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Cover
“Whether viewed from the sky or ground, Amazônia has always filled me with awe” Sebastião Salgado HonFRPS
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July / August 2021 Vol 161 / No 4 rps.org
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SEBASTIÃO SALGADO HonFRPS
The Journal of The Royal Photographic Society July / August 2021 Vol 161 / No 4 rps.org
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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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‘IT IS THE LAST FRONTIER, A MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE’
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To publish the work of the renowned documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado HonFRPS once is a great privilege. Being able to run a second Salgado cover story must take the luck of the devil. The first feature was for my debut issue at the helm of the RPS Journal in 2017 – a delightful baptism of fire. Salgado had selected his ‘Best shots’ from a career that had brought startling images of gold mines, burning oil wells and genocide to the eyes of the world. Then aged 73, the Brazil-born photographer, whose first discipline was economics, still had a thirst for understanding our world. Back in 2017 Salgado was already on a six-year journey that would take him into the beloved Amazônia he had explored intermittently for four decades. The result is a stunning book that illuminates some of the world’s most untouched – and vulnerable – environments and cultures. In the foreword to Amazônia, from which we have published an extract, Salgado says: “For me, it is the last frontier, a mysterious universe of its own, where the immense power of nature can be felt as nowhere else on earth.” During his journey, which ended in 2021, he visited a dozen indigenous tribes that exist in the world’s largest tropical rainforest. You can see some of his powerful images from page 364. We explore other frontiers in this issue. As the world continues to grapple with the pandemic, we look at the positive impact that photography can have on mental health. On page 394, three contrasting photographers tell us how their craft helps them navigate wellbeing issues personally and creatively. Again finding light in darkness, 13 British image-makers – all RPS members – have photographed survivors of the Holocaust for a life-affirming exhibition to be shown at IWM London, and the RPS Gallery in Bristol. In a preview of Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors on page 414, six photographers tell the stories behind their pictures. Now that the RPS Gallery is open again, we hope to be able to welcome you back in person once more. If you do manage a visit you’ll be able to view IN PROGRESS, another ambitious exhibition curated for the RPS that showcases the work of five innovative visual artists. It’s a brave new world out there.
KATHLEEN MORGAN Editor Aerial view of the Auaris area in the Parima Mountains, Parima Forest Reserve, Yanomami Indigenous Territory, 2018 by Sebastião Salgado HonFRPS
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How recent cataclysmic megafires in Australia and Canada sparked the imagination of photographer and Prix Pictet nominee Alan McFetridge
We speak to seven photography students about working and studying through the pandemic, and their hopes and plans for the future
GRADUATES
DOCUMENTARY
ART PRODUCTION
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Richard Misrach’s magnum opus, his on-going Desert Cantos series, has been conceived on a scale as vast as his acclaimed largeformat photography
The photographers Paul Sanders, Robert Darch and Melissa Spitz discuss the relationship between their creative work and issues around mental health and wellbeing
Moving exhibition Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors features pictures by 13 British image-makers, all RPS members, for an overwhelming study of human endurance
BEST SHOTS
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MENTAL HEALTH
PORTRAITURE
RICHARD MISRACH; ALAN MCFETRIDGE; ROBERT DARCH; JANE WEINMANN; FREDERIC ARANDA FRPS
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The theme of ‘Colour’ prompted some stunning entries to the Exposure members’ competition, including winner Ade Gidney’s vivid Peak District study ‘Nuclear sunset’
Rebecca Douglas’s image of two people staring out from a Brutalist block of flats captures the sense of isolation that many have experienced recently
EXPOSURE
BACKSTORY
Cover story SALGADO
The legendary documentary photographer returns with his latest book Amazônia, based on a six-year long engagement with the people and places of the Amazon rainforest
ADE GIDNEY; TERENCE LANE ARPS; REBECCA DOUGLAS; SEBASTIÃO SALGADO HonFRPS
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DISTINCTIONS
Two Contemporary Distinctions photographers use monochrome woodland imagery to frame questions about past tragedies and primeval power JULY / AUGUST 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 HRH The Duchess of Cambridge
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Treasurer John Miskelly FCA FRPS
Contributing Editor Rachel Segal Hamilton
Trustees Dr Avijit Datta, Sarah J Dow ARPS, Andrew Golding ASICI FRPS, Janet Haines ARPS, Mervyn Mitchell ARPS, Sir Brian Pomeroy CBE ARPS
Art Director John Pender Managing Editor Andrew Littlefield
Chief Executive Officer Evan Dawson
Editorial Assistant Jennifer Constable
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President and Chair of Trustees Simon Hill HonFRPS
Editor Kathleen Morgan rpsjournal@thinkpublishing.co.uk 0141 375 0509
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
Client Engagement Director Rachel Walder Circulation 10,963 (Jan-Dec 2019) ABC ISSN: 1468-8670
The Journal of The Royal Photographic Society
July / August 2021
Vol 161 / No 4
© 2021 The Royal Photographic Society. All rights reserved.
CONTRIBUTORS
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Sebastião Salgado (page 364)
Simon Bainbridge (page 376)
Rachel Segal Hamilton (page 404)
The Brazil-born photojournalist and Honorary Fellow is world-acclaimed for visual storytelling that illuminates environments and cultures under threat. His latest book is Amazônia.
Bainbridge received the 2019 RPS Award for Photographic Publishing. Editor of the British Journal of Photography for 17 years, he is author of the book Magnum Artists.
A photography and visual arts writer, Segal Hamilton is contributing editor to the RPS Journal. She has also worked for titles including the British Journal of Photography.
RPS JOURNAL
PORTRAIT OF SEBASTIÃO SALGADO BY MARCIA NAVARRO, 2021
The ‘RPS’ logo is a registered and protected trademark. Every reasonable endeavour has been made to find and contact the copyright owners of the works included in this publication. However, if you believe a copyright work has been included without your permission, please contact the publisher. Views of contributors and advertisers do not necessarily reflect the policies of The Royal Photographic Society or those of the publisher. All material correct at time of going to press.
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What lies beneath
BY FRANCINE FLEISCHER CLIENT
New Yorker Francine Fleischer studied figurative painting and ballet before discovering a flair for photography. Those formative influences are clear in this image from the series The Water in Between, to be published by Steidl as a photobook later this year. Fleischer made her name while working in the studios of Annie Leibovitz HonFRPS and Michel Comte, and her work is now exhibited internationally. The playfulness of this picture belies the fact that the deep natural well seen here was once used by the Mayan civilisation for human sacrifice. In today’s Mexico it is now a popular site for all kinds of aquatic recreation. A photobook of The Water in Between is published by Steidl later in 2021. francinefleischer photography.com 342
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In focus NEWS, VIEWS AND EXHIBITIONS
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WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER ALFIE BOWEN ON AUTISM
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ANTONY ZACHARIAS OPENS HIS KIT BAG
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CARLOTA GUERRERO AND ‘THAT’ SOLANGE PORTRAIT
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‘Catholic West Belfast, kids building a bonfire in Divis Flat, 1978’ by Chris Steele-Perkins HonFRPS
TIME FOR REFLECTION
Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins HonFRPS has revisited his archive during lockdowns to collate two new books Renowned Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins HonFRPS has spent much of the Covid-19 pandemic in Japan, his wife’s homeland and a place he’s visited regularly over 20 years. He has taken far fewer pictures than he’d like over the past year and a half. Limitations imposed by successive lockdowns have been professionally
frustrating, he says, “not documenting one of the major events of the 21st century, but what it has allowed me to do is go through some of my archives”. The Troubles, a book of his archival work from Northern Ireland, has been published by Bluecoat Press. The 100th anniversary of the establishment of a border in Ireland in 1921 prompted the
idea for this publication. The book includes images Steele-Perkins shot in 1978, as part of the Exit Group of photographers documenting urban poverty in Britain at the time; and there are also photographs taken in 2008, when Steele-Perkins photographed and interviewed some of the same people he’d met decades earlier. JULY / AUGUST 2021
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The Troubles is published by Bluecoat Press bluecoatpress.co.uk chrissteeleperkins.com
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Many of the pictures he felt most drawn to when editing the book were ones he’d ignored all those years earlier. “Over time things become important,” he says. “When you look at the pictures more meditatively, they reveal something you perhaps didn’t see before.” He cites the example of two similar frames showing a boy with a stone in his hand. The one he initially favoured had a cleaner composition, the other had a car right behind the child’s head. “Maybe at the time I thought it was a bit messy,” he says. “But it’s exactly the mess that the thing’s about.” The process of putting together A Secular Prayer, published in Germany by Steidl, was quite different. Selecting 100 pictures of children on behalf of Queen Silvia of Sweden’s charitable foundation, Steele-Perkins had in mind exactly the images he was after. It was simply a case of finding them.
‘Catholic West Belfast, youth with a stone during a riot at the top of Leeson Street, 1978’ by Chris Steele-Perkins HonFRPS
“When you look at the pictures more meditatively, they reveal something you perhaps didn’t see before”
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‘Newcastle, England, marching band and power station’ by Chris Steele-Perkins HonFRPS
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‘Untitled, 1997’ by Maxine Walker
HOMECOMING ART
An exhibition of pioneering self-portraiture by Maxine Walker, the Birminghamborn Black photographer active in the 1980s and 1990s, runs until 30 August at Midlands Arts Centre.
‘Fiesta’ by Alfie Bowen
ENVIRONMENTAL AWARD
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Kathleen Ricker has won the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation Environmental Photographer of the Year Award 2021 for her image ‘Gorilla by the water’.
A rising star of wildlife photography, Alfie Bowen explains why autism can be one of life’s advantages He has been obsessed with wildlife for as long as he can remember. “My first word was mallard,” says 23-year-old photographer and environmental campaigner Alfie Bowen. “Photography began as another way to satisfy my obsession with our natural world.” Photography became far more than that when Bowen began experiencing bullying and social exclusion at school. “It was my therapy,” he says. “Out in the field with a camera in my hand I forgot about the stresses and sadness of school. It was the only place I felt truly relaxed.” Now, with the publication of his first book, Bowen hopes to highlight the positives of living with autism. Wild World: Nature Through an Autistic Eye features an introduction by the photographer, conservationist and broadcaster Chris Packham, who has spoken about his own experience of autism. A screening of the 2021 film An Eye for Detail, which focuses on Bowen’s life and work, will be followed by an in-person Q&A with the photographer at RPS House on 12 September.
Bowen, an ambassador for Nikon and Young Bird Photographer of the Year, explains: “There are lots of misconceptions about autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the one that annoys me most is people assuming we are stupid. We are the exact opposite. “The autistic brain is complex – it always demands new, useful information, which is important for animal photography. I’ll spend ages learning about the animals I’m going to photograph so I can predict their behaviours. ASD also helps me visualise what I want to capture, and gives me the determination to create it perfectly. “I feel a responsibility to use the platform I’ve built through my art to raise awareness, both for the plight facing the animals that are the stars of my photographs, and for young people with autism and mental health issues, so none of them have to feel as lonely as I did.” Wild World: Nature Through an Autistic Eye is published by ACC Art Books alfiebowen.photography
exposition.fpa2.org/ online-exhibition
A SENSE OF PLACE
Fine art photographer Chloe Meynier took first prize in the Life Framer Photography Award’s ‘Home Sweet Home’ spring call-out for a striking staged portrait, with an image from her series Made in the Shade. life-framer.com
CONGRATULATIONS MAXINE WALKER / AUTOGRAPH, LONDON
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‘PHOTOGRAPHY WAS MY THERAPY’
macbirmingham.co.uk
As we went to press Martin Parr HonFRPS, the Magnum photographer celebrated for his unique take on British life, was recognised with a CBE in The Queen’s Birthday Honours 2021. martinparrfoundation.org
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From my kitbag Canon EOS 5D Mark III with L bracket, Canon 16-35 f/4 L IS lens, Canon 24-105 f/4 L IS lens, Canon 70-200 f/4 L IS lens, Gitzo GT1545T tripod, Arca Swiss Monoball p0 Ballhead, Canon wired remote, two spare Canon LP E6 batteries, Lexar CF cards, various ND filters, Hoya Fusion Antistatic CIR-Pl, step-down ring (77-67mm), Peak Design quick release camera strap, tripod key, black electrical tape, Maglite LED, Swiss Army knife
Plan ahead
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RSB PHOTOGRAPHY COMPETITION
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‘Interconnected’ is the theme for this competition, which offers £1,000 for one overall winner aged over 18, and £500 for the Young Photographer category. Deadline is 23 July. rsb.org.uk/photocomp
BJP INTERNATIONAL AWARD ART
A solo show in London and a £5,000 production grant are up for grabs in this award, whose past winners include Juno Calypso and Jack Latham. Deadline is 19 August.
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IN THE BAG
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Antony Zacharias, who specialises in long exposure photography, opens the lid on his favourite gear
How does this kit help you achieve the images you’re after? I find that this setup is not too heavy and the lenses’ focal ranges cover most compositions. I carry a variety of ND filters that I can combine if necessary. Is there anything in there besides photography gear? I’m never without my Maglite and spare battery as I often work off the beaten track late at night. A granola bar or two can often stave off those hungry feelings that tend to make a shoot that bit less enjoyable. Such items help me to stay out in the field for as long as it takes to get the perfect shot. Tell us about a recent image or shoot you did with this gear Just before lockdown I found myself by this derelict jetty and the menacing clouds seemed a perfect composition for a long exposure image. It proved difficult to judge the speed of the approaching storm and, literally, after just this one image, I found myself running to avoid a torrent of rain and lightning.
