Earlier this year, in a studio in London, artist Ben McLaughlin found himself in a room full of Ukrainians. There were boxers from a local gym, a grandmother with her family, a Ukrainian make-up artist and a group pulled together from the city's Ukrainian community by casting director Julia Gilmour. Behind them hung enormous prints of landscapes shot 1,500 miles away, along the Dnipro river.

Dnipro Fotostudiia, a 38-page portfolio made over a single weekend, sits at the centre of Dnipro, The Plunging Shore, the first edition of Unofficial, a new publishing series McLaughlin launches this month through Officialzine. Each edition will be made with an artist or image-maker creating work about the place they grew up, with a deliberate focus on places that don't register as cultural centres. 'I almost find the more obscure the place, the better,' McLaughlin says.

Up first is Eugenia Skvarska. The Ukrainian stylist and art director grew up in Kyiv, on the banks of the Dnipro, and after Russia destroyed the Kakhovka Dam in 2023, she felt an urgency to document the river. 'It's impossible to separate it from the history of Ukraine,' she says.

She travelled it between the sites of her childhood with photographer Kalpesh Lathigra in a tiny Smart car donated by a concrete company: guiding, driving, translating, telling the stories of the places they passed through.

The landscapes they came back with, shot on large-format film, are full of summer light. 'A lot of work I see from this region is not bleak, but it's cold,' McLaughlin says. 'I hope this project turns that perception on its head.'

Skvarska is more direct. 'We knew this project shouldn't be about documenting destruction. Kalpesh has photographed wars before, but this time we wanted to photograph the soul of the country. The war is still present, but only through subtle details: anti-tank hedgehogs, traces of grief, or a quiet sense of uncertainty in the background.'

She describes her boyfriend's mother spending a night in a bomb shelter, then the next afternoon at the river among families and friends. 'People are constantly trying to hold on to moments of normalcy,' she says.

Rather than presenting the road-trip material as straight documentary, McLaughlin printed Lathigra's landscapes as vast studio backdrops and staged the London portrait shoot against them, with Skvarska styling the cast in garments by young Ukrainian designers, alongside vintage clothing sent from Kyiv by her assistant. 'I wasn't interested in creating costumes, or a romantic image of Ukrainian identity,' she says. 'I wanted the styling to feel honest and contemporary, while still carrying traces of memory and home.'

The portraits sit at the heart of the book, bookended by the landscapes and combining the two collaborators' hands into a single visual language.

The format is difficult to place, which is the point. 'It's not a magazine, but it's not an artist book. It sits in this kind of funny space between,' says McLaughlin, who spent his early career making artist books, then commissioning for magazines.

Unofficial is, in part, a response to what he sees as a glut of both: too many photography books, too many image-led independent magazines with no tone of voice. His answer is to extract the single story and give it everything, an edition at a time. Each is printed in a run of 450 by Grafiche Veneziane and the production shifts to fit the project - an insert, a poster, or a piece of tipped-in ephemera. 'It's not neat,' he says, approvingly.

What began as a set of scans took two years to edit, in printed-out sessions with Adam Murray, a curator and course leader of the MA Fashion Image programme at Central Saint Martins (where Skvarska first began the project as his student) and a close collaborator throughout. Across the book, the river resurfaces in unexpected places - in a painting hanging in a photographed interior, in wedding-venue curtains that gather like waves. 'There's a strength in taking a bit of time,' McLaughlin says. 'I don't think the project would have got to this point without it.'

Two editions a year are planned, and the next two are already in motion. Though McLaughlin is keeping them under wraps, he hints that one draws on a small-town photographic archive spanning half a century. Future editions may loosen the format further still: he's interested in hometowns curated by contributors who aren't image-makers at all. The series grew partly out of conversations about authenticity, and about how often the image of a place has been made by people who aren't from it. It’s what he hopes every edition will share: work made from the inside, in places the world rarely looks.

Widely acknowledged as the most-respected photography prize out there, the Prix Pictet has focused on photography’s ability to incite conversations around sustainability since its inception in 2008.

Every other year, the prize announces a new theme, revealed at Les Rencontres d'Arles, which engages with these social and environmental considerations, triggering a cycle which ends with the winning work undertaking a global tour. Themes typically centre around one word – previous iterations have included Fire, Storm and Disorder – and now director of the Prix Pictet Michael Benson has revealed that the theme will be Jungle.

‘The world’s jungles are the great green lungs of the planet,’ says Benson. ‘These huge carbon sinks play a crucial role in regulating and helping to stabilise the planet’s climate. Yet across the globe jungles are in crisis, forests are threatened by deforestation, fires, and degradation; surface water has been lost and rivers are increasingly disconnected and polluted. The implications of any loss or degradation of these densely interconnected ecosystems extend well beyond changes in land use.’

The jury – led by chair Dutch-born British businessman Sir Tim Smit – will review portfolios of work from all around the world which respond to the theme, before deciding on a shortlist of twelve photographers, set to be announced next summer. Elsewhere, Prix Pictet will also host an exhibition at Paris Photo, to mark the Pictet Group’s new role as the official partner.

It is a collaborative relationship which speaks to this year’s theme, exploring the links between humanity and society. ‘Nothing in a jungle exists alone,’ Benson adds. ‘They are complex interconnected systems that we only vaguely understand. The jungle is a place of mystery and secrets. It is a place of legendary lost cities and civilisations of economic adventures and many broken dreams. In this way, the jungle mirrors contemporary human environments more than we might expect. Cities, digital networks and social ecosystems have their own undergrowth: layers of complexity that obscure as much as they reveal.’

prix.pictet.com

The first thing you see as you enter Vibeke Tandberg’s new show is her face, twice. A monitor shows Merge (1998), a 16mm film in which the photographer has double-exposed herself onto herself. It’s a simple effect, but this low-res doubling is a synecdoche of Tandberg’s body of work: there is no one single self.

Questions of identity and performativity run throughout ‘They Live’, a new exhibition at Bergen’s Kode in Tandberg’s native Norway. The show tracks Tandberg’s career, from her early photo projects in the 1990s to more recent plaster works and videos shown for the first time. A key figure from the Nordic wave of young artists in the 1990s, Tandberg was an early advocate for digital photography and photo manipulation. For Living Together (1996), Tandberg used then-new photo editing tools to create a photo series in which she appears as her own twin. In Faces (1998), she merged her face with other people’s, creating androgynous, fictional portraits. The results are unsettling, not because they enter uncanny-valley territory, but rather because they seem hyperrealistic. There’s a clear through-line between these 30-year-old works and today’s debate around authenticity and truth in imagery.

Tandberg herself appears many times throughout ‘They Live’, but she insists that these are not self-portraits. 'That’s a loaded term,' she told me. 'It feels like a self-portrait is done because you want to tell people something about your inner self. It's confiding in the viewer something more psychological than I have ever been interested in. For me, it’s always been more conceptual.'

Tandberg, who started life in the theatre before training to be a photographer, has always enjoyed dress-up. She came to national attention with the Bride series (1993), in which she appears as an idealised newlywed alongside 11 different men. The photographs were published as wedding announcements in local newspapers on the same day, 24 July. The project established Tandberg’s main interests: performativity, playfulness, but also a desire to provoke and critique patriarchal norms.

In 2003, Tandberg bought her most important accessory. She purchased a latex mask and the character of ‘old man’ was born. He appears in much of Tandberg’s subsequent work. Old Man Going Up and Down a Staircase (2003) shows Tandberg, pregnant with twins at the time, performing the role of the aged man, heaving himself up and down a flight of stairs. 'It was such a relief to get rid of my own face,' Tandberg says. 'I was grateful to work within a mask, hiding myself.'

Soon, however, she let other people perform the role. 'It could be anyone in that mask,' she says. 'I didn't really need it to be myself anymore.' The mask is worn by the ballet dancer Maria Kochetkova in Old Man Dancing (2021) and by an assistant in Post Americana (2026), a new film for the exhibition where the old man is a dying cowboy.

The most interesting moments of ‘They Live’, however, star Tandberg’s face – and these are not confined to photography. Echo’s Bones (2021), named after a Beckett short story and realised during the Covid pandemic, contains 87 plaster busts of Tandberg: they lie on the floor, distorted and brutalised – like a graveyard of mutilated selves. As with Bride, Echo’s Bones sees Tandberg using herself to play with conceptual, if unsettling, ideas. Echo’s Bones looks like a society that’s died, but it’s also the same death mask over and over.

The accompanying exhibition catalogue contains several essays that situate Tandberg in an intellectual framework; her work is interpreted through Foucault, Butler, and Deleuze, among others. The exhibition itself, however, only has introductory wall text. We are left to interpret the works ourselves – but not before feeling something first. Tandberg’s oeuvre is well suited to theoretical discussion, but audiences shouldn’t let ideas stand in the way of emotional engagement. After all, Tandberg’s entire career, from the camp to the macabre, is rooted in play.

‘They Live’ is at Kode Bergen Art Museum until 12 September 2026

kodebergen.no

Wimbledon is, of course, defined by the tennis – or is it? What fascinated me most was everything that surrounds it. Over generations, the championships have developed a visual language of their own, built through colour, ritual, uniforms, architecture and an extraordinary attention to detail.

Discover the vibrant design codes of Wimbledon

Working almost exclusively with tight frames, I focused on colour, geometry and repetition. This year's brilliant sunshine became an important part of the story, casting hard shadows across the grounds and reducing many scenes to graphic compositions of green, white and purple. The tennis itself often became secondary to the systems that support it.

Every element feels intentional. One particular standout was the London Fire Brigade, who act as stewards and security throughout the fortnight. Professional, impeccably presented and genuinely welcoming, they quietly contribute to the uniquely British character of Wimbledon, where traditions and systems have been refined over generations.

Then there are the strawberries. They are one of those enduring Wimbledon rituals that have become almost mythological, with queues for them sometimes longer than those for the courts themselves. Alongside the uniforms, scoreboards, pristine grass courts, straw hats, Pimm's and the iconic all-white dress code, they form part of a visual language that is unmistakably Wimbledon.

It’s a scorching day at Lacock Abbey, in the village of Lacock in Wiltshire, and, beneath the screeching of low-flying swifts, Martin Parr’s widow is in the National Trust property’s Manger Barn, discussing her husband’s final work. And his legacy.

‘This project, it really did resonate with him,’ Susie Parr says of ‘Lacock’, a series of portraits of English community and tradition, a year in the taking and curating, which the great photographer-documentarian completed shortly before his death at 73 on 6 December 2025. ‘He was also aware that he was not well. He kept saying, “I'm in the departure lounge." And this was a manageable, doable piece of work.

‘Very different from his fashion work,' Susie adds with a smile of these typical Parr portraits – vivid but unadorned – of shopkeepers and schoolchildren and scarecrows; of VE Day 80th anniversary parties and the Garden and Allotment Association Annual Flower Show; of prize-winning potatoes and best-in-class raspberries and a stout vicar bedecked in Union flags. ‘Martin was the most unlikely fashion photographer – he really hated fashion, actually! He really wasn't at all interested! But it did bring in money for the [charitable Martin Parr] Foundation.’

Across 2025, Parr travelled from the couple’s home in nearby Bristol to shoot in and around the abbey and the adjoining picture-perfect village. Susie and Dr Andy Cochrane – curator of ‘Lacock’ and of the abbey’s Fox Talbot Museum that’s hosting the year-long exhibition – think he must have visited around 30 times.

Parr was a photographer with an anthropologist’s eye, and Cochrane says that all his career-long themes ‘permeate through the work at Lacock: material culture; the daily life of people; and the conviviality, how people engage and get on with each other. That's all embedded in this photography.’

In multiple ways, the series is a carefully considered bookend to an extraordinary career. Parr had shot (briefly) in Lacock in 1988. As the one-time residence of scientist and photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77), Lacock Abbey is widely viewed as the home of photography, hence the National Trust’s on-site Fox Talbot Museum. And the new project became a perfect distillation of Parr’s perennial interest in what his wife calls 'the middle ground. He was drawn to the ordinary, day-to-day life of people, rather than the extremes of how people are behaving'.

Susie Parr and Dr Andy Cochrane tell Wallpaper* more.

W*: Susie, that 1988 visit to Lacock – how did that come about?

Susie Parr: We had been living in Wallasey in the early 1980s, and Martin did his [1983-85] work in [Merseyside seaside resort] New Brighton, The Last Resort, which was the work that shot him to fame. But he also got a lot of criticism for being a middle-class photographer photographing working-class communities.

So, he was thinking: ‘I need to photograph my own tribe.’ And we were thinking: ‘Where can we live to enable you to do this?’ I was the breadwinner at the time, and I got a job in Bristol. So we moved down here and he started that work. It was supper parties, cricket matches, private schools. Very different from the New Brighton work.

Visiting Lacock was part of that. He loved a summer fête and he came and photographed plant stalls, things like that, for a [1989, Thatcher-era] project about the middle classes called The Cost of Living. Those photos, some of which are in this exhibition, were for that project.

W*: So it was a kind of visual anthropology.

SP: Absolutely. He wasn't articulate about it. He just thought in images. He wouldn't be able to analyse his work in an intellectual way. He just had an anthropological approach to ordinary life.

Andy Cochrane: In one of the first meetings that we had at the foundation, Martin brought out an anthropological book that was written in the 1940s, with colour-saturated photography by John Hinde. It was about understanding a National Trust village, Luccombe in Somerset, as part of a Mass Observation project.

I think Martin always wanted to go there and photograph it, and then went instead to Chew Stoke [in Somerset for 1992 project A Year in the Life of Chew Stoke Village]. So there had [long been] a sense of trying to document a National Trust village.

W*: Did the villagers require much persuasion to let him into their homes?

AC: At first, a lot of people, if they're not into art or photography, were unaware of who Martin Parr is… But with Simon [Dunn], the vicar, we did a free screening of [2025 biographical documentary] I Am Martin Parr in St Cyriac's church and invited the village.

And, of course, as people were getting themselves photographed, and the foundation was printing them immediately and handing them back out to the village, it created a critical mass [of interest].

He was also keen to engage with community groups, the clubs, the church, the school. So he was going to all these events in the evening. He was in the yoga club and the photography club and the art club. And the pace that he worked was really impressive to see. He was moving at a pace that was a young man's game!

SP: He was so disciplined and hardworking.

W* And, apparently, disarming. As one of his clearly smitten subjects, Azar Watling of local business John Watling Bespoke Jewellery, says in the accompanying video showing in the museum, ‘he was a little bit cheeky’.

SP: His natural communication style was a bit to the point, blunt, no messing about, no small talk. But when he wanted to engage with people, he could be very funny and charming, with a little bit of banter. He could do that, but it wasn't his natural style.

W*: The village’s VE Day 80th anniversary celebrations in May 2025 must have been catnip for Martin, given everything it represents and the associated, flag-waving iconography.

SP: He did like a Union Flag, but he wasn't very happy about the way they'd been used recently, and all the St George's flags everywhere. He was always wary of the Brexit-y, Reform-y-type thing. But he was never politically critical of any group.

But flags were definitely an important iconography for him – there are so many photos of fetes with Union Jacks and bunting and everything like that. At his funeral, we recreated a country fête for the reception. We had lots of the kind of [food] from his photographs: sad cupcakes, rainbow-coloured cakes, lots of sandwiches wrapped in clingfilm.

W*: Did he like a cake to eat as well?

SP: He loved a cake! Favourite cake? Lemon drizzle, I’d say. Mine? I’m not a cake person, but... a nice fruitcake sometimes. He loved his cup of tea and a cake at 3.30pm. And the final picture in the [‘Lacock’ exhibition] book is his cup of tea and his plate with cake crumbs on it. For me, it’s a poignant full stop to the project.

W*: From a Lacock Abbey point of view – being the home of the beginning of photography – showcasing the final major commission from one of our greatest ever documentarians must feel particularly providential for the property and the National Trust.

AC: It's pretty neat and it’s pretty helpful. The [Fox Talbot] museum was set up in 1975. The National Trust didn't have the money for a museum then – doesn't now! – but they were helped by another internationally famous British photographer, Cecil Beaton. So last year was the 50th anniversary, and Martin was here at that time doing this project. And now with Martin, who’s bigger than Cecil, he’s set it up for the next 50 years.

It is so generous, for the village, the National Trust, and it's a gift to everyone to be able to see this work.

W*: How good a summation is this exhibition, in this place, of Martin’s interests, his eye, his instinct, his emotional feelings for Britain and its people?

SP: I was surprised when I saw it. It's actually very kind. And very different from [his other work]. Because he could have come in and done a number on the hordes of tourists who come to the Fox Talbot Museum. But he didn't. It’s a return to the much earlier, more elegiac way of working. More connection, more gentleness. So I think it's the perfect way to end for him.

W*: Do you mind if I ask, Susie, how emotional is it for you seeing this work displayed here? We're not that many months on from your husband's passing.

SP: I must say, I did get a bit choked when I was looking at the images to write my little introduction [in the book]. But I think I'm OK now. I'm sort of used to it.

I'm finding it really interesting to think about it, that he actually went beneath the façade of the model village to look at real people and real communities. So again, it's another thing to be very proud of about Martin, that he finished off in this way… This, for me, is a perfect rounding of the circle.

‘Lacock’ by Martin Parr, 27 June 2026 – 27 June 2027, Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire

nationaltrust.org.uk/lacock

A new monograph published today makes the case for Miyako Ishiuchi as one of the most important photographers of the modern era. Ishiuchi Miyako: Traces, edited by Lena Fritsch and Yasufumi Nakamori, spans five decades of the artist’s career while placing unusual emphasis on Ishiuchi’s own voice. Alongside extensive reproductions of her work, the volume includes extracts from her earlier writings, an in-depth interview conducted by Fritsch and a newly commissioned essay by the photographer herself.

Born in 1947 and raised in Yokosuka, a Japanese port city shaped by the presence of an American naval base, Ishiuchi emerged within a photography world that was overwhelmingly male-dominated. She became one of the few women of her generation to achieve international recognition, developing a practice that challenged conventional approaches to documentary photography.

At the heart of Ishiuchi’s work lies the premise that history reveals itself through surfaces. Rather than documenting events, she photographs the traces they leave behind – scars on skin, worn clothing, crumbling apartments, lipstick tubes, dentures. In her images, objects and body parts become repositories of memory, carrying the imprint of lives that might otherwise go unrecorded.

Her breakthrough came with ‘Yokosuka Story’ (1976-77), a series made upon returning to the city of her childhood. Rather than producing a straightforward documentary account, Ishiuchi photographed streets, buildings and neighbourhoods marked by the proximity of the US naval base. She followed it with ‘Apartment’, a study of ageing interiors and decaying architecture that earned her the prestigious Kimura Ihei Award in 1979.

In the 1990s, Ishiuchi turned her attention to women’s bodies, producing close-up photographs of surgical scars and other physical marks – records of experience inscribed on flesh. This was followed by ‘Mother’s’, made after her mother’s death, in which shoes, dresses, cosmetics and dentures become vehicles for exploring grief.

Two later series extended this logic from the personal to the historical. For ‘Hiroshima’, Ishiuchi photographed the clothing and personal belongings of atomic bomb victims. Her focus was not the disaster itself but its intimate residue.

A similar sensitivity informed a project commissioned by the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City. Ishiuchi photographed the Mexican artist’s most personal possessions – the corsets that supported her damaged spine, the dresses that became part of her public image, the medicines that sustained her and the cosmetics used to construct her iconic appearance. Kahlo’s belongings had been sealed away by Diego Rivera following her death in 1954 and remained hidden from public view for half a century; it was fitting that Ishiuchi – an artist preoccupied with what objects carry across time – was the one to photograph them.

Traces is the book that Ishiuchi’s career has always deserved.

Two young men, lads, possibly teenagers, stand in the Adriatic, stacked one atop the other. The blonder of the pair wears a chain and wraps his legs over the shoulders and around the torso of his companion, who is bare chested with a tan and striped swimming shorts. ‘I asked them to start playing where the water was low, but they decided that one would sit on the other’s shoulders. It was not my idea!’ photographer Walter Pfeiffer shares of the double portrait, shot in Rimini in the 1980s. ‘I love when the people I photograph participate in the process. I like being in good company.’

At Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin, where a major new retrospective, ‘Walter Pfeiffer. In Good Company’, has just opened, the image is blown up to movie-poster size and framed with a white border. Positioned so it’s the first standalone image visitors see upon entering the show, it makes a bold impression and, moreover, is a fitting introduction to Pfeiffer’s six-decade career (in 1984, it covered the October issue of French publication Gai Pied, once described as ‘the queen of Europe’s gay magazines’). The show’s moniker, similarly, is a strong proxy for Pfeiffer’s character. The Swiss photographer’s reputation as an enthusiastic collaborator becomes tangible at the show’s opening in Italy, where friends and admirers swarm him to say congratulations and wish him a happy birthday (he’s just turned 80).

Before you enter the show proper, a vast wall covered with pages pulled and printed from Pfeiffer’s scrapbooks provides additional context for the work that follows. It’s a practice he established in the 1960s while working at Globus department store in Zurich, where he had been hired as a window decorator following his studies at the city’s School of Arts and Crafts. ‘I was bored and had no ideas, then I started to crop images out of magazines and glue them into these notebooks,’ he recalls. ‘I don't like to look through my work, that's why I love this wall – I forgot everything, so it was again interesting for me. When we printed it as a book [2012’s Scrapbooks 1969-1985], we took only the interesting things, but here there is more to discover.’

