was “over the moon” to find he’d come second.

He plans to spend his £500 prize money on a new iPhone.

“In future I’d love to go into all types of creative industries – designing clothing, making sculpture, installations and other art, as well as designing products,” he says, “and of course I am going to carry on with my photography because there is no way of stopping it.” instagram.com/flex_z

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‘Florentine’s quarantine’, left

Third prize Flo Hendriks

Think of the early days of the pandemic and one image above all springs to mind: frenzied supermarket shoppers stockpiling toilet paper.

Flo Hendriks’s third prizewinning shot, ‘Florentine’s quarantine’, was inspired by this odd phenomenon.

“It made me laugh and question humanity’s intelligence, but then again, we did it too,” she says. “I wanted to create something that symbolised lockdown, to make it so blatantly obvious that it almost became a bit of a joke.”

Nadav Kander HonFRPS says: “I appreciate people who show their hand in the artwork and often with photography that’s lost because the camera just records what’s in front of it.

This photograph shows there is a thinking, feeling human being behind the camera. I admire this picture for its authorship.

Flo has set up the scene, lit it and made it very striking.”

Based in Surrey, 18-year-old Hendriks is studying photography, along with art and drama, for her A levels. She

has been taking pictures since childhood, first exploring travel photography before focusing on portraiture and fashion.

“Lockdown made me appreciate my health, my friends and family, and the ability to express myself through the creative arts,” she says.

“I used it as a time to test my limits, experimenting with new media and self-portraiture.

Every morning I’d form an idea, execute in the afternoon, edit in the evening.”

As much as the recognition, Hendriks appreciates the fact this competition has allowed her to share her vision with others.

“Winning third place has given me the opportunity to show how I view the layers of lockdown.

The unusual and comical, the distorted and dark,” she says.

“I want to continue photography into university and a career.

I can’t imagine doing anything else. The narratives and identities I create really are a reflection of myself. They tell the story of me.” instagram.com/for.fl

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House ad - IPE 162, 1

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© Mat Hay Alice and Sarah, Glen Lyon

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INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION 162

Free Admission Thurs – Sun 10:00 – 17:00 RPS Gallery 337 Paintworks Bristol BS4 3AR rps.org/IPE162 #IPE162

The world’s longest running photography exhibition Discover 100 contemporary images by 43 photographers

23 Jan – 5 Apr 2021

Visit our website to book talks, workshops and activities that explore the exhibition’s themes @the_rps @royalphotographicsociety @royalphotographicsociety

IPE162 is kindly supported by theprintspace

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EXPOSURE COMPETITION WINNERS GO WILD

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OF THE BEST SOCIETY EVENTS

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ONLINE TALK: A CONVERSATION WITH CURATOR COLIN FORD CBE Thu 28 Jan, 6-7.15pm Colin Ford CBE, one of Britain’s first curators of photography, discusses some of the highlights of his distinguished career with Gilly Read FRPS. You will need access to zoom.

Free to attend but book online rps.org/colinford

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SCOTTISH MEMBERS’ PRINT EXHIBITION 2020/21 – ABERDEEN Mon 1 Feb – Mon 1 Mar, 10.30am-4pm Enjoy some of the Scotland region’s best work in an exhibition launching at the Aberdeen Arts Centre before touring to eight venues between Inverness and the Borders.

Free to RPS members rps.org/print-exhibition-aberdeen

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Clockwise from top left: ‘Delhi (tales of a city)’ by Sunil Gupta HonFRPS; ‘Flower portraits after Mary Dillwyn’

by Anna Fox HonFRPS; ‘Venice bridge of miracles’ by Joy Gregory HonFRPS; ‘The peacemaker, Chandra Mahal, Jaipur Palace’ by Karen Knorr HonFRPS

CELEBRATING SUCCESS

GO TO rps.org/whats-on for the latest updates

ANNA FOX HonFRPS / JAMES HYMAN GALLERY

After an unprecedented year the RPS is set to showcase talent with a new ‘in conversation’ series providing insights into the work and practice of recent award winners

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The RPS is celebrating its 2020 Awards by launching a series of conversations with past and present award winners in January 2021. From artists and curators to scientists and educators, distinguished speakers will talk about how photography is used in their practice.