1854.photography/awards
NATURAL LANDSCAPE AWARDS
Joe Cornish HonFRPS is on the judging panel for this prize for photographers capturing the landscape ‘in a realistic manner’, with a top prize of $5,000. Closes on 1 September. naturallandscapeawards.com
TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR
‘Havana Nights’ by Antony Zacharias
Any tips for getting started in long exposure photography? You don’t need all the gear to jump in – just an ND filter. A 6-stop filter is a good place to start. A stable camera is vital – buy the lightest and sturdiest tripod you can, so that you don’t begrudge carrying it around with you. Look for something stationary in your composition to anchor the image and accentuate the movement that you will capture with the long exposure. 52 Assignments: Photographic Exposure by Antony Zacharias is published by Ammonite Press. antonyz.com
This award, supported by the RPS, welcomes images of people, landscapes and wildlife. The overall winner will receive a cash prize plus a Fujifilm camera and lens. Closes 12 October. tpoty.com
‘Snail by the water’ by TPOTY Vladimir Alekseev
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‘Protests, summer 2020’ by Misan Harriman ART CLIENT
‘Y60_5,900km from the river source’ by Yan Wang Preston, part of the Messums Gallery’s new photography collection
‘Untitled, 2020’ from the series Languor by Donavon Smallwood
Misan Harriman
Dr Julie Bonzon
Donavon Smallwood
Bnar Sardar
PHOTOGRAPHER
ART HISTORIAN AND CURATOR
PHOTOGRAPHER
PHOTOJOURNALIST
This former City of London headhunter has made history since taking up photography just four years ago. Besides shooting a renowned Black Lives Matter image and becoming the first Black man to shoot a cover for British Vogue, Harriman is now chair of the Southbank Centre. southbankcentre.co.uk 350
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A South African photography specialist, Bonzon has been appointed head of the recently launched photography department at Messums Gallery, London, with a roster of new artists and special commissions. Exhibitions commence in September. messumslondon.com
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Smallwood’s series Languor – a portrayal of Black tranquillity in Central Park – has won him this year’s Aperture Portfolio Prize, which comes with a $3,000 cash prize, a feature in Aperture magazine and an exhibition at the Camera Club of New York in August. donavonsmallwood.com
The Bristol-based Iraqi Kurdish photojournalist fled Iraq with her family in 1991. One of the few female photojournalists to document the war in her homeland, Sardar has shared her experiences as Ambassador for Refugee Week 2021. instagram.com/bnar.sardar
CAMILLA HOLMSTROEM; YOUNCE MAHMOOD
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FIVE HEAD TURNERS TO WATCH
Headturners, 1 ‘A view of a Hawraman at night, northeastern Kurdistan region of Iraq’ by Bnar Sardar
Nick Knight
BRITT LLOYD
PHOTOGRAPHER
Knight is known for his legendary fashion work but in his latest exhibition, Roses From My Garden at Waddesdon Manor in Aylesbury, he presents floral still lifes inspired by Dutch painters of the 16th and 17th centuries. waddesdon.org.uk nickknight.com
‘Sunday 29 September, 2019’ by Nick Knight
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REMEMBERING HRH THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH
The subject of countless portraits, Prince Philip is here commemorated by an RPS member
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This portrait of Prince Philip was commissioned by the Royal Mint, along with another of The Queen, for a £5 coin commemorating the couple’s diamond wedding anniversary. Following the death of Prince Philip on 9 April 2021, the photographer Alan Shawcross FRPS reflects on what was to become one of his favourite portraits. “I’d photographed The Queen once before and The Duke a number of times,” says Shawcross. “These sittings, always somewhat challenging, ranged from those in uniform – he held honorary military positions in more than 50 organisations – to those in civilian dress, as in this particular case.” The sitting got off to a tricky start after Shawcross decided to set up in a different location than planned with Prince Philip. The Duke complained they were clearly in the wrong room and had moved some of his furniture, says Shawcross. “He quickly recovered his composure and the sitting proceeded in fine style, producing this portrait which I feel shows something of his personality and remains an especial favourite of mine.”
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Prince Philip, Honorary Member of the RPS, by Alan Shawcross FRPS
HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, 10 June 1921-9 April 2021
Notice of the Annual General Meeting of The Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain Notice is hereby given that the Annual General Meeting of the Society will be held at RPS House, 337 Paintworks, Arnos Vale, Bristol BS4 3AR on Saturday 25 September 2021 at 10am BST.
The business of the meeting will be: • to receive the minutes of the 2020 Annual General Meeting • to approve the Trustees’ report and accounts for the year ended 31 December 2020 • to authorise the Board of The Royal Photographic
Society of Great Britain to appoint and to agree a fee for the Society auditors • to receive the results of the 2021 Board of Trustee elections 2020 • to vote on any qualifying motions All documentation relating to the above,
along with a platform for casting your votes in the council elections and appointing a proxy for the AGM, may be found at mi-vote.com/rps/ If you would like to register for postal communication, or have any questions relating to voting or
the appointment of a proxy, please contact the appointed agent, Mi-Voice, by email: support@mi-voice.com Further information may be found at rps.org/agm-2021 By Order of the Trustees
The Royal Society of Great Britain is a company registered in England and Wales No RC000798 and a Registered Charity No 1107831. The registered office of The Royal Photographic Society is RPS House, 337 Paintworks, Arnos Vale, Bristol BS4 3AR.
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What to see
Catch these exhibitions online and in person
DEUTSCHE BÖRSE PHOTOGRAPHY FOUNDATION PRIZE 2021
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The Photographers’ Gallery, London Until 26 September
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CAO FEI / VITAMIN CREATIVE SPACE AND SPRÜTH MAGERS; MICHAEL BENNETT; RICH WILES; CAMILLA GREENWELL AT STUDIO WAYNE MCGREGOR, LONDON; JOHN BLAKEMORE
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This is the 25th edition of the prestigious prize. The work on show by the four shortlisted artists – Alejandro Cartagena, Cao Fei, Zineb Sedira and RPS Hood Medal recipient Poulomi Basu – is unique and distinctive, while sharing an interest in such issues as conflict, technology and cultural memory.
thephotographers gallery.org.uk
‘Nova, 2019’ by Cao Fei
IN WHICH LANGUAGE DO WE DREAM? Impressions Gallery, Bradford 7 August to 13 November
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MOVEMENT IN STILL FORM
Some 5.7 million Syrians have been forced to leave their homes since the civil war began. Photographer Rich Wiles spent four years collaborating with a Syrian family, the al-Hindawis, on this project, which blends archival family photos with new images by them and by him.
Online
impressions-gallery.com
TULIPOMANIA Argentea Gallery, Birmingham 15 July to 28 August
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John Blakemore HonFRPS once described the tulip as “a flower of constant transformation, of a sensual and gestural elegance”. His 30 handmade prints on show at the Argentea Gallery were made over the course of 20 years, testament to Blakemore’s deep-held fascination with this subject.
Camilla Greenwell has been photographing dance for 10 years. This virtual exhibition showcases her work with the artists and companies performing on the stage of Sadler’s Wells in London. Her intimate shots offer a behind-the-scenes view on the creative combination of music and movement.
argenteagallery.com
sadlerswells.com
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PIER CLOSING TIME Oriel Colwyn, Colwyn Bay Until September
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In 1979 Michael Bennett was commissioned to photograph the seaside resorts of North Wales during the winter, but when the results were deemed too bleak he was sent back in summer to shoot more. Even then, the realism of his work went down badly – until its rediscovery in 2019.
orielcolwyn.org
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THE ROADMAKER James Barnor HonFRPS RRB Photobooks (£45)
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The road is the perfect metaphor for thinking about the groundbreaking life and work of Ghanaian photographer James Barnor HonFRPS. So says historian and curator Dr Damarice Amao in her introduction to this book of Barnor’s images spanning six decades. “This image of the road, and its slow-paced construction, is wonderfully suited to James Barnor himself,” writes Amao, “to his personal trajectory and his photographic career, woven in a singular way between Africa and Europe, between the past and the future of a profession, between individuals belonging to different worlds.” Born in 1929, Barnor established his first studio, Ever Young, in Accra in 1950, made commissioned portraits of Ghanaians as
their country headed towards independence, while also working as an editorial photographer for magazines and newspapers. When he moved to London in 1959 he took courses at the London College of Printing and Medway College of Arts, returning to Ghana and establishing the country’s first colour photo studio, X23, before returning to London in the 1990s. This publication brings together his pictures from Accra and London, shot in the studio and out on the streets. The images capture the spirit of post-war modernity and multiculturalism, as well as post-colonial identity, across these two cities. They also reveal Barnor’s mastery of the medium and his remarkable photographic range. The book coincides with two major retrospective exhibitions of
‘Sick-Hagemeyer shop assistant, Accra, 1971’ by James Barnor HonFRPS
the photographer’s work – James Barnor – Ghanaian Modernist at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery as part of Bristol Photo Festival, and James Barnor: Accra/ London – A Retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Rachel Segal Hamilton
ENGLAND’S SEASIDE HERITAGE FROM THE AIR
I’LL BE LATE TONIGHT Roxana Savin Self-published (£30)
Alan Brodie Liverpool University Press (£50)
Published while she was still a Master’s student, Savin’s impressive debut photography book explores the lives of women living in gated expatriate Russian communities. Her clean, crisp autobiographical images intersperse pensive portraits with domestic still lifes, and snowy exterior shots. You can find an interview with Savin in the June RPS e-newsletter Journal Extra. Rachel Segal Hamilton
This collection of historic aerial photographs gives a different perspective on British seaside towns. Away from the hubbub of the seafront, the images taken by Aerofilms Ltd between the 1920s and the 1950s shine a light on the architecture and infrastructure that helped to make these places such popular holiday destinations. Rachel Segal Hamilton
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NORTHERN ENGLAND 1983-1986 Michael Kenna Nazraeli Press (£50)
Michael Kenna was born in 1953, in Widnes, Lancashire. In 1983, the death of photographer Bill Brandt impelled Kenna to return from San Francisco and revisit the industrial sites of the north of England that Brandt had photographed in the 1930s. Kenna’s reacquaintance with his northern homelands inspired an ‘art documentary’ approach that works as a poignant homage to Brandt. Simon Hill HonFRPS
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My place
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New Mexico
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Clockwise from above ‘Fissures, 2017’, ‘Deep blue pool, 2018’, ‘Power color, 2016’, ‘You’re right there, 2018’ by Natalie Christensen CLIENT © JAMES BARNOR COURTESY OF GALERIE CLÉMENTINE DE LA FÉRONNIÈRE; GENEVIEVE RUSSELL
The intoxicating colours and architecture of New Mexico inspire Natalie Christensen When photographer Natalie Christensen relocated to New Mexico from Kentucky, where she had been born and raised, it felt like another world. “The air is so clean and the high elevation makes everything sparkle in the sunlight. That, combined with the apricot tones of the adobe architecture against the bright blue sky, was intoxicating to my senses,” she recalls. “It is one of the most unique and beautiful places in America.” Seven years on she continues to feel that sense of awe which she channels into colourful, minimalist images that capture “the liminal spaces” within New Mexico’s iconic architectural landscape. As much as
the place itself, Christensen’s practice as a psychotherapist inspires her photographic approach. “It is much more powerful to pose a question to a client than to make a definitive statement,” she says. “I see my photos as an extension of that – each image is posed as a question, first to myself and then the viewer. I am drawn to things for a particular reason, although I don’t always know that reason in my conscious mind.” 007 – Natalie Christensen is published by Setanta in collaboration with Open Doors Gallery. nataliechristensenphoto.com setantabooks.com JULY / AUGUST 2021
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LOCATION “The place is a traditional noodle making factory. I found it three years ago and since then I visit the factory each year in the month of Ramadan. About 50 people work in this factory and most of them are women. The workers only earn about £2 per day.”
Right ‘Making rice noodles’ by Abdul Momin
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HOW I DID THIS Discover the secrets of a winning image by food photographer Abdul Momin You have to look twice at this shot by Bangladeshbased photographer Abdul Momin to realise what you’re seeing. This striking composition entitled ‘Making rice noodles’ earned Momin first prize in the Pink Lady® Food Photographer of the Year Fujifilm Award for Innovation, which celebrates original approaches to capturing food. Here, he talks us through his technique. The Pink Lady® Food Photographer of the Year tenth anniversary exhibition is at RPS Gallery, Bristol, 20 November-12 December. abmomin.com 356
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SUBJECT “The picture shows a young factory worker surrounded by thousands of noodle strands which are hanging from the ceiling to dry. These noodle strands need to be monitored each hour so that they don’t get stuck to each other, or don’t get too crispy so they break easily.”
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STORY “These types of noodles, known as Shemai, are made with hot water and rice flour which are combined with a raising agent and cut into thin yarns of around six feet in length. Once the noodles are made, they are hung to dry for 48 hours before being woven, packaged and shipped across the country.”
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KIT “I used my Nikon D7200 with a Nikon 10-20mm lens to take the shot. I didn’t use any external light source as I wanted to capture the warm and natural vivid light. Many people have taken photos of noodles, but as I wanted to try something new I took the photo lying on the ground to get the perspective I wanted.”
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TIMING “In the holy month of Ramadan people cook the noodles with milk and sugar and serve as their fast breaker at sunset. People also send Shemai as traditional gifts to their relatives during Eid festivals. It is a very popular delicacy among villagers in Bangladesh.” JULY / AUGUST 2021
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James Dadzie, 53, by Matilda Temperley, recipient of the 2016 RPS Joan Wakelin Bursary
JOAN WAKELIN BURSARY 2021 The Joan Wakelin Bursary offers £2,000 to an individual to produce a new photographic essay on a social documentary issue.
Entry is free and open to photographers of any age or nationality. The Bursary does not support projects requiring travel to, or within, war zones.
Established in 2005 in memory of distinguished documentary photographer Joan Wakelin HonFRPS, the Bursary is administered by the RPS in partnership with the Guardian.
The RPS is asking applicants to propose projects based in their country of residence to allow for any Covid-19 restrictions, and to help address environmental issues associated with long-distance travel.
Closing: Monday 16 August 2021
Supported by
To apply go to rps.org/wakelin21
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TAKE NOTE Name: Carlota Guerrero Age: 31 Base: Barcelona High point: Shooting album artwork for Solange Knowles USP: Bold portraiture celebrating the bonds between women
They say write what you know – but this philosophy can apply equally to image-making. “Being a woman is my condition and my starting point,” says the Spanish photographer Carlota Guerrero, whose first photobook was recently published by Prestel. “I feel an intimate admiration for a woman’s figure. I’m fascinated by her power and presence. To photograph is to honour, to celebrate and to thank women for everything I’ve learned from them.” As a teenager in Spain, Guerrero would take portraits of her female friends, but it was a call from the singer Solange, when Guerrero was 24, that set her on course for a career in photography.