Occupying six rooms with more than 100 images from the 1970s through to the 2020s, ‘Walter Pfeiffer. In Good Company’ highlights the broad scope of Pfeiffer’s career. In one of the smaller spaces is the series Das Auge, die Gedanken, unentwegt wandernd from 1986, featuring black and white headshots printed in strict record cover-sized squares, the portraits are situated in pairs, high up towards the ceiling. Elsewhere, colour is largely king, used to underscore the subversive vitality prevalent in the collection of still lifes, fashion images and erotic scenes. ‘Walter's very open about letting other people interpret the work,’ offers Nicola Trezzi, who, with co-curator Simon Castets, was primarily responsible for the show’s rhythm. ‘He has done so many books and exhibitions, he’s always creating a company of people that will inspire him and trigger his curiosity.’

One particular group of photographs stands out for its delicate sensibility: the portraits in Untitled (Carlo Joh), shot over several months in 1973, portray a young trans person reconfiguring their appearance through make-up and drag. Embracing Pfeiffer’s ongoing pursuit of beauty but with a faint ephemeral shadow (the teenager passed away not long after their final session), the close-ups appear visibly different from their neighbours, a condition emphasised by the large moat of white space and silver frames in which they’re presented.

‘It’s the heart of the exhibition,’ the photographer and Trezzi agree. ‘I knew I had to do this show [1974’s “Transformer: Aspects of Travesty” at Kunstmuseum Luzern], and I’d seen him before in the library of the art school,’ shares Pfeiffer of spotting his subject, later relaying the decision to leave Untitled (Carlo Joh) out of the book that accompanies the Turin exhibition: ‘The atmosphere of the series is completely different. It would have suffered if it was inserted in this energetic rollercoaster of images.’

Books – self-published since near the start of his career and, later, released with the Zurich publisher Edition Patrick Frey – have long been a vital component of the photographer’s work, and the new monograph, from Mousse Publishing, is a unique example that places text, including an essay by Trezzi, at its centre. ‘It’s the first book where I didn’t have to do anything. I always think about when I'm not here anymore, and it was like I wasn’t here. That's why I'm glad I'm in a state now, where if the company is really good, I don't have to worry,’ notes Pfeiffer, adding further weight to the show’s collaborative label. ‘In the 1970s, nobody wanted to show my work; people were not ready. That’s probably why it still looks so fresh, even after six decades, but I wanted people to see it!’

‘Walter Pfeiffer. In Good Company’ is at Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, until 13 September 2026

pinacoteca-agnelli.it

There is no-one making work quite like photographer Annie Collinge. Soaked in colour and with a healthy dash of surrealism, Collinge’s work plays with our expectations of the mundane in a manner which veers between the cute and the sinister. In combining strong colours with esoteric objects and an uncanny gaze, she plays with size, dimensions, the real and the fake, presenting the familiar anew.

She has worked with brands including Valentino, in 2023 winning a Grammy for the cover art for Dry Cleaning’s Stumpwork alongside her long-time collaborators the art director duo, Rottingdean Bazaar. In her new book Ask Alexa when we are all gonna die tomorrow :-) she has made a series with her son.

'I just started taking pictures of experimenting with him as a model, and decided a couple of years ago that I wanted to make a book,' Collinge says.

She is very collaborative in her work, a natural start for the photo series created with her 12-year-old son, who turns 13 this month. Collinge’s sister Miranda is a writer and has contributed a poem to the book, making it a family affair; for Collinge this process of working with people who are in your daily life makes spontaneous creative work easier.

Collinge has created series with Julie Verhoeven, Peter Jensen and Tim Key, but her longest partnership is with Rottingdean Bazaar, with whom she has worked with numerous brands including BIMBA Y LOLA, Bottega Venetta and the Thames & Hudson Catwalk Series.

'I really don’t like working on my own,' she explains. 'It is a difficult thing for an artist, it's sad but it's like also being a twin and it's helpful to have someone to bounce ideas off. The ultimate thing is to find people that you can be so brutally honest with that it doesn't matter.'

The book’s title comes from a note Collinge's son left for her one evening, and the photographs in this series address, in part, the one-dimensional way parenthood and family life are often portrayed online.

'I think it isolates people that aren't parents, and I think it isolates people that perhaps haven't found parenthood is exactly how they imagined it to be,' the photographer says. 'So, I find those images quite jarring and I was very conscious of not making them myself.'

While there are images of Collinge's son in the book, there are also many images of interiors and object. The process of looking for objects online and in real life; acquiring them; capturing them on film; and, eventually, letting them go is intrinsic to what Collinge (who has also published a book titled Things I Looked at on eBay) does.

Collinge's love of objects comes in part from being raised in London by a British father and an American mother, and objects from America having huge resonance in the home in a pre-Google world. After having to clear her grandmother’s house as a child in California, she developed an aversion to hoarding, so her process of acquiring and shedding items she finds in charity shops and online is offset by being able to somehow own these objects in an image.

'I'm kind of an antiques dealer on the side,' she confesses, adding that she is currently collecting Lucite paperweights, and is also renovating a 1960s Severalls doll’s house. Made as part of patients’ rehabilitation at a hospital in Essex, they are now collectibles and once the project is completed and the photographs have been taken, the items will be sold.

For all the process that goes into making her photographs, Collinge’s images stay with you. They persist both for their subversiveness and for how pleasurable she makes those subversions feel to look at. In Ask Alexa she takes us on an intimate journey through the place where her art meets her life.

Over the last decade, Andre D. Wagner's photographs have documented the rhythms of daily life, both on the streets of his native Brooklyn and further afield. His work seems to capture the essence of what it is to be human, although he sees things a little differently.

'I think photography can sometimes inherit a very extractive language,' he explains. 'We speak about "taking" pictures or "capturing" places, but I’m not sure that’s what I’m doing. I’m usually trying to empty myself enough to receive what’s already there.'

Whether through his work photographing Black youth and communities in New York or portraits of some of the world's most famous faces, Wagner's intuition allows us to see behind the eyes of his subjects, feeling the emotional weight of a lived moment.

For this new project, he's turned his lens – in this instance, a Google Pixel phone – to nature, photographing the wilds of Mallorca, Spain for a body of work that, for once, leaves the human condition far behind.

Wallpaper*: Why Mallorca?

Andre D. Wagner: Mallorca was simply where life had placed me at that moment. I arrived open, and over time, the place began to reveal itself.

W*: What's the secret to capturing the essence of a place when you are merely passing through?

ADW: Even if I’m only passing through a place, I try not to arrive with rigid expectations or predetermined narratives. In Mallorca, the longer I walked and stayed open, the more porous I became to the rhythm of the place. Eventually, it felt less like I was moving through Mallorca and more like Mallorca was moving through me.

So if there’s a secret, it’s probably openness. Letting the place speak before you try to define it.

W*: You've spent over a decade photographing people. What do you get from turning your camera to the land?

ADW: Photographing landscapes gives me a temporary release from the density of human drama, though I don’t mean that negatively. People carry immense psychological and emotional complexity, especially in cities. The landscape opens a different register for me, something more elemental.

In Mallorca, that meant the sea, the mountains, shifting air, altitude, cold mornings, warm afternoons. Those elements began shaping my attention in a different way.

But I don’t necessarily see landscape as less dramatic than photographing people. In many ways, the elemental world is even more dynamic. Humans are still part of nature. We’re expressions of the same forces.

So while the subject matter changes, my approach doesn’t change very much. I’m still responding intuitively to light, composition, texture, rhythm and whatever feels alive or reverberant in the moment. The photograph becomes a way of holding some trace of that experience.

W*: What's your favourite part of Mallorca? Where should we stay?

ADW: I stayed in the mountains of Sóller. If you enjoy solitude and a slower rhythm, you really can’t go wrong there. The mountains and the air have a way of slowing you down in the best possible way.

W*: Can you recommend something to inspire creativity on the island?

ADW: I was in Mallorca through an artist residency called MEKKA whose whole ethos was centred around rest, simplicity, presence and giving artists space to just be. So I wasn’t there trying to force inspiration.

What I found instead was that when you slow down enough, nothing kind of becomes everything. Inspiration starts appearing in very small and quiet ways.

That said, one practical thing I highly recommend is renting a Vespa. Moving through the island that way felt incredibly freeing and immersive, especially in the mountains and smaller towns.

W*: What's something not to miss?

ADW: I happened to be there during the off-season, and honestly, that felt like the thing not to miss. The quietness of the island was incredibly beautiful to me.

I think we sometimes overlook our own instincts because there’s this idea that there’s a ‘right’ or popular way to travel. But for me, Mallorca revealed itself most deeply through slowness, space, and simplicity.

W*: What projects do you have coming up?

ADW: I have a photo book titled New City, Old Blues coming out this year through the Gordon Parks Foundation and Steidl, which feels significant because it represents work made over a decade in New York.

At the same time, I’ve been moving quite a bit recently. I spent a month in Japan in January and have been in India since February. By the time I return to New York, it’ll likely be sometime in June. All of that movement has opened up a completely new body of work that I’m still processing, but it feels deeply energising and expansive.

Since 2019, Creator Labs has served as Google Pixel’s incubator for visual storytelling. Born from a mission to safeguard artistic autonomy, the program provides world-class photographers with the capital and technology to execute ambitious, non-commercial bodies of work. For Season 10, Andre Wagner joins an elite cohort of six global artists tasked with "Asking More" of their medium.

Photo London is back for another year, except not as you’ve seen it before. This year marks the photo fair’s debut at its new Olympia location, in Kensington. After celebrating its tenth anniversary last year, the fair has transitioned away from its usual Somerset House set-up, and now nestles into the historic National Hall venue, which is currently undergoing a £1.3 billion redevelopment led by Heatherwick Studio.

What's new at Photo London?

The new location means more space. This year, viewers can expect even more galleries and photographers to present their work. There is also a new ‘Source’ section which is dedicated to solo presentations by culturally significant artists including UP Gallery exhibiting work exploring Taiwanese identity by Wu Chia-Yun; Galerie Julian Sander presenting the late American photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon’s project Portraits; and ROLF Art bringing Santiago Porter’s deeply personal Piezas series.

There is also a new film screening room dedicated to artists' films and their role within photography including Sarah Moon’s film There is something about Lillian. The fair has also expanded its discovery section for emerging galleries featuring strong South Asian representation, along expansion of the publishers section.

Coupled with the new additions are returning favourites, including Master of Photography. The fair will also present a second edition of Positions which features unrepresented photographers.

As always, there is a lot to see, and slotting it all into a few compact days is difficult. However, if time permits, it would be recommended to see the work of fashion photographer Steven Meisel. Here the presentation includes his photography in London, and in particular his iconic ‘Anglo-Saxon Attitude’ series, which can be viewed at the Master of Photography exhibition.

In Source, enjoy the work of Peter Sillem who presents a series of prints by married-couple Ute and Werner Mahler, including a selection of their fashion photographs from behind the Berlin Wall in the days of the GDR. Making his Photo London debut, Julian Sander will present a personal tribute to his lifelong friend Rosalind Fox Solomon, who passed away last year. She was celebrated for her portraits of suffering and survival.

Also at Source, JEDNOSTKA presents works by Polish artist Weronika Gęsicka. Here, Gęsicka’s uses photography to question truth and reality using stock photography archives, AI image generation and digital manipulation.

In Discovery, transport to Ibiza through Agony and Ecstasy's debut. The gallery presents work by Catalan-Spanish photographer Oriol Maspons and German photographer Walter Rudolph. The presentation is rooted in deep visual nostalgia of Ibiza, taken between 1976 and 1985.

Mumbai-based art gallery Fulcrum presents Vasudhaa Narayanan’s imagery which captures gender, domesticity, and the body. Her work dives deep into the patriarchy, caste, and cultural conditioning, and looks at how women’s bodies become contested sites.

At Photo London’s the Positions section is used to platform photographic artists without gallery representation. Morocco-based Hicham Gardaf’s work looks at careful framing and the colour of the city, whereby his work becomes almost abstract. Motivated by social issues, Iranian photographer and documentary maker Tahmineh Monzari focuses on Iranian women and their roles in urban and rural cultures; while in Barcelona, Luis Casadevall captures fleeting encounters within the urban landscape using black and white photography.

The Main Section of the fair features galleries such as London’s The Photographers Gallery. Here they present work by Sayuri Ichida who looks at self-identity, memories and life experiences. PHOTOINK in New Delhi showcases Ketaki Sheth’s series ‘Twinspotting’. The story behind this series came about when Sheth married Aurobind Patel and moved to London. Once there she realised there were 30,000 registered Patels in the UK directory, Sheth began to take portraits of Patel twins in the UK, pairing them with Patel twins back in India.

Photo London founders Michael Benson and Fariba Farshad, said: ‘We are incredibly proud of the team who have brought together an impressive group of galleries for the launch of this new era at Olympia, including newcomers from as far afield as India and Africa proving London is still a great draw for international galleries…it is clear that Photo London’s second decade has begun in formidable style.’

Photo London runs from 14-17 May 2026 at National Hall, Olympia Hammersmith Road London W14 8UX photolondon.org

What’s in a kiss? Quite a lot, actually. Intimacy, attraction, reassurance, love – kissing is a raw and primal way of searching for that elusive human connection.

Post-pandemic, the act of kissing became more vital than ever; laced with caution, it epitomised a shared trust in an unstable environment. It is a shift that fascinates Sweden-born, Los Angeles-based musical artist Tove Lo and photographer Kenny Laubbacher, who captured more than 600 candid moments of people kissing during Tove Lo’s 2023 ‘Dirt Femme’ tour.

The Kiss Book, shot across 15 countries and 18 cities, documents the results of crowds of tour attendees being asked to kiss. ‘All pictures were taken soon after the world fully reopened following the pandemic, when kissing and dancing in sweaty crowds still felt surreal and a little forbidden,’ the duo say. ‘This added a level of ecstasy to these moments and you can feel that energy in the photos.’

The photographs are a mash-up of hands, faces and embraces. There’s couples, throuples, crowds of friends and, occasionally, a disgruntled onlooker. Throughout, affection takes shape in the playful and the passionate. In their unflinching zooming in on a moment that is usually private, the photographs are always moving.

The tome's designers, creative director Charlie Twaddle with Samuel Burgess Johnson, intertwine these enduring elements through the book’s seductive red design. They say: ‘The choice of red as a colour serves as a symbol for flesh, while the red page edges reflect on the biblical concept of original sin in a “post distancing” society.’

The Kiss Book, £50, from Baron Books

Without already having context, it can be difficult to tell what the buildings that Dean Sameshima has photographed in the Wonderland series actually are. The names of the photos hint at erotic interiors, but at a glance, the buildings themselves are a world away from this promise. This seems to be the point: that these buildings, when devoid of the things that we might associate with them, end up blending into the background and becoming anonymous.

All of them are framed the same way: shot from across the road at a medium distance, presented with stark objectivity. They’re exteriors of sex clubs and bath houses around Silver Lake in Los Angeles and, presented by Soft Opening in London, around 30 years after Sameshima first captured the series (from 1995-97), the work takes on a new, more all-encompassing kind of emptiness. As queer spaces become increasingly precarious, and the policing of queer identity and desire becomes more violent, Sameshima’s images seem to have become haunted.

The entrances to these buildings are often hidden away in Sameshima’s photographs. In Untitled (Closed 1995), mesh screens conceal a door, turning the building – with the address ‘1800 Hyperion’ emblazoned on it in black letters – into an almost abstract space, its purpose unknown. In another, the door is cast under a shadow by the building’s awning.

The spaces, even from the outside, take on a kind of otherworldly quality; there’s a sense of something hidden behind these entrances that might elude a viewer on first glance, a world that can only be revealed by one who knows where to go to find it. The space of the gallery itself seems to highlight these ideas of impenetrability; rather than being vast and open, as it has been for previous exhibitions, here, Soft Opening is defined by a series of walls that divide up the gallery. Like the barriers and closed doors that Sameshima’s images highlight, it raises the question of exactly what lies beyond the threshold.

But the one threshold that seems to most concern the Wonderland series isn’t just about physical space; the way that the inner life of a building and its occupants can be hidden by an anonymous exterior. Instead, Sameshima’s work has, willingly or not, found itself on the precipice of time: an elegy or monument to what used to be. The absence of people in these images is impossible to ignore; with Sameshima having first taken the pictures in the mid-1990s, a decade after the worst of the AIDS crisis, it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that even these spaces of queer desire are so often defined by the absence of bodies in and around them.

The world itself seems frozen in these images; in Untitled (Older Men, 1995), a blue building stands as a sentinel, its neon lettering switched off; the building to one side of it boarded up and covered with posters for gigs that have since been and gone. Sameshima has captured this world in a state of flux; one reeling from the AIDS crisis, and bracing itself for whatever is next to come.

Sameshima’s fragments of desire don’t just exist in urban spaces. Alongside his frozen bathhouses and sex clubs, the artist presents a series of exterior images; popular cruising spots in Griffith Park Los Angeles, and Harbour City Recreational Park in Lomita. As opposed to the stark, fragmented nature of the building photographs, Sameshima’s exteriors carry with them a kind of fragmented narrative; these are images that can read as a journey towards a thwarted or lost desire.

A series like Untitled (Griffith Park) seems to trace generations-old footsteps, propelled by a powerful, voyeuristic force, searching for the people that may have once been here. There’s a temptation when looking at these images to crane your neck, to try and get a sense of what might just be lurking beyond the corner, if, just out of view, there’s another body.

If there’s a central question that ties together the buildings and public spaces that make up Wonderland, its what, if anything, can be done with this emptiness. Through a spare, objective lens, Sameshima refuses to offer meaningful answers about either the cause of the absence in his photos, or a sense of what – if anything – can be done in the face of emptiness and loss.

These innocent-looking building façades, and fragments of parks seem to refute the idea of any kind of narrative – whether it's a narrative through time, or the arc of desire to a satisfying conclusion. Yes, this might be frustrating, but that frustration seems to be the point. Even the curation of the show itself speaks to this; the walls between photographs, and the fact that, at the end of it all is another image of another shuttered building. There are no answers here, and nor, the show seems to be hinting, could there ever be.

While Sameshima’s photographs carry with them evidence of the wider world – next to one of these buildings is a sign for a Dolly Maddison Bakery, a sign warning ‘beware of dog’ – it’s a world that remains spare, cold, lacking in humanity. While there is no wonderland at the bottom of Sameshima’s rabbit hole, there is still a place well worth spending time; even as it (deliberately) frustrates, and feels heavy with loss.

Dean Sameshima at Soft Opening until 23 May 2026

softopening.london

When asked about the last time he made a photograph that surprised him, Christopher Anderson goes quiet. 'You're going to make me cry,' he says, and he sounds like he means it. It hasn't happened in a while. For someone who has spent the better part of three decades with a camera in his hand, that admission is not a small one. But what follows matters more than the admission itself. Making new book Index, he says, has pulled him back somewhere. 'I feel ready to start making real pictures again. I don't know exactly what it's going to be, but I feel ready to be open to that now.'

What connects Anderson's work across time is not subject matter but perspective. His presence in the image is the constant, whether he's in a conflict zone, the Oval Office or his own kitchen. Born in Canada and raised in west Texas, he first gained international recognition in 1999 when he boarded a small wooden boat with 44 Haitian immigrants attempting to sail to America. The boat sank in the Caribbean, and the photographs earned him the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 2000.

What followed was years of conflict work and magazine commissions, including a tenure shooting for New York Magazine. Becoming a father in 2008 led to an intensely personal body of work about his family, published across three books: Son, Pia and Marion. He now lives in Paris, where he has been based since 2019. Last December, his portraits of the Trump administration for Vanity Fair brought his work to an audience far beyond the photography world. Index, published by Stanley/Barker, is where much of this work now sits together for the first time.

The idea was not a retrospective, with all the tidiness that such curation implies, but something closer to the experience of opening boxes in a studio and finding things you'd forgotten you'd made. Eleven volumes, placed in deliberate proximity: photojournalism, portraiture, family, street photography, selfies. The ghost of William Eggleston's The Democratic Forest (his own ten-volume exercise in photographing without hierarchy, made across the 1980s) is somewhere in the background. Anderson didn't set out to invoke it, he says, but acknowledges the kinship. 'There is a little bit of that idea. A lot of these photographs are the constant act of seeing.'

Not every volume announces itself. The cars – interiors shot in passing, with no particular reason attached – are closer to a reflex than a project. 'There's not really a reason to photograph them. It's sort of a compulsive action,' he says. He talks about the search for patterns, about marking his place in time, a kind of geotagging. Emotional coordinates rather than aesthetic statements. In that sense, they are perhaps not so different from the rest of his personal work; the same impulse, finding different surfaces.

The White House volume is a different story. He had gone in with a journalist's brief, to photograph honestly, without flattery or the smoothing instincts of celebrity portraiture. The internet read it as a provocation. Images became memes, political ammunition, evidence of intent he hadn't had. He wasn't rattled so much as fascinated. 'I never could imagine that the pictures would jump the guardrails the way they did,' he says. He's long been accustomed to images taking on lives of their own once published, but nothing had prepared him for that particular velocity. The approach itself was nothing new; he'd been making political portraits this way since his 2014 book Stump – close, unretouched, unsparing. What the reaction revealed, he suggests, is less about the photographs than about how completely we have stopped expecting to see politicians as they actually are.

Going back through his archive for Index, Anderson kept finding absences. Moments he'd been present for and never photographed, because at the time his eye was too selective, too ruled by ideas about light or composition or what constituted a worthy image. 'I just wish I had a picture of that thing, regardless of how nice the light was.' The conclusion he draws is not complicated: photograph everything. Not because everything is equally beautiful, but because you don't yet know what will matter, or when. 'It's all important in the end.'

The book also includes an imagined conversation with Werner Herzog, which Anderson refers to in passing as 'the fake interview'. It articulates something he returns to in conversation too: that an archive is not a fixed thing. Meanings shift. Images that seemed unremarkable at the time begin to hold something that wasn't legible yet. He compares photographs to wine, for the way they keep transforming in the bottle.