Free online talks – or make a donation – with Honorary Fellows Karen Knorr, Joy Gregory and Sunil Gupta are available to book now, with more speakers to be announced in the coming months. rps.org/awardstalks

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PASSION PROJECTS IN NATURE & THE LANDSCAPE WITH ROBERT CANIS Sat 6 Feb, 4-5pm Robert Canis showcases his stunning images and talks about his experiences of photographing the natural world. £3/free to Digital Imaging and Nature group members rps.org/2021/robert-canis

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ENGAGEMENT – ARTEH ODJIDJA Thu 25 Feb, 6.15-7.45pm Learn about the work and influences of award-winning portrait photographer Arteh Odjidja.

Free to RPS members rps.org/Engagement-Talk-ArtehOdjidja

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TELLING STORIES WITH YOUR CAMERA – THE SHOOT Sat 27 Feb, 10am-3pm Join the Documentary group for a course that gives you tips from professional photographers on topics including contemporary composition techniques.

You will need access to zoom. £75/£56 RPS members rps.org/Feb2021-Storytelling-TheShoot

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Enjoy the results of the bimonthly online members’ competition, themed around ‘wildlife’

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WINNER

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What big eyes you have

by Carolyn Moore

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“I live on the beautiful Somerset Levels where wildlife is abundant and we are surrounded by fantastic nature reserves. I often jump in the car to enjoy time here but I hadn’t overly explored the wildlife on my doorstep.

Springtime lockdown was a revelation to me as I spent beautiful hours on foot exploring the local countryside and its wildlife.

“I’m lucky enough to have the Levels backing up to my garden fence and in that space in the spring there were deer.

Getting up before dawn and hopping over the fence I could get a bit closer. I spent many early mornings following her at a distance and got some reasonable images, but nothing remarkable.

“This shot was pure luck. I was up early and noticed this time she had come in search of me. She was at the bottom of the garden in the long grass. I was able to sneak down behind our garden shed so as not to scare her. With camera and beanbag at the ready, I used the fence as a support, and enjoyed her sheer beauty in the colours of the early morning sun.

I hope you enjoy her too.”

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Supported by

NEXT COMPETITION

Submit your photography on the theme of ‘Food’ by 14 January 2021 at exposure.rps.org for the chance to win a Nikon Z6 mirrorless camera

COMMENDED

Pheasant landing at sunset

by Patrick Hudgell ARPS

THE SELECTOR Andy Parkinson on ‘What big eyes you have’

Recognised for world-class images and an ethical approach to his craft, Andy Parkinson has been awarded three times in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.

He contributes to National Geographic and BBC Wildlife magazines.

“This was an immediately captivating image – one I knew required an inordinate amount of skill and fieldcraft to capture. Roe deer are extremely challenging subjects and there are no prepaid sites where a photographer can simply turn up and produce quality images.

“Images such as this require time and knowledge,

and it’s obvious this photographer works in a compassionate and gentle way, qualities echoed in the picture.

“The roe, though alert, is looking off into the middle distance – something other than the photographer is piquing her interest. The eye-level perspective, photographed through a

serendipitous gap in the vegetation, creates a beautifully soft and muted backdrop yet retains enough detail to add much needed context to the environment in which she has chosen to feed.

“A shadow-free and subdued light further enhances the soft, gentle tones found throughout the image.

“There were so many strong entries and the only way I could separate the two chosen – and I argued to include more – was by feeling.

“I just kept coming back to the roe deer and, for me, an image that elicits a physical response, a gut feeling, just had to be the one that I settled on.”

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REPRO OP SUBS ALAN HODGSON ASIS HonFRPS President, The Royal Photographic Society

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Sir H Trueman Wood MA, President of the Royal Photographic Society, 1894-1896

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Let’s start with three questions Firstly, why deliver a President’s address – is this some shock announcement? That is not the case, it is simply the fulfilment of Bylaw 11.1, which states: “The President shall deliver an address to the Society during the term of office.”

Secondly, why now? The term of office is two years, and this AGM marks mid-term. It therefore seems sensible to take this opportunity now.

Finally, what should the address contain?

The RPS governing documents give no guidance on this – possibly a good thing as it gives us flexibility. It is your chance to see me explain things.

I am mindful of our history and I went searching for guidance. The RPS Journal archive at archive. rps.org is an excellent resource and looking back I found a most fabulous example that seems pertinent to this day.

The President’s address of Sir H Trueman Wood was read to a meeting of the RPS on 8 October 1895. It even provided a theme – change but no change. We are in a period of change, but that is no different from the past.