Having seen her portraits on Instagram, Solange asked if she would shoot the images for her album A Seat at the Table. Guerrero has since worked on commissions for clients including Nike, Missoni, Dior, Spanish Vogue and Playboy, as well as producing fine art photography. Just before the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 she directed a live performance for Art Basel Miami featuring Lourdes Leon, daughter of Madonna, alongside others dancing and embracing on stage. Guerrero’s style treads an intriguing line between the mythical and the futuristic, with influences felt from fashion, dance and the counterculture of the 1960s. Choreographed and ritualistic, her portraits
frequently show groups of women linked together by plaited hair, often nude. “Clothing is something that separates my lens from the subject that I am portraying and adds a layer of information that sometimes I do not want to decode,” she says. “If I want to portray somebody’s essence it’s easier to portray them naked. I am consciously reacting to the male gaze in photography. For me it’s crucial to have women portraying women in order to change the game.” Tengo un Dragón Dentro del Corazón: The photographs of Carlota Guerrero is published by Prestel at prestelpublishing. penguinrandomhouse.de carlotaguerrero.com
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Clockwise from above ‘Solange Knowles, A Seat at the Table, 2020’; ‘Sacred bond for Chantelle, 2019’; ‘Model mafia, New York, 2018’
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Five questions 1
What makes you get up in the morning?
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The excitement of a new day. I like to watch the sun come up. Regardless of what might have happened the day before I always wake up in a positive frame of mind, looking forward to several hours to myself before my husband wakes up.
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What’s been your toughest moment behind the lens?
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The most difficult time has been when I was trying to document institutionalised poverty in Rajasthan, India. Almost every day seems to raise an ethical question when
you’re confronted with people in extreme distress. Do you photograph them or do you not?
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Where would you most like to be photographing now?
I’ve come to realise that what I am most interested in photographing at any time is whatever is happening to me wherever I am – and right now that’s in south London.
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Which image makes you most proud?
It’s the image that’s the cover of my book, Christopher Street 1976. It was a casual street picture taken
“I look forward to several hours to myself before my husband wakes up”
‘Tilonia rural development in India, Bhil mother and child, Rajasthan, India, 1980’
after Stonewall and before AIDS when gay men were ‘coming out’ and claiming a public space. After 40 years it quietly became iconic.
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What’s next?
‘Bikram, 2007’, from the series Mr Malhotra’s Party
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There are shows lined up as well as a
couple of books including, unusually for me, a photography textbook. There’s also a residency with Studio Voltaire and the Imperial Health Trust, based in two London hospitals and looking at long-term HIV survivors and the
medicalisation of gender discourse. Sunil Gupta HonFRPS is joint winner, along with Maria Kapajeva, of the KrasznaKrausz Photography Book Award 2021. kraszna-krausz. org.uk
SUNIL GUPTA HonFRPS / PORTRAIT OF GUPTA BY CHARAN SINGH
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Holocaust survivor Ben Helfgott MBE, a former champion weightlifter, photographed with his grandson Sam by Frederic Aranda FRPS
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Features 364
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“Nothing has given me greater joy than working with the dozen of indigenous tribes portrayed in the book Amazônia”
“I needed to see beauty in things, and the only way I could see that was through photography”
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“In a way, my work over the last 50 years has been about navigating between the political and the aesthetic”
“Time never stays still in the real world, but photography can stop it. That is what I love about it”
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“I’m looking for ways of showing not just how bad fires are, but how we can live with fire in a very different way”
”In portraying genocide I did not want to fall into the traps and tropes of ‘dark tourism’”
ALAN McFETRIDGE
MICK YATES
“A deep trauma had been stored in my heart since learning about the Holocaust” FREDERIC ARANDA
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RETURN TO AMAZONIA He has spent six years photographing the Amazon rainforest and its indigenous tribes for a new book. Sebastião Salgado HonFRPS explains the latest chapter in a 40-year passion
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Previous pages Marauiá mountain range. Yanomami Indigenous Territory, municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, state of Amazonas, 2018 Left Bela Yawanawá, from the village of Mutum, with a headdress and painted face. Rio Gregório Indigenous Territory, state of Acre, 2016
When I first visited an Amazon tribe in the mid-1980s, I remember feeling anxious about meeting people whose lives were so radically distinct from my own. There, men and women, families whose ancestors had inhabited these forests for millennia, were still treated as ‘primitives’. How would they receive me? How would I react to them? How would I behave before such different human beings? That early experience of living alongside the Yanomami, one of Brazil’s largest ethnic groups, was so powerful that it has shaped my relationship with the natives of the Amazon region ever since. Finding myself cut off from the world in a remote village in the northern state of Roraima, I soon understood that the Yanomami were not in fact that different from me. After just a few hours in their company, I began to relax, to feel accepted. The emotions we shared – to love, to laugh, to cry, to feel happy or angry – served as our common language. I felt at home in my own tribe, that of all humans, where myriad systems of logic and reason are interwoven with my own, with those of Homo sapiens. Since then, and particularly over the past decade, I have spent long periods in the Amazon, navigating its rivers, flying over dense jungle and peripheral mountain ranges and, above all, living among its people in tiny communities scattered across the world’s largest tropical rainforest. And I can say without hesitation, even after a career full of extraordinary experiences, nothing has given me greater joy than working with the dozen of indigenous tribes portrayed in the book Amazônia. Through them, thanks to them, I reconnected with my own prehistory. I rediscovered the lives we led thousands of years ago. The natives of the Americas are descendants of the migrants who crossed the Bering Strait from Asia during the last Ice Age some 20,000 years ago. With the arrival of European conquistadors and colonisers in the 16th century, their numbers were decimated by diseases brought by these foreigners, and by wars waged against them. Then, through a gradual process of miscegenation, the identity of a majority of them became mestizo. Indigenous women were at the heart of the formation of the Brazilian people. After the first Portuguese landed in Brazil in 1500, they were soon followed by hundreds of thousands of men. It was not until 55 years later that the first five Portuguese women landed. The Jesuit missionaries who accompanied them were quick to notice hundreds of thousands of mestizo children, prompting accusations that the Portuguese men had been living in promiscuity. Although the number of natives living in the Amazon rainforest fell drastically, their experience was different. Thanks to the impenetrability of the jungle, for centuries they were able to preserve their traditional tribal way of life. Now they too are threatened: one aim of this photographic project is to record what survives before any more of it disappears. The Amazon region embraces nine South American countries, with 60% of the rainforest lying in Brazil. The population of this area is thought to have numbered around five million in 1500. Today, in a territory more than eight times the size of France, there are just 370,000 indigenous people belonging to 188 tribes and speaking 150 different languages. A further 114 tribes have been identified, but they have not been contacted. JULY / AUGUST 2021
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Towns and cities sprang up along the Amazon and its major tributaries as far back as the 17th century. But in the middle of the 20th century a dangerous new chapter in the indigenous peoples’ struggle to survive began with the opening up of Brazil’s vast, undeveloped and sparsely populated interior. Migration from southern Brazil led to the deforestation of the Amazon to make room for cattle farming and soybean cultivation. New roads and navigable rivers facilitated migration and made it easier for logging firms to harvest valuable hardwood and for freelance prospectors to seek gold. With these outsiders, who included religious groups bent on evangelising remote tribes, came influenza, measles, malaria … and death for thousands of natives. Intentionally set forest fires in the Amazon are not new, but they have multiplied so drastically that they now grab attention far beyond Brazil because of their undisputed impact on climate change. Often described as the world’s lungs, the rainforest has been steadily losing its ability to absorb vast quantities of carbon dioxide. Instead, it has been adding to global CO2 concentrations, creating an enormous ‘carbon bomb’. The Amazon rainforest is the only place on Earth where humidity in the air does not depend on evaporation of seawater. Thanks to its size and an intense concentration of humidity, this forest generates its own process of evaporation in which each tree acts like a geyser or aerator, releasing hundreds of litres of water into the atmosphere daily. As a result, thanks to its hundreds of billions of trees, this blanket of vegetation creates an extraordinary airborne river, or river of vapour, which carries more water than the Amazon River pours into the Atlantic Ocean each day. The impact of this on global climate conditions is immense. With 20% of the Amazon’s biomass already lost, any further disruption of its ecological equilibrium will have drastic repercussions far beyond Latin America’s frontiers. Yet too many Brazilians still fail to recognise that protecting the Amazon is also in their interest. Surely they, no less than Argentinians, can understand that their immense agricultural wealth depends directly on the rain that falls over the Amazon. What drew me back to the Amazon? Certainly not its dark side – not the fires or deforestation or the poisoning of rivers by gold miners or the drug trafficking and arms smuggling. Rather, it was to savour afresh the unparalleled beauty of this vast region. For me, it is the last frontier, a mysterious universe of its own, where the immense power of nature can be felt as nowhere else on Earth. Here is a forest stretching to infinity that contains one tenth of all living plant and animal species, the world’s largest single natural laboratory. I was also eager to renew my attachment – I might even say my identity – with the native peoples who care so diligently for the forest. The constitution adopted after Brazil’s military dictatorship ended in 1985 recognised this. And since then, 26% of the Amazon region has been reserved for the exclusive use of its original inhabitants. And the results have been encouraging: according to satellite imagery, in contrast to damage suffered by private land, national parks, and government-owned property in the region, there has been almost no burning or deforestation within the indigenous reserves. Without outside help, most tribes have preserved the pristine conditions of their reserves. 370
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Salgado, 4 Previous pages Landscape showing an igapó, a term referring to forests that are often flooded by blackwater from rivers. Left bank of the Lower Rio Negro, around the confluence with the Rio Branco and near the Anavilhanas Archipelago, state of Amazonas, 2019 Above The Korubo lived in isolation until the mid-1990s when a group of them, nearly all suffering from malaria, approached some white people for help. Today, about 120 Korubo live in two villages on the banks of the Ituí River in the Javari Valley Indigenous Territory, in western Amazonas state near the border with Peru. Txitxopi, pictured above, was a boy when the first Korubo group was contacted. Hunting encampment on the Ituí River, 2017
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Hopes for the future of Amazônia
Previous pages Keiá Yawanawá, from the village of Mutum, paints the back of young Kanamashi, from the village of Amparo. The flower-shaped ornament in her hair is made of bird feathers. Rio Gregório Yawanawá Indigenous Territory, state of Acre, 2016 Left The Maiá River in Pico da Neblina National Park, in the São Gabriel da Cachoeira area. Yanomami Indigenous Territory, State of Amazonas, 2018
Whether viewed from the sky or on the ground, Amazônia has always filled me with awe. Neither words nor photographs can fully convey the sensation of being overwhelmed by the sheer power and majesty of nature. Just as unforgettable is the feeling of intimacy I experienced when spending weeks on end with different tribes. Through them, the forest and rivers took on a new meaning, one that offered life and sustenance. I felt privileged to be allowed to share their time and space, first patiently learning to be accepted, then quietly recording their daily lives – their warm family ties, their hunting and fishing, how meals are prepared and shared, their magical ways of painting their faces and bodies, the importance of their shamans, their dances, and rituals. In this way, I could feel and convey their gentleness. The lives of these ethnic groups are changing. My hope is that [they] learn to coexist with the outside world while preserving their languages and culture. For this, we – and along with us, all Brazilians – can play a role by recognising that these native peoples, and the rainforest they protect, are irreplaceable treasures of humanity and of our planet. To survive as a culture, though, indigenous peoples cannot simply be objects of anthropological interest; they must also contribute to – and benefit from – the sustainable development of the Amazon by tapping its extraordinary renewable botanical wealth, whether in exotic spices or nuts or plants with medicinal and cosmetic value. My wish, with all my heart, with all my energy, with all the passion I possess, is that in 50 years’ time this book will not resemble a record of a lost world. Amazônia must live on – and, always at its heart, its indigenous inhabitants. Amazônia by Sebastião Salgado HonFRPS is published by Taschen, £100. amazonasimages.com/accueil and taschen.com JULY / AUGUST 2021
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Outdoor dining, Bonneville Salt Flats, 1992 “It’s a landscape worthy of Dali. Having that in place in this setting was just really beautiful and strange and wonderful and symbolic of American culture.”
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SUPERSIZE VISION While his forebears strolled the New York streets in search of the American psyche, Richard Misrach headed for the desert. Then he discovered large format. He tells Simon Bainbridge about 50 years of thinking big
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He is among the most critically acclaimed photographers of a golden generation in his homeland of the United States. There, Richard Misrach is known as a pioneer of large-format colour who has captured the sublime beauty – and the misuse – of the American West. It is two decades since I last talked with the charming and erudite photographer, meeting him ahead of his exhibition at Michael Hue-Williams’ gallery on London’s Cork Street, the debut of his ongoing, multi-part series of Desert Cantos. Curiously, there’s been little opportunity to see his work in the UK since. Indeed, the vast majority of his more than 120 solo shows have been mounted in the US. Misrach exudes the friendly intellect of a free-thinking California native; a sharp-witted autodidact who has always
been a little ahead of his time, pushing the medium in new directions with his supersize prints in his early career, and pursuing environmental concerns long before it was an issue for mainstream discussion. He saw the warning signs in the desert, where he’s made much of his work since the mid-1970s, finding a landscape replete with metaphor, symbolism and reflection, where others may only have seen emptiness. It has so far been the source of 40 chapters of work, each contributing to an epic, multistranded narrative that he says he’ll continue as long as he is able. But he has allowed himself digressions, making works in the forests and on the beaches of Hawaii, or along the industrial corridor of the lower Mississippi, and even a series shot from his front porch – which is where I catch up with him.
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Untitled #394 (Falling girls), 2003 “I saw these small figures in the ocean at a distance. And they reminded me very specifically of a newspaper photograph of people falling from the Twin Towers, which I had on my studio wall. [My series The Beach] became a metaphor for this idea of a small figure in this vast space ... The world had suddenly altered, and I needed to address 9/11, but indirectly. It was a private way of thinking about that.”
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Venus and missile evasion flares from Gu Oidak, 3.19.96, 8:29–10:18pm, 1996 “I was standing on a Native American reservation, and I was photographing the heavenly bodies above, [capturing] a beautiful abstraction of just perfect lines scarring the black night. But you can also see these weird things, like blobs, kind of ugly and slug-like, versus the beautiful arc of the universe. It was surreal, but I just didn’t know what it was.”