'I long for being in love with photography the way I used to be,' he says. The past tense is there, but so is something else. Not nostalgia exactly, more like hunger. He doesn't know what comes next; perhaps only that he's ready to be surprised again.

Long before UK hip-hop and electronic music were globally recognised, Eddie Otchere and Normski were capturing culture in motion, documenting dancefloors and scenes as they unfolded in real time. From the birth of British drum ’n’ bass, breakdancing and raves to the early intersections of rap, sound system culture, jungle and garage, their images amplified Black British identity and celebrated youth expression at a pivotal moment in music history.

As analogue architects, they documented homegrown movements while tracing the crossover of artists from New York, LA, and Detroit through a British lens. Their photos captured the energy, chaos, imperfection, and intimacy of both superstar subjects and underground subcultures on film in a way that could neither be manipulated nor replicated. From Wu-Tang Clan goofing around in east London to De La Soul in a grimy Brixton alley, and Estelle in the Bronx with an image that propelled her from London to the Grammys with ‘American Boy’.

Eddie Otchere is a cultural chronicler, educator, and author who treats his cameras as an extension of his heart. Born in Brixton with Ghanaian roots, he cut his teeth in the communities he would later document. As jungle breakbeats were beamed from pirate radio to London’s estates, he positioned himself not as an outsider but as an archivist of lived experience. Hand-picked as the official photographer for Goldie’s Metalheadz club night in the mid-1990s, he also captured Aaliyah on the verge of fame on a sunny hotel balcony in Swiss Cottage and shot headshots of every member of Wu-Tang Clan, producing some of their most enduring images. Today, he continues to document a new generation, from UK junglist Sherelle to Jamaican reggae titan Chronixx.

Normski is a natural-born hustler and sharp shooter. Born Norman Anderson and raised in a Jamaican household in north London, he built his first darkroom at 12 and taught himself to develop film before most kids picked up a camera. His magnetic prowess led him to document the birth of Detroit techno, East LA girl gangs, voice a generation as the electrifying host of the BBC’s Dance Energy and become an in-demand DJ. His archive includes some of the earliest, seminal shots of Public Enemy, Salt-N-Pepa, N.W.A., Ice-T, and the Juice Crew on London soil. Incalculably tenacious, he shot on the fly, sometimes cold-calling magazines from payphones with his last 25p to sell images before they were even developed. Today, he remains a pivotal ambassador of UK hip-hop.

In 2026, both their passions are still fuelled by storytelling and future chapters. Their work has appeared in i-D, The Face, Melody Maker, NME, Hip Hop Connection, and far beyond. They’ve both published hit biographies, including Normski: The Man With the Golden Shutter, Otchere’s Who Say Reload: The Stories Behind the Classic Drum 'n' Bass Records of the ’90s, and Spirit Behind the Lens: The Making of a Hip Hop Photographer. Their photos have hung in galleries worldwide, and now at V&A East as part of ‘The Music is Black’, a landmark exhibition marking 125 years of Black British music shaping culture.

For the first time, both photographers have come together in this interview to celebrate the impact of their images.

Ultramagnetic MCs

Normski: I’ve heard people compare my photos to an adrenaline shot; Ultramagnetic MCs, 1989 at Dingwalls, is exactly that. I love this photo. I titled it ‘Yo! Bum Rush the Show!’ after Public Enemy’s debut album, and because it was the wildest rushing of backstage doors I’ve ever witnessed.

At that time, Ultramagnetic MCs were one of the most dynamic, brilliant rap groups ever. Everyone who was into ‘real’ hip-hop was at that gig. It was a big deal, and the photo means a lot to me, not least because Dingwalls was my local.

A lot of US acts didn’t realise they had a fanbase here; people just like them, living the music. Hip-hop closed those gaps and brought people together.

The gig was totally oversold, and Dingwalls was teeny. Promoters thought hip-hop was a fad, like skateboarding in the 1970s. But the crowd rushed in so fast that I had to jump on stage to avoid getting crushed. I had no idea how bright my flash was, but it was powerful enough to capture faces, even outside.

In the end, they did the show with the back door open so folks could listen from the street.

So Solid Crew

Eddie: When garage came along, I wanted to contribute to that iconography by working with So Solid Crew and lock into those guys. Especially because they were local to me, Battersea people, who shared the same hood.

I set up a lot of their early photos, and had already shot Lisa Mafia, Romeo and Mega Man when I was commissioned to do the press shot for their defining track, ‘21 Seconds’.

I brought in Karen Binns (a superstar stylist) to style the shoot and the video, which was an executive move. That was an executive move. Garage kids weren’t afraid to be seen; jungle kids didn’t want to be seen. So when I told them, ‘I’m getting the best stylist in the world,’ they ran with it, ‘Whatever she costs, we’re in.’

On set, I was teasing them: ‘If you’re a crew, where’s the crew? We need that shot.’

That Saturday afternoon in Battersea, their whole crew pulled up. Kids were just walking out from the estates into the local park. I knew the spot because of the gas towers, proper south London. They’d just landed a big deal, and even though I told them not to spend the money on cars, Romeo and Mega Man both rolled up with Audis. To me, that image summarises the garage era. It's the photo I wasn’t paid for, but knew we needed.

It ended up in the VHS insert for the high-budget ‘21 Seconds’ video, which had its own Leicester Square red carpet premiere. The track went to number one, won a MOBO, was performed on the Top of the Pops Christmas special and is now hanging in V&A East.

Goldie

Normski: Eddie and I were probably the only two people who ever took pictures in Metalheadz. There was only one light above the DJ. It was dark as hell in there! It wasn’t about being seen; it was about being beaten up by the bassline and the riddim. Men used to be in the corner burning greenery, everyone was flying off of their heads. The place was crazy! A proper jump up!

That’s why this photo has a lot of meaning to me because that was my introduction to this sound and culture that was like ‘This is fucking me man! I love this shit!’ I went in there with a little snapping camera in my pocket. I didn’t push it too hard because it was not comfortable when a flash went off in that place! People hated that! That was ungracious behaviour.

Goldie used to walk around that club high-pitch whistling, so loud when the track dropped and making sure everyone was happy (I won’t try to do it cuz I’ll probably blow some teeth out.) But in this photograph, if you look at it closely, you can see my fist at the bottom of it. I called him over

Kemistry and Storm

Eddie: This photograph is a diptych taken in 1995 of drum ’n’ bass trailblazers Kemistry (1963-1999) and Storm. After linking with Goldie, they co-founded the Metalheadz label and launched the Sunday sessions at the Blue Note that became foundational to the UK drum’n’bass scene and cemented the club’s place in a wider musical revolution. I was deep in and documenting.

Goldie controlled the visual narrative; no one took a picture without his say. He handpicked me to capture the warmth, intensity, and essence. For me, this is the golden image.

Kemistry and Storm were the queens. They were the heads of the label, heads of the DJ line-ups, they ran all the business and made sure that all the boys, many with massive egos, turned up on time. They set the tone and tempo of what happened in the room, while Goldie and everyone else worked under them. I don’t think it’s said enough about how many women cultured and cultivated drum ’n’ bass to be what it is. This diptych encapsulates that. Storm's looking out to the crowd while Kemi's looking down at herself, keeping her eye on the decks.

De La Soul

Normski: Here’s De La in one of my 'five-minute sessions.' It was their first big gig at Brixton Academy. I had a girlfriend, Bliss, who DJ’d on a pirate station, and she said, ‘De La Soul are here! We’ve got to go. I’ve got an idea: get some daisies for the D.A.I.S.Y. Age,’ because that was De La Soul’s acronym for ‘Da Inner Sound, Y’all.’ They were rappers who weren’t about hypermasculinity or luxury, but instead about peace, culture, and harmony.

So I went to Camden Market, spent £1.50 on these dry daisies, caught the train to Brixton and blagged my way in. I caught De La right as they were about to go on stage, but promised I’d be quick.

We ended up in this tiny gap behind the venue, in the back street. It’s nighttime, and I’ve got my little softbox flash out, trying to light three faces with one bulb. I take a few shots, then say, 'Guys, would you mind holding these?' and pull out the beat-up bunch. They’re like, 'Not really! Why the fuck would we be holding those?!' I explain the concept. They go, 'Alright, cool,' but you can tell from the photo they’re not fully 'cool'.

The photo came out great. No one had thought to shoot them that way before. That’s what I love about connecting with a subject’s message and translating it visually.

Method Man

Eddie: Picture editors always asked me to shoot acts that essentially terrified them, and Wu-Tang most certainly fit that brief. They had a reputation for lifting the air with blunts, being loud like an army sharpening swords, and carrying the spirit of gladiators. I’ve been lucky enough to photograph every member and have plenty of yarns from that time.

Ol’ Dirty Bastard once asked me to destroy the negatives. That moment has never left me. I watched the entire Wu-Tang Clan getting passport photos taken in a booth at Earl’s Court station. Popa Wu invited me onto their bus, where we listened to Stax records from Putney to Kentish Town. It was my first encounter with them, and their first time outside the US.

The Method Man photograph feels definitive of that era of Black British music culture. I shot it on Ilford HP5+ British film in a scrubby space behind the Forum, while Masta Killa and Ghostface were scaling walls like Spider-Man. These NYC kids were like comic book characters showing off their superpowers. Method Man came over and said, 'Let me show you a trick.' He pulled his cap strap over his eye, snapped his eyelid back and made the face, the rest is history.

The vibe reminds me of cult vigilante films Death Wish 1,2 and 3 which were filmed in the brillantly gritty east London which was meant to be the Bronx.

She Rockers

American hip hop was about shiny clothes and afros, fur coats, crocodile skin shoes. The golden era was colours, flare and noise. Rappers wore varsity jackets and old-school shit I loved, like FILA tracksuits and big Porsche glasses.

Our look in the UK was based on the reggae/raggamuffin scene. It was Clarks, corduroys, pin rolls, argon socks, yeah! Just a completely different take on it, and an independent identity.

I took this promo shot of the She Rockers, a pioneering British all-female hip-hop group in Shepherds Bush. They were wearing high-top Adidas Erwing trainers, layering the chunky gold jewellery of Black Atlantic hip-hop scene with their own identity. They’re projecting that sexuality isn’t about showing skin, it's about looking cool and being accessorised with plenty of attitude. This picture has been reposted and repurposed more times than I can count, and was acquired by the V&A museum for its cultural significance in depicting the Black experience in the UK.

Normski on Eddie: Estelle

One photographer, I've admired from the day I met him, was Eddie. If someone asks me ‘Who’s the best other UK photographer?’ I’d say Eddie Otchere, straight away. You know why? Because Eddie's always loved photography, he loves taking pictures, he loves the cameras and playing with all different types of film. He'd rock up carrying a Rollieflex camera or some secondhand old piece of shit and take a beautiful shot. He’s not somebody who takes pictures, he’s a master artist of the photography world.

He came up about ten years after me, at that point, magazines only wanted to feature me as a TV star, a celeb. I was the one who started it, yeah, but I also stepped back when I got on TV, just as everything I loved was beginning to happen, when Eddie kicked up and I thought, ‘Damn. He’s shooting everything I wanted to shoot.’ He was working for all the magazines, getting the time to really capture people and transform British artists into stars across the globe without the 'grab-the-shot mentality' I’d had.

Eddie on Normski: Public Enemy

Junglist Lads

Eddie: You asked me to select a photo I’ve taken that feels definitive of Black British music culture and this is it; Junglist lads outside an old Jungle record shop (with its own folklore) called De Underground in Forest Gate.

Silver Bullet Posse

Normski: I love this photo. It’s a perfect example of 1990s street style and commanding your environment. Different races, different haircuts, different fashion, taken on the steps of a Lloyds Bank.

Looking back now, I realise I was one of the only people photographing a burgeoning 1980s/90s era. A load of my work is just portraits of young, mostly Black, inner-city kids. It was a moment in culture and society where, had I not taken these photographs, there would be far fewer records of that scene.

‘The Music is Black: A British Story’ is at V&A East until 3 January 2027

Faces and Phases, the groundbreaking portrait series to address the discrimination and systematic violence facing Black LGBTQIA+ individuals in South Africa, is marking its 20^th anniversary this year. The photographic and narrative project was created by South African photographer Zanele Muholi to address the (under)representation of members of the communities in mainstream visual culture and to help change negative narratives about queer people on the continent. The body of work features hundreds of powerful black-and-white portraits.

'I want people to know that we are here, we were here before and we will always be here without fear of exclusion or being excluded, without fear of being side lined, without fear of being undermined because any person who says I am and comes forth means that they are doing that on behalf of many others who are silenced by immediate spaces from their churches to schools to workplaces,' says Muholi to Wallpaper* about the beginnings of producing what is now 'the most important Black visual archive' focusing on Black lesbian, trans and queer communities, having seen how they are depicted in mainstream media.

The individuals featured in Faces and Phases are 'participants who are partaking in the most important study of our lifetime,' as the self-described visual activist puts it. They are all 18 or older and are openly themselves. It is a deliberate decision by the artist to ensure that 'I present my people in the most positive, healthiest, and dignified manner to educate many others within the continent and the African continent to say that hear us, respect us, and recognise us because our existence saves lives.'

That’s the kind of practice that Muholi is renowned for both locally and internationally: bringing visibility to Black lesbian, trans, and queers communities, and addressing prejudice, discrimination, stereotypes and violence aimed at members of these communities. The artist has been teaching photography for over 20 years, extending that to include uplifting initiatives that provide photography lessons to young people and Black women in townships and rural areas in South Africa, as a way 'for them to write their own stories.'

The Muholi Art Institute partners with visual art teachers in South Africa and sponsors students on trips to art fairs, museums, and galleries to experience what they are taught in class and to interact with practising artists and other professionals in the field. The institute also hosts an independent artists’ residency. For about a decade and a half, Muholi has funded close to 200 people to study photography at the Market Photo Workshop, a renowned Johannesburg photography school which counts the artist as an alumnus. 'In that way, I’m not alone and people get to share their visibility as well and at the same time get some qualifications to produce work in their communities and surrounding areas,' shares the artist, adding the idea is 'not to enjoy your own resources but to share with different communities in the most kind manner.'

In early March, Muholi was named the 2026 laureate of the prestigious Hasselblad Award, the world’s largest photography prize which acknowledges the artist’s 'powerful and sustained contribution to contemporary art,' and pointing out 'activism and community work is an integral part of their practice, which combines political urgency and formal mastery, making Muholi a central figure in global queer visual culture.' Previous winners of the Hasselblad award include Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Nan Goldin, David Goldblatt, Malick Sidibé and Carrie Mae Weems. 'It means a whole lot. It’s for all of us,' says Muholi, referring to Black Lesbian, queer and trans communities. 'It’s not for me. And it means that the world is listening.'

Muholi studied Advanced Photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg in the early 2000s, and later earned an MFA in Documentary Media at Toronto’s Ryerson University in 2009. In 2013, the artist was named an Honorary Professor of video and photography at the University of the Arts/Hochschule für Künste in Bremen, Germany (2013), and received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Liège in Belgium in 2023.

For over twenty years, Muholi has been at the forefront of celebrating and documenting the lives of Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex communities through photography, helping to shift narratives and expand conversations about activism, representation, race, identity, and human rights. These themes are reflected in a growing number of projects, including Only half the Picture (2003-4) on lesbian lives and hate crime survivors, Brave Beauties (2014-ongoing), which celebrates transwomen and Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) (2014-ongoing, a self-portrait series which challenges stereotypes and representation of Black people in visual culture.

'Before I am a photographer, I am a visual activist living in the art world trying to make a difference to ensure that there is visibility of Black bodies in mainstream photography,' explains Muholi. 'And it basically means that for the next generations, they have a sense of who we are as individuals, as communities, as gender non-conforming people and also human beings who are making a difference in this lifetime,' adds Muholi.

Some of these works by the photographer are held in collections including the Pinault Collection (France), Tate Modern (United Kingdom), Museum of Modern Art (United States), Foundation Louis Vuitton (France), and Wits Art Museum (South Africa) The work has also been show in solo and group shows around the world including at Tate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Fotografiska Stockholm, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale.

On 10 October through 24 April 2027, Muholi’s work will be on view in a major solo exhibition at the Hasselblad Centre in Gothenburg, Sweden, as part of their Hasselblad Award prize, which includes SEK 2,000,000 (about £163,000), a gold medal and a Hasselblad camera. The solo show’s opening will be preceded by a week of public events and the award ceremony on 9 October.

'I am here because of the community that helped me,' says Muholi, adding, 'we owe it to ourselves to make sure that there is a visual archive that speaks to the moment, and speaks to the future as well.'

The twin fascinations of fallen Empire and urban exploration collide in photographer Eric Lusito’s new book, Soviet Scientific Institutes. A visual essay chronicling the catastrophic decline in funding and research in the post-Soviet era, Lusito’s camera takes us on a fascinating tour of the faded relics of communism’s utopian and authoritarian grip on the country’s scientific endeavours.

An introduction by history professor Paul Josephson frames these images in context, chronicling how the focus on science became one of the driving philosophical and economic forces behind the Soviet Union’s national identity. This was coupled with the distinctive aesthetic qualities of the era’s analogue technology, bombastic scale and a commonplace incorporation of vivid elements of art and design.

There’s an obvious retro-tinged delight in these images, along with poignant schadenfreude at the combination of misplaced optimism and downright mystery that underpins the relationship between these places with Cold War militarism. Whole communities were dedicated to such ‘Big Science’ projects, often closed off from the rest of society.

Lusito’s journey took him around the sites that still exist in the USSR’s former republics and satellites (access in Russia being somewhat difficult). Despite the obvious decay and apparent obsolescence, some of these facilities are still very much in operation.

Facilities visited include a cosmic ray research centre located deep in the Armenian mountains and a vast radar array in Ukraine, apparently ‘believed to be a climate-altering weapon’ by local residents.

Soviet Scientific Institutes, Eric Lusito, £26.95, Fuel Publishing, Fuel-Design.com, @FuelPublishing

Hans Hansen is not necessarily well known to anyone but the most studious of photographic historians. Throughout a long career, the self-taught German photographer has quietly carved a niche as a master of still life and commercial image-making. His work explores colour and composition, as well as drawing lessons from modern artistic movements, resulting in some of the most striking and memorable product images of the 1970s, 1980s and beyond.

Curated by Dr Esther Ruelfs and Claire Müller, ‘Photo: Hans Hansen’ is a large-scale retrospective of Hansen’s work, a collection of 220 photographs that cover every aspect of a six-decade career. Hansen’s clients have included brands such as Volkswagen, Kodak, Erco, Nikon and Lufthansa.

In unskilled hands, his stark compositions and use of light and shadow would create stark, lifeless imagery, but somehow, Hansen ekes out the playful and the unexpected, creating images that have formed the heart of influential campaigns in the process.

Born in Bielefeld in 1940, Hans Hansen studied lithography and Applied Graphics at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, although he never graduated. Working with a medium-format Rolleiflex camera, Hansen began his career with a collaboration capturing the Finnish designer Tapio Wirkkala’s glass collaborations with Iittala.

Hansen used the camera as a compositional and creative tool, part informed by the era’s rediscovery and rehabilitation of the Bauhaus and other modern movements. This is photographic minimalism, to be sure, but it’s also technically precise.

Among the images on display are his seminal vision of the 1988 Volkswagen Golf, dismantled into 6,843 constituent parts. This advertising photograph was actually an update of an earlier campaign for the VW Beetle, part of the ‘Think Small’ series commissioned by the pioneering New York ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach.

Working with the deep-pocketed auto industry – he also worked for Porsche, Mercedes-Benz and Fiat – also helped Hansen acquire studio space and technology, including custom flash units. He was able to deploy the unexpected use of colour to highlight form and brand, taking car photography away from its serious, quasi-scientific roots.

His work for Lufthansa was paired with the typography of Otl Aicher, showcasing the very best in German creativity. Other specialities included the use of abstracted series, especially for the work done for lighting manufacturer Erco, as well as food photography and his own personal projects, including the most recent, Analog.

The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg manages Hans Hansen’s 10,000-strong slide archive, as well as his personal collection of art glass, documentation and correspondence. The exhibition is a rare opportunity to revisit the work of this pioneering photographer.

‘Photo: Hans Hansen’ is at MKG Hamburg from 17 April to 1 November 2026.

For more information, visit MKG-Hamburg.de, @MKGhamburg, Hansen.Works

You might remember Prince as many things: one of music’s most thrillingly talented and innovative stars; a polymath who created his own artistic HQ Paisley Park to realise the extent of his ambitions; a symbol both figuratively and, for a short name-change period, literally, who still defines the colour purple. But for Steve Parke, Prince was both a boss and a friend – a man who offered him the chance to expand his own artistic remit and was notably generous with the opportunities he gifted to those around him.

Parke first began working with Prince aged 25 during the rollout of his 1988 album ‘Lovesexy’. Having shown some of his artwork to a member of Prince’s touring band, he was offered the chance to design part of the stage set for the video of single ‘Glam Slam’ and was then taken into the fold, designing T-shirts, helping with creative odd jobs and, later, painting what would become the sleeve for 1990’s ‘Graffiti Bridge’ LP.

'We learned on the job, for sure,' Parke recalls. '[Prince] would say, ‘If you can do this, I wonder if you can do this?’ And he would ask if you'd want to try it. That was pretty amazing because, when I look back on it, I don't know too many other musicians at his level at that time who would have done that.'

One such opportunity came in 1996 when, intrigued by the slowly proliferating availability of the still-burgeoning digital camera, Prince asked Parke – who already had experience in analogue live music photography – to test out the new technology with him. Already ensconced in the inner circle of Paisley Park, the shoots would be spontaneous and on the fly; a pair of artists experimenting with the immediacy of working digitally in real time. 'We worked by the seat of our pants, we didn’t really employ traditional techniques,' he explains. 'He was very enamoured with the idea that we could just shoot and he could see it right away, so the casualness [of the photos] came from the fact that we could just do it. It's like having a cell phone now – you take a ridiculous number of photos; way more than you would if you were using film. That's what was different about having this immediate feedback. It gave him a lot of freedom to just try things.'