But why 1895? Well, I was preparing a paper on photographic technique in 1895 for an RPS conference on the collodion process and was researching the archive. 125 years on, the RPS Journal provided a snapshot of the Society then and the similarities were fascinating.

Trueman Wood discussed the term of office of the President (two years is about best) and the need to see new faces in Council. The issue of the RPS headquarters and considerations of its size and location were in play. There were debates on the Society’s prosperity, a change in style to the RPS Journal, and the relationship between the art and science wings of the RPS. Not much changes.

Setting that in context I planned an address in two parts. Wood covered what had happened and I planned to go a little further – what is there to do in the coming year?

Looking back on the last year The last year can best be described as turbulent – for members and the RPS. This is explored in detail in the Trustee Annual Report voted for in the AGM, but it is best here to concentrate on positives.

We welcomed some new faces with Evan Dawson as incoming CEO and a whole new Trustee body, apart from me. It is as if the 1895 wish came true.

The 2019 election was an indication that the scheme of governance of the RPS had become fragile. The result is a Council with a whole new

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skill set and experience in governance. As an example, this is not my first time as President of a society dealing with images and, like my other chairmanship roles, my task is to achieve consensus across this team.

That election also resulted in an external review and a set of recommendations. I will summarise these in three areas. The first points us towards embracing diversity and inclusion in all we do.

A report and teamwork is in progress – search rps. org for Evan’s article, ‘Photography is for everyone’, as a snapshot of this.

The second recommendation was to conduct a full governance review, which again is in progress.

Part of this recommendation was to take a more structured approach to Trustee candidate selection and the establishment of a nominations committee.

Council will take a decision on this following the governance review.

The third was more subtle – to address how we behave towards each other. It is a cultural issue and nothing new. You can see it playing out in the 1895 transcripts and it exists in other groups too.

This is the reason I read out a code of conduct for meetings I chair.

MICHAEL PRITCHARD FRPS

Some things never change – even when nothing appears the same

In summary, change but no change. Just like the Council of 1895, we are examining the options for change.

Looking forward to the next year Council has two key deliverables to the membership over this coming year. The first is a review of the RPS strategy. The existing 2018-2023 strategy is on rps.org – search ‘strategy’. It was published in early 2018 and a lot has now changed.

It suggested a mid-term review and we are doing this with substantial stakeholder engagement.

Our aim is a February completion date.

The second is to deliver the governance review.

This was a promise to members and is in hand.

Council will publish the report in full, together with an action list. As a result we may need to make changes to bylaws and rules, so an EGM could be called around February in order to be in good time for the next election process.

All this will not be conducted in some darkened room, away from membership scrutiny. There will be communication throughout the process, as we have already been doing through VoiceBox and emails to members. I do get responses and questions and I try to address these.

Again there are similarities to 1895. Their debates were published in the RPS Journal and were open and frank. Change but no change.

A personal summary My plan for this presidency was to get out and about as part of my ‘Trust and truth’ agenda.

I can now only do this virtually, but that’s an opportunity not a constraint. I have attended chapter meetings in Benelux and Australia, sat in on online talks and presented a paper to the RPS collodion conference.

I write for a living – or did before early presidency intervened. In addition to the collodion paper you can read what I am about in President’s News on rps.org – now just over 100 entries. There has been an RPS Journal article with Alan Elliott in Australia, DIG Group DIGIT ‘Long road to digital’, and an RPS PhotoHistorian paper.

But two years will be more than enough. This time next year I will hand over to Simon Hill, recently voted President Elect, but I hope to see as many of you as I can in the coming year. Indeed, I may need to see you again in this forum for a February EGM. The RPS and wider society is living through difficult times. I would like to acknowledge the sterling work of Evan and the team, but also of volunteers and members, for taking the RPS through this. Hope you and yours stay safe.

See you around.

The President’s address was delivered online

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President's address/OCA house ad, 1

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House ad - Digital photography, 1

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DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY COURSES FROM THE OPEN UNIVERSITY, SUPPORTED BY THE RPS The Open University and The Royal Photographic Society have a long-standing relationship, underpinned by our shared passion for photography and life-long learning.