This time I have to make do with a video call, speaking to him from an unseasonably chilly London while he sits outside the house in the Berkeley Hills where he’s lived with his wife since the late 1990s. It is close to the University of California campus where he studied maths and psychology some 50-odd years ago, and where he made his first serious foray into photography, capturing the antiwar protests and their brutal suppression at the end of the 1960s. It was a formative period, for him and for America. It is a good time to reflect on all this, not just because his experiences as a young man so defined him as an artist, but because he has recently released his latest book, published by Aperture, with whom he’s had a long and fruitful collaboration. Richard Misrach on Landscape and Meaning is the sixth in Aperture’s excellent Photography Workshop series, each made with a singular artist, designed to “distill their creative approaches, teachings, and insights”.
Misrach is self-taught, which only makes this more interesting. He learnt printing at a non-credit class at Berkeley, but the rest came by poring over books at the university library, and just shooting and learning from his mistakes. He hasn’t taught much himself either. “For many people, you’re either a great teacher, or a great artist, and it’s really hard to do both,” he explains. “I think John Baldessari might be the exception to the rule.” Misrach provides the dialogue that runs throughout the book, interspersed with his own pictures, beginning with his observation that “photography and political engagement blossomed simultaneously for me,” referencing the tumultuous protests at Berkeley in 1969. “In a way, my work over the last 50 years has been about navigating these two extremes – the political and the aesthetic,” he continues. “I’ve never been able to reconcile them, but I think it’s the tension JULY / AUGUST 2021
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between love for the inherent magic of the medium and its power as a tool for social change that have kept me passionately engaged.” His first proper series, Telegraph 3am, was made with good intentions, capturing formal portraits of street people. The idea came to him in a dream, and this sense of destiny was fulfilled when Cornell Capa rang him, having seen his selfmade book, and offered him a show at ICP. And yet he soon came to view it as a failure. “Nothing happened for the people on the street. I ended up with a coffee table book, basically. I thought that social documentary work had a voice of power in the world. It didn’t. And that was a big wake-up call.” He was perhaps on the verge of quitting photography altogether when the winds of change began blowing in a new direction. “Berkeley was heading towards this more metaphysical era,” he recalls. “There was a lot of interest in Eastern thought, meditation, yoga, health food – all that stuff was exploding, and kind of replacing the disillusionment with political activity.” He was affected by that too. “And so I decided to retreat from photographing people, but take the skills that I learned.” Towards the end of the Telegraph Avenue project, he’d begun working exclusively at night. It had been a powerful experience, allowing him the “freedom to explore and learn the language of the medium”. So he took that with him to the desert, camping out for two or three weeks at a time, shooting cacti with a strobe light. “I just sort of lit up the desert at night. And that was it; that took me back in a totally different direction.” It must have been a visceral experience, I say. “In the desert, you feel like you’re standing on another planet,” he replies. “That was really powerful.” Misrach immediately recognised the photographic potential of this landscape. Whereas his forebears had used the streets of New York City, or the pristine nature of Yosemite, as a symbolic map to explore the beat of America’s conscience, “I saw the desert as a tabula rasa”. He switched to large format, and began shooting in colour, partly inspired by some of his contemporaries, Joel Sternfeld in particular. That meant Misrach was photographing in the daytime again, increasingly fascinated with the depth and sense of scale he was able to achieve. He also began pushing the sizes of his prints, utilising the descriptive qualities of his 8x10 camera by exploiting new scan and print technologies.
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Born in 1948 in California, America, Misrach is renowned for his pioneering colour work and his large-format landscape photographs. He is fascinated by the impact of humanity on the environment, and with regions that reflect the extremes of the human condition, as demonstrated by his ongoing series Desert Cantos.
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Diving board, Salton Sea, 1983 “I think of photography as a form of pointing, a way of saying to the viewer, ‘Look at that!’ The aim is not just to show people what it’s like to be in a certain place; it’s also about creating a visual construct that makes the viewer consider larger issues. And yet the flooded towns [beside an inland lake in the California desert] were beautiful. The light on a large body of water in the desert is exquisite.”
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When some of the prints were shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washingon DC in 1979, he recalls one critic describing his pictures as garbage, writing that the size was garish and ridiculous. “But I knew I was on to something. I’d read somewhere that people thought the same about Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionist painters. But these guys were exploiting scale, and I realised that photography didn’t do that.” Perhaps the most important revelation, however, was the decision to use a literary trope. “I wanted to start doing series in the desert of the American West, and then link them together using Ezra Pound’s cantos form – that idea that you take several different ideas and you put them together and they become something bigger … more epic. That hadn’t been done in photography.” It has been his lifetime project and so far, over the course of four decades, he has produced 40 of these cantos, some encompassing just a handful of images, others running into
hundreds. The critic Gerry Badger says it is “possibly one of the most ambitious [projects] in the history of the medium – compounded of many ideas, existing on different levels, and subject to profound shifts in subject and mood.” Misrach began with The Terrain, a series of images capturing a sense of disrupted wilderness, shooting manmade objects seemingly at odds with their untamed surroundings. He followed with cantos that continued to explore the spectacle and the mystery and the abuse of the desert from different perspectives that focused first on the essential elements: The Flood (the so-called Salton Sea); Desert Fires (manmade blazes); The Event (space shuttle landings). Some of the ensuing cantos, such as The War, shot at the Bravo 20 military test site, have been more overtly documentary in approach. Others, such as Desert Skies, are more concerned with the metaphysical. Yet even these cantos are imbued with both political and aesthetic concerns.
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Hazardous waste containment site, Dow Chemical Corporation, Mississippi River, Plaquemine, Louisiana, 1998 “It looks like a little pond, and there’s a fence. But when you read the sign, one side is supposed to be a toxic waste dump, and the other side is actually the Mississippi River. The tide of the river is coming up and leaching into these toxic fields where there’s this waste storage from these industrial companies, and then it’s leaching back into the river and then going downriver to all these different communities.”
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12.15.99, 5:14pm, 1999 “In the 1990s I took a break from the Desert Cantos series. My wife and I bought a little house in the Berkeley Hills. The lot was overgrown with trees and vegetation; when we cut it back we discovered we had an extraordinary view of the Golden Gate Bridge from our front porch. It never would have occurred to me to photograph the bridge until I saw our view of it.”
Ultimately, though, Misrach wants these images to stand the test of time, to become part of the historical record, and for him the goal is to produce work that aspires to the enduring impact of Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. On the other hand, with Skies, the abstraction is cut with language; the images’ titles, literally embedded into metal frames, point to the history and politics of place names. This was the work that Misrach was debuting in London two decades ago, alongside The Sky Book, published by Arena Editions. Many of the cantos have had this singular treatment. Others have been shown together, as in his midcareer retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 1996. And this must surely be his hope, that all his cantos might one day be shown together somehow. That would be some challenge. I get the feeling that Misrach personally needed this overarching structure as much as the work itself benefitted from its epic realisation. It gave shape to his literal and
intellectual wanderings, yet allowed him the freedom to go off map on occasion, with his activist work documenting environmental hazard along the Mississippi, for example, or quenching his aesthetic curiosity with series such as Golden Gate and On the Beach. But Desert Cantos is his magnum opus, his life’s work. “I realised that this is an epic model that I can just keep using,” he reflects. “And I loved it. I was having a blast discovering, just by wandering around, and it was luck. I could have done that and nothing could have come to fruition. But it turned out to be a model – a way of working – that allowed it to just keep expanding on its own. And the only way that the Desert Cantos ever really ends is when I’m gone, because it’s only limited to my ideas, and they really do keep going and going.” Richard Misrach on Landscape and Meaning is published by Aperture, priced £22. aperture.org/books JULY / AUGUST 2021
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‘Early winter patch burning by Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre and the University of Tasmania, 2019’
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A fascination with fire has taken Alan McFetridge from Canada to the Australian outback. The Prix Pictet nominee explains why WORDS: GAVIN BELL IMAGES: ALAN McFETRIDGE
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‘Healers, 2019’
The firestorms that ravaged huge swaths of Australian bush in its ‘Black Summer’ of 2019-20 generated enough heat to melt steel, explode granite rocks and vaporise trees. Flames up to 300ft high gathered energy equivalent to a thermonuclear bomb, and killed 445 people as well as an estimated one billion animals. Apocalyptic images of the aftermath of the Australian catastrophe, and a similar event in Canada, have gained the New Zealand-born photographer Alan McFetridge a nomination for the Prix Pictet. The prize is awarded for artistically outstanding work highlighting a particular facet of sustainability, with the theme this year of ‘Fire’. 386
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McFetridge began focusing on the complexities of fire in 2016 after being awarded an RPS/TPA Environmental Bursary. The support from the Society, in partnership with The Photographic Angle, allowed him to document the consequences of a megafire in a remote subarctic region of Alberta that was the most costly natural disaster in Canadian history. “I was pretty interested in what happens in the aftermath of such events, where whole suburbs are levelled,” he says, speaking from his home in London. “I was looking for an event that was out of people’s control that had some forced migration component. It was quite spur of the moment – I just thought this is interesting, let’s see.
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“Once you start looking at a fringe event on the edge of civilisation it is clear that the impact on these people has been caused by global pollution. You have to consider climate change, that’s really how I got into fire.” McFetridge travelled to Fort McMurray, an oil town built in dense forest whose 80,000 residents were forced to flee on the sole access road in the country’s biggest mass evacuation to date. Close behind them, towering flames soared into pyrocumulous clouds generating lightning. McFetridge’s images of the aftermath – a frozen wilderness blighted by the charred remains of trees and settlements – starkly show us the cataclysmic effects of megafires raging out of control.
“What I wasn’t prepared for was the degree of trauma that these fires cause,” he reflects. “It’s pretty severe, not only for the plants and animals. Both Australia and Canada are fiery landscapes – historically the plants have evolved with fire – but they’re not used to this level of heat. On a scale where a whole town has lost thousands of houses there’s a lot of shock, and I hadn’t come across anything like this before.” Not for the first time, McFetridge was struck by the detachment of city dwellers from ecology. Driven by fossil fuel industry profits, the Fort McMurray community was unaccustomed to fire risks in the boreal forest around it, and woefully unprepared for the disaster that almost engulfed it. JULY / AUGUST 2021
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“I felt compelled to capture and highlight this aspect of the location, and not to excuse humanity’s part in the burning,” says McFetridge. One of the constant themes of his work is the complex relationships between fire, human activity and climate change; three years after the Canadian blaze, he was focusing on contrasting fire management systems in Australia against a background of intense wildfires in its hottest and driest summer on record. “I went to Australia because I was interested in First Nation communities that understood fire at a deeper level,” he says. “There you have very distinct ways of traditional land care by
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‘Scale of enterprise, 2019’
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people who used fire as an ally for thousands of years to promote growth, and European settlers whose attitude to conservation was ‘use it or leave it’. “The Aborigines’ small-scale patch burning reduced fuel for wildfires and created fire breaks so that fires of the scale experienced today were rare or unknown. I think it’s important to involve these communities in this discussion. That’s really what I’m focusing on. There are pockets of Australia with sublime landscapes where fire has been the predominant way that people have been modifying land for millennia, and when you look at the plants and the garden aesthetic you think, ‘What has the west missed out on?’”
‘37.52994601706195, 149.68942734056398, Mallacoota, Victoria, Australia, 2020’
After consulting leading Australian fire experts, McFetridge set off on a 5,000km road trip from Queensland to Victoria, using satellite imagery to locate the most severely burned regions, where he set up his camera for large-format photography to document the immensity of the devastation. There are no dramatic action shots or portraits of human misery in his work, more a sobering, reflective contemplation of what awaits unless humanity sharply reduces global carbon emissions. Climate change has increased the chance of bushfires by 30%, according to a study by the World Weather Foundation, and the question hovering over all of McFetridge’s images is – where will humanity go when its lands are no longer habitable? JULY / AUGUST 2021
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“I felt there were enough photographs coming out of the Australian blazes and I’m not particularly interested in what fire looks like,” he says. “I’m more interested in how it got like this and who’s responsible. You’re looking at a double aftermath. You have the aftermath of the fire, but you’ve also got links between the lack of any ecological philosophy in capitalism, and the opposite of that where you have people who care for the land and have a direct connection with it, and an ecological philosophy built on that premise.” On the human toll, he says: “I try not to focus on people who have been immediately affected by fire. It’s traumatic, so I don’t feel like pointing a camera at someone who has just been through something like that. “It’s not just about the disasters, it’s about adaptation. I’m looking for ways of showing not just how bad fires are, but how we can live with fire in a very different way. I think if we’re going to keep polluting the planet, adaptation is a key part of the conversation.” Bushfires in Australia are monitored by satellites as well as ground level observation, and instant alerts are available on mobile phone apps, but sometimes there is no way out. McFetridge visited Buchan in Gippsland, where residents were forced into the centre of a cricket oval and set up water hoses to douse themselves as the flames and heat intensified around them. “Fire is traumatic, even for those who have learned to live with it,” he notes.
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‘Cool fire, 2019’
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“As I went further south, in one particular area there was extremely severe burning, and you’ll see in the photographs there was just nothing left – the views were 10km in every direction. There’s not a bird, there’s not a leaf, the rocks beneath your feet sound as if they’ve been baked in a kiln. It’s deathly silent.” In his travels he encountered a toxic haze of drifting smoke that would come and go, transforming the landscape into a dreamy aesthetic spiked with dangerous toxins. “Atmospheric pollutants are captured in leisure pursuits and outside workplaces, and the serious impact of these particles on mental and physical health are given very little consideration,” he says. One of the experts who McFetridge consulted was Dr David Bowman, professor of pyrogeography and fire science at the University of Tasmania. In May 2020, they went for a walk around Hobart. “We went to an excavation site and it was 8ft down into the ground and Dr Bowman said, ‘look, dry to the bedrock’. We went to another area and he pointed out how Hobart is surrounded by giant eucalyptus forests and he said it’s a time bomb. He understands how dangerous this stuff is. “You can imagine if the boreal forests reach a tipping point of collapse – this is one of the green lungs of the planet. Half of the great barrier reef suddenly collapsed and died three or four years ago. We’re talking about
‘Tree of life, 2019’
giant Earth sub-systems going wrong and we don’t really hear about boreal forests. I think that’s alarming – it freaks everybody out and it’s happening, it’s going on.” Dr Bowman agrees. “I think Alan understands the dangers facing us, and he’s done a good job in coming to Australia and Canada and drawing connections to indigenous knowledge,” he says in a phone call from Tasmania. A Royal Commission that investigated the Australian fires has heightened awareness of aboriginal fire management, but Dr Bowman says it would be a mistake to think all you have to do is wave a magic wand and aborigines can come and fix the landscape. The situation is far more serious. “The climate in Australia is undeniably changing. What happened in 2019-20 was crazy, a three-year drought and a relentlessly dry summer with oven-dry winds pouring out of the interior driving these fantastic firestorms.” Dr Bowman warns that the blazes can be seen as an omen of apocalypse unless urgent action is taken to counter global warming. “The way I would think about it is imagine we’re on an international space station and a fire breaks out. You’ve got to choke off the fuel of the fire, so it’s obvious we JULY / AUGUST 2021
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have to decarbonise, but we’ll still have to deal with the legacy of embodied climate change which is a lot worse than people realise. The nightmare scenario for the Earth’s system globally is that if the boreal forests burn at the scale they’re beginning to burn, and the organic soil burns and the methane in the permafrost is released, then we’ve lost the spaceship. It will be uninhabitable.” Dr Bowman points out that 40% of the Earth’s carbon stores are in boreal forests and if they burn the result will be an icefree world. “We go to a hothouse, a dinosaur world and we’re going to die because the forests will burn before our eyes and turbo-charge climate change out of control. That’s what’s going to happen and it scares the crap out of me.”
