
Retrospecting Sandy Hill
22 December
Chris Shaw turned to photography because college didn’t suit him. In his own words, he was the only northerner in a class full of southerners, and in 1987, used his camera to connect with the people he felt more at home with. This took the form of nearby Sandy Hill estate – a jumble of oddly designed houses on the border of Surrey, containing ’normal’ people Shaw was more inclined to talk to.
Retrospecting Sandy Hill – new from Mörel books – contains portraits and snapshot glimpses of day to day life on the estate. With scribbled annotations, torn edges and scrawled crossings out, the publication is an authentic documentation of a cul-de-sac of English history.
Photography: Chris Shaw
Writer: Elly Parsons

Feed me
21 December
New from the London-based independent publisher Mörel, Instagram is photographer Stephen Shore’s third tome constructed around the collective remits of spontaneity, randomness and tight time constraints.
The book collects Shore’s Instagram feed to date, collating the entirety of his image feed and exploring both his use of the app as a photographic tool and the community-building potentials therein.
Ubiquitous uber-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has also contributed to the book, scanning the extent of Shore’s feed – printed on each left hand page of the book – and selecting images to detail on the right.
Instagram is released in a limited edition of 200 copies.
Writer: Tom Howells

The past is a foreign country
18 December
Currently on view at Antwerp’s FOMU Foto Museum, ’August Sander – Masterpieces and Discoveries’ is a major retrospective on the hugely influential German photographer.
Though most lauded for his portraits of ’People of the 20th Century’ (work from which is on display here), the exhibition transcends just that series to include a wealth of material exploring myriad themes, including images of pre- and post-Second World War Cologne, botanical and industrial surveys, and German landscape photography.
The oeuvre spans five decades, and the show features over 300 original prints. Curated by Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Rein Deslé and Joachim Naudts, ’August Sander – Masterpieces and Discoveries’ is on view until 14 February 2016.
Pictured: Zirkusartisten (’Circus performers’), 1926–1932. Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne; SABAM, Bruxelles, 2015
Writer: Tom Howells

The poet of light
17 December
In a career spanning five decades, Ray Metzker quietly and dedicatedly altered the course of modern photography. The American-born image maker is best known for his large ’composites’ – assemblages of printed film strips and single frames. Throughout his career, Metzker’s subject was light itself; people and objects were there simply to react with the source, rather than the other way round.
Featuring a small, never-before-seen macquette of 12 contact-light-shape prints organised into a grid, Laurence Miller Gallery’s exhibition of Ray Metzker’s work brakes new ground. The collection also displays his well-known favourites, like Philadelphia 1963 (printed 1985), pictured here, and the show presents a singular opportunity to view a great master’s work in its most complete form.
’Ray Metzker: The Poet of Light’ is on view until 23 December 2015.
Photograph courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery
Writer: Elly Parsons

Eyes around the world
15 December
Currently showing at Zurich’s Helmhaus, the sixth edition of ’Welt-Bilder / World Images’ continues the globe-spanning anthropological scope of a photographic project now in its tenth year.
The exhibition features work with a variety of compositional and technical approaches, in myriad sizes and presentations, encompassing a breadth of contemporary photography – presenting a sprawling, enlightening and confounding take on the world around us through the eyes – and lenses – of a sensitively curated range of international practitioners.
’Welt-Bilder / World Images 6’ is on view until 21 February 2016.
Pawn Shop, Ozone Park, New York, by Paul Graham, 2013. Courtesy the artist and carlier | gebauer

Hidden patterns of Hong Kong
16 December
The German photographer Michael Wolf has been documenting the enveloping, sprawling cityscape of Hong Kong since 1994, exploring both heady high-rise architecture and the dense network of laneways and alleys that comprise the metropolis’s wormholes and makeshift storage spaces.
A selection of Wolf’s detailed – almost anthropological – surveying of the latter is currently on show at London’s Flowers Gallery, entitled ’Informal Arrangements’. Many focus on the banal personal flotsam positioned through these spaces – coat hangers, chairs, gloves – while others pick out the dense, inadvertent patterns in piping and apartment facades. All transpose the everyday into images variously surreal and affecting.
’Hong Kong’s back alleys are often unnoticed against their more glamorous counterparts of dazzling architecture,’ Wolf explains. ’However, they present an authentic slice of Hong Kong’s grass roots culture. In my opinion they should be nominated as a heritage site.’
Pictured: Architecture of Density, Scout Shots, by Michael Wolf, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Flowers Gallery
Writer: Tom Howells