Available courses: Digital photography: creating and sharing better images (TG089) Digital photography: creating a professional portfolio (TZFM200)

FIND OUT MORE BY VISITING www.openuniversity.co.uk/photography Image credit: Richard Milton-Worssell ‘Millennium Bridge at Low Tide’

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‘Marine Aquaculture #1, Luoyuan Bay, Fujian Province, China, 2012’,

by Edward Burtynsky HonFRPS

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THE ROAD TO NET ZERO EDWARD BURTYNSKY HonFRPS, COURTESY FLOWERS GALLERY, LONDON / NICHOLAS METIVIER GALLERY, TORONTO

The RPS is exploring how to reduce its carbon footprint – and help you do the same A small working group was created to consider the RPS response to the climate emergency following a 2019 AGM resolution.

The Climate Change Working Group (CCWG), chaired by member Martin Hancock LRPS, was asked to consider all areas of the Society’s operations and activities – and how it could reduce its carbon footprint. The group also explored how the RPS could, through the medium of photography, use its role and profile to increase public awareness and understanding of issues linked to climate change and biodiversity loss.

Some progress has been made, though some initiatives have been delayed due to the pandemic. The RPS investment portfolio is being reviewed, with careful consideration being given to how to responsibly divest any assets that can reasonably be considered to directly contribute to climate change. Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria will in future help inform the selection of investments.

The use of virtual meetings, exhibitions and training has increased substantially and provided a new baseline. Some Special Interest Groups have also incorporated environmental photography into their event programmes. The RPS Science Photographer of the Year competition now includes a Climate Change category.

An online talk series is being developed and we climate@rps.org expect to run an event at the Bristol Photography to contact the Festival this spring. We will explore adding a section Working Group to the RPS website where members can view the sustainability credentials of major equipment suppliers, and look at travel carbon offsetting initiatives to assist in reducing their own carbon footprint.

With some 11,300 members across the globe covering a variety of genres, the RPS has a unique opportunity to play an important role in raising awareness of climate change and environmental degradation, and contribute on the road to ‘net zero’ emissions.

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Evan Dawson and Alan Hodgson ASIS HonFPRS

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Landscape photographer Joe Cornish HonFRPS explains why the great outdoors has an allure that transcends time, seasons … and pandemics

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The environment is the carbon footprint for our burning issue of our time. community.

Landscape is a crucial Our local area has also subject for all eyewitness become significantly more reporters and storytellers, crowded – that is a sign of more including photographers. leisure time for employees on Before photography, furlough, and when children landscape painters found the have been unable to attend search for recognition and school. Photographing relevance a struggle, with landscapes with people is also certain academic authorities – part of the landscape language, notably Sir Joshua Reynolds and no doubt some will have – describing it as a minor art. seen this as an opportunity.

Yet landscape has always been I love being outside. I am one of the most popular and always excited by what I might influential of all pictorial genres. find. I am curious about the As a landscape photographer transformations of light. I get a and committed thrill from coming across environmentalist I love wildlife unexpectedly. to see the ways in I love the picturewhich landscape DISCOVER making process. photographers I am also somewhat a selection of Distinctions submissions at tell their stories. introverted, and rps.org/arps-example This includes so enjoy the luxury and rps.org/frpsdocumenting the of being alone example destruction of with my camera ecosystems, as well as surrounded by the continuing to seek out nature’s sights and sounds of nature. inspiring beauty and wonder.

My work hasn’t really Edward Burtynsky HonFRPS changed stylistically during the exemplifies the power of pandemic, but a commissioned eyewitness artistry in his book assignment has required environmentally charged particular problem-solving skills imagery. Mandy Barker FRPS and experience. I have also has found a new way of looking returned to try specific at the devastating effect of compositions in our local plastic pollution in our oceans woodlands over and over again through her extraordinarily in different conditions. This has imaginative work. Yet both these both been good practice, and great photographers continue obviously increases the chances to treat aesthetic balance and of making the most of unusual beauty as fundamental parts light and weather. Trees and of effective visual storytelling. woodland have undoubtedly As a result of the Covid-19 been an enormous solace and pandemic, most photographers inspiration during this time. have got to know their local area much better. That has been Joe Cornish HonFRPS is an unexpected bonus. It has chair of the Distinctions also meant a much lower landscape panel

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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

LICENTIATE (LRPS)

Applicants must show photographic competence in approach and techniques

ASSOCIATE (ARPS)

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

Distinctions, 1

WHAT ARE RPS DISTINCTIONS?