Aside from a handful of images that were selected as promo shots, most of these pictures have remained unseen until now. But in his new two-volume book Prince: Collected Photographs, Parke throws open his extensive archive to let the world into the inner workings of the legend’s visual process. There are photos of Prince at his Paisley Park home and with his first wife Mayte Garcia and dog Mia; others show him messing about at a children’s playground, or in different outfits that he’d cycle through in the same shoot, trying to find the vision that clicked.

Importantly, all the images are ones that Prince – who passed away in 2016 – had OK-ed at the time. 'I feel confident in sharing them because these are all things he approved,' Parke notes. It means that, a decade after Prince’s death, and having spent significant time debating how best to share the work (the first volume is presented in black and white as a work-around for the colouring issues that they faced by shooting in such an off the cuff manner), fans are now able to get a glimpse of the notoriously meticulously and aesthetically-minded artist in a more casual setting. 'It was just the two of us and there was no outside pressure on any of it,” says Parke. “A lot of the shots didn't have a deadline or a specific purpose, so I definitely see the work reflecting more of the person I would see on a daily basis rather than the rock star – even though there are those pictures too.'

Parke’s favourite shots in the collection are from a day spent with the artist at a local arboretum. The pictures are casual and intimate - a snapshot of a moment that the photographer recalls fondly. 'I think that’s the only time I can think of when it was just the two of us with no-one to pull him away. Anytime we were in the studio, his brain would be in all the other things he had going on. But when we were out in the arboretum, there were no cell phones and nobody was going to bother him. It was a beautiful day that sticks in my mind just because it was so unusual on so many fronts,' Parke remembers.

And while the hundreds of images shown in Prince: Collected Works speak to the hefty expectations at Paisley Park ('You were put through the ringer a little bit with the number of hours you were awake and the amount of stuff you were expected to produce,' Parke laughs), the photographer’s main takeaway, having spent the last years trawling his archives and remembering his storied time under Prince’s employment, is of how much the artist cared about putting the time in. When most people were sleeping on the advent of new technology, Prince was the one testing the waters, and working out how to use it to his advantage.

'He didn't take his skill set for granted. He worked at it. He pushed it,' says Parke. 'He is one of the hardest-working people I've ever met and I’ve worked with some pretty hardworking people. The difference with Prince was that he put the work in and a lot of people don't.'

Prince: Collected Photographs is published April 14th via ACC Art Books.

In 2015, the photographer Joel Meyerowitz found himself in the preserved studio of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964). Casa Morandi at 36 Via Fondazza in Bologna – a museum that was formed from the artist’s studio and residence after his death – retains the physical legacy of a lifetime of close looking, and is filled with the objects that were the subject matter of Morandi’s celebrated still-life works.

The result of Meyerowitz’s visit was a celebrated and now sought-after book, Morandi’s Objects, first published in 2016 by Damiani. Now, the photographer has revisited his imagery from that trip, creating a new, expanded edition of the book that delves deeper into his relationship with the artist and his lasting influence.

Meyerowitz is not the only visual artist to find solace in Morandi’s totemic imagery – Bridget Niedermair published Horizon in 2016, and countless architects cite the solemn stillness of his compositions as inspiration. Morandi's paintings can be seen in the background of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.

In 2023, Amanda Renshaw curated an exhibition of Morandi’s Objects at Venice’s Palazzo Franchetti. On the occasion of the new publication, Wallpaper* discussed the updated book and the work of the Italian artist with Meyerowitz.

Wallpaper*: Before you started this project, did you consider Morandi an influence on your work?

Joel Meyerowitz: No, Morandi was not a direct influence on my work because I wasn't really a still-life photographer; I was a street photographer. I loved Morandi for his work and for the mystery and spatial joys of looking at this work. I really felt like I had learned a lot from seeing the way he used simple things to make really profound statements, but he wasn’t a direct influence on the work I had done before going to his studio.

W*: What drew you to this project? For art historians, these mostly pragmatic objects are almost sacred – how did it reflect your choice of framing and backdrop?

JM: I had a commission to do a book on Provence. While in Provence, I went to visit Cézanne’s studio in Aix-En-Provence. While in Cézanne’s studio, I noticed he had painted the walls of his studio a dark grey, and on a table against the grey wall, he had painted his still lifes, which were mostly fruit. You’ve seen his apples and oranges; sometimes there were skulls, and sometimes there were some sculptural objects, and occasionally there were bottles in his still lifes.

I was interested in why he used grey. In our contemporary artistic culture, artist studios are generally white boxes. So I began to think about the grey background, and how it made things stand out for themselves, without the contrast of the white wall with the given object.

So when I went back to the place I was living, in Bonnieux, Provence, I set up, as a test for myself, a grey background, and I started putting objects on it to see if I could come up with a really good answer as to why Cezanne did that. I became so interested in moving objects around on a grey background that I felt like I was opening myself – for the first time – to still lifes.

Then, at some point, I returned to Tuscany, where I was living, and I thought, ‘I’m going to go to Bologna and visit Morandi’s studio’; I heard you could go in and see where he worked. So, I went to Bologna, looked at Morandi’s work surface, and saw it was totally different from Cézanne’s, and Cézanne was an influence on Morandi.

My point is, I became interested in objects on backgrounds, because I had never done still lifes. Suddenly, I found myself asking a question. What is a still life, to me? That led me to make more of my own still lifes, and at some point, I thought I would go to Morandi’s house, to that studio, and ask the curators if I could photograph all of his objects and do it on his work table, so that I could show the world what it was Morandi was working with, and how he transformed them.

It was a really simple way of honouring Morandi’s huge effort, over all those years. I promised myself not to assemble objects to create ‘faux Morandis’; I just wanted to show the interested public what those objects looked like, so they could see for themselves how he played with them.

W*: The presentation and framing of the objects is – inevitably – very painterly. Your work has covered a huge variety of subjects, events and places, often capturing dynamic moments. How does photographing static objects compare to this diversity, especially in terms of lighting and framing?

JM: In this case, to honour a single object meant that when I put it on Morandi’s table, the game I played was turning each object slowly and carefully, so as to not remove any of the dust on the object. I carefully turned the object around, so I could see all of its faces, to see if there was one face that spoke to me more than any other position as I turned it.

And it was true! There were objects that, as I turned them, suddenly had character, as if they stood up strong and tall. It might have been from a dent in it, scratches on it, or some angle of it that gave it a presence.

I was looking for presence. Did these objects have their own character, and the question that I asked after that was, did Morandi do that himself, when he was playing with these figures that he was putting on his work surface? Did he turn them around the same way, to see if they offered him a new presence, new energy, a new point of view?

I think I was simply trying to honour each individual object. I never moved the camera; the camera stayed in the same position for the 300 objects I photographed there. That way, they would always be the same size, as Morandi saw them, and the same size for the public to look at them.

What I learned from Morandi’s assembling of objects was that for many years, when I was working on the street, and still true to today, when I raise my camera, its usually because there’s a cluster of people on the street, presenting some kind of field of force, some kind of energy, and some interaction between a group of three or four people who are walking together, and perhaps a couple, off to the right or left of this cluster.

I feel an energy in the space of the street, the light of the street. I tried to translate that into the still lifes that I was making for myself. I was using street energy, or ‘street assembly’, as my thematic undertone to give my arrangement of forms some kind of new feeling, or something that I recognised from the unpredictable outside world I worked in. So, in that regard, I can understand the joys that Morandi gained by playing with his objects over and over again for all his years.

Morandi's Objects. The Complete Archive of Casa Morandi, Joel Meyerowitz, texts by Joel Meyerowitz, Maggie Barrett and Amanda Renshaw, Damiani, €55, DamianiBooks.com, JoelMeyerowitz.com, MuseiBologna.it

To the uninitiated, 222 West 23rd Street in Manhattan is just another New York address. To those in the know, it’s the location of the unforgettable Chelsea Hotel, once the byword for rock’n’roll excess and general 70s seediness. The 12-storey Queen Anne revival structure is still there and hosting guests, albeit in a far more upmarket capacity than the legends tell.

The Hotel Chelsea (Chelsea Hotel is how it came to be known in its heyday) is the subject of a new photobook from Albert Scopin, born Albert Schöpflin in 1943 and now an acclaimed artist working on large scale pieces using asphalt as a primary material. Scopin ‘moved to New York in 1969, the day after the moon landing’ and ended up in the Chelsea Hotel for his first two and a half years in the city.

Whilst making a name for himself as a photographic assistant, Scopin also turned his camera on his fellow Chelsea Hotel dwellers. This eclectic bunch of artists, filmmakers, musicians and hangers-on made for a rich environment for portraiture, even if at the time many of the people he photographed were largely unknown.

It’s remarkable to look through these pages and see the nascent New York scene emerge, with portraits of, among others, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, then a couple, as well as filmmakers like Wim Wenders and Milos Forman. Avant-garde director Jonas Mekas also lived in the Hotel, as did the late queer activist Rosa von Praunheim.

It was a target rich environment for a photographer (Scopin was working as an assistant to fashion photographer Bill King at the time), yet remarkably Scopin set this portfolio of images aside, believed them to be lost, and wasn't reunited with them for over four decades. In addition to an exhibition at Berlin’s FWR Gallery, this new monograph assembles these rediscovered images and places them in their historic context.

As well as the assembled emerging art crowd, Scopin captured those that worked at the Chelsea, as well as the incipient squalor that was to grant the establishment such notoriety towards the end of this stage of its life (it was the infamous location of Nancy Spungen’s murder at the hands of Sid Vicious in 1978. A few decades before Dylan Thomas had also died at the hotel).

Using a simple Kodak Instamatic, Scopin’s candid imagery captures the bohemian underworld in all its unvarnished glory, with Warhol’s Factory acolytes serving at bit part players amidst a cast of genuine eccentrics and innovators. A valuable piece of artistic, social and LGBTQ+ history.

Scopin: Chelsea Hotel, € 38.00, texts by Albert Scopin Schöpflin, Michael Stoeber, Kerber, KerberVerlag.com, Amazon.co.uk, feldbuschwiesnerrudolph.com

When Gordon Parks picked up a camera in 1937, aged 25, Black Americans around him were processing the repercussions of the Civil War. In 1865, four million enslaved people were emancipated; while they attempted to build their lives over the ensuing decades, they were subjected to humiliating racial segregation laws, mob violence and lynching, and denied a vote.

Parks, born into poverty and segregation, was a witness to it all. After buying a Voigtländer Brillant camera from a Seattle pawn shop for less than $12, he taught himself to take photographs. In 1948, Parks was hired by Life magazine, the first Black staff member, writing articles to accompany his photo essays, which emphasised the dignity and resilience of his subjects.

Many of Parks’ vital works, including his Segregation in the South series and portrait of Dr Martin Luther King Jr as he delivered his landmark ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, have now been united in London in a curation at Alison Jacques gallery, overseen by social justice activist Bryan Stevenson.

Stevenson, who received the Martin Luther King Jr Nonviolent Peace Prize in 2018, and was named by Time as one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2015, brings a sharp eye to his curation, which spans a 25-year period, from 1942 to 1967. The exhibition, titled ‘We Shall Not be Moved’, is named after the protest anthem that stemmed from the African American spiritual song ‘I Shall Not Be Moved’, indicating steely resolve.

For Stevenson, Parks’ role as a humanitarian becomes the central focus. ‘In some ways, Gordon Parks was a role model,’ he says. ‘He's helped me see the importance of narrative in advancing justice and the power of art to create spaces where you can impact both the mind and the heart. I love that he elevated the lived experience of so many people like me and he allowed us to see our struggles in a larger context. It was a joy to curate an exhibit that animates the power, dignity, strength and resolve of people who are oppressed but determined to be free.’

The scale of the works on show here renders them all the more powerful. Outside Looking In, taken of Black children looking through steel mesh at white children in a playground in Alabama in 1956, is emotive and striking. Department Store and Mr and Mrs Albert Thornton feel almost too intimate to view.

‘There is an inherent tension in wanting to educate people about the harm, degradation and brutality of bigotry and discrimination without completely presenting or defining people in terms of their victimisation,’ says Stevenson, pointing out that Parks was thoughtful in treading the line between exploitation and education. ‘Gordon Parks seemed to be aware of this challenge and his images were unusually effective because they depicted the brutality and anguish of exclusion and racism while still emphasising the dignity and beauty of the people excluded. Parks documented the harm of segregation but also the hope of those who were marginalised. You respect and admire the subjects in many of his photos because he's made you aware of the burdens they bear, but also their determination to persevere.’

Seen together, Parks’ photographs are an emotional tribute to this perseverance in the face of a seemingly casual everyday injustice. It runs through everything, from a child’s ice-cream cone to a student peering through a microscope. Adds Stevenson: ‘Through the lens of Gordon Parks, Black people could be beautiful, complex, joyous, grief-stricken, regal, triumphant, burdened and overwhelmed. He made the Black community fully human, which was atypical of the images most frequently presented, and especially uncommon in mainstream publications with white readers.’

For Parks, photography was the medium through which he could achieve the greatest impact. In 1970, when speaking to Eldridge Cleaver, an early leader of the Black Power organisation, The Black Panther Party, he commented: ‘You have a 45mm automatic pistol on your lap, and I have a 35mm camera on my lap, and my weapon is just as powerful as yours.’

'We Shall Not Be Moved' at Alison Jacques London from 5 March – 11 April 2026, alisonjacques.com

When Tops first appeared as a short film in 2024, it was brief and restrained, shaped by touch, breath and proximity. As a book, the project stretches out, unfolding as a series of still moments that reward slower attention. For artist Lindsay Perryman, who was keen to portray transmasculine vulnerability after their own experience with top surgery, the move from film to book was never about translation, but continuation. 'After the short film, I thought it was necessary to continue it,' they say. 'The complexity comes through when you include different people’s perspectives.'

Where the film’s intimacy lies in closeness, the book introduces reflection. Still images allow motifs to recur and meaning to surface gradually, often only in hindsight. Scars, which Perryman has described as taking on new significance during the editing process, register here less as evidence of surgery than as signs of care, of having been held, attended to and supported. That care also extends beyond what is visible. It appears in the practical knowledge exchanged between people, from advice and reassurance to recommendations passed from one person to another. Healing is not framed as an individual experience, but as something shaped collectively.

One of the most compelling aspects of Tops is how it understands community. Care does not sit alongside the work as sentiment; it gives the work its structure. 'I would hope that people see that community is very important,' Perryman says, 'in all aspects of queer life. I also hope the work invites those outside that community to witness without spectacle.'

That refusal of spectacle runs throughout the book. The images are calm and unforced, resisting the neutrality of the studio in favour of bedrooms and lived-in spaces. Healing, Perryman insists, happens at home. Subjects appear at ease and unguarded, and the camera stays close without intrusion. At moments, the act of photographing appears in a mirror or reflection, not as self-assertion but as an acknowledgement of presence. Authorship here is relational, with the photographer positioned inside the conditions of trust that make the work possible.

More recently, Perryman’s practice has begun to move beyond photography. 'I used to identify strictly as a photographer,' they say. 'But this work pushed me to explore other mediums.' Cyanotypes and sculptural forms are emerging as part of a growing archive. The impulse remains consistent: to create records that take up space, that can be physically encountered, and that resist erasure through their material presence. 'I didn’t see much of this kind of work when I was growing up,' Perryman says. “Making something that could exist in history felt important. For my younger self, and for others.'

Ultimately, Tops brings into view forms of support that often go undocumented. It doesn’t offer resolution, but recognition: of shared knowledge, and the quiet ways people look after one another. In doing so, it frames archiving not simply as preservation, but as an ongoing responsibility.

TOPS is published by Palm* Studios

palmstudios.co.uk

Photographer Marc Wilson’s latest monograph looks at the spaces and landscape of post-industrial Britain. In The Edge of Ruin, Wilson gleans an uncanny beauty from land that has been churned up by centuries of process, extraction and exploitation, exploiting the atmospheric haze of typical British weather to give these places an otherworldly, alien feel.

To the unfamiliar, these images don’t betray their industrial heritage; it’s only when one delves into the captions and accompanying essays that you realise that these contours and skylines represent the remnants of various industries, from abandoned tracks and spoil heaps, to quarries, mines, and clay works, to irrigation and water supply projects.

For Wilson, the challenge was to document these ‘seemingly benign places’ without romanticism, demonisation or nostalgia. Noting that many of these environments continue to pollute their surroundings, despite their bucolic appearance, Wilson says the images present a ‘version of our own future: a landscape tainted by ruthless exploitation of the world we inhabit.’

‘I walked 1,000km to reach desolate locations that had been underestimated and uninhabited until their riches were exposed,’ he continues, ‘[these are] landscapes that were formed by nature and remoulded in the pursuit of power and wealth. In making this book, I discovered the shadows and impressions of the past.’

Wilson’s other books include The Last Stand (currently in its fourth reprint), a visual documentation of a journey along the coastlines reshaped by the Second World War. Wilson travelled 23,000 miles to 143 different locations in the UK and Northern Europe, chronicling the decay and remnants of the crumbling fortifications that still stud the dunes, sands and shallow waters of what was once a substantial military bulwark.

‘Photography, Video Game, Landscape’ by Pascal Greco

A very different take on the post-industrial aesthetic comes from photographer Pascal Greco. On the surface, Photography, Video Game, Landscape appears to be a travelogue through a mix of moody, spectacular and quotidian landscapes.

But this quiet realism is an illusion, for these are all ‘in-game spaces’, captured as part of an increasingly popular trend for chronicling the digital picturesque as part of one’s journey through a game space.

‘I travelled to more than ten regions in four years, including Northern California (Cyberpunk 2077), Japan (Assassin's Creed Shadows), Mexico, and Australia (Death Stranding 2),’ Greco says.

The book, which is also accompanied by an ‘in-game film’, Place(s) Space(s), is the artist and avid gamer’s second foray into in-game photography, following 2022’s (sold-out) Place(s), a paean to the world of Hideo Kojima’s cult PlayStation title Death Stranding.

Greco spent hours during the pandemic exploring Kojima’s reimagining of a futuristic Iceland. The new book brings together vistas from over a dozen games, fabricated realities that are – to many people – more familiar and evocative than real landscapes.

Just as Wilson shows us a world inexorably changed by technology, Greco’s eye captures realms that only technology could have created.

For the last few years, Kalpesh Lathigra's work has moved around ideas of home and belonging, mostly to test where it breaks down. Mémoire Temporelle began as a way of walking Mumbai with his family history in mind: tracing his grandfather's route from Gujarat to Bombay, then on to Nairobi and London, while trying (and not quite managing) to answer the question of 'home.' It's a project that carries the pull of memory, but it also pushes back against easy nostalgia by admitting fiction and the fact that his gaze has been shaped by a Euro-American photographic education.

His first solo exhibition in India, ‘The Lives We Dream in Passing’, gathers the full trilogy: Mémoire Temporelle; The Indian Photo Studio (a box of found studio portraits, faces staring out from unknown lives); and Junagadh, his father's hometown, where streets and hotel rooms become charged spaces of looking. The exhibition pulls together photographs that already existed separately, but something has shifted. He's more certain about his position now, and he's stopped trying to smooth it out.

Seen together, the work feels settled not because it offers answers, but because Lathigra is clearer about where he stands inside it. 'What feels settled is an understanding of me,' he says. 'The chaotic energy in my head, the photographs as a kind of symphony.' Over time, his attention moved away from negotiating identity and towards trusting his own responses as an artist. That clarity came into focus in the hotel rooms of Junagadh. He's long been drawn to hotels as spaces where he can be alone and anonymous. Neither India nor the UK, the room sits outside fixed categories. While there, reading Letters to a Young Poet, he was drawn to Rilke's idea of solitude as strength and the need to 'embrace the difficult.' He looked around the room and, as he puts it, 'the realisation of who I am at heart and what position I hold as an individual hit me.'

From inside, often at height and using a basic point-and-shoot camera, Lathigra began photographing the street below. The limitations of the camera and the distance of the view mattered. 'It allowed me to be a voyeur,' he says. Looking through windows, he became aware not only of gestures unfolding outside, but of his own act of looking. Only later did he find language for it. When he came across the idea of positionality, it felt less like a theory and more like a name for what he'd already been doing. 'The window, the height, that distance represented a kind of divorce,' he says. 'Once I realised that, I leaned into it.'

Importantly, that distance is not treated as something to overcome. Moving away from photojournalism's fixation on access and immersion, Lathigra resists the idea that proximity equals authenticity. The separation in these images is deliberate; the work doesn't try to disguise the fact that it's made by someone who grew up in Forest Gate, London, and carries that history with him.

Back on the street, the work changes register. It's no longer about the elevated view from above, but about being on the ground with a gaze that remains, unavoidably, shaped elsewhere. The work originally carried the working title A Point of Departure, inspired by thoughts of his father leaving India and the lives that followed. Being there again wasn't about reclaiming a place. 'It's an arrival,' he says, 'but validated in myself.' The photographs acknowledge the Euro-American influences that shape how he sees, without apology. 'The water you drink is you,' he says, pointing to the ways education, reference and experience quietly assert themselves. He cites Joachim Brohm's Ohio as a work that resonated deeply – not as a template, but as confirmation that a way of seeing is always formed by where you've been.

Across the exhibition, many images remain partially obscured or hard to pin down. In one, a car interior breaks apart in reflection, inside and outside collapsing together. In another, palms dissolve into haze. For Lathigra, that uncertainty is central. 'Opacity is everything,' he says. To explain too much would close the work down. Meaning is left open, unfixed.