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‘Hell on Earth, 2020’
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‘Fire bunker and destroyed house, 2020’
This is why McFetridge intends to continue focusing on these existential threats by producing a monograph of his work in Canada, and returning to Australia. “There’s a lot more to do,” he says. “I have a lot more to learn. It’s a complex area that highlights a problem we have with psychological distancing between big environmental events and everyday life. It’s difficult to come back from seeing that level of severity and enter a city where there doesn’t seem to be any kind of change happening. I think that’s what we have to focus on.” As delegates prepare to attend the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in November, might they be advised
to view McFetridge’s work? “I can’t control that,” he says. “I think the best thing is to try and create work that has some sense of honesty about what is happening. “Historically Australia has the most volatile climate on the planet, so we’re starting to see what other parts of the world will begin to experience further down the track, and it’s accelerating, the timeline is getting shorter.” The shortlist for ‘Fire’, the ninth cycle of the Prix Pictet, will be announced on 8 July 2021. prixpictet.com alan-mcfetridge.com JULY / AUGUST 2021
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‘THE ONLY WAY I COULD SEE BEAUTY WAS THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY’
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Many are searching for ways to improve their wellbeing in the light of the pandemic. Three photographers tell David Clark how image-making helps them navigate life and mental health
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The number of people experiencing mental health issues has been increasing in recent years, with the global pandemic triggering a full-blown mental health crisis. Factors including job insecurity, fear of infection, isolation and bereavement have led to increased demand for treatment of such conditions as depression and anxiety. In April 2021 the Royal College of Psychiatrists reported that 2.2 million adults and nearly 400,000 children in the UK sought help for mental health problems during the pandemic, adding that the situation “will likely get a lot worse before it gets better”. Although a return to normal life is now under way, it’s likely that many will continue to struggle with the legacy of Covid. Landscape photographer and RPS member Paul Sanders believes engaging in photography can bring significant benefits to mental health. “I’m absolutely passionate about the power that photography has to help people overcome anxiety, and to positively adjust their outlook on life,” he says. Sanders joins fellow photographers Robert Darch and Melissa Spitz to reveal how they each use image-making to document and explore mental health issues – as well as overcome them.
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‘Edenbridge, Kent, 2021’ by Paul Sanders
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Sanders began his photographic career in 1984, working in fashion and advertising, then later moved into newspaper photography. In 2004 he became the picture editor on the Times, leaving seven years later to focus on landscape work. He now runs photographic workshops and retreats with an emphasis on mindfulness, through his company, Still.
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“My depression started to kick in around 2010 and began with insomnia and heightened anxiety. There was quite a lot of pressure in my job as the Times picture editor and coupled with that my marriage was breaking down, so I took the decision to leave and become a landscape photographer. “At first this left me even more depressed because the images I was taking had nothing to do with me. In all my years as a photographer, I was always commissioned and shooting what other
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people wanted, so I never knew what sort of photographs I wanted to do. “Around 2013 I changed my therapist and she got me to talk about how I was feeling through my photographs. She asked me why I liked shooting with long exposures and I said, ‘I’m anxious, I can’t breathe, my head is filled with voices and noises, but when I sit next to the camera while it’s exposing, I can almost see everything slowing down and it makes me feel calm.’ Later, when I looked back at
the pictures, I’d remember the calm and be able to breathe. She really helped me see that. “I found photography was becoming like a meditation, it was a time of slowing down and contemplation. When you’re in a state of depression nothing seems beautiful, but I needed to see beauty in things and the only way I could see that was through photography. “I realised what I had to do was not look for validation through social media or exhibitions or print sales,
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“Photography was becoming like a meditation – a time of contemplation”
Above from left ‘Birling Gap, East Sussex, 2021’, ‘Stromness, Orkney, 2020’, by Paul Sanders
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‘Cuckmere Haven, 2021’ by Paul Sanders
but just photograph what I enjoyed looking at. Now, I don’t mind if 100 people or no people like my images. I do them purely for myself and they reflect how I feel in a particular moment. “I shoot black and white because I enjoy the simplicity. I use the same workflow and keep things
as straightforward as I can because as soon as I get lost in the kit, I lose the connection with the subject. I can see beauty in a fence post, or in the way shadows are formed on a wall. I enjoy the flaws in the world and don’t strive for a perfect picture.
“I’m grateful for the things that are presented to me. I don’t view photography as a competition – it’s a contemplation. It’s like a continuous therapy through photographs. “It makes me appreciate life so much more.” discoverstill.com JULY / AUGUST 2021
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Darch graduated with a BA in Documentary Photography from the University of South Wales at Newport in 2004. He holds a Master’s in Photography and The Book (2015) and an MFA Photographic Arts (2016), both from Plymouth University, where he is now an associate lecturer in photography. He has published two books of his work, The Moor (2018) and Vale (2020).
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PORTRAIT OF ROBERT DARCH BY CHRIS JOHNSON
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“Between the first and second year of my degree I fell ill with a transient ischemic attack, which is essentially a minor stroke. Then, during my second year, I had glandular fever and felt really unwell for a long time. I took a year out from my studies to get better and during that year was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. “My symptoms included brain fog and a feeling of weakness. At my worst I couldn’t leave the house
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From the series Vale, 2020, by Robert Darch
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very often, and any mental processing was difficult. I continued making photographs but I changed how I was working – I focused much more on details in small spaces, and pictures relating to my internal life. “After finishing my degree I continued living at home with my parents until they retired to Devon in 2006, after which I lived independently in Worcester. As a result of being at home for so long my world became small and
From the series Vale, 2020, by Robert Darch
“My symptoms included brain fog and a feeling of weakness. At my worst I couldn’t leave the house very often, and mental processing was difficult”
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insular. I had issues with anxiety and especially with re-integrating into the world. Things like getting a train or bus were difficult. Towards the end of living alone I’d also got quite paranoid and I realised it wasn’t a healthy situation to be in. “Two years later I moved in with my parents in Devon and slowly got better. Eventually, ten years after I first became ill, I felt well again, and able to lead a normal life and work as a photographer. By the time I started my Master’s in 2013 I had spent a long time
developing and thinking about my photography, and everything came together in my practice. “My most recent book, Vale, is my main project which links to mental wellbeing and reflects on my ten-year period of illness. “It also strongly relates to people feeling trapped and locked down and isolated by Covid during the last year. In a way it’s a projection of those lost summers in my early 20s, obviously heightened and romanticised. The people in the images are kind of
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From the series Vale, 2020, by Robert Darch
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stand-ins for me and how my life could have been. “I think one of the reasons I got ill was that I was a perfectionist. I was completely driven and I felt like my body just gave in. But if I hadn’t got ill, I wouldn’t be making the work I am now. The experience of long-term illness changed me and as a result I’m much more relaxed. I have a level of ambition, but it’s not the same as when I was 21. I’m just doing this work for me because I enjoy it.” robertdarch.com
‘Mom’s mask, pt 1, 2011’ from the series You Have Nothing to Worry About by Melissa Spitz
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Spitz, born in 1988, is originally from St Louis, Missouri, and now lives in New York City. She was named Instagram Photographer of 2017 by Time magazine and received Magnum’s Inge Morath Award in 2018. Her best-known work, You Have Nothing to Worry About, is a long-term documentary series on her mother, Debbie, who suffers from mental illness. “My mom was first hospitalised when I was seven years old. My dad was away on business and she was telling me there were people in our house that wanted to kill us. After two days of her phoning the police she was taken away for psychiatric treatment and I was left with my neighbours, feeling anxious
and confused. From then on, this kind of chaotic and traumatic situation became normal life for me. “I formally started photographing mom when I was in college. My professor had said I wasn’t making work that was up to par for the class and I felt angry and wanted to prove him wrong. I drove two hours
back to my home and photographed our house, the pills, the garbage, then my mom came in, saw the camera and started going into theatrics. “Later my professor looked at the photos and saw my mom and said, ‘Is she mean?’ I was so floored this had even come across in the photos because she was happy in JULY / AUGUST 2021
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‘Praying, 2013’ from the series You Have Nothing to Worry About by Melissa Spitz
most of them. It really turned into catharsis at that point – it became a way for me to talk about something I had been so embarrassed by and had felt so much shame about for so long. “For the first couple of years of photographing her she was so out of it in most of our sessions that I don’t think she always realised what we were doing. Then one time she looked at a photo and said, ‘How can you make me look like this?’ We got into a big fight about it, but later she said, ‘Will you please keep taking pictures? 402
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They scared me but they’ve helped me see I’m not living my life correctly.’ “That was when the collaboration really started. We would create photos that illustrated events that had already happened – for example, she would say, ‘I want to act out this panic attack I remember having.’ “Occasionally I will get a comment online saying what I’m doing is exploitative and cruel. I used to get very defensive about it, but now I think, OK, believe that if you want to, but I can guarantee that my mom
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loves the attention and it makes her feel important. “The process of photographing my mom has helped me see her in a new light, where I can understand and respect her more than I thought I could. With the photos she can see how genuine my love is for her, and that despite all that’s happened, I’ve still made her the centre of my life. That’s validated her and validated our relationship and I believe the work has truly saved her life.” melissaspitz.com
‘Pool day, 2015’ from the series You Have Nothing to Worry About by Melissa Spitz
“It turned into catharsis at that point – it became a way for me to talk about something I had been so embarrassed by”
‘All of mom’s prescriptions, 2014’ from the series You Have Nothing to Worry About by Melissa Spitz
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It’s been a year like no other, with lectures delivered online, socially distanced photo shoots and virtual degree shows. But these promising photography students from institutions around the world are looking forward to a bright future JULY / AUGUST 2021
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Coenraad Torlage
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Born: 28 December 1998 Institution: Stellenbosch Academy of Design and Photography, South Africa See more at: coenraadtorlage.com @coenraadtorlage
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I was born on a farm in South Africa. Farming is an intense occupation that requires passion and unwavering dedication. My project Young Farmers is about the
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Previous pages HW and Olwethu after a long day herding cattle on horseback, Elandslaagte, 2021 Below Chanel, Dundee, 2021
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individuals who choose this life because they believe they have a responsibility. This is a heavy weight on all of our shoulders. South Africa is an unpredictable land with severe droughts, safety concerns and debates over land ownership. Young farmers are working toward a fairer and more equitable future of sustainable food security. I photograph people who are closely
connected to me. They are often my friends, family, peers and people from my community. Through them I am, in a metaphorical manner, taking portraits of myself and the land that I have come to love. I have been inspired by the work, images and portraits of Pieter Hugo, David Goldblatt and Jo Ractliffe. I plan to continue working on Young
Farmers for another year, and then create a book. I was humbled to win the Sony World Photography Awards Student Competition for this work, which was exhibited online and published. The South African narrative is visually strong, culturally complex, and I see it as my mission to tell these stories through the lens of my camera.
All images From the series Attachment by Sayuri Kakehashi
Sayuri Kakehashi Born: 5 August 1998 Institution: Seian University of Art and Design, Japan See more: instagram. com/mgr_syr Time never stays still in the real world, but photography can stop it. That is what I love about it. Making fixed images with photography is like proof I’ve lived, while a lot of things and people change continuously. I really enjoyed working on my first photography book. I find that I’m not good at explaining my work in words so the photobook I made was a way to
express myself. By photographing something many times and creating an image, the abstract image within me becomes concrete. Right now, I’m working on a job that has nothing to do with photography, in order to gain experience as a Shakaijin. This literally means member of society in Japanese, commonly someone in full-time employment – so I can save money for the future, but eventually I want to become a photo artist who can make a living through my photography.
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Left Sun exposure: 45 mins (midday) pH of cyano/seawater solution: strong acid Photo paper: RC silver gelatin, 7x5 expired, make unknown
Victoria Stokes LRPS Born: 7 June 1984 Institution: Falmouth Flexible, online See more: victoriastokes.com @victoriastokes. photography My love of the natural world, in particular the ocean and remote wilderness areas, is the biggest influence on my work. My final degree project, acidopHobe, pushed me out of my comfort zone. Being in lockdown I didn’t have the usual luxury of photographing in the field so it forced me to think outside the box and change my approach. The work looks at ocean acidification, an environmental issue that is still very much under the radar but will
have a huge negative impact on marine life. Through experimenting with alternative processes I examine the effects of changes to ocean chemistry over time by mixing photographic chemistry, using various pHs of seawater, and combining photographic processes from different eras to create cyanolumen prints. I aim to collaborate with scientists to continue trying to improve public understanding of environmental issues. Photography can introduce audiences to aspects of our natural world they may never see in person. This drives me to create work which hopefully encourages people to want to preserve nature.