FELLOWSHIP (FRPS)

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

Above ‘Mosedale from Red Pike’ by Adrian Gidney FRPS

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Fellowship Landscape Adrian Gidney FRPS A retired detective living on the western edge of the Lake District in Cumbria, I took up photography more seriously around 2012 when I retired from Cumbria Police. I had taken photographs before this but mostly to document my activities walking, climbing and biking in the outdoors. I now incorporate photography with my love of the fells.

My Associate, achieved in 2019, was in the documentary genre. It documented a limestone quarry which had been obtained by Cumbria Wildlife Trust and is now overtaken by plants and wildlife. It was a combination of landscape and close-up images of the flora and insects which have made the quarry their own.

I wanted my Fellowship submission to be purely landscape images of the area on ‘my doorstep’ which I love so much. Photography comes from the Greek and means ‘drawing with light’. This was what I wanted my portfolio to demonstrate. Many days I can go out in the fells and not get a

single image that captures how the light paints the fells and valleys. Other days, when the weather is clearing, shafts of sunlight will light small patches of a hill or valley. These are the moments I wanted to show.

WHY THIS PORTFOLIO WORKS It’s a notable achievement to be the first Fellow of the RPS in the new Landscape Distinction, so bravo to Adrian.

This portfolio may not be groundbreaking in terms of technique or viewpoints, but it achieves exactly what Adrian set out to do in his statement of intent.

There is a range of different conditions of weather, lighting

and season, and also of perspectives. Besides such well-known spots as Ashness Bridge there are a number of superb high-level prospects, which speak volumes for the photographer’s commitment to seeing the landscape from everywhere.

As a body of work it is rich with emotion and beauty, and its style is achieved through a sense of connection with, and a deep appreciation for, his subject.

Adrian’s portfolio is an eloquent reminder of the inspiring beauty of these Lake District hills and mountains which are a much-loved part of our national fabric.

Opposite page ‘Buttermere from Warnscale’ Above ‘The Step, Deepdale’

Statement of intent I have walked and camped in the Lake District for nearly 40 years.

I regularly stay in the fells overnight to capture the mood in the evening and first light in the morning. It never ceases to amaze me how the light alters the landscape right before my eyes.

The variations in light during the seasons add another dimension to every scene, transforming the colours of the hills, the sky and reflections in water.

It is my intent to portray the land and the light – sometimes light that only lasts for the briefest of

moments. My submission depicts the mountains, valleys and water of the Lake District I love. It expresses the emotional connection I feel when I am in the landscape, embracing wide vistas and more intimate scenes.

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From my earliest childhood I have walked in the countryside.

I still do. I love the variety of landscapes and the way they change with the seasons, weather and tides. I have walked hundreds of miles along the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, and on Dartmoor.

Landscape photography feels like my home. It is where I am most comfortable. I like to take my time, walk around a location, see how a composition might come together, and anticipate how the light can turn the mundane into something special.

I made no conscious decision to get into close-up landscape

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Below left ‘Untitled’ Below right ‘Untitled’

photography. I have dabbled with macro photography and this, combined with the typical landscape device of looking for foreground interest in a wider view, led me to seek out images up close. I found I could remove the wider landscape of sky, sea and cliffs and make images that took on a different, more abstract quality.

I wanted to show fine, beautiful detail, elegantly composed, while also being abstract and ambiguous. Some people like to know what they are looking at, how large it is and how to understand it. I deliberately aimed to diminish these guides or constraints

and free up viewers to make their own interpretations.

WHY THIS PORTFOLIO WORKS It is no easy task to take such a consistently tight perspective, a relatively faithful eyewitness photography approach, and work in a really restricted area, yet produce such a well-seen and varied portfolio.

Wonderful observation of pattern and some pleasing ambiguities of scale made for a surprising variety. The expressive potential of rock surfaces is well judged and rendered – tonally – as well, making for a satisfying and stimulating body of work.

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Statement of intent Two adjacent bays are known for their massive cliffs and rocks, spectacular from a distance.

If you look more closely you can find another world of pattern, texture and detail.

I enjoy seeking out these vistas at close quarters. Hard, angular, sharp rocks meet the sea and are

worn into smooth curvaceous shapes. Layers of slate are interspersed with sedimentary siltstone and sandstone, the multiple origins of which produce great variety in colours and textures. Rises, falls and sweeping lines are revealed, suggestive of a wider landscape.

