In his early career, Griffin introduced a bold new visual language to corporate photography, going on to create truly audacious campaigns that went well beyond any normal brief. Meanwhile, his work was exhibited in galleries, museums and festivals, starting with some key shows in Britain in the 1970s that were milestones in the acceptance of photography into the mainstream art world. 

The 1980s were his peak years, when he produced some of his most famous images and he came to wider international attention. (The Guardian named him “the photographer of the decade” in 1989). In 2003 he returned to image-making after a 12-year segue into music videos and TV commercials. The photography landscape had changed, and there weren’t the riches of before, but there were garlands. 

“He had a completely unique vision,” says Martin Parr, who met Griffin at Manchester Polytechnic in the early 1970s, establishing a lifelong friendship. “The kind of portraits he did, no one had seen anything like them before. He was a real innovator.”

Life in light 

Born in Birmingham in 1948, Griffin had grown up in Lye in the Black Country, leaving school at 16 to work as a trainee pipework engineering estimator for British Steel. He remained there for four years, later saying that the clash and flash of nearby metalworks was a major influence on his imagery (the symbol of the heroic worker would figure throughout his 50-year career). At Manchester, Parr recalls that the pair “immediately connected and became friends.” Alongside Daniel Meadows and others, they formed a kind of salon, challenging each other in photographic games and studying the work of a new wave of self-styled documentary photographers such as Tony Ray-Jones.

Griffin moved to London to pursue a freelance career, and taking a portfolio of black-and-white photographs of ballroom dancers to Roland Schenk, the celebrated creative director of Management Today, proved crucial. “It was an important meeting,” says Anne Braybon, who years later was art director of the magazine, and later still would commission Griffin for the National Portrait Gallery. “Schenk was the first to commission Brian, seeing in his work a new Robert Frank. He also introduced Brian to fine art and film, and those influences continued.”

Griffin repaid Schenk’s faith with extraordinary, theatrical, subversive portraits of otherwise nondescript business leaders. This bold approach formed the basis for an multi-award-winning and lucrative career that flourished in the boom years of the 1980s, working for design and advertising agencies while shooting cutting edge imagery for the music industry.

He was a virtuoso when it came to lighting, but the basis of Griffin’s imagery was observation, finding some small detail in his subjects to magnify and playfully twist. Perhaps his most famous album cover, Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp! (1979), was one of his quickest to shoot, capturing the singer’s bright white winklepickers in a shaft of sunlight while trying to find a location to make a portrait on London’s Southbank.

“He took chances, he pushed the envelope,” says Paul Hill, a leading figure in British photography by the 1970s who selected Griffin’s work (alongside Parr and Thomas Joshua Cooper) for Three Perspectives on Photography at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1979. It proved one the most important UK institutional shows of the decade at a time when the mainstream art world began waking up to photography.

“As well as having a great eye and an extraordinary sense of things coming together within a single frame, he used lighting in a very original way,” Hill explains. “Brian’s mission was to make unique images. Whether he was photographing Depeche Mode or Margaret Thatcher, he wasn’t trying to make a likeness or do a PR job. He was trying to make an important, unique photograph.”

Another key exhibition was at the 1987 Rencontres d’Arles photo festival. The festival’s director, François Hébel, had shown Parr’s The Last Resort the year previously, and Griffin’s former college mate suggested his work for the next edition, where it was exhibited alongside Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The festival opened new opportunities for Griffin to exhibit across Europe, and he worked with Hébel again many times over the years in different guises.

“He was one of my closest friends in photography,” says the Frenchman. “I really admire his work, and I don’t think he gets the recognition he deserves. He had a way to get his subjects to do anything he wanted. There are very few photographers that have this ability to create signature images in the very short time [you have to shoot a portrait]. You instantly recognise a Brian Griffin picture. There is a consistency, even though he changed over the years, moving from black-and-white film to colour digital.

“I have seen him shooting, and he had such concentration in front of the people he was taking pictures of. I think that’s why they would always do what he wanted them to do; here was this guy in front of them with his eyes so intense.”

London calling

Griffin was also a pioneer in the field of photobooks. Parr reckons he was the first photographer in the UK to go the self-publishing route as an act of creative independence, collaborating with his great friend and “soul brother”, the acclaimed graphic designer, Barney Bubbles. There would be many more books throughout his career, and one of them, Work, marked a highpoint and in some senses a closure to the first half of his career. It was published in 1988 alongside a one-man show at the National Portrait Gallery, and went on to be awarded the best photography book at the Barcelona Primavera Fotografica in 1991.

Much of it was drawn from his best known corporate commission to photograph the new Broadgate development in the City of London. Typical of Griffin, he chose to elevate not the new buildings or the financiers, but the workers who built it. “Rosehaugh Stanhope, the developers, were erecting sculptures around Broadgate but none of them paid heed to the workers building the project,” Griffin wrote in his 2021 self-published biography, Black Country Dada. “So, Peter [Davenport, the designer who commissioned him] and I decided to create our own sculpture. However, this was a living sculpture using one of the project workers, Eric Foster, a steel erector.”