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Above ‘Building up courage’ from the series Embarrassed Below ‘Climacteric # 19’ from the series The Climacteric
Jane Weinmann Born: 11 August 1964 Institution: Open College of the Arts, distance learning See more: janeweinmann.ch My work has gradually become more conceptual. I stage images, often using self-portraiture, then employ double exposure techniques or add colour as metaphors or as ways of layering or challenging meaning. The Climacteric, my series on the menopause, was personal and, in
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some ways, almost therapeutic to create. I enjoyed exploring the medical literature and historical debates around the topic, finding out what it meant to other women. And most of all, experimenting with different ways to artistically represent the chaotic, powerful and unpredictable emotions that can be experienced. I really wanted to encourage conversation about the topic so I needed to make the work accessible to a broad audience.
I’ve used exaggerated poses and selfdeprecating humour as well as adding coloured emojis. The series is broken up by vivid red images representing hot flushes which occur unexpectedly, just as they do in real life. I love the possibilities that photography offers to represent and explore feelings and emotions that are often hidden, the things you just can’t see and that are not spoken about. I want my viewers to ask questions about what’s beyond the surface of an image.
Sayuri Ichida Born: 16 December 1985 Institution: University of Westminster, United Kingdom See more: sayuriichida.com instagram.com/the_ final_view I take pictures to fight against my fear of the irretrievability of time. When I was 20 years old I lost my mother. My regret that I didn’t photograph her when she was still healthy has in part fuelled my motivation to take pictures. My collaboration work with a ballet dancer, titled Mayu, changed my perspective of
the human body. The process of photographing her was almost like constructing a sculpture. Since then, the body has taken a more central role in my work. My plan after graduation is to self-publish a project then approach some commercial publishers to see if I can publish the book for a larger audience. I’m interested in non-traditional installations, such as building structures with large-scale prints to invite the viewer to enter my photography physically, and I hope to find opportunities to explore this.
Above, right, below From the series Absentee by Sayuri Ichida
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Alberto González
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Born: 4 April 1980 Institution: University of Chester, United Kingdom See more at: alberto gonzalezphotography. squarespace.com @agonzalez baphotography What I like about photography is the possibility of creating
something, the capacity to express what I imagine through images. I did a project where I created images based on blind people’s dream narratives. Blind people do not dream with images and it was a challenge to transform these narratives into surreal visual representations.
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My practice revolves around fine art photography and I am particularly interested in the technical aspects of lighting. My style is inspired by the photography of the 1920s to 1940s. I’m now studying for an MA in Fine Art so that I can continue developing my practice while teaching
photography at a college. I would love to continue exhibiting my projects and doing commissioned work. In the future I would like to complete a PhD in photography so that I can research and teach photography – including the technical aspects such as lighting – in higher education.
Above ‘Fragile landscape’ Right ‘Human’ Below ‘Red apple’
Mario de la Ossa Born: 8 June 1994 Institution: Bilder Nordic School of Photography, Norway See more: mariodelaossa.com @de.la.ossa I always wanted to do something creative but I ended up starting out as a construction worker. It was a good experience and part of growing up and finding confidence in myself. Photography is still new to me, so I need to keep experimenting. The last two years have been trial and error within different genres, from the more classical documentary work of portraying people and places of subcultures we don’t hear too much about,
all the way to having an AI build a portrait based on 21st-century internet influencers, which will feature in my graduation exhibition. I’m interested in the parts of ourselves we suppress, don’t want to talk about, or simply won’t admit to. In my project Ødipus(sy) I dove into the famous Oedipus Complex proposed by Freud, visualised through my mother and girlfriend. After doing a lot of work documenting real world situations, this was my first step into the conceptual world. I blur the lines of fiction and fact to challenge the photograph’s responsibility to tell any sort of truth.
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‘OUT OF THE DARKEST TIMES THERE CAN BE OPTIMISM’
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Portraits of Holocaust survivors by RPS members are to be exhibited at IWM London and RPS Gallery. Six of the photographers tell Kathleen Morgan the remarkable stories behind their images
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Inge Hyman, far right, with her children Peter, Philippa and James by Anna Fox HonFRPS
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They are striking portraits of remarkable people united by one vital fact – each survived the Holocaust that destroyed their loved ones, communities and heritage. Photographed with their families in the first few months of 2021, each subject endured the systematic persecution of European Jews by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 that led to the extermination of 6 million people. These survivors went on to find new homelands, put down roots, and bring up children and grandchildren. They include Inge Hyman, who fled Vienna with her family; Sigi Ciffer, who endured an Austrian slave labour camp; and Hanneke Dye, born in secret in the Netherlands while her parents were in hiding. Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors is an exhibition honouring those who escaped the Holocaust and celebrating the full lives they have led in the UK since their arrival. More than 50 portraits of survivors and their families, by 13 British image-makers – all members of the Royal Photographic Society – can be seen at Imperial War Museums, London, and later at RPS Gallery, Bristol.
The exhibition, curated for the RPS by Tracy MarshallGrant, director of the Bristol Photo Festival, anticipates the opening of IWM London’s Second World War and The Holocaust galleries on 20 October 2021. “Each portrait shows the special connection between the survivor and subsequent generations of their family and it emphasises their important legacy,” says Marshall-Grant. “The portraits seek to simultaneously inspire audiences to consider their own responsibility to remember and to share the stories of those who endured persecution. It creates a legacy that will allow those descendants to connect directly back and inspire future generations.” Here, six of the image-makers share the stories behind their portraits – and the experiences of the survivors they photographed. Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors is at IWM London, 6 August 2021 to 7 January 2022, and RPS Gallery from January 2022. See more of the exhibition in July’s Journal Extra e-newsletter. iwm.org.uk
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INGE HYMAN by Anna Fox HonFRPS THE PHOTOGRAPHER “Working on the Holocaust survivors portrait project has been fascinating and humbling. Hearing the frequently hidden and powerful stories from my subjects has been mind-blowing and impossible to imagine, yet all with the knowledge that the kind of horrific crimes that happened in Nazi Germany are still happening. It is a reminder of the importance of remembering not to forget, to keep retelling the stories, to keep taking action.” THE SURVIVOR Inge Hyman (Ingeborg Neufeld) was born in 1935 in Vienna, where her parents ran a
coffee house. Following persecution and the confiscation of their home and business, Inge, her brother Edgar and their parents escaped in 1938 on one of the last trains out of Vienna. Much of her extended family were not so fortunate. The family lived first in Paris then fled again to London, just before the Germans occupied France. Inge, a clinical psychologist, has studied the effects of trauma. She married the eminent book publisher Robin Hyman and has three children. James is an art historian focused on supporting British art and photography; Peter is a political adviser and educationalist; and Philippa is a clinical psychologist. Inge has eight grandchildren.
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SIGI CIFFER by Tom Hunter HonFRPS THE PHOTOGRAPHER “I’ve always been fascinated by history and the lives that get caught up in world events. And there is nothing more disturbing, moving, horrific and compelling than the Holocaust – the human condition at its darkest. But from this tragedy such amazing hopeful lives have been made and teach us how to move forward. “I have been living in the east end of London since the 1980s and at one point had a market stall on Brick Lane, the centre of the old Jewish London. This warm, hardworking community spoke of far off old countries to the east, in collapsed empires. “When I met the people in my photographs, history came to life. Their eyes sparkled when we talked about places where they had worked, the businesses they built up, their children and their
children’s children. You realise history isn’t just in books but in the lives of these people who are so generous with their stories, teaching us humanity, wisdom and a need to work together as humans. It’s been an incredible history lesson.” THE SURVIVOR Sigi Ciffer was born in Hungary in 1925. During the war he was arrested as a Jew and sent to Austria as a slave labourer in Mauthausen Concentration Camp. His parents and six of his siblings were murdered in the Holocaust but Sigi survived. In 1946, with just £10 from the Red Cross to his name, Sigi arrived in the UK. It was here that he made his home and had a family – two sons, a daughter and nine grandchildren. Throughout his working life he was a picture framer in London.
Sigi Ciffer by Tom Hunter HonFRPS
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THE PHOTOGRAPHER “As a Jewish person I have always tried to explore my cultural heritage in my work, with my first solo exhibition in 2009, Kosherface, devoted to Judaism. “The Holocaust is something I would never have dared to hope I could tackle in my photography. A deep trauma had been stored in my heart since learning about the Holocaust in my youth, but also in the hearts of my family and community at large for generations. If it happened within the lifespan of our survivors it could happen again within mine or yours, so it’s important to keep talking about it. “At the same time, survivors are lifeaffirming proof that out of the darkest times there can be cause for optimism. I wanted my photographic approach to be bright and joyful. How else to look upon my own people, having defied the bleakest odds and being in the UK today with generations of children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren to show for it? This is not the time to be sad – it is the time to rejoice and celebrate the tenacity of life.”
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THE SURVIVOR Huguette was born in Paris in 1931, the second of three daughters of Dora and Maurice Salanic. After the invasion of France by Nazi Germany in May 1940, the family remained in Paris until 1942 when they left for Cannes to what was then the so-called ‘Free Zone’, otherwise known as
Vichy France. Maurice travelled first and the girls – Simone, 13, Huguette, 11, and Eliane, seven – were sent by Dora to travel alone by train from Paris to Cannes. At the border of the ‘Occupied Zone’ and the ‘Free Zone’, German soldiers boarded the train and interrogated the girls. Simone denied they were Jewish and said they were travelling south to visit their “very ill grandmother”. Eliane was taken off the train on the assumption that, as the youngest, she was most likely to tell the truth, but was returned and the girls travelled on to Cannes, followed by Dora soon after. After the takeover of the ‘Free Zone’ by German troops at the end of 1942 and denunciation of Jews by non-Jewish neighbours, the family went to live in the village of Lectoure in south west France, where they remained until the war’s end. A younger brother, Jean-Pierre, was born in Lectoure. The family later returned to Cannes where Dora and Maurice opened a kosher restaurant, the Restaurant Windsor, which became popular with clientele from all over the world. In 1953 Huguette met and married Eli ‘Alec’ Cukier. He had managed to escape the Warsaw Ghetto and was the only survivor of the Holocaust from his immediate family, losing his parents, four brothers and a sister along with countless members of his wider family. Huguette and Alec have two sons, Gerard and David.
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Holocaust survivors, 3 Huguette Cukier cuddles great-grandson Finley, with son Gerard, left, and grandson Ashley and great-grandson Mylo, right, by Frederic Aranda FRPS
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Mindu Hornick with daughter Nicola by Michelle Sank
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MINDU HORNICK by Michelle Sank THE PHOTOGRAPHER “When I was asked by the RPS if I wanted to be involved in this project I felt incredibly privileged. Being from immigrant refugee Jewish parentage myself, this history and the associated stories hold enormous resonance for me. “As I am based in Exeter I was offered the opportunity to work with Mindu who lives in Birmingham. I had researched her story prior to my visit – the horrors she had encountered in Auschwitz itself, her and her sister’s subsequent move to an ammunition factory and the other events that followed till they were finally liberated by the British. “I was not prepared for the woman who opened the door when I arrived – her face and demeanour radiated a zest for life. I asked her how she had regained faith in humanity after all she had experienced, and she answered by saying that they “just wanted to live”. “Because of Covid-19 restrictions I undertook the shoot in the garden. I wanted the setting to reflect the ‘majesticness’ of Mindu – hence the chair that I situated from the house. Nicola had covered her head with a
scarf due to the impending rain, and I became acutely aware of the historic biblical reference and importance of this to the visual narrative.” THE SURVIVOR At the age of 12 Mindu Hornick (now aged 94) was sent to Auschwitz with her mother, sister and brother. When they arrived, Polish Jews were offloading people from the trains. One of them told her mother in Polish Yiddish that she and her son should go in one line, and Mindu and her sister in another. Her mother and brother went to the gas chamber. The man had told Mindu and her sister to say they were older than they were, and that they were seamstresses, and this helped them. After a while the sisters were moved from Auschwitz to work in an ammunition factory in a forest. They were cold and hungry but now had a mattress to sleep on, accompanied by the scent of pine trees rather than the ash of the camp. Mindu – now aged 94 – only spoke about the experience 40 years afterwards, when a friend she had made in Leeds who had been in another camp encouraged her to tell her story.
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Hanneke Dye holding a photograph of herself as a newborn with her mother by Carolyn Mendelsohn
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HANNEKE DYE by Carolyn Mendelsohn THE PHOTOGRAPHER “It was a special and moving experience to spend time with Hanneke. She spoke openly about her experience of being born a ‘hidden child’ in the Netherlands during Nazi occupation, and how the trauma affected her family. “I find the photograph she is holding of her mother and herself, taken shortly after her birth, incredibly poignant. Hanneke only discovered the details of her family history after the death of her mother, who had found the memories too traumatic to talk about. “Hanneke is spirited, warm and charismatic, and it was an honour and pleasure to spend time with her.” THE SURVIVOR Hanneke Dye, who lives in Hebden, North Yorkshire, was born in secret on 10 February 1943 in a village near Breda in the Netherlands, while her Dutch Jewish parents hid from the Nazis. Her mother gave birth in silence, with no painkillers, in case people heard and informed the Nazis. When Hanneke was just 10 days old her mother gave her to a brother, Uncle Jaap, as his home in Breda was thought safer because he was married to a non-Jew.
The house was raided by the Germans the day they left. Hanneke’s aunt Lena, aged 16, had been left to look after Hanneke and by some miracle the baby was fast asleep and quiet in the attic and was not found. The trauma of the raid stayed with Lena all her life. “My aunt had such a fear that the Nazis would find me, or that I would cry, that even after the war she was full of fear,” explains Hanneke. “In 1988 she jumped from a fifth-floor apartment thinking the Germans were there to get her.” After the raid Uncle Jaap took Hanneke to a woman known as Sister Pop, who ran a nearby children’s convalescent home in Breda in which she sheltered some Jewish children. Hanneke was reunited with her parents after the war, when she was two-and-ahalf, but the trauma of the early separation has remained with her all her life. Her grandparents Marcus and Anna, and her Aunt Bartje, perished in Auschwitz, and her Uncle Abraham was killed in Sobibor. Hanneke moved to the UK aged 22 in 1965 and lived in Hounslow, then Halifax. She had three children, and grandchildren, and went on to make a life in the Yorkshire Dales. In 2012 Hanneke was an Olympic torchbearer in Harrogate for the 2012 Olympic Games.
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JOHN HAJDU MBE SUBS
by Jillian Edelstein HonFRPS
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THE PHOTOGRAPHER “Photographing John Hajdu has been inspiring and challenging – a feisty, opinionated, strong man who is both direct and extremely personable. The photographic process is always a collaboration – his input added to the strength of this image.”