Other scenes are more abstract. In the absence of flora and fauna and without a wider context, the visual cues which indicate scale and guide our perception are greatly reduced, giving welcome scope for ambiguity and alternative interpretations.

Above ‘Untitled’

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Associate Landscape

Above top ‘Into midtown’

Peter Benson ARPS

Above ‘Battersea Power Station’ Main picture ‘St Paul’s in December’

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Looking through my back catalogue to the early days of my photography, landscape photography seemed natural for me to do.

Even prior to buying my first DSLR, other than family

gatherings there are very few people pictures. So, my landscape photography started off at first during a holiday or on a day out and has evolved into the photography I am now doing. During that journey

I found my passion for urban nightscapes, which I am pleased to say is still evolving.

When the sun disappears below the horizon something magical happens for me. It’s the same whether I’m in London by

the Thames, locally in Cambridge, or in another country. The ambient light changes everything, especially if the lighting in a scene produces different colour temperatures.

The reflections in the waterways also play their part, as does the height of a tide and the light reflected back into a city from the cloud base.

Photography now fills a fair part of my time that about nine JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

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years ago I would have spent working. Now I am well into retirement I run night photography workshops so that others can take enjoyment from the photography I love.

Below ‘To Wall Street’

WHY THIS PORTFOLIO WORKS This exemplary portfolio is

technically superb and aesthetically extremely well judged. In all but one image water is used to bleed colour and light into a fantastical foundation for these cityscapes. It is an unashamedly idealised, almost dreamlike evocation

of the city, more an illustration of an urban idea than a depiction of individual places.

Rich in detail and inviting in composition, Peter’s cityscape photographs have found a way of making even construction cranes appear glamorous.

SUBS

“It is an unashamedly idealised, almost dreamlike evocation of the city”

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Statement of intent “I often think that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day” – Vincent Van Gogh Wandering through a city in the daylight there is always a certain energy, but frequently it is a commonplace and impersonal experience.

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Conversely, exploring the city at night can be mesmerising. The same, often noisy, places you wandered through in the morning change significantly under the veil of night-time.

When the night has come, thousands of glittering lights transform places into

enchanting, colourful and completely magical sights. Everything looks so beautiful, especially in the reflection of the water.

In this portfolio I hope to convey the evocative beauty, and sense of tranquillity and calm, that I observe in cities at night.

Associate Landscape Hsiang Hui Sylvester Wong ARPS

Above ‘Untitled’

My first taste of photography was a great inspiration drawn from a dear friend, a schoolmate of mine, who is a talented international landscape photographer. Since then landscape photography has led me to appreciate the beauty of Mother Nature.

One moment I am a recorder and a beneficiary of Mother Nature and its beauty, then an ambassador for it in the next. Participating in the ‘now’ and ‘then’

experiences – equally awesome, equally priceless.

Photography brings me such joy, peace and purpose.

It is a wonderful platform to share with the world.

I believe that in every person there lies an inner child fantasising about flying as a bird, soaring as a mighty Superman or a fairy. A child curious about what it would be like to see the world from above.

[The introduction of] drones is therefore a dream come true.

Drone photography not only [gives] a new dimension to landscape photography but can be applied in other genres – opening up new possibilities.

I hope drone photography encourages more photographers – even nonlandscape photographers – to be motivated and edified by the beauty of Mother Nature as seen from different perspectives, and that this technology opens up new spaces for creativity.

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WHY THIS PORTFOLIO WORKS Drone photography is a new frontier in the illustration and interpretation of landscape, and this portfolio is a remarkably varied and imaginative selection of images.

Every single picture has something to recommend it, and every perspective is at least fascinating in content, and at best wonderfully artistically composed. There are clearly many challenges with drone photography, not least the technical ones of making wellexposed compositions into strong light. Yet throughout the portfolio these difficulties are overcome with panache.

Most of the images depict landscapes that are worked and have been hugely altered by human activity. These often produce pictures with fascinating patterns. But also, it is a reminder of the profound footprint we have left on Earth.

“A reminder of the profound footprint we have left on Earth”

Statement of intent As a young boy I imagined what a bird’s-eye view would be like. Please understand that the airplane wasn’t possible then, where I come from, so my hope was for technology to fly me

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like a bird and soar on that journey. With the invention of drones, my childhood dream is a reality. We can admire the beauty of Mother Nature in ways and angles as never before, [with] minimal

interference and maximum altitudinal freedom. Indescribable, unimaginable.