Griffin spent the 1990s shooting music videos and TV commercials, co-founding his own production company. In 2003, he was invited to support Birmingham’s bid to become the European Capital City of Culture. His return to photography after 12 years away sparked newfound interest in his back catalogue. Art Museum Reykjavik staged a retrospective in 2005, followed by large-scale exhibitions focusing on various aspects of his practice in Arles, Birmingham and Bologna, along with dozens of smaller shows. Griffin became a patron of Derby’s Format Photography Festival in 2009 – the same year he was honoured with a major retrospective in Arles – and four years later received the Centenary Medal from the Royal Photographic Society and an Honorary Doctorate from Birmingham City University.

A ‘rare’ generosity

Yet his hunger to make unique images never diminished, and he remained prolific as both a photographer-for-hire and an artist in his own right. His personal projects were more tightly conceptualised and yet more varied in their focus, ranging from Gary, a series on his neighbours in Rotherhithe, where he lived and worked for more than 40 years; The Black Kingdom, based on his early years in the 1950s and 60s; and Spud, inspired by a residency in Béthune-Bruay in Northern France, marking the centenary of the end of World War I.

There were more major commissions too – notably for Reykjavik Energy, another for HSI and the opening of St Pancras station, and best of all, to his mind, for London’s Olympic Games Road to 2012, which he was determined to shoot, and was commissioned by Braybon for the National Portrait Gallery. “He was bold. He always went his own way,” s he recalls. “At the opening, Nadav Kander walked in to see Brian’s work, naming him ‘the master.’”

Hyman, who had planned to work with Griffin on a new retrospective this year, is certain of his importance in the story of British photography. “He’s got a central place in that history. He was also a very individual voice.” Like everyone else contacted for this article, Hyman mentions Griffin’s vivacity and generosity of spirit. Magdalena Shackleton, who supported Griffin’s work for years and showed two solo exhibitions at her MMX Gallery in South London, fondly remembers exhibiting his work at art fairs – and Griffin surrounded by friends in their local pub. “He always met people on the same level, whoever they were, and wherever they fitted into the business world or the art world,” says Hébel. “He would pull out a little something of his subjects so you would understand their role. But there was no hierarchy. And that is incredibly rare.”

“My work has shifted from thinking about portraiture as a definitive thing, and more rather like portraiture as an ongoing, underlying source for the work”

Exposure presents 40 works mainly from Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio, in which Sepuya uses red lights, props and mirrors to question the dynamics of studio portraiture. Begun in 2017, the series stretches beyond the traditional boundaries of the photoshoot, disrupting the hierarchy which places final image over process, setup, and the relation between artist and sitter. The show represents an evolution from casual domestic portraiture to something more self-referential, but without losing the intimacy of Sepuya’s early shoots. “My work has shifted from thinking about portraiture as a definitive thing, and more rather like portraiture as an ongoing, underlying source for the work,” he tells me. “It’s about the complications that are produced in the making of portraiture.”

Sepuya’s practice began at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he studied for a BFA in photography and imaging until 2004. The early 2000s was a raw time in New York shaken by the September 11 attacks. Artists were at the forefront of the queer and cultural revivals. Sepuya mentions Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern’s 2022 documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom as “very much the place I was in New York” – a daring Williamsburg counterculture where people partied and marched together against the US’s wars in the Middle East.

With ambitions to become a fashion photographer, Sepuya began shooting friends in his apartment, capturing the intimacy of his social circle. Looking back, the pictures appear as domestic portraits, but not necessarily “the way a subject is revealed through not only figure but also an eye into their surroundings,” he explains. After all, the subjects were in his home rather than their own, allowing him to break the association between person and prop and instead strip the setting, gesturing towards studio arrangements. “It took a while for me to realise what I had taken for granted – that I was photographing in my home, a place where I was already very comfortable,” Sepuya says. He would use blank walls and show just the edge of a table or bed, anticipating the manipulation and obscuring of surfaces in later work.

The queer scene gathered momentum and Sepuya’s portraits found a home in BUTT magazine and his own SHOOT zine, in which he published a single male portrait session each session, often featuring nudes. “These portraits that I was just making for myself started to circulate in a way that I hadn’t anticipated through social media – they became quite notorious,” he explains. “I was thinking about the way in which portraiture is wrapped up in this economy of exchange and solicitation – particularly by gay men in homoerotic spaces.” AA Bronson founded NY Art Book Fair in 2006, giving the scene new exposure and expanding Sepuya’s list of friends and subjects. The period triggered a new way of interpreting visual culture. “How do images work in the world?” Sepuya wonders. “How do they circulate and transform relationships? How do they come back?”

If New York inspired the male poses and careful bodily observation in Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio, its treatment of studio spaces has nomadic origins. As more friends began making portraiture around 2010, Sepuya would turn the lens on their shoots and his own, creating a literal introspection. He mentions a Cecil Beaton photograph of Pavel Tchelitchew painting his muse Peter Watson with poet Charles Henri Ford also present – a conscious layering of friendship and artistry within the frame. Sepuya became interested in “recognition and the way that photography is positioned,” he explains. “The camera as a vector pointing outwards and allowing you to understand the position of the artist, the author, the photographer through those things that surround them.”