The Lives We Dream in Passing does not aim for closure. Junagadh, Lathigra suggests, remains unfinished – he's thinking about going back with his father, who turns 80 this year. A road trip, maybe, to close something out. For now, what's offered is a photographer's way of seeing: shaped by contradictions, comfortable with distance, resistant to resolution. Lathigra's not trying to arrive anywhere. He's showing what it looks like to accept where you're standing.

'The Lives We Dream in Passing' is at NCPA (National Centre for Performing Arts) Photography Gallery, Mumbai until 3 March 2026

ncpamumbai.com

'Find me 20 boys. Athletic. Abs. Good thighs.' Out of context, this line reads almost camp in its authority. In context, it is edged with anger and fervid inquiry. In her debut monograph, The Boyfriend Casting (2025), published by Libraryman, photographer Rosie Harriet Ellis charts a contemporary coming-of-age. Shot over five years, the project unfolds in distinct acts, moving from a tender domestic closeness to a cool, clinical study of the male form. The work is a personal undoing, a reckoning with intimacy, with the camera, with men.

'I needed a new boyfriend,' Ellis writes. 'Not one to love, one to photograph.'

The first chapter serves as the book’s catalyst. It opens with a reclining male figure, echoing Diego Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus before suffragette Mary Richardson’s blade slashed its surface in 1914. These early photographs, made while Ellis was working on her master’s, focus on her then-boyfriend Nick. He is held in a tender, near-obsessive gaze. The hues are warm and the light soft, but her focus remains exacting.

His body becomes a measured terrain: contours surveyed, muscles charted, limbs laid out like coordinates. 'He performed, and I adored,' Ellis writes in her accompanying text. What began as a mapping of desire soon became a source of tension. Two years into the project, just months before her degree show, Nick withdrew consent. Ripping up the model release, erasing the work. In an act not unlike that of Slasher Mary.

Prompted by this rupture, Ellis cast a substitute. A pretend boyfriend. 'I also wanted to make him jealous,' she reveals on a call. 'There are many photographic layers and personal agendas at play.'

For the book’s second act, she and Nick devised a pose guide that could be replicated by understudies. A studio was booked, 20 pairs of his white briefs purchased, with their old duvet marking the stage. Act three, as it were, sees a series of men standing in identical poses, their bodies disciplined into sameness. Tattoos and hair patterns rebel as subtle signs of difference. The resulting images are chillingly anatomical. Even the light is homogenising and impersonal. Ellis explains that at the time she was shooting luxury handbags for commercial clients and lit these men in the same way, as desirable, interchangeable objects. The models appear dissociated from their own bodies. Standing there, standing in.

After the sterile studio portraits, Ellis joined a martial arts gym (as in any good break-up) to understand why she felt so strongly about Nick. 'A big part of it was how obsessed with his body he was,' she confirms. These images depict wrestlers, not lovers or pretend boyfriends. Cropped, monochrome frames abstract these bodies into a pas de deux of power and struggle, classical in its brawl for dominance.

'I’m fascinated by masculinity, male ego, and have always been hugely jealous of it.' Ellis explains that a lot of her work is occupied with masculine fragility 'that sits so close to the surface', which 'could all fall apart' at any moment. This recalls Raewyn W Connell’s concept of Hegemonic Masculinity, which theorises the instability beneath masculinity’s claim to dominance.

Throughout her book, Ellis inhabits the authority of the male photographer. 'I really wanted to approach it like a man,' she confesses. In questioning masculinity, she adopts the male gaze, though its authority is as fragile and precarious as the very object of scrutiny.

In the final two chapters, closeness and distance coexist. The images shift again, warmer and slightly hazy, as Ellis falls for photographer Gareth. Though initially wary of bringing the camera back into the bedroom, she is nonetheless compelled, and the chapter records this reprise of falling in love. Slow shutter speeds depict sex, cum, and the impressions of pressed bodies. This time, however, her own body enters the frame. One photograph shows Gareth cross-legged, head bowed. His body is abstracted, neither icon nor stand-in, held and framed by Ellis’s legs. This conclusive photograph, perhaps, could encapsulate the book in a single frame. As Charlotte Jensen writes in the foreword, ‘in trying to author the male image, she found she wanted, needed, to author her own image, too’.

The Boyfriend Casting does not seek resolution; rather it sits in the tension Ellis set out to hold, between intimacy, pain, anger and desire. The images have the ease of Wolfgang Tillmans, the tactility of Nan Goldin, and the forensic obsession of Vince Aletti. It is not a feminist manifesto, no Mary slashing Venus, nor a tidy adoption of the male gaze. Like any good coming-of-age story, it is messy, sexy, and at times uneasy. It is precisely this tension, this relentless photographic inquiry, that gives the book its force. The abs and thighs, well, they are an added bonus.

Rosie Harriet Ellis, 'The Boyfriend Casting,' is published by Libraryman and priced €60, libraryman.se

Picking up Roe Ethridge’s Rude in the Good Way, you’re instantly caught in the middle of a Southern shootout, Ethridge wielding his camera, while the subject, Lindsay, points a BB gun directly at you. The cover, conceptually, is a stroke of perfection, effectively eye-catching, surrounded by an air of danger. Yet, it's the visual imperfections of the photograph that stand out to Ethridge, who, video calling from his couch amidst the record-breaking New York City snowstorm, critiques, ‘it’s not lit right, it’s all kind of messed up. It feels like you’ve stumbled into something like, uh-oh.’

It’s that same intentional imperfection that has defined Ethridge’s nearly three-decade-long career and embodies the book’s title, a phrase that continued to come up throughout our conversation about the book’s contents: the B-movie CGI-inspired collages of Lindsay Lohan, thrown together as quickly as possible, were ‘rude in the good way.’ The confrontingly sexual paintings of John Currin, photographed during a 2008 studio visit on assignment for Artreview, were indeed ‘rude in the good way.’ The photographs, taken on his iPhone of the back of his camera, from a shoot where the original images had been lost, yet again, were ‘rude in the good way.’

As a child of the Reagan era, who spent his adolescence wanting ‘nothing more than to be a wholesome American good boy from the South,’ Ethridge’s interest in the imperfection of American life naturally arose once he left suburban Atlanta for college and began to critique that 'perfect' identity. His first three books, Orange Grove, Spare Bedroom and County Line – which have been compiled into a three-volume reissue titled In the Beginning to accompany the release of Rude in the Good Way – showcase his early explorations of American imperfection, from desolate strip malls to unloved orange orchards.

‘I recognise all the themes, the sense of colour and composition, they are still part of who I am now,’ he says of the books he originally self-published in the mid-2000s. Within the pages of Rude in the Good Way, you can see a direct through-line to that early work; the photographs of mouldy peaches are reminiscent of the mouldy oranges in Orange Grove, and an image of an open refrigerator feels like a contemporary sequel to his 1999 photograph, Refrigerator.

Coming four years after American Polychronic, a 400-page career retrospective, I was curious if it was difficult to begin another book after releasing what seemed to be the wrapping up of a lifelong body of work. ‘There's no finishing the book, but I do think that it did affect me. Having mid-career retrospective-type shows and books, there’s a kind of weird death feeling, where you’re stuck asking yourself questions like, ‘Am I Dead?’ ‘Is this over?’ But, it never is. You have to keep going and find what keeps you interested. That’s what this book is.’

Roe Ethridge, ‘Rude in the Good Way’ is published by Loose Joints, £43.00, loosejoints.biz

At 90, Don McCullin is still looking. He has just returned from Indonesia, where he has been photographing on assignment, and is preparing for an invitation from the Vatican to photograph its museum collections. Travel, he admits, has become harder. Airports make him feel sick. The physical demands of the life he once led no longer appeal.

Nevertheless, he is starting 2026 with not one, but two exhibitions unfolding close to home. ‘Broken Beauty’, showing at the Holburne Museum in Bath, brings together images from across his career, placing some of his most recent unseen photographs of Roman sculptures – captured in museums around the world – alongside earlier work from conflict zones, landscapes, portraiture and still life. In February, Hauser & Wirth Somerset will present ‘Don McCullin. 90’, which marks his ninth decade by tracing the quieter threads woven throughout his career.

His early years were spent learning how to disappear. He photographed markets, neighbourhoods and people going about their lives in Finsbury Park, north London. 'I was learning how to disguise my presence,' he says, 'how to snatch pictures.' He is careful not to romanticise this. Even then, he was aware of the moral weight of looking. That awareness has never left him. 'I know I’m stealing from people’s lives by taking their images,' he says. In war, that knowledge sharpened into something constant and uncomfortable. Even now, he places himself 'on trial' when he photographs.

On the surface, the Roman sculptures at the heart of ‘Broken Beauty’ offer silence. They cannot protest or suffer in front of him, but McCullin does not see them as neutral objects. Even stillness, for him, is burdened with history. 'Before the man and the chisel got to that stone, people died in their thousands to get it out of the quarry,' he says. 'There was always someone suffering while I was photographing. Even a Roman sculpture.'

Landscape is where that questioning loosens its grip. Since settling in Somerset, McCullin has increasingly turned his attention to the land around him, which he only photographs in winter (watch McCullin speak of this in Hauser & Wirth’s short film, which we featured on the occasion of his 2020 exhibition at its Somerset gallery). It’s the season’s nakedness that draws him in. 'The landscape is in pain. It’s under rain and frost, the whole historical judgement of the elements.' He can sit on a hill for hours, waiting for the light to be right. He speaks about gazing at dark winter skies, conjuring mythical thoughts inspired by Arthurian legends and the long histories embedded in the land. He references John Steinbeck’s time in nearby Bruton and the pleasure of creative thought, of letting the mind wander. After decades of witnessing violence, the quietness of this kind of looking feels earned.

That freedom makes the distance from war more apparent. Conflict, he says, has changed. Drones have replaced ground-level confrontation, silently bringing death from above. The kind of war photography he once made is no longer possible in the same way, and he is sceptical about its impact now.

'My images were to try and persuade you to be anti-war. And since I've given it up I've seen things ten times worse than what I photographed,' he says. 'I don’t think the work I did made much difference to the world.' There is no bitterness in this, just clarity. McCullin speaks often about stepping back. He talks about growing tomatoes, about dahlias filling his house in September, about the satisfaction of tending something living. He laughs when recalling the young man who ran across battlefields, putting two fingers up to snipers, but he is serious about what this shift represents.

Asked about legacy, he shrugs off comparisons to art-historical giants. 'Legacy is short,' he says. 'Even Cartier-Bresson is being forgotten. I’m just a little old photographer living in Somerset.' What matters to him now is the ability to work without danger and to be among objects he loves. The chance to return, briefly, to something like the peace he started with. He recalls a trip to Crowthers reclamation yard, Isleworth at the age of 26. Having photographed a group of statues, he turned on the self-timer and jumped in beside them. It’s the only self-portrait he has made, and the first time it will be shown in the UK.

'When I finished, I found one last piece of stone. It was a man kneeling down, kissing a woman's legs. Nothing could be less war than this. It's a picture of peace and love.' He pauses. 'How strange, that I did this peaceful picture and in between all that I did all that dreadful stuff, and now I'm back to photographing Roman statues again.'

Outside, the countryside is bright. When the call ends, he plans to walk the hedgerows near his home. The Vatican assignment, he tells me, will be the last serious project of his photographic life. But for now, the looking continues.

Broken Beauty runs at the Holburne Museum from 30 January to 4 May 2026, alongside Don McCullin. 90 at Hauser & Wirth Somerset (14 February - 12 April 2026)

holburne.org
hauserwirth.com

Martin Parr (1952-2025) was a keen supporter of The Photographer’s Gallery in London, a relationship that began with his first solo show at the venue in 1977, ‘Hebden Bridge and Beauty Spots’.

During the last year of his life, Parr and the gallery worked together to plan an exhibition focusing on the works he made in rural Ireland in the early 1980s, a collection the photographer felt had not been shown widely.

The series, A Fair Day, was Parr’s last major project in black and white, before he moved into the distinctive bold colours and hyper-realistic style debuted in 1986’s The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton. It depicted the lives of working Britons under Margaret Thatcher, and established his own unique form of social documentary.

The humour and playfulness glimpsed in this lesser-known series embodies Parr’s typically sharp eye. His capturing of ‘fair days’ – the times communities gathered for trade or entertaining, or to mark religious events – shows a society in flux, caught between traditional rituals and a burgeoning modernisation.

In the photographs, dance halls and cattle trading are historical foils for modern new buildings and plastic cups. Timeless, bleak landscapes are spiked with TV aerials; elsewhere, village halls are dominated by 1980s fashion. As always, Parr finds the humanity in everyday moments.

‘Martin Parr: A Fair Day’ from 9 February to 19 April 2026 at The Photographers' Gallery, thephotographersgallery.org.uk

‘Luigi Ghirri: Felicità’ at Thomas Dane Gallery proposes happiness not as a condition to be attained, but as a way of inhabiting the world through images. This is not joy as spectacle or affirmation, but something quieter and more exacting: the felicity of naming, noticing and holding things in view without exhausting them. Curated by Alessio Bolzoni and Luca Guadagnino, and unfolding across both of Thomas Dane’s Duke Street spaces, the exhibition makes a persuasive case for Ghirri as one of the most lucid thinkers of photography’s perceptual limits – and one of its most generous practitioners.

The exhibition’s physical split is not incidental. Moving between the two galleries feels like moving between registers of looking: from surface to space, from image as object to image as environment. Bolzoni and Guadagnino’s curatorial touch is deliberately light, allowing Ghirri’s internal logic to emerge through juxtaposition rather than didactic framing. What results is not a survey, but a carefully calibrated rhythm – one that mirrors Ghirri’s own conception of photography as an open, elastic system rather than a sequence of definitive statements.

The photographs that anchor the first space are small, restrained, almost stubbornly unassuming. Works such as Sassuolo, 1970 and the cluster of Modena images made between 1970 and 1973 appear to offer very little at first glance: fragments of walls, signage, partial horizons, colours softened into chalky blues and muted reds. But this reduction is precisely the point. Ghirri understood that modern landscapes – particularly the Italian countryside – had become visually exhausted, over-coded by clichés and nostalgia. Rather than attempting to restore a lost pastoral ideal, he chose to work from within this representational void.

These early images operate like a pared-down vocabulary of place. In Modena, 1971, a sign gestures beyond the frame, pointing nowhere in particular. In another Modena photograph, from 1972, a strip of sky presses against a flat plane of colour, collapsing depth into surface. The photographs refuse narrative resolution; instead, they ask the viewer to stay with the act of looking itself. Happiness, here, is not revelation but attention.

This emphasis on surfaces, maps and signs establishes a logic that carries into the second Duke Street space, where interiors and landscapes extend the same conceptual enquiry. Wallpapers photographed in the mid-1970s flatten rooms into graphic fields, turning domestic space into another kind of atlas. Walls behave like pages; photographs become images of images. The boundary between inner and outer worlds – so central to Ghirri’s thinking – begins to dissolve.

The later works bring this sensibility into the open air. In Capri, 1981 and Croce Bianca, Piacenza, 1984, colour becomes more luminous, but never expressive in a sentimental sense. The compositions are precise, almost architectural, holding the viewer at a measured distance. Landscapes from the late 1980s: Campagna Emiliana, 1985-89, Marina di Ravenna, 1986, are neither celebratory nor elegiac. They refuse the familiar drama of old versus new, rural versus industrial. Instead, they present a world shaped by coexistence, where distinctions have lost their visual productivity.

This curatorial decision to skirt Ghirri’s most iconic images in favour of quieter, less resolved works sharpens the exhibition’s thesis. ‘Felicità’ is not about reclaiming landscape or reasserting photography’s authority. It is about recalibrating the gaze. Ghirri believed photography should organise attention rather than overwhelm it – offering a pause within a world increasingly governed by speed, repetition and visual noise. His images do not seek to transform reality; they allow it to appear, lightly and with measure.

Seen today, Ghirri’s work feels less prophetic than necessary. In an image economy driven by excess and instant legibility, ‘Felicità’ argues for another mode of seeing: photography as a way of staying with things, of accepting their partiality, of recognising that meaning often resides in what remains unresolved. Bolzoni and Guadagnino’s exhibition doesn’t present happiness as an outcome, but as a condition of looking – one grounded in silence, precision and the radical modesty of paying attention.

Luigi Ghirri: Felicità is at Thomas Dane Gallery from 23 January to 9 May 2026, thomasdanegallery.com

How do you create an image that feels both familiar and unsettling? This is the realm of American visual artist and photographer Brooke DiDonato, whose new photo book, Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer, will be released on 29 January 2026. The monograph brings together DiDonato’s surreal work in a collection that blends nostalgia, humour and unease.

This is DiDonato’s most comprehensive collection to date, featuring her best-known series – including A House Is Not a Home – alongside new work appearing in print for the first time. The book also includes an introduction by writer Eleanor Sutherland and a conversation between Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and writer Eve Van Dyke and DiDonato’s father, Bob DiDonato.

The images are rooted in domestic life – depicting white-picket-fenced homes and other suburban environments in Ohio and beyond – but are distorted into the fantastical. Human bodies appear in everyday contexts – on sidewalks, in cornfields and deserts – but in unexpected, even impossible, ways. They’re contorted into uncanny positions – limbs bent across sofas, climbing into attics and emerging from unlikely places.

A pair of legs hang from a window, flowers bloom from armchairs and toilet bowls, and foliage crawls from beds and telephone receivers. A head squeezes into a dollhouse and bodies fold into a fireplace, perch on a ceiling fan blade, and slot between the crockery in a kitchen cabinet.

The images evoke dreamlike disorientation: we recognise the world, but it feels off-kilter. DiDonato’s imagery recalls Freud’s concept of the uncanny, where the familiar becomes eerie through distortion. The photographs capture feelings that are difficult to articulate – like forgetting a face, or a once-familiar place becoming strange over time.

A defining element of DiDonato’s work is the playful, provocative titles she assigns to her photographs. Names such as Growing Upward Has Its Downside, What to Expect When You’re Expecting Nothing, and Went to Therapy but I’m Still in My Patterns hint at modern-day anxieties; her work is infused with dark comedy and self-awareness, adding an element of emotional truth. Each image becomes a private joke shared with the viewer.

What about the title of the monograph itself? While Take a Picture, It Will Last Longer recalls the playground taunt, it also echoes the tradition of vanitas painting – still-life works popular in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries depicting skulls, extinguished candles, wilting flowers, hourglasses and decaying fruit as reminders of life’s transience. DiDonato’s work similarly balances life and death, humour and tragedy, intimacy and alienation.

A man stares at us wide-eyed as he crouches on a rock, cradling his hands close, a desolate wilderness rising behind him. It could be an eerie photograph from a 1960s horror film, but its presence in a new book, The Ramble, NYC 1969, places it amid the early work of photographer Arthur Tress. In 1969, he captured gay men, like himself, cruising around The Ramble, a forested area in New York’s Central Park, the winter before the Stonewall riots and the shift in gay rights movements that would follow.

'A [term] for gay people at the time was twilight people,’ says Tress, dialling in from his studio on a mid-winter Friday morning. ‘You couldn’t tell your family, you couldn’t tell your employer – especially if you worked for the government or in education.' He recalls his parents sending him to a psychiatrist when he was in high school. 'Of course, he told me being gay was bad, against the law, unnatural and that I should get a girlfriend,' he laughs. 'Which didn’t really work out.'

The Ramble was ten minutes away from where Tress lived on 72nd Riverside, and the moment he stepped into its world of hidden gestures, hankies and leather, he felt a fellowship with the other gay men, whom he imagined also shared his low self-esteem, stemming from the shame of doing something illegal. There were many who didn’t want to be photographed, recalls Tress, as they could lose their jobs. 'There was a crippling anxiety,' he says. 'Somehow, as a photographer, I could bring that out of them – almost like I was a director of a film.'

While Tress’ photographs might seem like merely documentation, the photographer was also showing a greater truth of the men, who revealed their emotional turmoil. 'In the late 1960s there was a strong move towards documentary,' he says. 'But we went against that with staging.' He had encountered the abstract expressionist works of George Tooker and Paul Cadmus at The Whitney when he was in high school, and from them he extracted an essence of isolation amid stark architectures of modernity, which percolated into this series.

Physique magazines were circulating at the time, but Tress wasn’t particularly inspired by them, cheekily mentioning that they might have inspired Robert Mapplethorpe, but he wanted to find a deeper recess within the psyche. Drawing on the magic realism of the artists he admired, Tress created a surreal world where men pop up from underground like phantoms, or lie spent on a tree trunk, like a modern-day vanquished warrior. 'That’s very dreamlike,' he smiles. 'I think as a child I lived in an escape world of fantasy, and I tried to embed these photos with that quality.'

Cruising was like photography for Tress, with prolonged waiting to catch the eye of other men. 'I was a Ramble wallflower,' he laughs. 'There was a lot of rejection – but after Stonewall, you could meet men at a gay community centre or a student dance and hold hands in public.'

Arthur Tress, 'The Ramble, NYC 1969' is published by Stanley / Barker, £60, stanleybarker.co.uk

Photographer Jan Staller’s new monograph, Manhattan Project, is a sideways examination of the city’s relentless pace of change. Staller’s focus is not on the physical structures that give the New York skyline its ever-shifting dynamism, but on the materials that are being hoisted, poured, and extracted in the pursuit of new architecture.

Staller has been photographing the city for nearly half a century, focusing specially on the idiosyncrasies of Manhattan’s West Side, as infrastructure comes and goes and parts of the city fall by the wayside or remain forever unseen. The subject matter of Manhattan Project is there for all to see, yet most of us look right through it.

By turning his camera on the construction process and abstracting the results through canny framing, Staller has turned New York into an open-air art gallery, alive with ephemeral sculptural objects en route to decades or centuries of entombment within contemporary architecture. Rebar, cables, steel, glass and pipes are rendered as if they were bold pieces of contemporary art.