Drones have unlocked a new dimension for landscape photography.

And they will continue to do so.

Distinction successes Congratulations to these RPS members Guraliuc Claudiu-Bogdan, Romania Jon Clempner, Essex John Culling, Princes Risborough Conor Donnelly, London Paul Dowker, Lincoln Dain Evans, United Kingdom Mike Franks, Bristol Vicki Gardner, Devon Sudeesh Kumar, Dubai Grace Law, Hong Kong Jim Meikle, Northumberland Colin Mitchell, East Sussex Brian O’Callaghan, Suffolk Elizabeth O’Neill, Dublin Louise Penberthy Jones, Cornwall Tom Plucinski, Essex Jennifer Rees Mann, Worcestershire James Renshaw, West Yorkshire Graeme Reynolds, Lincolnshire Kevin Smoker, East Sussex Malcolm Snelgrove, Devon Mark Stone, Gloucestershire David Sutch, Abu Dhabi Brigette Thomasson, Tyne & Wear Phillip Tugwell, Flintshire Geoff Walker, West Yorkshire Daniel Waller, London Jennifer Warr, Dorset

ARPS EXEMPTIONS OCTOBER 2020 Clare Lusher, Ross-Shire Barrie Spence, West Lothian LRPS EXEMPTIONS OCTOBER 2020 Norma Cameron, Aberdeenshire Alec Davies, Fife Rita Flynn, Monaghan LRPS OCTOBER 2020 Roger Agnew, Milton Keynes Sarina Au-Yeung, Hong Kong Andrzej Bargiela, Nottingham Graham Clegg, Lincolnshire Maggie Clews, West Sussex Michael Conley, US Martyn Elliston, Channel Isles Bridget Fonteneau, Dorset Kevin Freeman, Surrey Ann Gardner, France Sourmen Ghosh, India Susan Grief, Suffolk Cathy Holgate, Hertfordshire Yasser Mobarak, Egypt Mark Noblet, West Yorkshire Kalidas Pavithran, Malaysia Roger Pendell, Hampshire Chris Price, Cornwall Nicola Riley, Essex Richard Shedrake, Surrey Benjamin Speed, London Stephen Taylor, London Graham Zimmerman, West Sussex ASSOCIATE FINE ART OCTOBER 2020 Andrew Dixon Carothers, Midlothian Margaret Elliot, Dumfries Hector Bernardo Epelbaum, Belgium Tom Knowles, Buckingham Richard Lavery, France Ruth Morris, Singapore Lesley Peatfield, York Lesley Rees, Kent Katherine Rynor, Essex Martin Searle, Kent Philip Tonkyn, Somerset FELLOWSHIP FINE ART OCTOBER 2020 Simon Street, Surrey ASSOCIATE LANDSCAPE OCTOBER 2020 Peter Benson, Suffolk David Carine, Woking Bridget Davies, Devon Yi Liu, China

ASSOCIATE DOCUMENTARY NOVEMBER 2020 Valerie Mather, West Yorkshire Tan Tong Toon, Malaysia Fiona Willoughby, Northumberland

Above ‘Sprinkling tarn, Sty Head’ by Adrian Gidney FRPS Stephen Miles, Nottingham Alison Taylor, York Hsiang Hui Sylvester Wong, Malaysia FELLOWSHIP LANDSCAPE OCTOBER 2020 Adrian Gidney, Cumbria ASSOCIATE APPLIED OCTOBER 2020 Damien Abbott, London Nigel Bealey, Hampshire Michael Berkeley, Wiltshire Barbara Cook, Cheshire Niall Robert Ferguson, Surrey Esme Lloyd, Dorset Remy Lloyd, Dorset Veerabrahmam Mandapalli, India James Drum Moir, Edinburgh Jo Shepherd, Bristol Peter Smith, Bristol Holly Stranks, Suffolk Douglas Watson, Warwickshire

Harry Wentworth, West Yorkshire Hongjun Yue, China FELLOWSHIP APPLIED OCTOBER 2020 Guy Bellingham, Bristol Christopher Copley, Co. Clare Joanne Gower, Hessle Jayne Odell, Suffolk Sarah Townley, Southampton ARPS EXEMPTION NOVEMBER 2020 Eileen Upton, Co. Cork LRPS EXEMPTION NOVEMBER 2020 Angela Edwards, Leicestershire Iona O’Neill, Gwynedd David Stapley, Kent LRPS NOVEMBER 2020 Nick Brown, Warwickshire