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THE SURVIVOR John Hajdu MBE was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1937 into an affluent middle class family. In 1944, as the Nazis hunted for all Jewish citizens, John held onto his Teddy while he was hiding in a cupboard. John’s mother was removed to Mauthausen Concentration Camp and his father to a labour camp. John survived in the ghetto, in inhuman conditions, and was freed by the incoming Soviet Army just as the ghetto was about to be blown up. He lived through the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, escaping with his mother’s sister. “She saved my life,” he says. With a small bag of food and Teddy, he manoeuvred through minefields mainly in the dark, crawling through mud in the middle of winter. Avoiding tanks, searchlights and border guards, they
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managed to cross the border into Austria. John was taken to a refugee camp, relying on strangers for shelter, clothing and food. He moved to Vienna where he queued outside the British embassy for hours to get permission to emigrate to England. John secured one of the last permits, arriving in England in 1957 with nothing, knowing no-one and speaking hardly any English. Having also got permission to emigrate to the UK from Austria, Teddy was in his suitcase and is still with him now. “Teddy, who was given to me by my parents when I was three years old, accompanied me through my life. Wherever I was, Teddy was always with me.” John attended school then studied catering at Hendon Technical College. After graduating he worked in the hotel industry, eventually becoming director of international sales for one of the UK’s largest hotel companies. He travelled globally to help increase tourism into England. Married in 1972, John has a son, daughter and four grandchildren. He was awarded the MBE for ‘Holocaust Education and Commemoration’ in the 2020 New Year’s Honours.
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Holocaust survivors, 6 John Hajdu MBE with Teddy by Jillian Edelstein HonFRPS
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From the series Punters by Andrew Wood ARPS
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DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR 2021 Do you have a story that needs telling, or a project you want to share with the world? Then make the RPS Documentary Photographer of the Year 2021 your first step. Anyone can enter the competition – including student, amateur and professional photographers, and storytelling image-makers worldwide. It’s a great opportunity to have your work judged by a professional international panel. All winning and commended entries will be exhibited at FUJIFILM House of Photography, London, before a
tour of UK venues. You could be invited to take part in the RPS Engagement Talks series and to feature in the RPS Journal and the Decisive Moment. There is also a one-year’s free RPS membership for each winning and commended photographer. Prizes for category winners: Open £1,250 bursary and professional development support from Martin Parr Foundation Student £500 bursary and professional development support from Simon Roberts HonFRPS RPS Member Fujifilm X100V camera
Closing: Thursday 5 August 2021
Supported by
To apply go to rps.org/dpoty
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EXPLORING SOLITUDE DURING LOCKDOWN
OF THE BEST SOCIETY EVENTS
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‘HUMANITARIAN VISION’ WITH JIM HOLMES Sun 11 Jul, 10.30am-1pm Join the Western Group as professional documentary photographer Jim Holmes gives a talk on his assignments to more than 50 countries, working extensively on humanitarian and environmental projects. Free online event via Zoom
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Clockwise from top left ‘Under the rain’, ‘Gates of pearl’, ‘Retrace’ and ‘Precious moments missed’ by Linda Bembridge FRPS
RPS AWARDS TALKS ... POULOMI BASU AND MONICA ALLENDE Tue 27 Jul, 6-7pm, £3 For the latest in our ongoing ‘in conversation’ series, 2020 recipient of the RPS Hood Medal Poulomi Basu will discuss her work with Monica Allende, former picture editor for the Sunday Times. Online event via Zoom
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JOHN THOMSON AND HIS PHOTOGRAPHY OF ASIA Thu 29 Jul, 6-7pm The Historical Group will commemorate the centenary of the death of former RPS member John Thomson FRGS with a talk by Betty Yao MBE, curator of two touring exhibitions around Thomson’s work. Free online event via Zoom
BEYOND BOUNDARIES
Abstract and landscape photography combine in an inspired fusion
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Linda Bembridge FRPS uses a combination of in-camera techniques, focusing on blending colour shifts, to depict whatever catches her attention. The internationally renowned photographer – whose achievements include an RPS Fellowship and the Award for Excellence from the Fédération
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GO TO rps.org/whats-on for the latest updates
Internationale de l’Art Photographique – will discuss her fusion of abstract and landscape photography in an online talk for the Creative Eye group on 14 August. ‘Abstract with a bit of Landscape’ – Linda Bembridge FRPS is on Sat 14 Aug, 3pm rps.org/lbabstract
VISUAL ART GROUP MEMBERS’ PRINT EXHIBITION Sat 7 – Fri 27 Aug, 9am-5.30pm Gallery Photiq, 40 Part Street, Leamington Spa CV32 4QN Members of the RPS Visual Art Group will show their work at Gallery Photiq, an independent gallery of fine art photography and photo-based mixed fine art. All welcome, from photographers to budding photographers, friends and family.
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‘THE GREATER PICTURE’ – A TALK BY TOM WAY Sun 12 Sep, 4-5.30pm For the North Wales region, Tom Way will give an insight into his life as a fine art wildlife photographer in this online talk. Way’s work has been awarded in such prestigious competitions as European Wildlife Photographer of the Year and The Sony World Photography Awards. Online event via Zoom
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Enjoy the results of the bimonthly online members’ competition, themed around ‘Colour’
NEXT COMPETITION
Submit your photography on the open theme of ‘Photography for everyone’ by 14 July 2021 at exposure.rps.org for the chance to be published in the RPS Journal and showcased on our social media platforms and website
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WINNER
Nuclear sunset by Ade Gidney
I have a camper van and love to travel in it to take landscape photographs. In July 2019 my mate Jason and I spent a few days in the camper up in the Peak District taking landscape images. Jason had not been on Bamford Edge before, and I knew it gave a great view over Ladybower Reservoir.
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We made it up there for around 8pm and sunset came about an hour later. I had taken several images up to sunset, but just after the sun went down the sky turned to fire. Jason was doing a piece to camera for his YouTube channel and started saying, “the sky has gone bonkers, it’s nuclear”.
This gave me the idea for the title of this photograph. The image is a single shot taken on a tripod (f/9 iso 400 1/8th sec @24mm) using a Lee 2 stop grad filter on the sky due to the dynamic range. I was able to capture all the detail in one image and it needed little processing to pull out all the detail in the shadows.
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Ben Moore on ‘Nuclear sunset’ Moore swapped the drawing pencil for the camera when he realised photography was his true love. Now the awardwinning, self-taught freelance photographer counts brands such as Adidas, Nissan and Nikon among his clients.
COMMENDED
Sunset over the big wheel by Joanne Court
“This image actually made me utter the word ‘Wow!’ when I first laid eyes on it. The vibrancy of colour and the reflection of the sky are just two things that literally made my jaw drop. “My eyes danced around the image for a few minutes while I took in all the colour, light, reflections and shadows. The sky is magnificent. I love the colour of the golden light which separates the skyline, the greens in the hillside, and the hints of purple and blue in the sky. “I know how challenging it can be to take an interesting image in a landscape environment and this contribution does it exquisitely. Even without the colour there is so much to take in – the texture of the rocks in the foreground, the hillside which touches the sky to the left, the small glimmer of the lake to the right. There’s a wealth of beauty in this image.”
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GLOBAL PLATFORM FOR AGM The RPS invites members from around the world to its Annual General Meeting
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We are welcoming all our members across the globe to our AGM for the first time as we celebrate the 2021 RPS In Focus event. The AGM, on 25 September (see page 352), will be hosted at RPS House and online via the Zoom platform, allowing members to join us wherever they are. On the agenda will be the results of voting for the new Trustees, who will serve until September 2024, along with any motions that have been submitted. The meeting will be for members only from 10.00am to 11.40am BST, opening with a presentation by the Australian photographer Len Metcalf and followed by AGM business. Members and nonmembers are then invited to join us from 11.40am BST to enjoy a day of presentations from international speakers. We will hear from our Exhibitions, Distinctions and Education teams on how the RPS’s Holocaust survivors
Speakers at the AGM include lecturer Tim Daly who delivers a popular RPS photobook course
exhibition at IWM London came about, and view some of the pictures; there will be overviews of Distinctions photobooks and the RPS Workshop for book making; landscape photographer Paul Sanders will discuss
mindfulness in photography, and you can also hear the President’s annual address. So please join your new Board members in celebrating the work of the RPS while we listen to some inspiring speakers and
prove that photography really is for everyone.
member and Chair of the Medical Distinctions Panel, and a Medical Group Representative on the RPS Council. Among his many other achievements, he was chair of the BIPP Medical Group; medical photography examiner and lecturer at the London School of Medical Photography; author and consultant at the Wellcome Trust and Amnesty
International; and registrar for CAMIP. Simultaneously, he managed medical illustration departments in several London teaching hospitals. Besides being passionate about all things photographic and an avid reader of the RPS Journal, Ray was also a consummate professional and a great friend and mentor. Nigel Pearson ARPS
For details of the In Focus programme and a link for booking your ticket please visit rps.org/rpsinfocus
Obituary Raymond R Phillips HonFRPS (1931-2021) Raymond R Phillips, who died in March 2021, was a member of the RPS from 1956, receiving his Fellowship in 1975 and Honorary Fellowship in 1997. For more than 20 years Ray served on the Medical Group Committee, including three terms as Chair. He was a member of the Medical Awards Standing Committee and the Science Distinctions Panel, a
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SIMON HILL HonFRPS President, The Royal Photographic Society
VOICEBOX
A hooligan’s game played by gentlemen – and ladies
Since the RPS Election 2019, this Board of Trustees has faced more than its fair share of challenges. No sooner had the results of the election been announced than our President resigned and we were embroiled in an investigation into the conduct of the very election that had put us here. Between that election and the one that we are fast approaching, we have seen the resignation of six Trustees – two Presidents, two elected Trustees and two co-opted Trustees. By any assessment that is not good for the Society, nor for the well-being of the individual Trustees. Yet, despite these challenges, the Board has continued to deliver on the duties and responsibilities for which it was elected. It has developed new By-Laws; created an exciting new Strategic Plan unlike anything the Society has seen previously; and has worked with Think, our publishers, to redesign the RPS Journal and make it an inspirational and award-winning resource. The Board twice ensured the succession of the Presidency; appointed a new Chief Executive; made temporary co-options to bring the Board closer to full strength and provide a more diverse range of skills and experiences; formed a Critical Friends Group to promote greater diversity and inclusion; established a Nominations Committee to facilitate a robust and transparent process for the more effective recruitment of Trustees; is overseeing the creation of Terms of Reference for all Committees; is producing Role Descriptions and Person Specifications for Officers and Trustees; and has drafted Regulations for a Chartered Photographer designation. The Board has gained greater control of the Society’s finances and investment portfolio; is completing the procurement of a new CRM system; and has achieved dozens of other lesser but very necessary initiatives. Under normal circumstances this would be an incredible achievement, but the Board has delivered all of this during a global pandemic.
A powerful drive forward by Imari Epps of Harrogate Ladies RUFC 1st XV. One of a series of photographs from a Distinctions photobook project by RPS member Richard Bown ARPS
“A team must continually review its game and reflect on how it is performing” If there is one activity I have missed above all others during the coronavirus lockdowns, it has been playing rugby, a sport that is often described as “a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen”. There is a standing joke on the Board that I often draw an analogy between our work as Trustees and ‘the noble game’ – and it is not just that both require a thick skin, an eye for strategy and lots of stamina. The success of any team depends on recruiting players who bring the highest level of skills and experience, and a consummate professionalism, to their game; they must be able to take criticism and build on the collective effort for the common ambition of the team above that of the individual. Whether it is the 15 players of a rugby team or the members of a Board of Trustees, a team must
continually review its game and reflect on how it is performing. The present Board has already begun a review of how it has performed and is intent on finding ways in which it can contribute more effectively to the future governance of the Society. This is a process that begins with the current Board but which I intend to continue with the new Board. Our new By-Laws provide for a Board of 12 Trustees – the President, the Treasurer (both incumbents remain on the next Board) and 10 new Trustees (six elected and four co-opted). We have a skilled and dedicated senior leadership team – Evan, Michael and Nikki. Altogether that makes 15 … perhaps it’s no coincidence that this is the number of players in a rugby team. rps.org/about/president-news JULY / AUGUST 2021
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Contemporary Fellowship Mick Yates FRPS
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Learn from a pair of successful portfolios revealing the secrets of two contrasting landscapes
In 1994 we first visited Cambodia as tourists with our then very young children. Some parts of the country were still seeing fighting between the Royal Cambodian Army and the Khmer Rouge. We heard shell fire when we were visiting the famous Angkor Wat temple on an otherwise lovely blue-sky day. This prompted our interest to learn more about the country and we started researching Cambodian history. I settled on the idea of photographing the landscape,
as that linked back to the buried history of the tragedy. These landscapes include sites of atrocities which are rarely visited today. Initial work using portraits and traditional documentary techniques just weren’t creatively ‘cutting through’. I want people to stop and ponder as they see the work – it doesn’t matter whether they begin with the text or with the photograph. I was acutely aware of ethical considerations in portraying
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
Opposite ‘The village chief was sorry for the young children; he said that they were all probably going to die’ from the series Unfinished Stories Above ‘My youngest brother was about three years old. Mother placed his body in the rice field next to our village’ from the series Unfinished Stories
LICENTIATE (LRPS)
Applicants must show photographic competence in approach and techniques
genocide and did not want to fall into the traps and tropes of ‘dark tourism’. At every stage the effort was collaborative with Cambodian friends, experts and artists. There is a lot written today about ‘socially engaged photography’ and this project demonstrates almost all aspects of those thought processes. It’s hard to create work respectfully yet with impact on the audience. My work today is mainly in colour, but as I was researching
ASSOCIATE (ARPS)
Requires a body of work of a high standard, and a written statement of intent
FELLOWSHIP (FRPS)
Requires a body of work of distinctive ability and excellence, plus a written statement of intent
‘aftermath’ photography and genocide, monochrome seemed the more natural solution. After much experimentation, I chose infrared for its power to show ‘hidden’ detail in the forest. These hidden details underline the sadly anonymous nature of the genocide. This project gave me an unprecedented opportunity to explore the ideas of individual stories within an over-arching historical narrative. mickyatesphotography.com JULY / AUGUST 2021
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WHY THIS PORTFOLIO WORKS Tessa Mills FRPS, Chair of the Contemporary Distinctions panel Mick’s statement of intent is powerfully emotive. This is a distinctive collection of sensitively ethereal images, which along with the text 434
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adds a sense of shock through a connection with the historical reality of the area. What we see in these beautifully delicate images often conceals the horrors that must be remembered. This portfolio meets every one of the FRPS criteria and
uses the juxtaposition of text and images to great effect. In this brave undertaking, the extremes of pain and pleasure are presented and work together to become a powerful Contemporary Fellowship Distinction.