With a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson and an essay by Brett Littman, Manhattan Project is a worthy addition to the canon of New York chronologies. This is the Staller’s third monograph. Examples of his work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago, while his editorial work has been seen in Fortune, Conde Nast Traveler, The New York Times and many others.

Manhattan Project, Jan Staller, $54, Simon & Schuster, SimonandSchuster.com, Amazon.co.uk, JanStaller.net, @JanStaller

Cast your mind back to the early days of Instagram and what a revelation the site seemed to be. Other than a few specialised sites like Flickr, 500px and DeviantArt, photographers didn’t really have an online space to showcase their work to a wider audience. Debuting in 2010, the app’s fascination lay in its square, Polaroid-esque format and array of aggressive filters. It wasn’t long before the creative community embraced the way Insta likes, shares and follows helped build followings and even make careers.

For photographer Alan Schaller, those early years of Instagram had a certain purity to them. Late to photography, after first training and working as a commercial songwriter and musician, Schaller picked up a camera at the age of 25 and found an aptitude, especially for street photography. ‘Photography is the opposite of music,’ he says. ‘It’s instant and non-collaborative.’ His work got noticed online and commissions flooded in. As well as his own substantial one million-plus following, Schaller set up Street Photo International, which has over 1.7 million followers.

And yet year on year, Insta delivered less and less. The advent of reels in 2020 saw the now Meta-owned site pivot hard to video content. Before this, SPI was getting around 40k submissions a day. With the advent of video, Schaller, like many other photographers, maintained his social presence but felt that the app’s appeal to pure photographers was waning.

Some pivoted to video, but Schaller – who made his name with crisply observed and beautifully framed black and white imagery – felt this was ‘madness – this isn’t how creativity should work. Why should we expect tech companies to care about the photography world?’

Instead, Schaller set out to create his own platform, assembling a team of photo industry players and taking on the role of CEO. The seeds of Irys were sown, just in time to tap into the current resurgence of all things photographic – not just phone photography, but dedicated cameras and even analogue film.

According to Schaller, Irys is a platform designed to actively celebrate the art of photography, not video, reels, memes or, heaven help us, AI. With a design partly inspired by the traditional photographic monograph, Irys will be familiar to anyone who’s tapped into a social media app over the last decade, only with a few key differences.

For a start, it’s curated by humans, not algorithms. Pictures aren’t compressed or cropped and you, the photographer, decide how best to display them in your portfolio. There are also no collections of filters or editing functions.

Irys offers the chance to browse and discover other people’s work, not have it pushed towards you algorithmically, with ‘collections’ set up to collate like-minded subjects, approaches, styles or whatever takes your fancy. Whereas one unthinkingly signs away all sorts of things when agreeing to a tech giant’s Ts and Cs, Schaller is adamant that everyone on Irys retains their image rights.

The team at Irys has already made solid partnerships with key camera brands, including Leica, Sigma and FujiFilm, reckoning that an eco-system that supports creators, promotes hardware and is committed to the industry is good for everyone. A basic account is free but naturally there are paid tiers. ‘We decided not to sell ad space,’ says Schaller, pointing out that Instagram has around 2.4 billion monthly users and that if just a tiny fraction of that number – less than 0.01 per cent – subscribed to Irys then the platform would be self-sustaining.

Naturally, you can like and follow photographers and images you admire, adding ratings across a number of different categories including composition, use of colour, etc. Your follower numbers aren’t made public, to avoid the inevitable popularity arms race that characterises other platforms.

‘It’s a more thoughtful space,’ says Schaller. ‘It’s not about attaching numbers to art. We want people to go on Irys and see great photography.' The Irys slogan, ‘This is what community looks like’, will also be extended to a new monograph publishing venture, Irys Publishing, and hopefully even a magazine.

It's a bold play to stand up to the dopamine dealers and create a platform that actively discourages doomscrolling in favour of more considered, focused browsing. But based on Schaller’s personal and professional experience, large swathes of the photographic community are not about chasing clout, obsessing over gear and going viral.

Irys recaptures something of Instagram’s early enthusiasm, spliced with the archival capabilities of Flickr, an isolated patch of quality amidst a raging sea of ever-changing imagery. For photographers and photography lovers, it’s a fine place to start exploring.

Irys is available for iOS and Android. Visit Irysphotos.com to download the app at the Play Store and App Store. @IrysPhotos, @Alan_Schaller, @StreetPhotoInternational

For more than 40 years, LA-based set decorator Lauri Gaffin has quietly shaped the worlds we see on the silver screen – from the frozen expanses of Fargo to the sun-soaked beaches of Thor. But Gaffin is also a photographer who's turned her lens toward the backgrounds of popular culture.

Now, that photography has been collected in a new book, which launched during Paris Photo, Moving Still: A Cinematic Life Frame-by-Frame. Gaffin captures the fleeting, unguarded moments that often go unseen, transporting readers from Edmonton’s icy plains to Louisiana’s swamps and the Martian landscape of the Mojave Desert. Beyond extraordinary sets, Gaffin documents the intricate interplay between directors, actors, designers and crew on projects ranging from The Pursuit of Happyness to Iron Man – the moments of laughter and stillness amid the chaos of production.

The book chronicles the reptilian alien from 2001 sci-fi film Evolution, discarded on the floor between takes, and the submerged plane that strands Harrison Ford and Anne Heche in the survival odyssey Six Days, Seven Nights (1998), swarmed with crew trying to navigate the challenging set. Gaffin also captures the stylised, high-gloss milieu of Charlie’s Angels (2000), the bizarre alternate world of Land of the Lost (2009) and the shiny, futuristic universe of Captain Marvel (2019).

The book functions as a behind-the-scenes retrospective, pairing Gaffin’s photographs with personal reflections from the moments they were taken, as well as candid insights into her own life – navigating her parents’ declining health, complex relationships and the emotional demands of filmmaking. Moving Still also includes texts by writer and fellow set decorator Florence Fellman, with a foreword by LACMA curator Britt Salvesen.

Gaffin’s photography balances spectacle and intimacy, becoming both a record of her craft and a medium of personal expression. The book celebrates the magic of cinema, honours those who bring it to life, and offers a deeply human story told through the lens of one of Hollywood’s keenest eyes.

All artists leave traces of themselves in their work: an emotion, a thought, a memory. There’s a kind of courage, even generosity, in offering up a fragment of yourself in the name of art. British photographer, filmmaker and artist Nadia Lee Cohen has captured countless faces and personas, yet in her character-driven imagery, it’s hard not to glimpse the many versions of herself.

Her first book, Women, published in 2020 by Idea, took six years to realise. Featuring 100 previously unseen portraits of contemporary womanhood, it feels at once vulnerable and brutal, rethinking the pop iconography associated with ‘strong femininity.’ In Julie Bullard, her more recent book in collaboration with Martin Parr, she becomes a fictionalised version of her childhood babysitter, conjuring a honey-toned vision of 1990s Britain. Whether subject or observer, Cohen’s hyper-stylised gaze doesn’t conceal reality so much as amplify it.

Nadia Lee Cohen presents ‘Holy Ohio’

Though her work has always felt deeply personal, her latest project may be the most intimate yet. Created with WePresent, the arts platform of WeTransfer, and distributed by Idea, it begins at the threshold of memory. In Holy Ohio, Cohen returns to America’s rural heartland to reconnect with a branch of her family, a place she had not returned to since she was a child, more than two decades ago.

Designed to physically echo a Bible, the 150-page volume documents a journey back to a place at once distant and familiar. ‘I last visited my family in Ohio in 1999. Ohio was my first introduction to anything overtly American outside of the television,’ she explains. ‘My mum’s brother moved to Ohio in the early 1990s with his wife and son to join his daughter, her American husband and their children. Eventually, his grandchildren had kids, then the kids had kids, and now the kids’ kids have kids; and now four generations of one family live in two houses right next door to each other on a tree-lined cul-de-sac.’

She recalls the scent of bacon, coffee and pizza – domestic noise as comforting as it was chaotic – yet she avoids the temptation of a rose-tinted family portrait. Instead, she turns towards the dysfunctional, tracing the frictions and eccentricities of Midwestern domestic life. ‘The house was very much alive – there was a cosiness to the chaos, and I was at the age where I found any kind of dispute or dysfunctionality exciting,’ Cohen adds.

Two decades of sporadic contact unfold across images of weathered skin, worn neighbourhoods, patriotic symbols, all-American slogans and a family home seemingly untouched by time. Eclectic possessions reveal the rhythms of a family shaped by an unfamiliar culture for the photographer. Cohen captures these clashing cultural nuances with candour and cinematic tension, her frames washed in a steel-grey melancholy.

‘Holy Ohio’ by Nadia Lee Cohen releases on 12 December, exclusively at Idea Books London, Dover Street Market London, and the Idea Books online store.

On a quiet street in Paris near the Comédie-Française, there sat a seemingly unassuming Chinese restaurant. But despite its nondescript façade, Davé, which opened its doors in 1982, was the pinnacle of glamorous Parisian nightlife for three decades.

A roll call of celebrities from across art, music, fashion and culture were regulars – including Helmut Newton, Grace Coddington, Allen Ginsberg, Yves Saint Laurent, Francis Ford Coppola, Iggy Pop, Rei Kawakubo, Lou Reed, Yoko Ono, Madonna, Alexander McQueen and Kate Moss. They ignored the ‘Complet’ (full) sign that hung on the door to party in absolute privacy.

There every night was owner Tai ‘Davé’ Cheung, who captured it all with his Polaroid camera. How did his guests feel when he pulled it out? ‘They were delighted. With the Polaroid, they saw the result immediately – no surprises. You can’t take a bad picture of someone without them knowing,’ he says now.

Word of mouth drew in his guests, he says. ‘I liked the creatives, the designers, artists, musicians and writers, especially because they taught me things: they shared. The first ones through the door – Brion Gysin, Jean-Marie Rouart, Eduardo Arroyo, Francis Ford Coppola, Aurore Clément, Suzi Wis, Anne-Marie Deschodt, Helmut and June Newton – especially.’

Now – launching during Paris Photo 2025 – Davé’s Polaroids are the subject of a new book , A Night at Davé, conceived by Charles Morin and Boris Bergmann with Davé, which reveals what happened behind its doors. Sofia Coppola, who was a regular in the 1980s with her parents and their friends, was such a fan, she has written the book’s introduction. ‘Davé was the place to be,’ she says.

‘It wasn’t a bourgeois place,’ reflects Davé. ‘It was a place where people could be who they wanted to be.’

There's much to see – and to covet – at Paris Photo 2025 (13-16 November), the 28th edition of the event, which is back at the Grand Palais for the second year in a row. It's hosting 179 galleries from 33 countries and a rich programme that encompasses photography in all its forms, from silver gelatin to blockchain. Artistic director Anna Planas says, ‘We want to embrace the entire history of photography, from the 19th century to the most contemporary works, and to show the diversity of the medium.’

The world's most important international photography fair, Paris Photo brings together big-name galleries and smaller ones, iconic photographers and emerging artists. If you're looking for gems by Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, Lee Friedlander, Irving Penn, Seydou Keïta, William Klein, Weegee, Sally Mann, Sebastião Salgado or Hiroshi Sugimoto, you've come to the right place.

But you'll also find lesser-known surprises, such as Marine Lanier, one of the artists in the ‘Emergence’ sector of the fair and winner of the Prix Maison Ruinart for an enchanting series called Alchimia, shot in the fields and skies of the Champagne region.

In addition to art for sale, the fair offers conversations, performances and book signings from the likes of Todd Hido and Wolfgang Tillmans. And ‘The Last Photo’ is an exhibition of works from the collection of Estrellita B Brodsky, one of the most important private collections of Latin American photography.

All of this edition's curators are women, though Planas says this was not intentional. What was deliberate is an ongoing increase in the number of female artists on display, from 20 per cent in 2018 to nearly double that percentage this year.

Upon entering, visitors come face to face with the Poggi gallery's powerful installation by Sophie Ristelhueber, the French photographer who won the prestigious Hasselblad Award in 2025. A wall nearly 40m long displays works from throughout her career, revealing the scars that war and other disasters have left on landscapes, cities and human bodies.

Steps away, at Klemm's Berlin, Truth Table, by Adrian Sauer, is a project about digital manipulation, consisting of different images (a smiley face, a palm tree, an Eiffel Tower) made up of millions of coloured pixels in various combinations.

Thierry Bigaignon has an actual darkroom on his stand, complete with a photographer: Renato D'Agostin. When a collector acquires one of his silver gelatin prints, they can meet D'Agostin, who will reprint it on the spot, to show how the development process works. Setting up his chemicals before the fair opened, the Italian photographer laughed, ‘It's going to be strange, I feel like an animal in a cage.’

Vermelho from São Paulo presents Brazil's Claudia Andujar, who has reworked her 1975 archives, attaching a yellow acrylic panel to a photo of the Volkswagen that she drove to the Venezuelan border for her work covering the Yanomami people. Rosegallery, from Santa Monica, has come back to Paris Photo after an absence of a few years with a solo show by Mexican artist Tania Franco Klein (who is also currently part of MoMA's New Photography exhibition).

Magnum Gallery is featuring vintage prints by several of its stars, including Philippe Halsman's 1948 portrait of a floating Salvador Dalí and three cats. Galerie Nathalie has Un feu by Luc Delahaye (formerly of Magnum), a photo of migrants standing around a fire, also part of Delahaye's solo show now running at the Jeu de Paume museum. Fraenkel presents a new work by artist/sound composer Christian Marclay, a grid of vinyl record sleeves and covers. Martin Parr's French-fry-eating seagull from 1996 graces the stand of Clémentine de la Feronnière. And at Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve's stand, Juergen Teller is drinking a beer while standing naked on his father's grave.

But not everything is profane. Galerie Binome is presenting dark, ghostly images from Laurence Aëgerter's series on French cathedrals and churches. Aëgerter screen-printed them with thermo-chronic ink, which undergoes a chemical reaction when sunlight hits it, revealing the image underneath. Gallery director Valérie Cazin says, ‘When this happens, the revelation is so magnificent and surprising that the spectator can only observe. It's the same magic as when an image is revealed in a darkroom. In a society where we are all hyperactive, it provokes a moment of meditation.’

The ‘Voices’ sector of the fair features two guest curators. One, Devika Singh, says she approached the theme of landscapes in different ways, ‘from documentary perspectives to more speculative and personal takes’. Works include French painter/photographer Bernard Guillot's atmospheric photos of Cairo's City of the Dead, as well as Indian photographer Gauri Gill's The Village on the Highway, a quietly political statement set against a backdrop of plastic tarpaulins.

This is the third year that the fair has a dedicated ‘Digital’ sector, curated by Nina Roehrs. It includes an installation by conceptual artist Cole Sternberg for Giga – a partnership between Unicef and the International Telecommunication Union to address digital inequalities among the world's children. Called A Garden, the project is a large cube upon which a million images of generative artwork are projected, representing a network of interconnected schools.

In a rather different vein, the digital platform TAEX is showing the Irish artist Kevin Abosch, who trains AI systems with his own images, then ‘sculpts’ them into a kind of synthetic photography. The results can be creepy, such as a white cockatoo emerging from a high-tech apparatus. Two centuries after the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce turned a camera image into the first permanent photograph, Paris Photo is still exploring what defines the art form.

Paris Photo 2025 runs 13-16 November

In 1903, the architect Adolf Loos was tasked with reworking a country house on the shores of Lake Geneva. Formerly a leprosarium, the residence was later the site of a controversy when the owner, physiology professor Théodore Beer, was accused of immoral conduct and left, in disgrace, for America. Now a private residence, the home’s rich history of unresolved tension and psychological trauma makes it an arresting example of twentieth-century architecture. For Portuguese photographer Jaime Welsh, it proved irresistible.

Welsh’s previous work has considered the role that ideological systems and political structures play in shaping us, in poignant images which emphasise the innocence and isolation of the individual. When he came across Villa Karma, its dual role as sanctuary and site of trauma felt like a natural jumping-off point from which to explore themes of perception, surveillance and identity.

‘I was drawn to Villa Karma for its secrecy,’ Welsh says. ‘The building is like a fortress, with rooms nested within rooms, doorways and vantage points built for observation. It feels ceremonial in its order and deeply oppressive, yet somehow oneiric. The history of the place also drew me in. It was shaped by illness, first a leprosarium and later the residence of a troubled neurologist.’

In Welsh’s photographs, Villa Karma becomes a living thing, its structure not only sheltering its inhabitants but also shaping them. ‘I was drawn to the passageways, whose lines of sight were designed for surveillance,’ he adds. ‘In the end, the camera assumes that role, replacing the architecture as the ultimate instrument of control.’

It is unclear, in the works, if the villa is healing or harming its inhabitants; to find out would be beside the point. ‘Safety and trauma often exist within the same space. What protects can also wound. Architecture absorbs contradiction, shaping anxiety and fear into form. I wanted that ambiguity to surface, where control and vulnerability coexist in the same frame.’

Jaime Welsh 'Convalescent' is at Ginny on Frederick, London, from 8 Nov – 17 Dec 2025

A dazzling duo

Ellie Stathaki, architecture and environment director

I recently came across jewellery entrepreneur The Diamond Lab, and this week, I had the opportunity to meet its founders, sisters Ruby and Jamie Patel, at their Selfridges pop-up with Maddox Gallery. Beyond their mission to bring ethical, lab-grown diamonds to the forefront of the luxury industry, the pair also plans to establish their own laboratory in Kenya, where the sisters hail from. Working within the country’s Special Economic Zones – which aim to boost local manufacturing and exports and to create jobs – they are hard at work, picking their architect and crafting their business's spatial representation. More to come.

A London institution

Charlotte Gunn, director of digital content

On Monday, it was off to The Connaught to celebrate editor-in-chief Bill Prince's new book about the hotel, with martinis served by the master Agostino Perrone. In attendance: the cute little white pooch from the cover.

A photographic pilgrimage

Hannah Silver, art, culture, watches and jewellery editor

I was lucky enough this week to have a walk around the exquisite new Diane Arbus exhibition at London’s David Zwirner gallery with curator Jeffrey Fraenkel. The intimate exhibition of 45 rare photographs focuses on the works Arbus created in private spaces between 1961 and 1971. Raw, honest, and respectful – they speak to Arbus’ massive talent.

A visual voyage

Jamilah Rose-Roberts, social media editor

I previously went down to Sadie Coles HQ for the opening of Arthur Jafa’s GLAS NEGUS SUPREME. Having missed his presentation in Croydon earlier this year, I was determined not to miss this one. There was an undeniable pull to this exhibition: the scale, the sound, the weight of it all. The highlight of the evening was meeting Jafa himself. Our brief, easy chat left me with a sense of privilege and a deeper connection to his work. His exacting yet generous nature made me want to return – to sit longer with the work, to let the sound and imagery seep deeper.

For his first exhibition at Sadie Coles, Jafa fills the Kingly Street space with a charged edit of new and recent works: two moving-image pieces, several paintings, silkscreens, and cutouts, all orbiting the same gravitational force – the depth and complexity of Black life. His films unfold with a cosmic and intimate allure, a surge of imagery and music that catches you off guard and carries you into a world of profound intrigue and captivation.

There’s a rhythm to Jafa’s world, a ‘Black visual intonation’, as he calls it, that folds sound and image into one another until they feel inseparable. Clips, faces, fragments, and beats move as if guided by pulse rather than sequence; everything vibrates. Musical figures appear as apparitions, passing through history’s veil with ghostly defiance. And yet, even in that spectral space, the work feels vividly alive.

The new paintings and silkscreens extend this dialogue: Kurt Cobain’s body hovers in a void; Foxy Brown glows, commanding her crowd. Fame, pain, transcendence – all held in tension, all rendered through Jafa’s unmistakable visual cadence. To witness his work is to feel language reshaped; it’s to understand how sound, image and memory can coalesce into something beyond narrative: a collective vibration.

GLAS NEGUS SUPREME continues that conversation with force and tenderness, expanding Jafa’s lexicon of Black being and becoming. On view at Sadie Coles HQ until 22 November 2025.

A Middle Eastern medley

Tianna Williams, staff writer

On Wednesday evening, I headed over to Lamb’s Conduit Street to enjoy a Middle Eastern feast at Honey & Co. The evening, which coincided nicely with Bonfire Night, was a display of festive dining that made me consider swapping the Christmas turkey for spiced lamb and stuffing shawarma. Honey & Co founders Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich (who also run sister outposts Honey & Smoke and Honey & Co Daily) served a vibrant mezze, complete with dips and salads. Mains followed, ranging from smoked duck with pickled cherries to slow-roasted lamb shoulder with plums and roses. The evening was rounded off with desserts, from feta and honey cheesecake (divine) to spiced apple mince pies, paired perfectly with Persian tea. The great news is that this delectable menu is available throughout the festive period if you fancy a fragrant feast for yourself.

A theatrical tempest

Gabriel Annouka, senior designer

If an apocalypse had a dress code, it would take the form of BULLYACHE: WHO HURT YOU? at Southbank Centre this week. Part of the Kunsty festival, and staged in the ample setting of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the performance – directed by Bullyache, the artist duo Courtney Deyn and Jacob Samuel – unravelled as a drag requiem: an end-of-days cabaret that played with glitter as much as it did with grief. East London drag star Barbs, sequins blazing, ruled the stage as a diva in disarray, balancing Deyn’s singing and the dancers with a lawless, intoxicating narrative. Music and lights begged for mercy, and surrender never looked so good. I may have cried, probably laughed, and most definitely both. Absolute mayhem, pure perfection.