FELLOWSHIP DOCUMENTARY NOVEMBER 2020 Mark Phillips, Buckinghamshire ACCREDITED SENIOR IN IMAGING IN THE CREATIVE INDUSTRIES & FELLOW Stephen Gill, Lancashire ASSOCIATE FINE ART NOVEMBER 2020 Davide Agnelli, Channel Islands Jan Beesley, East Sussex Michael Corrigan, Spain Julie Cowdy, North Yorkshire Theodore Kefalopoulos, Greece Susi Petherick, London Eva Pitt, Leeds Chris Saunders, Wanstead Malcolm Wood, Norfolk FELLOWSHIP FINE ART NOVEMBER 2020 Andrew Barrow, Oxfordshire Christopher Osborne, Midlothian Peter Roworth, Lincolnshire

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‘THERE ARE COMPLEX GENDER AND POWER ROLES AT PLAY’

A publicity image featuring artist Frida Kahlo raises questions about social mores, finds Dan Cox

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Although evidently a publicity shot with little concern for While researching the RPS Collection for the V&A’s 2018 artistic form, the camera captures more than might be expected exhibition Frida Kahlo: Making Herself Up I discovered publicity at first glance. There are complex gender and power roles at shots of the renowned artist apparently deep in play. We see Kahlo attending one of Haz’s classes despite conversation with the painter, photographer and being, as a handwritten inscription on the back educator Nicholas Haz FRPS. of the photograph notes, ‘the best-known woman This particular image was taken by an unknown painter of Latin America’. photographer in June 1945 during Haz’s visit to The RPS Collection is at The image also seems to reinforce the idea that Mexico to present his ‘image management the V&A Photography Kahlo had eclipsed Rivera artistically by this point – system’. It shows Kahlo and her then husband, the Centre, London vam.ac.uk though the writing on its reverse titles it ‘Nickolas socialist muralist painter Diego Rivera, listening Haz and Mrs Rivera/Mexico June 1945’. intently to Haz. It is this interplay between form, content, celebrity and A fascinating character in his own right, Haz hindsight which can elevate even the most perfunctory of published Image Management: Composition for Photographers photographs into the realm of the fascinating. in 1946. His ideas bridged the transition from pictorialism to modernism, and he influenced Ansel Adams’s ‘zone focusing Dan Cox is curator, documentation and digitisation at system’ after the pair worked together in 1937. Haz was also the V&A Museum, London admired by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen.

VISIT

ART PRODUCTION

“The camera captures more than might be expected at first glance”

THE RPS COLLECTION / V&A MUSEUM, LONDON

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Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Nicholas Haz FRPS, Mexico, 1945

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From the series Boys of Volta by Jeremy Snell

JEREMY SNELL

Beneath the beauty of a Ghanaian lake lies a complex tale of life and loss Lake Volta in Ghana is a vast artificial reservoir, formed in 1965 when a hydroelectric dam was created downstream. Today the Akosombo Dam generates the bulk of Ghana’s electricity, while the lake has become a centre for the country’s fishing industry – an industry built on child exploitation.

According to the International Labour Organization, 20,000 enslaved children work there.

Jeremy Snell, a Brooklyn-based photographer and cinematographer, first visited Lake Volta after being commissioned by non-profit organisation International Justice Mission to create content for a campaign against child trafficking.

Struck by the character and beauty of the place, Snell felt compelled to return and develop Boys of Volta, his own project about the lake. With their delicate colours, soft lighting and silhouetted portraiture, his images portray Lake Volta as a dreamy, almost mythical place.

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“Life on and around the lake seemed like a fairytale,” he explains. “Three thousand miles of dammed water encompass what used to be large forests and hillsides, so the trunks and tips of thousands of trees can be seen as you drift through its waters.”

Some of those who appear in Boys of Volta are fisherboys, others local children whom Snell sought permission to photograph.

“Creating a sense of security and respect with the kids was very important while photographing them,” he says. “For me, the photographs point to the beauty of the lake and those who live on it, the complexity of life in the area, and the treacherous situations some of these kids find themselves in.”

Boys of Volta is published by Setanta Books. setantabooks.com and jeremysnell.com

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