Opposite ‘My mother told me do not tell others about our family background. I also pretended to be illiterate’ from the series Unfinished Stories Below ‘I could not do anything’ from the series Unfinished Stories
“What we see in these beautifully delicate images often conceals the horrors that must be remembered”
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Below ‘I decided not to tell Akeo that his mother had passed away. I was afraid he would report me to the Khmer Rouge’ from the series Unfinished Stories
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Between 1975 and 1979 the Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 2 million people in their attempt to create an agrarian society cleansed of the urban intelligentsia. Forty years later the genocide’s devastating impact on Cambodian society still resonates, and personal stories remain untold. Our collective memory is driven by the ‘mug shots’ of victims at the Tuol Sleng torture facility and the skulls from the Choeung Ek ‘Killing Fields’. Those accused were meticulously
photographed, tortured until they confessed, and then killed. The camera was in effect their executioner. Yet there are almost 20,000 mainly unmarked grave sites across the forests. The story of the genocide is today buried in an anonymous landscape. Despite its power to judge, the camera also has limitations in telling such complex stories. How can we condense genocide into a short series of contemporary images?
Above ‘One of the injured patients had a broken backbone from which he would surely die. There was no specialised treatment available for him’ from the series Unfinished Stories
How do we show bodies not there? How do we best communicate intense, horrific stories of survivors without falling foul of triteness and trope? And most importantly, how can we get an audience to ‘look again’ at events long past? Unfinished Stories tells the personal accounts of Cambodian friends who have never spoken out before. It combines a photograph which illustrates the strange phenomenology of the now often beautiful landscape with a quotation from their traumatic experience.
The aim is to hold the viewer’s attention for quiet study, in a manner which has a long photographic pedigree. The Khmer language is used to respect the storyteller while also anchoring the geographic location of communal suffering. English aids the Western audience. This series, in chronological order of events, combines present day photographs of that historical landscape of death, made real with narratives of personal pain in that same landscape.
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Opposite and below Untitled, from the series Sciryuda
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Contemporary Associate Terence Lane ARPS
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I have been taking photographs for about 50 years and as I approach the end of my working career am now able to find time to explore ideas and pursue projects. I prefer to work within the contemporary landscape genre but am clearly in the midst of nature when I am in the depths of the forest. Besides growing up there, I see Sherwood Forest in a fragile state, a shadow of its former self, as more and more seems to be demanded of it.
Even so, over the period of a year, the natural rhythms and energy can still be sensed, heard, felt and observed. The Sciryuda portfolio is part of a much wider, long-term project. Any mention of Sherwood Forest will usually conjure up thoughts of certain myths, characters and legends, all dealt with elsewhere by others. The name ‘Sciryuda’ was first associated with the forest more than 1,000 years ago. By giving it an identity or name,
value is implied and from that point forward it has been a controlled, managed and exploited area of nature. I have a few ongoing projects but the most important is directly related to Sciryuda. The working title is ‘OutForest’ and as the name implies, I am positioning myself outside the forest looking towards it from what is a creeping boundary.
“I see Sherwood Forest in a fragile state, a shadow of its former self”
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WHY THIS PORTFOLIO WORKS Tessa Mills FRPS, Chair of the Contemporary Distinctions panel Terence Lane’s statement of intent is personal, sensitive and important, piquing the viewer’s interest and enhancing our understanding of this portfolio. These images bring us face to face with tree-beings whose lives are explained pictorially. Massive strength and delicate detail combine with new leaves showing optimistic renewal. There is a cascade of birch among twisted old boughs. There are moving whispers of connectivity within the whole forest. This is a good example of the statement of intent priming our understanding, and the images exploring and developing the themes. We gain deeper empathy through the photographic choices made by Terence, presenting us with a strong Contemporary Associate Distinction. 440
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Distinctions successes Congratulations to these RPS members LRPS EXEMPTION MARCH 2021 Yaw John Boateng, London Debbie Isitt, Denbighshire Alison Miles, Cork ARPS EXEMPTION MARCH 2021 Nick Hodgson, London Ashfar Kahn, West Midlands Julie Kirrane, North Yorkshire Leonard Williamson, Alicante ARPS TRAVEL MARCH 2021 Andrzej Bargiela, Nottingham Raymond Ching,
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Hong Kong Jiajun Chai, China Anindya Majumdar, West Bengal Robert McKenzie, Worcestershire ARPS VISUAL ART MARCH 2021 Alison Buchanan, East Sussex Judith Kimber, Belfast Fiona Spence, West Lothian Cliff Spooner, Hereford Sophia Spurgin, Hertfordshire Joseph Chiong Soon Tiong, Sarawak FRPS VISUAL ART MARCH 2021
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Lorna Brown, West Sussex Diana Chan, HKSAR Martin Erhard, West Sussex David Rutter, Berkshire Lung-Tsai Wang, Taiwan LRPS APRIL 2021 Stephen Ball, Essex Kirsten Bax, Dumfriesshire David Clews, West Sussex Morag Forbes, Perthshire Chris Goodacre, Huddersfield Neil Hall, Norfolk Saul Huck, Gwynedd Tim Marchant, Cambridge Russell Millner, Cumbria Richard Sambrook, Surrey David Sanders, Surrey Andrew Sillett, Surrey John Smith, Gloucestershire
Maureen Smith, Grange-over-Sands Umarphun Visessathorn, Thailand ARPS CONTEMPORARY APRIL 2021 Paul Ashley, Cambridgeshire Adrian Hough, Devon Peter Terence Lane, Nottinghamshire Maureen Martin, Devon ARPS NATURAL HISTORY APRIL 2021 Dinesh Allamaprabhu, Karnataka Steve Barrett, Dorset T K Biju Varghese, Dubai Sourav Chakaborty, Bolpur
Janice Clark, Gloucestershire Anthony Cooper, Leicestershire Timothy Cossins, Cleveland Martin Hancock, Suffolk Stephen Hyam, London Duncan Locke, Worcester André Neves, Cambridge Michael Psyllides, Kent Alex Rees, Warwick Thigh Wanna, Singapore Jennifer Margaret Webster, Worcestershire FRPS CONTEMPORARY APRIL 2021 Bunshri Chandaria, Hertfordshire Richard Hall, Lincolnshire Magda Wolna, Oxfordshire
Left Untitled, from the series Sciryuda
Statement of intent Sciryuda (Sheer-Yooder). The immense strength of the ancient oak, the fragility of a new sapling. There is life here. My ongoing project is to make photographs in and around a nearby ancient forest, where I have lived for almost all of my life, and where my ancestors worked the land. A living wilderness for about the past 15,000 years, the earliest known name for it is Sciryuda, first documented at the time of the Danelaw more than 1,000 years ago. Sciryuda translates as ‘the wood belonging to the shire’ and is now known as Sherwood. A primeval forest and once covering a large area, Sciryuda
Roger Wotton, Buckinghamshire Mick Yates, Wiltshire FRPS NATURAL HISTORY APRIL 2021 Ann Healey, Middlesex Darron Matthews, Staffordshire Martin Vaughan, Leicestershire Julia Wainwright, London FRPS RESEARCH APRIL 2021 Tim Daly, Cheshire Alexa Neale, West Sussex LRPS MAY 2021 Nasser Al-Tell, London Raymond Bulpitt, Manchester
for me is an ethereal wilderness, a place of extreme beauty, tranquillity, presence, movement, light, shade, darkness and time. A sleeping giant, a ray of hope, gestures, battles, conversations, a murmur. The trees cover, shield, hide, veil, screen, yet they simultaneously do the opposite by opening up space and offering glimpses. I am off the beaten track and I arrive, listening and observing as my curiosity and imagination moves me back and forth across time. Inspiring and intensely spiritual, Sciryuda is never still – living, it moves and flows. Seeing, hearing, feeling, witnessing and connecting with this
Thomas Byrne, London Wing Ho Chan, Hong Kong Andrew Clifton, Surrey Ben Cremin, Wiltshire Jeremy De Souza, Hampshire Lynne Harles, Hampshire David Jones, Gwent Roger Kent, Wiltshire Siam Kerr, County Antrim Steven King, Hampshire Howard Klein, Surrey Louise Knaresborough, Brazil Chloe Leach, Michigan John Martyn, Suffolk Charles Alden York Miller, Charente Susan Mitchell, West Yorkshire Margaret Powley,
area of nature is both exhilarating and uplifting. This wilderness needs protecting – there is little left. Contemplating the many myths and legends about the forest, and thinking on the people who have ruled over, controlled, managed and looked after Sciryuda, my purpose is to depict this ancient forest and wilderness on one part of its long journey to wherever it is going. These images have not been made to provide a documentary record, but rather to offer a reflection or indication of the deep heart of Sciryuda, its fragility, its strength. We must look after this ancient forest, Sciryuda.
Lancashire Martyn Smith, Gloucestershire Stephanie Thomas, Cornwall Carol Tritton, Dorset Marketa Zvelebil, Aude ARPS APPLIED AND PORTRAITURE MAY 2021 Janet Brown, West Sussex Yiu-Kwan Ching, Hong Kong Paul Edmunds, France Andrew Haugen, Surrey Agnes Van Der Logt, Indonesia Lorraine Spittle, West Yorkshire Andrew Williams, Hertfordshire
Jennifer Willis, County Antrim Colin Yelland, Exeter ARPS EXEMPTION MAY 2021 Chris Jerrey, West Sussex Dibs McCallum, Norfolk Natalie Robinson, London ARPS LANDSCAPE MAY 2021 Robert Bolton, Wiltshire Diana Buzoianu, London John Cuthbert, Clackmannanshire Geraint Evans, West Yorkshire Lin Gregory, East Sussex Paul Parkinson, Kent David Travis, Staffordshire
DISCOVER more about the Distinctions one-to-one portfolio review service at rps.org/advice
FRPS APPLIED AND PORTRAITURE MAY 2021 Frederic Aranda, London David Bird, Gloucestershire Pak Shing Lo, Hong Kong Paul Reiffer, Dorset Simon Street, Surrey Douglas Thompson, Lanarkshire Hongjun Yue, China FRPS LANDSCAPE MAY 2021 Mohammed Arfan Asif, United Arab Emirates Steve Geer, USA Steven Michael Hunter, Hertfordshire Max Robinson, Switzerland Jayne Winter, Worcestershire
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A member of the first RPS Council, John Dillwyn Llewelyn plays with perceptions of life and nature, writes Catlin Langford
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The rabbit is framed by a lush forest scene. It looks towards In 1833 John Dillwyn Llewelyn married Emma the camera, body raised and ears alert, as if about to dart away. Thomasina Talbot, the first cousin of William Henry Yet there is something distinctly unnerving about the rabbit’s Fox Talbot. Llewelyn had wed into photography. Six appearance, something unnatural. The animal is stuffed. years later, in 1839, Talbot announced his invention The photographer’s use of stuffed animals is of the photogenic drawing. confirmed in a letter written by his wife who records, Talbot encouraged Llewelyn’s interest in “Mr Llewelyn has been very busy lately making photography. Inspired, Llewelyn experimented pictures of stuffed animals and birds with an with a range of photographic media. He regularly The RPS Collection is at artificial landscape, in real trees, shrubs, flowers exhibited and was a founder member of the the V&A Photography Centre, London and rocks and even shallow pools of water.” Photographic Society of London, which became vam.ac.uk Llewelyn’s series of stuffed creatures includes the Royal Photographic Society. otters, pheasants and a snarling stoat, all delicately Llewelyn limited his focus to the Welsh landscape, posed in carefully constructed environments. The use becoming highly accomplished in producing nature of stuffed animals ensured Llewelyn achieved that greatly studies. He was commended for his skill in capturing desired sharp exposure for which he was so renowned. moving, natural phenomena despite long exposure periods. His photographs freeze the fleeting: the passing of clouds Catlin Langford is curatorial fellow in photography, and the breaking of waves. supported by The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation, Llewelyn’s interest in nature led him to document animals, at the V&A Museum, London including this salted paper print Rabbit, dated around 1852.
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“There is something distinctly unnerving about the rabbit’s appearance” CLIENT THE RPS COLLECTION / V&A MUSEUM, LONDON
‘Rabbit’, circa 1852, by John Dillwyn Llewelyn
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‘Lockdown life: Paul and Simon’ by Rebecca Douglas CLIENT
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This image from the book Hold Still, introduced by HRH The Duchess of Cambridge, Patron of the RPS, captures the sense of solitude felt by many during lockdown, finds Rachel Segal Hamilton When she looks at this photograph – taken during the first UK-wide Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 – Rebecca Douglas wonders what it must have felt like for her subjects. Douglas’s image of Paul and Simon looking down from their 15th floor window at the almost empty world below has been selected for Hold Still, a nationwide project led by the Duchess of Cambridge and now published as a book. ‘Lockdown life: Paul and Simon’ is one of a series of images that the photographer shot around Margate. Paul’s sister, Wendy, had booked this shoot along with portraits of their other relatives who live locally. “Their mum held an iPad while their sister Zoomed in from Canada, so the whole family was connected in these portraits when they’d all been so disconnected,” says Douglas. 448
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It was a chilly morning, so no other windows were open when Douglas pointed her long lens up at the couple from the car park of their Brutalist block, Arlington House. “Out of all the portrait work I’ve created over the last 12 years, this was the first image where, other than a text to say I was there, I gave no direction,” adds Douglas. “I shot a few compositions and this one seemed to be the most striking. The sense of solitude comes from the stillness in their pose and the vastness of the closed windows around them. So many people have said they relate deeply to the photo, somehow illustrating how we all felt, holding still from our homes.” Hold Still is published by the National Portrait Gallery. View the 100 Hold Still portraits or buy the book at npg.org.uk/hold-still
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