A scent-sational history

Anna Fixsen, US editor

‘There are three things no respectable woman should do: smoke, dance the tango and wear Shalimar,’ a famed 1920s-era adage went. Unfortunately for those upright citizens, the appeal of Shalimar – a hypnotic amber fragrance dreamed up by French perfumer Jacques Guerlain in 1925 – has remained a favourite of bad girls everywhere (Frida Kahlo, Brigitte Bardot, Rita Hayworth… need we go on?) for exactly a century. To celebrate the milestone, Guerlain has concocted a 21st-century version of the flapper-era fragrance, Shalimar L’Essence, which emphasises the perfume’s mouth-watering, vanilla notes for a scent that’s suited to today’s rebel. I popped by an exhibition at the Waldorf-Astoria (now home to the world’s largest Guerlain spa) to experience both new and old formulations and geek out over the fascinating history of this storied art deco aroma. Time travel hasn’t been invented yet, but Shalimar might be the next-best thing.

In 1978, Zofia Rydet embarked on a colossal task: photographing the inside of every household in Poland. The 67 year-old had already produced a major body of work with Little Man – a study on children, published as a book in 1965 – while her series of photomontages, The World of Feeling and Imagination, had been in development since 1975. What became Sociological Record would ultimately take Rydet into the 1990s, culminating in more than 20,000 images, only a fraction of which were ever printed (by the series’ end her efforts were solely focused on making sure there was a record, as opposed to sharing it).

‘Not everyone could have had access to these people,’ says Clare Grafik, Head of Exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, where a substantial new exhibition of the work has just opened (through 22 February 2026). ‘They were often in rural areas with a very local life. For her to gain their trust and access their inner most domestic environments, is a real testament to her personality.’ Rydet travelled by bus or relied on friends for lifts, turning up and knocking on doors unannounced. ‘The actual photographing was quite quick,’ Grafik adds on a video call, ‘it was the conversations she would subsequently have with the homeowners, that profoundly affected the way she thought about life and work.’

A month earlier I had been invited to the Zofia Rydet Foundation, inside the home of its founders, Zofia AugustyNska-Martyniak and her mother Maria Sokol-AugustyNska (Rydet was AugustyNska-Martyniak’s great grandfather’s sister, though she usually refers to the photographer as her great grandmother). Sat in the family’s living room with Grafik and her co-curator, lecturer and cultural manager Karol Hordziej, the visit mirrored some version of Rydet’s own circumstances, with talk filling much of our allotted time. At one point AugustyNska-Martyniak recalls casually how, when Rydet died, in Gliwice in 1997, most of the family were interested in inheriting her cameras; she and her mother instead became custodians of the archive, and it moved with them from a residence in Rabka, to the Kraków house where we’re introduced. The Foundation was established in 2011.

Hordziej , a school friend of AugustyNska-Martyniak’s (he remembers, unconscious of their gravity at the time, first seeing Rydet’s pictures on the walls of her home), has been working with the Foundation for a number of years, originally helping to digitalise the archive as a way to preserve, celebrate and extend its function. In London however, the focus is on around 100 physical prints Rydet made in her home darkroom, as well as books and personal letters. A documentary, ‘Endlessly Distant Roads’ is also on show; made by the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Różycki in 1989, in it, a young AugustyNska-Martyniak can be seen walking beside Rydet, carrying the photographer’s camera bag.

‘The Photographers’ Gallery is interested in what happens to archives, how you deal with archives online, and how they then get translated into physical exhibitions,’ continues Grafik. ‘This project became quite important in terms of thinking about that, because obviously the digitalisation of much of the Sociological Record was the way that that work suddenly became disseminated beyond the boundaries of this sort of niche field, but we’re looking at just a tiny part of it. Ultimately the prints tell you something different about what her intention was for the work, versus scans from negatives.’

‘The project was such an ambitious undertaking, particularly for a photographer in the autumn of her career, to suddenly decide that's what she wanted to do,’ she notes. ‘It brings up all sorts of interesting issues to do with photography, archives, identity; there's many layers to it.’ Rydet predominantly worked in black and white, shooting with a wide angle lens and flash, and the exhibition is largely comprised of the busy domestic spaces of the project’s ‘People in Interiors’ sub-series; lace curtains, religious ephemera, floral tablecloths and posters of pop stars all feature. Elsewhere are works from ‘Women on Doorsteps’, ‘Windows’ and ‘Presence’, the latter highlighting the many images of Pope John Paul II Rydet observed on her travels, (notably elected the same year the Sociological Record commenced, the former Archbishop of Kraków had been the first non-Italian pope in over 400 years).

‘She was very free,’ offers Hordziej, who has worked on previous Zofia Rydet exhibitions across Poland and also in Paris. ‘She never married, never had her own family. Maria from the Foundation told me that her male colleagues [as well as joining photo clubs, she became a member of the Union of Polish Art Photographers in 1965] joked that they were kind of jealous, that she could save all her money for traveling and focus on photography. But she also wanted to talk with her photographs, to ordinary people. She really focused on the message – it’s not how it's done but what is it about.’ Attuned to the project’s future significance, during her lifetime Rydet made a point of entering competitions and gifting her work, oftentimes sending it out internationally; some of these respective labels and similar ephemera still exist in a folder at the Foundation.

Five decades on, against a backdrop of camera phones and social media, reality TV and a contemporary interest in what other people’s homes look like (those before us and currently around us), the exhibition brings Rydet’s work into a new context that speaks to her own curiosity, and her desire to share widely what she saw. ‘She was really photographing people – who wouldn't have been photographed much in their lives, maybe never inside their houses – in their kind of essence, in these interiors that had been put together very organically and often practically,’ shares Grafik. ‘Versus today, where things are photographed all the time. They are so rich as images, each one is a little universe.’

Zofia Rydet: Sociological Record is part of the UK/Poland Season 2025, produced with The Photographers’ Gallery in partnership with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Zofia Rydet Foundation. It is on view at The Photographers’ Gallery until 22 February 2026

Theoretically, the smartphone era should have done away with the requirements for compact point-and-shoot cameras – as any photographer knows, the best camera to use is always the one you actually have on your person. However, as a growing contingent of image makers are discovering, it's the intention behind an image that makes it more meaningful, and nothing makes that intent more focused than a dedicated camera.

Hence the resurgence in popularity (and price) of older compact cameras, as enthusiasts rush to rediscover all the highly competent camera hardware that was developed over the last decade but overlooked in favour of smartphone sensors and image processing.

We’ve rounded up five of the finest pocketables available today, along with an analogue outlier for those looking to ditch digital altogether.

Ricoh GR IV

The newest iteration of a longstanding photographer’s favourite, this year’s Ricoh GR IV replaces the GR III, which debuted back in 2019 and is still highly prized. Incredibly compact and lightweight, with the capability to power-on in around half a second, the GR IV is the kind of camera pros keep on hand.

A new sensor and new 18.3mm F2.8 lens improve image quality, with no less than 53GB of onboard memory, full wireless connectivity and manual controls, it’s a true pocketable powerhouse.

Ricoh GR IV, £1,200, Ricoh-Imaging.co.jp, @Ricoh_GR_official, Amazon.co.uk

Leica Q3 43

For some, nothing less than a camera bearing the legendary red dot will do. Whilst Leica is still best known amongst photographers for the M Series – now featuring an electronic viewfinder for the very first time – the company has a long history of making compact cameras dating back to the dawn of the digital age.

The newest compact model from the German manufacturer is the fixed lens Q3 43, with a 43mm focal length and full compatibility with Leica’s pro-grade FOTOS app.

Leica Q3 43, £5,900, Leica-Camera.com

Fuji X Half

A curate’s egg of a camera that you'll either love or hate, the Fuji X Half attempts to bridge the divide between digital convenience and analogue feel. ‘Dedicated to distraction-free creativity’, in Ricoh’s words, the X Half comes with a number of film-simulating filters as well as a unique 3:4 vertical format.

This mimics ‘traditional’ smartphone image-making with the benefit of a far more sophisticated 32mm lens, with the added creative benefit of combining two images in a single frame. This 2-in-1 option can consist of a still and a video, allowing for endless juxtapositions and experiments.

Weighing in at just 240g, the X Half also has Film Camera Mode, a way of focusing the mind by reintroducing the limitations of film. In this mode, the rear LCD viewfinder is disabled and you’re restricted to taking just 36, 54 or 72 images before you can ‘develop’ the results on the X Half app. The analogue style ‘film advance’ lever must also be operated between each shot.

Fuji X Half, £629, Fujifilm-x.com, Amazon.co.uk

Sony RX100 VII

Sony’s flagship compact is ideal for vloggers and videographers as well as traditional stills photographers. With an onboard 24-200mm Zeiss zoom lens, the ability to take stills at up to 20 fps, 4K video and a host of other features, the RX100 VII is one of the most comprehensively equipped compact cameras on the market.

A sophisticated auto focus system can track fast moving objects and even the individual eyes of your subject, with shutter speeds of up to 1/32,000 second, on-board image stabilisation, support for vertical video and external microphones and much, much more.

Sony RX100 VII, £1,049, Sony.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk

Canon Powershot G7 X Mark III

Another long-established prized performer in the ultra-compact sector, Canon’s G7 range continues to hold its value. The latest G7 X Mark III weighs in at 304g yet crams in 4K recording, a 24mm 4.2x zoom lens, exceptional video quality and even the ability to stream directly to YouTube.

The addition of a silver/black colourway nods to Canon’s classic 35mm SLRs and adds another layer of desirability, as does the ultra-pocketable form factor.

Canon Powershot G7 X Mark III, £995, Canon.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk

Lomo MC-A

Finally, an analogue option from the long-standing 35mm film faithfuls at Lomography. The Austrian company has upgraded their mainstay to include a retractable 32mm lens, full autofocus, an onboard LCD display with self-timer and other functions, onboard flash and more.

Probably the most significant update the strictly analogue Lomo ethos since the medium format LC-A 120 camera was introduced in 2014, The new MC-A brings the colour, grain and atmosphere of 35mm into a compact, affordable package. It's an encapsulation of Lomography's stated mission to celebrate the joys, idiosyncrasies and occasional fails of analogue.

Lomo MC-A, £449, Shop.Lomography.com, @Lomography

A young man cradling a newborn baby, a girl with wildflowers threaded through her hair, teenage siblings wrapped in an embrace: these are not typical images from a country at war, but then neither is FUTURESPECTIVE, a typical exhibit. Opening at the Saatchi Gallery this week, FUTURESPECTIVE showcases the work of 34 young and emerging Ukrainian photographers who were discovered via an open call and selected by a jury that included photographer Carlijn Jacobs and Brett Lloyd, among others.

The aim of the exhibit is to introduce the country’s next generation of photographers on the international stage and, in the process, it presents a portrait of a country at war as seen by youth. The result is a diverse collection of work that spans documentary and art photography, still life, landscape, and collage, some of which were taken before the war began in 2022, and others after. No matter the context in which they were taken, the present circumstances give every image greater resonance. Gathered together on four of the gallery’s white walls, the pictures compel viewers to see how the questions that preoccupy all people, especially young people – what matters to me now? What might come in the future? – become even more significant when they are put at risk.

For many of the young photographers in the show, the opportunity to display their work forced them to confront these questions anew. ‘In the first months of the invasion, I felt a very strong apathy: creating art was no longer needed when it came to survival,’ says Vic Bakin.

‘I asked myself the same question again and again: what’s it for? Why create? And I couldn’t find any answer. I am talking about art, of course. I am not talking about photojournalism, reportage, and documentary photography, which became extremely important in the first months and continue to be important. We should not underestimate the work of Ukrainian (and foreign) photojournalists, who first showed the world Bucha and Mariupol and continue to show the world what happens here. Ukraine, like any other country at war, relies on this powerful medium.’

‘One could say [artistic photography] is not immediate and it’s not crucial enough,’ Bakin continues. ‘And I would agree; it’s a different kind of approach. But still, if you can touch the heart of the audience, it is a legitimate way to do your work. For me, it works: you talk about the same thing, but with different words or in a different language. But still, you tell the story. No matter what, the function is still the same.’

Photographer Mykola Maychyk echoes a similar sentiment, noting that the war has changed the personal and public significance of his work.

‘Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, my vision and approach to creativity have been turned upside down,’ Maychyk says. ‘My photography has gained a new sense of sensitivity and compassion. It has become a powerful tool for sharing Ukrainian culture (in my case) and for informing the world about the war in Ukraine – a role also seen in the work of Ukrainian military photographers and documentarians.’

Indeed, FUTURESPECTIVE demonstrates just how powerful a tool photography can be, offering viewers intimate insight into a country at war, and the toll such an experience takes on the ones who are forced to go through it. For artists like Maychyk, that is what makes this exhibition so important.

‘Sadly, it took such turbulent times for many of us to realise how vital it is to present Ukrainian art to the world,’ he says. ‘This act serves two inseparable purposes – to inform the world about the war, and to highlight Ukrainian artists whose work is nationally and internationally competitive.’

‘I hope visitors leave with sincere, positive and at times, compassionate feelings. The variety of styles and approaches is truly remarkable, and these works are the kind you want to look at closely, to really feel. I believe that’s exactly what will happen.’

‘FUTURESPECTIVE, at Saatchi Gallery until 16 November 2025, https://www.saatchigallery.com/

The Docrats still retained their ancestral home on the 20^th Street in Johannesburg when South African photographer David Goldblatt took their photograph, capturing an image of comfortable serenity. Soon after, the Docrats were 'disqualified’ from living there – like many others, governed by apartheid laws. From 1946 to 2016, David photographed this displaced community in the Fietas region, composed of the suburbs of Pageview and Vrededorp, which has now been compiled by his daughter Brenda Goldblatt into the book ‘Fragments of Fietas’.

As early as 1923, plans for separate urban residential areas for Africans had been developed. Local legislation was already propagating segregated living, but once the Nationalist Party came to power with veiled intentions of white supremacy and instilled the Group Areas Act of 1950, racially segregated town planning became compulsory for South Africa. It forced many like the Docrats to move out of their homes to places 'set aside for them'.

It's an intimate portrait of people that David presents, highlighting a personal relationship with many of them. A group, possibly a family, stands in front of a house which they were about to abandon – some of the elders smile but the younger children’s faces are etched with distress. An empty breakfast table in Tahera Karbelkar’s house speak to her fear in the final days in which she stayed in her home, not answering the doorbell of the Group Area inspectors when David visited her. Her house was demolished and never rebuilt, the dream of redevelopment having never been achieved by the Mandela government.

A blackboard outside a shop reads, ‘We have been trading here for the last 40 years, where must we move?’ In a photograph taken in Ossie’s shop in 1976, his daughter smiled as her father looked on. A year later, her sister Asiya Docrat was lugging items helping Ossie Docrat to close shop. 'I had blackboards outside and I used to put the [match] score up there,' Ossie had said. Before closing shutters, the blackboard read: Fietas died today.

Fragments of Fietas, MACK, £35

mackbooks.co.uk

In April 2024, curator and author Catherine E McKinley travelled to Mali to meet the family of legendary photographer Seydou Keïta, to discuss an upcoming exhibition and to ask for their participation.

Celebrated as one of the most outstanding 20th-century photographers, Keïta ran a photography studio in the Malian capital, Bamako, between the late 1940s and early 1960s, where he shot black and white portraits of fashionably dressed people, with the patterned backdrops that he is perhaps best known for. He also documented the social and political landscape in pre- and post-independence Mali. That work was introduced to the West in the early 1990s, first anonymously in New York and then later identified, in group and solo exhibitions at galleries, museums, and foundations around the world.

During the Mali trip, McKinley had extensive conversations with members of the artist’s extended family, who showed her his archive, which in turn became their contribution of previously unseen material, photos, and other items in their possession.

‘Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens’, billed as the most extensive North American presentation of the artist, is now open at the Brooklyn Museum, and includes almost 275 works, including portraits, rare images, and never-before-seen negatives, textiles, jewellery, dresses, and the artist’s personal items. Keïta‘s family also put McKinley in touch with a surviving sitter of the artist, whose interview will be on view in the Brooklyn Museum exhibition.

'It’s a real range in terms of size, format, and exposure,' says McKinley, who organised the exhibition with Imani Williford, curatorial assistant of Photography, Fashion, and Material Culture at the Brooklyn Museum. 'I think what strikes me the most is that we’ve kind of really just begun to look at Keïta in particular, but also at the broader field of African photography in relation to world photography. So it’s very exciting for me. I think that it’s a new moment in terms of scholarship, and for viewers.'

The journey to the West African country was formative in many ways. 'I learned a lot about Keïta,' McKinley tells Wallpaper*. 'I would say [his family] disrupted a lot of my ideas about who he was and what the studio life was like. And I didn’t realise how involved the family was in the photographic process and how much they were a part of the studio life.'

The knowledge gained from the visit and conversations, McKinley adds, 'shaped everything. It changed the DNA of the exhibition, and even how I look at a lot of the works, because even many of the photos that are well known end up having family members as subjects.' McKinley cites an example of a sitter whom she initially thought was a famous singer, but who turned out to be a completely different person. 'It altered how I think about a lot of the work,' says the curator.

Stories about Keïta’s studio portraits often state that the sitters were middle-class Malians, but that wasn’t necessarily the case, as the list included migrant workers, civil servants, visitors from across West Africa, and some people who saved up for the occasion, 'because of the importance of having a photographic record or memento for the family', as McKinley puts it. 'I think it’s a really exciting moment to re-approach Keïta.'

‘Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens’ is at the Brooklyn Museum until 8 March 2026

brooklynmuseum.org

‘You only have the responsibility to yourself,’ says Juergen Teller, the much lauded German photographer sat opposite me in his trademark neon shorts, surrounded by the personal work that forms the physical centre of his new exhibition, ‘you are invited’ (the phrase is lifted from a religious pamphlet he encountered earlier this year; a photograph of the event features some metres away). ‘You want to be excited by yourself, to surprise yourself,’ he continues, relaying the weight (or not, as it transpires) of inaugurating Onassis Ready, the latest arts space from the Onassis Foundation. Three years ago, when he was first approached by artistic director Afroditi Panagiotakou, he was shown several potential venues, but Ready, at the time derelict, was the most exciting, says Teller.

He returns to the sentiment of excitement multiple times within our allotted minutes: currently of paramount excitement is his series Symposium of Love, which is making its debut in Greece. Comprised of more than 100 images, uniformly sized just north of the standard 4x6-inch holiday snap, displayed here in a single-file configuration, the series was made in Lithuania – where Teller’s wife and creative partner, Dovile Drizyte, is from – and features the couple as one, limbs sprouting, against a sand dune. ‘It feels often like we’re becoming one, and I thought, how do I do this in my work?’ offers Teller. ‘I’ve never done that before, double exposure or superimposing things. The dunes were great; I photographed her rolling down, she photographed me. It’s like a metaphor for how you stumble through life, there’s something boring, something tragic, something beautiful…’

Woven into the rhythm of the nudes are landscapes and portraits of stuffed animals from a taxidermy museum they visited with their young daughter, Iggy. ‘Iggy really enjoyed it, but I super enjoyed it,’ shares the photographer. ‘Then in the studio it became clear that this work is about life on the planet, and love and nature.’ The series' title, a reference to Aristophanes’ speech from Plato’s Symposium, characterising love and the feeling of becoming whole, followed later. ‘Josselin [Merazguia], my exhibition manager, read me this text and I thought fuck me, this is exactly fucking brilliant for this show in Greece, it’s just perfect.’

Love, family, relationships and religion are frequent threads throughout the wider show. Elsewhere on the ground floor are further photographs of Drizyte, as well as Iggy (not to be confused with Iggy Pop, although features in the show too), the Pope, Teller’s parents, friends, collaborators and self-portraits, while downstairs in the basement is a more conceptual interpretation: a small video room showcases fashion films made between 1998 and today, while The Path of Hope occupies the main hall. Initially conceived for Harper’s Bazaar Italia, photographs of models in variously decorated Italian churches are blown up to mammoth size. Towards the back of the hall, a sleek grey pavilion screens Men, the photographer’s love letter to male relationships inspired by his father-in-law (nearly seven minutes long, the film sees Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård cutting Teller’s frozen faeces away with a stick).

‘The whole thing could have been square, really boring,’ suggests Teller of the exhibition’s design. Instead, he worked with Tom Emerson of 6a architects, with whom he collaborated on the 2023 show ‘i need to live’ at the Grand Palais in Paris, and who also designed his RIBA award-winning studio in London. ‘Tom’s extremely sensitive [to the work] and brings ideas which help me to be excited; he’s an important part of the show. There are many architects who are like dictators, doing it without really thinking about the work, but with Tom, we have fun.’

Of the curatorial intention, Teller adds, ‘I wanted to have it specific to the space, the place, the people, and to what I feel right now in that moment.’ His fascination with football is well documented – during an earlier preview he notes that his beloved Bayern Munich are playing against Dortmund at the same time as the exhibition’s opening party (they’ll win, 2-1) – and when we speak, he uses this to underscore his precision in choosing which works to show, pointing out an image of a bare-looking goal, shot in Sifnos earlier this year, before swivelling in his chair to highlight the training ground of local team Olympiacos, on the other side of the building.

Immediately to our right are vitrines filled with images from The Myth, shot with Drizyte at the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio in 2022, examining the old wives’ tale of raising your legs in the air to get pregnant. It’s the concrete nucleus of the show, and feels emotionally so too. ‘It’s the heartbeat in a way, the centre of the whole thing,’ agrees Teller. ‘I find it very beautiful and romantic, but it can be easily dismissed. It’s what surrounds me, what my head and body are occupied with. It’s an abstract fairytale of a family, it’s not a reportage – even with the coffee series [Guten Morgen Sonnenschein], you have no idea what my kitchen looks like. It’s the same with my self-portraits, I’m not any better or worse than Isabelle Huppert, but I’m always around.’

In a vitrine on the outside perimeter is a close-up of a can of Gaza Cola, the nails of the hand clutching it, belonging to the designer Katharine Hamnett, decorated with the Palestinian flag. It’s part of a wider series about Brexit that the photographer made with Hamnett, with whom he first worked in the 1990s, and reads as an anomaly against his otherwise largely apolitical showcase. ‘You react to the environment of what is now, culturally what you do is a mirror of things,’ says Teller. ‘That’s why I put the table opposite Why Trump [an image made in 2017 of the David King book, Why Trump Deserves Trust, Respect & Admiration, poking out from a jacket pocket]. It’s important what she’s doing and what she stands for, similar to what Vivienne Westwood was doing. I’m very proud of that work, and I put it in because it’s an important statement.’

Juergen Teller, 'you are invited', until 30 December 2025 at Onassis Ready, Athens, onassis.org

'At this point in life I don't like titles – “street photographer”, “documentary photographer”, I’m tired of all that,’ laughs Jamel Shabazz. 'I’d call myself a documentarian. I’m just recording things on my personal journey. My camera is my compass. It allows me to see things in the world that I wouldn’t see otherwise. I go with the flow, meet people and learn.'

Shabazz – a US Army veteran-turned-career prison officer, retired early to turn unofficial social worker, mentor and, yes, photographer – is looking back over the images in his new book Prospect Park, a compendium of shots he took in Brooklyn’s own answer to Central Park from 1980 to 2025. A favourite of his shows three women, seen from behind, perched together on a low tree branch: it turns out that they had been visiting that same spot every year since junior school to just sit for the day and reminisce. Shortly after the shot was taken, a hurricane took the tree.

'Everyone I’ve met in the park has had a story and without my camera – and the portfolio I’d carry with me, which helped show I was sincere – I wouldn’t have had those conversations,' says Shabazz. 'But life is slower in the park. People are more at peace, so they’re easier to photograph. I have vivid images of going to the park as a child, where the air is clean, where I saw a lake for the first time. It was an oasis, and when I was older, I realised I had to get back there, and kept going back there, to jog, to meditate, always with my camera. And it hasn’t changed at all. I can go there now and get the same feeling.'

The park also provided Shabazz with some relief, not least from the fact that his day job was a litany of desperation and brutality in a ceaselessly hostile environment. It was an opportunity just to talk to people and make connections, a process in ways more important than the photos that came out of it. 'It was an opportunity just to see humanity in a different space, to share my story, hear theirs, maybe be a big brother to the younger guys facing challenges in their lives,' says Shabazz. 'And everyone I met had a story [such that it] felt like there was a reason for that meeting.'

Nonetheless, his Prospect Park pictures – families, couples, hobbyists, party people, dreamers, wanderers, 'a lot of love and joy' – are at the gentler end of the photographer’s work. As a child of the era of Life, National Geographic and Playboy – 'magazines that created a whole visual language and a way of seeing the world' at a time when photography was arguably a more critical medium – it was perhaps inevitable that Shabazz’s work has more often focused around harder-hitting social commentary: prostitution, race, homelessness, Aids, the crack epidemic. 'Sometimes I feel like I’ve only seen those [bleak] kinds of images,' he laments. Right now, he’s volunteering in an animal shelter and working on a project about animal welfare.

'I have a profound love of dogs, and the dog I was raised with was the greatest gift I ever had besides a camera. Actually, I’m getting a little tired of humans right now with everything going on, with all the hatred,' says Shabazz. 'But my father [an official US Army photographer] taught me always to have themes, so when I go out of the door I have at least ten in my mind. My eyes are open, my camera locked and loaded and I’m ready to observe.'

Shabazz says that his decades of shooting Prospect Park photographs were not only a relief from the gloom; today he loves social media, he says, 'because those incredible images feed my mind, but they also cause a lot of pain to see how bad things are too'. The park photographs were also an attempt to provide a counter-narrative. Look, they seem to say, we’re more alike than you imagine. We can get on with grace and good humour. We can have empathy. 'It’s not an escape [from the realities of life],' Shabazz insists, 'but a balance. Prospect Park has been a medicine for me too.'

Prospect Park Photographs of a Brooklyn Oasis, 1980 to 2025 By Jamel Shabazz with contributions by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Richard E. Green, and Noelle Théard © 2025 Prestel Verlag, Munich · London · New York

amazon.co.uk

Abbey Road Studios has revealed the winners of the 2025 Music Photography Awards (MPAs) at a celebratory evening staged across its renowned Studios One and Two. Hosted by Lauren Laverne, the night combined awards presentations with live performances from Artist in Residence Jordan Rakei and singer-songwriter Orla Gartland, plus DJ sets from Dimitri From Paris and Klaverson.

The ceremony honoured both emerging and established image-makers while also celebrating two titans of the field. David Bailey CBE received a one-off Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by Nile Rodgers, with tributes from Elton John, Alice Cooper, Mary McCartney, Jarvis Cocker, Penelope Tree and Pattie Boyd. Mary McCartney described Bailey as 'a complete inspiration and a legend – you can feel him in every picture that he takes.'

Meanwhile, Anton Corbijn was named 2025’s ICON Award recipient, following Jill Furmanovsky’s win last year. Corbijn was celebrated with messages from Depeche Mode, U2, Nick Cave, Michael Stipe, Tom Waits, Lenny Kravitz, Siouxsie Sioux and Bryan Ferry, among others. Nick Cave commented: 'You have spent your career making me more handsome and interesting than I actually am. Your work continues to fascinate and inspire us all. You are indeed an icon.'

This year’s awards attracted more than 20,000 entries from 30 countries, with two new categories – Portrait and Festivals – joining the line-up, alongside a guest category celebrating Club Culture.

The trophies, designed by London-based artist Rose Pilkington, abstracted the inner workings of Abbey Road’s analogue recording gear in luminous, multi-dimensional digital form – a nod to the interplay between music, photography and technology.

The winning and shortlisted images will go on display at the Royal Albert Hall’s Amphi Corridor (22 October – 3 November), with a free public open day on 25 October. A further exhibition at Outernet London in November will showcase an expanded selection from the shortlist.

Speaking on the awards, Abbey Road’s MD Sally Davies said: 'Abbey Road has always stood at the intersection of music and creativity. These awards are our way of celebrating the photographers who make music visible, and freeze emotion and history in a single frame.' Lead judge Rankin added: 'It’s so great to see music photography thriving. It has never felt more vital.'

Founded in 2022, the MPAs have become the world’s only dedicated music photography awards, growing into a year-round platform that spans exhibitions, workshops and mentorship. Now embedded within the Abbey Road Music Photography Accelerator, the initiative continues to invest in the next generation of image-makers.

Abbey Road Music Photography Awards 2025 winners

Making Music: Jordan Curtis Hughes – Matty Healy, The 1975

Live Music: Ruby Boland – MAY-A

Music Moment of the Year (supported by Outernet London): Kirby Gladstein – Lana Del Rey

Underground Scenes: Adam Ziegenhals – Unabomb

Emerging Photographer of the Year (supported by adidas): Melissa Gardner – Lava La Rue

Festivals: Inès Ziouane – Festival d'été de Québec

Portrait: Alec Castillo – Adam Amram

Club Culture (guest category): Connor Baker – Glitterbox, Hï Ibiza

Judges’ Choice: Platon – Nile Rodgers

Lifetime Achievement: David Bailey CBE

ICON: Anton Corbijn

US photographer Thomas Prior rarely deals in spectacle. Instead, his photographs circle the edges of things, attentive to atmospheres rather than events. His new book, Slip Me the Master Key, published by Loose Joints, gathers two decades of such images into what he calls ‘quiet alarms’ – photographs that hum with unease, registering the uncanny in the ordinary.

The unease is not incidental. Prior’s subject is the Anthropocene, the term coined by scientists to describe a proposed new geological epoch in which human activity – burning fossil fuels, reshaping landscapes, driving mass extinctions – has become the dominant force shaping the planet. Once confined to academic debate, the word now reverberates through art, literature and photography as a way of grappling with life under conditions of profound human-made change.

How, though, do you photograph the Anthropocene without resorting to apocalypse? For Prior, the answer lies in restraint. ‘I see photography as an early warning signal,’ he tells me. ‘Though the larger question is whether anyone truly cares to look or listen.’ Where conventional news imagery thrives on urgency, he lingers on the aftershocks: a sterile consultation room, a roadside drenched in unnatural light, a landscape gnawed at by extraction.

In Facelift Consultation, Manhattan (2022), a woman’s face is mapped with surgical lines, a minor scene made unsettling by what it implies about control, vulnerability and the body as commodity. It is, on the surface, an image of routine medical preparation, but Prior’s framing sharpens it into something else: a portrait of a culture that treats flesh as raw material, open to correction, enhancement, even reinvention. Read within the book’s broader context, it becomes another Anthropocene marker – a reminder that the urge to reshape the world also extends inward, to the reshaping of the self.

That sense of the uncanny, the ordinary tipped off balance, runs through the book. ‘I believe the uncanny is simply the feeling I have when I’m looking for subjects to photograph, which is then hopefully transmitted to the viewer,’ Prior says. The subjects vary wildly, but the tone is consistent: subdued, oblique, quietly charged. His pictures speak less to what has happened than to what it feels like to live in a world where the ground itself seems to be shifting.

The American work carries particular weight. ‘I find the American uncanny to be particularly tragic because there’s a sense that we have the tools to do better, but we don’t,’ he reflects. His vision of his home country recalls the work of William Eggleston or Alec Soth, photographers who illuminated the ordinary, but it tilts darker – more alive to menace. In Morgue Truck (7th Ave), New York City (2020), a stark pandemic image, the dread is not just in the subject but in its atmosphere: a society faltering in plain sight, its fragility exposed.

Yet Slip Me the Master Key is not simply a portrait of America. Its reach is broader, moving between human and planetary scales: Adderall shortages and boxing sweat alongside glaciers and garbage patches. ‘The monumental subjects are just as informed by our actions, flaws, and desires as the smaller, more intimate ones,’ he insists. ‘They are all part of the same human-shaped world.’ In Receding Glacier, Torres de Paine (2014), the retreat of ice is captured with quiet clarity, an image that reads as slow erosion rather than spectacular collapse. Seen against something as close-range as Blood and Sweat, New York City (2023), where a boxer’s exertion is frozen mid-motion, it underscores Prior’s point: that the Anthropocene is not just about distant landscapes but also about the physical strain, the exhaustion and fragility written into everyday lives. The crisis, in his sequencing, exists everywhere at once – planetary in scope, personal in effect.

Restraint is what gives these images their charge. Prior resists the pull of drama, offering instead fragments, oblique details, quiet moments. It’s a sensibility closer to Paul Graham or Vanessa Winship, photographers who prefer atmosphere to grand gesture. Sequenced carefully with Loose Joints, the photographs bleed into one another, accumulating into what Prior describes as ‘a careful procession.’ The approach recalls Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, with its constellations designed to spark associations across time. Here, too, meaning arises not from individual images but from the mood they generate together.

The book ends, tellingly, not with spectacle but with a phrase. They is, they is, they is (2018) borrows its title from Tobias Wolff’s story ‘Bullet in the Brain’, printed at the book’s opening. ‘It’s an acknowledgment of the beauty that can be found in the wrongness of something,’ Prior says. ‘It was important for me that the book not end on a note of complete hopelessness.’ In Wolff’s story, a man at gunpoint recalls not the defining events of his life but a small, grammatically wrong phrase from childhood. Prior’s use of it is both tender and defiant: a reminder that even in fractured times, it is often the overlooked, imperfect details that resonate most deeply.

That, finally, is what Slip Me the Master Key offers: not a survey of disasters but a register of moods. A way of sensing how the present feels – uncanny, unstable, strangely beautiful. Prior’s ‘quiet alarms’ do not clamour for attention, but once heard, they are impossible to ignore.

Slip Me the Master Key is published by Loose Joints, £52, loosejoints.biz

In her new book Scripted, photographer Alex Black uses the visual language of commercial advertising to tell a new story – a glossy gothic in which stereotypical beauty standards are twisted into eerie and opulent visions.

It is the first monograph from Black, a renowned fashion and beauty photographer who shoots for magazines including Wallpaper*, and has worked for brands such as Maison Margiela, Diesel, Tom Ford and Pat McGrath. Like any successful commercial photographer, Black understands that advertising is its own kind of psychology; an exercise in probing, anticipating and, at its most successful, creating desire.

Scripted gives Black the chance to explore that relationship between photography and desire on her own terms, to subvert the tricks and illusions of the medium, rather than use them to fulfil the needs of a publication or brand.

'I’m trying to figure out what the image is doing through the visual codes – what is it communicating?’ says Black. ‘By stripping back those familiar elements, I’m creating space for a kind of duality, a contrast between high and low, minimalist and decadent, familiar and foreign.’

With Scripted, Black plays with those dualities to create images that draw you in with their high-gloss surface and keep you looking with their outré subjects. There are images of beautiful faces so retouched they appear plastic; a close-up of lips painted glossy yellow; a perfectly groomed face with frizzy hair, floating bodilessly in black space.

The book is also filled with grids that show the same image with one element changed, like a red painted nail that is cut into familiar manicure shapes (square, taloned) and strange ones (a diagonal line, saw-like spikes). The juxtaposition creates a sense of uncanniness, making painting and shaping your nails in any way suddenly seem like a bizarre ritual. Another shows six images of the same AI face, its plastic perfection and retro make-up recalling Barbie dolls, but its hair styled into impossible, space-age shapes that make it look both old-fashioned and hyper-modern.

‘What we’re trying to look at is how identity is a script, something you build piece by piece,’ says Black. ‘Beauty is a part of that script. Something like the choice of your hair dye feels so personal, but it is also tapping into something that was sold to you.

‘With this project, I wanted the images to reflect that,’ continues Black. ‘I imagined the beauty process through these objects and remnants that feel a bit harsh, almost torturous. We really do put ourselves through pain for beauty, like waxing and cutting hair, which is quite a violent act if you think about it. I wanted to contrast that sense of discomfort with the softness and lushness advertising usually sells, so the work feels like it’s holding both truths at once.’

That duality is captured perfectly by one of the most striking images in Scripted, which shows a long nail covered in bits of beauty detritus – a smidgen of cream, part of a fake eyelash – a stylised version of reaching into your beauty bag and getting covered in mess. Through images like this, Black proves that ‘beautiful’ and ‘grotesque’ can be synonyms rather than antonyms. With Scripted, the visual pleasure of aspirational imagery we know so well remains, but is distorted into new forms. Like a carnival mirror, the image it reflects back to us is strange, but all the more compelling for it.

Scripted is available from alexblackstudio.com, €70

Just a stone’s throw from Central Saint Martins (CSM), in Coal Drops Yard, you’ll find nine glowing lightbox displays of photographic intrigue. A girl lies supine in a field reminiscent of a Andrew Wyeth painting; a colourful spill of pin tacks glints from a woman’s shiny black hair; and a cinematic wide-shot tableau captures a model scrolling on her phone inside a vast photographic set. At first glance, you might not recognise these to be fashion images – but they are. Part of a new exhibition curated by writer and editor Violet Conroy, ‘Rethinking Fashion Image’ showcases the work of nine students and alumni from Central Saint Martins who are challenging the boundaries of fashion photography today. Exploring themes of selfhood in the modern age, humanity’s place in nature, and diasporic belonging, their work is reflective of a new generation intent on dismantling outdated stereotypes of glamour and exclusivity in favour of stories with more substance.

‘CSM has been an incubator for so many amazing photographers, many of whom have gone on to big careers in fashion,’ says Conroy, who was invited to curate the show by CSM lecturer Adam Murray. ‘I went in with no theme, but as I looked at the work, threads began to emerge. Much of the work is about identity and selfhood, and it’s really rooted in people and place. A lot of the work wouldn’t even conventionally be categorised as fashion imagery at all.’ Conroy points to the legacy of an anti-glamour style established by photographers like Corinne Day and Wolfgang Tillmans in the 1990s, which has stippled into various forms of contemporary realism today. ‘Something that’s interesting is the casting,’ she says. ‘There aren't any traditional models in any of the photographs. It's really inclusive casting and more unconventional, everyday people. I think that’s because there’s less of an interest in glossy, unattainable fantasies today.’

Together, these works highlight a new school of talent driven by a desire to establish their own visually rich worlds, rather than simply producing beautiful images. Displayed outdoors for the public to see, Conroy hopes the exhibition will reach beyond the echo chamber of fashion to a wider audience. ‘It’s exciting that it's in these windows rather than a gallery, because it means it's on the street,’ she says. ‘I want people walking past to see it and be interested in these young visual talents they wouldn’t encounter otherwise.’

As the show opens this weekend, coinciding with the start of London Fashion Week, here five of the exhibited image-makers tell the stories behind their work in their own words.

A new London exhibition celebrates the work of nine rising fashion image-makers from CSM

Carina Kehlet Schou (top)

‘I was born on the eastern coast of Denmark and grew up on the south east coast of the UK.

‘My work often only shows one subject in a state of detachment – even if there are multiple subjects in an image, they are emotionally distanced from each other. The work in this exhibition forms part of a yet unfinished series tentatively titled Aletheia, an Ancient Greek term meaning ‘disclosure,’ ‘revealing,’ ‘unhiddenness,’ and ‘reality.’ In Greek mythology, Aletheia was the goddess of truth. The notion of truth, and the search for meaning, is something I am always thinking about. In this context, I have been particularly engaged with William A. Ewing’s idea that ‘all photographs portray desire’ – a phrase which I continue to excavate through my work.

‘I’ve often worried about which world my work belongs to, since I feel like I’m neither a fashion photographer nor an art photographer, but somewhere in between. With this exhibition, Violet and Adam are opening doors for photographers who find themselves in that space, and that feels so exciting to be a part of.’

Rino Qiu

‘My academic background was originally in mechanical engineering before I went to CSM. My photographic practice is influenced by contemporary photography and architecture. I often look to artists such as Jeff Wall and Nigel Shafran, whose works inspire me with their sense of contingency and authenticity. I mainly shoot with a medium-format digital camera as I want the images to retain traces of time and place, rather than becoming merely perfect pictures. My work often focuses on the people and spaces behind the fashion industry, paying attention to overlooked workers, working environments, and moments out of the spotlight.

‘This photo was taken at a photography base in Shanghai in August 2024, where I participated in the design and construction of the set. Notice the electric fan in the frame – it is new and fresh with the smell of the paint. In the foreground is a model in casual clothes holding a mobile phone, whom I captured after a fashion shoot. This image seeks to capture a sense of fashion in the everyday – the real people, spaces, and emotions that lie behind the scenes. I tried to convey the fragility and resilience of the individual in the vast machine of China's fashion industry.’

Kaine Harrys Anamalu

‘I am a Nigerian-Italian photographer working between London and Milan. My work explores presence and identity and the image’s capacity to hold both personal memory and collective imagination. I work primarily with medium format photography and Polaroids, because they allow me to oscillate between clarity and ambiguity. I draw on influences from the visual arts of the 1930s, Italian cinema of the 1950s and 60s, and Negritude, while reflecting the lived experiences of diaspora. Ultimately, I am interested in how the body appears in space, how it carries history, and how the image might propose a new centre of gravity.

‘The works I’m exhibiting are two studio portraits made earlier this year. They reflect my interest in how a photograph can hold presence – not through performance, but through restraint. Together they hold a tension between intimacy and distance, presence and absence. This tension is what interests me, especially in relation to the Black subject, whose image has too often been cast in extremes. Being part of this exhibition means entering into a broader conversation about what fashion image-making can be. It matters that these portraits are shown publicly – not as a gesture of inclusion, but as a way of proposing another way of seeing, another way of being seen.’

Xueling Chen

‘The works in this exhibition were chosen from a larger group of images I submitted to my tutor between the years 2017 and 2019. These images are among the core works from my series ‘City Blue’. At that time, I had not yet been exposed to commercial photography. I was very inexperienced, and my motivation and inspiration for taking pictures came almost entirely from a raw and simple instinct. I was deeply curious about the world and about people. I would take models to explore ruins and shoot photographs in those forgotten spaces. My understanding of sexuality and desire was also very naïve then, and I believe that sense of confusion is reflected in the images from this series. The title ‘City Blue’ was inspired by the French erotic film Betty Blue, which I found incredibly beautiful. For me, participating in this exhibition is a rare opportunity to show my work in London. I have always hoped to bring China’s underground photography onto a larger stage. This kind of work is still considered a kind of subculture in China, but I believe every visual style carries its own possibilities.’

Camille Lemoine

‘The work that is in this show is from my series ‘Down Tower Road’. This work was made in response to not seeing my experience of living in rural Scotland reflected in photography, which typically relies on literal depictions of the landscape, such as farming, landmarks or dramatic vistas, rather than how it feels to exist here. I wanted to instead create imagery that communicates the subtle language of the land and that questions what it means to deeply know a place. I draw attention to things like the dark blue before heavy rain, the shape of the hedge where the sparrows live, the distinct way that the light unfolds. The often seemingly insignificant things that people living in these places interact with and feel a familiarity to. All of the work was made in my hometown, Baldernock, between 2023 and 2024, and combines my love for the location I grew up in, constructed scenes and documentary.

‘I feel very grateful and proud to be part of this exhibition alongside nine other brilliant photographers. Clothes have never been the focal point to my images and I’ve always been more interested in engaging with my own life experiences through my work. It's really exciting to be part of a wider conversation surrounding the role of fashion imagery in visual culture today.’

Rethinking Fashion Image is on view at Lower Stable Street Lightboxes, King’s Cross, until 5 January 2026. Exhibited photographers are Kaine Harrys Anamalu, Coco Wu, Carina Kehlet Schou, Xueling Chen, Rino Qiu, Camille Lemoine, Maya-Aska Arai, Olivia Chen & Kaiwei Duan and Lorane Hochstatter.