Residencies at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Studio Museum, Harlem, and on Fire Island allowed Sepuya to gather props and explore rephotographing using images from correspondence with friends. He learned how to shoot on digital during his MFA at UCLA and began incorporating mirrors in his compositions. This enabled him to integrate images made while travelling in Europe and Mexico, fixing prints to mirrors and puncturing the presumed boundaries of the studio.

In Exposures, images feature mirrors littered with research material – “a studio space that could be both the recurring background for an image but also would slightly change over time,” Sepuya explains. Gold fabrics were important for referencing Modernism and Surrealism, while Black velvet maintained the sexual gestures of mid-20th century homoerotic photography while also nodding to 19th-century large-format dark cloths. The combination of black fabric and mirrors “opened up new ways of thinking about the idea of Blackness in terms of material – and the necessity of Blackness for making latency visible,” he says.

Sepuya has exhibited extensively over the past seven years, a form of stress testing for images in constant dialogue with their predecessors. A small show at Team Bungalow, LA, in 2017 was a debut for his darkroom images, which then went to Document in Chicago the following year. Inclusion in MoMA’s Being: New Photography 2018, the 2019 Whitney Biennial and the Barbican Centre’s Masculinities: Liberation through Photography (2020) confirmed his position in the new curatorial focus on queer reflexivity. Recent forerunners for Exposure were shows at Bortolami Gallery, NY; Vielmetter, LA; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; and last year’s twin Peter Kilchmann display in Zurich and Paris. “Where the ideas come in is always responding to observing what happens once the work is made,” Sepuya explains. So viewers in Nottingham will engage in many kinds of spectatorship: with the artist, his subjects, the studios – and previous audience perceptions.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Exposure, is at Nottingham Contemporary until 05 May

“I’m concerned with the final image, thinking about how it’s going to sit in the world”

Lee originally studied marketing at Bowie State University, Maryland, but quit his job a decade ago to pursue a life in art. Beginning with street photography and becoming interested in people’s stories, he then took an MFA at California College of the Arts. Lee’s graduate show was a precursor of sorts to the SF Camerawork exhibition, focusing on the iconography of the Marlboro Man – the tobacco marketing character played by real cowboys, which helped propel Marlboro to industry leader in the 1970s.

Marlboro’s cowboy figures were traditionally white, though, and Lee’s work is about confronting such blindspots and prejudices in American mythology, in the hope of giving viewers a more balanced representation of the country’s history. With family roots in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Houston, Texas, Lee is shaping a practice informed by the legacies of the Deep South and Great Migration, concerned with restoring Black histories while tracing current aspirations. The cowboy project is ongoing, with the current aim to widen the scenarios and contexts the subjects are captured in. A recent trip saw Lee venture to rural Louisiana, where he met the only Black competitive rodeo rider in the state’s high schools. “I want to document every aspect of each subject’s life on the ranch,” Lee says. “I want to move away from just person and horse – diving into what this lifestyle is and the layers within it.”

Lee returns to a term used by Ghana’s Akan tribe to summarise his philosophy – ‘Sankofa’, meaning ‘It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind’. “We are here and we have been part of this American Dream too, even though we haven’t had the opportunities to enjoy the American Dream,” he says.

Charles Lee, Sweat & Dirt is at SF Camerawork, San Francisco, until 03 February

For Starskey Butler, there is an unbroken continuum between social work and creative practice. “I’m an artist and I’m a social worker but I’m one person,” they say. “There might be a technical separation but there is not a spiritual separation.” Now based in Birmingham, Butler was brought up in Wolverhampton by Ena, their unofficial foster mother. Ena is ‘Nan’ (though not biologically) and an abiding influence – a documentary where she shares her warmth and wisdom features in Thirty-Six. 

Elsewhere, landscape images from a series called IN/OUT evoke the interplay between external and internal worlds while pictures made at Ena’s home touch on the ways that memory and culture shape our identities. A moving-image piece trains our gaze on the greenhouse in her garden, while a still image shows a spade belonging to Ena’s husband, another formative figure for Starskey Butler. The artist speaks of history and culture – how many Jamaican immigrants brought farming traditions from their country of origin to Britain – but they are as much metaphors for how we are nurtured and how we grow.

There are always multiple versions of any story. There is a version of Starskey Butler’s story that sensationalises pain and trauma; there are versions of their story seen through the perspective of family members, caregivers, council authorities. And there’s the version of the story they tell here, picking their words carefully as we drink tea in a quiet room away from MAC’s public areas.

“I’m an artist and I’m a social worker but I’m one person… There might be a technical separation but there is not a spiritual separation”

The artist did reconnect with their birth mother when they were 7 or 8, but it was only as an adult that they really got to know her. Access Subject (2022), an in-progress book project centred on portraiture and dialogue between the pair, was sparked by the discovery of those children’s services records. “I just went round to her house and was like, ‘I’ve got these records, shall we do a photography project?’” She agreed and they looked through the records together, speaking at length about her childhood and life before Starskey Butler was born. “After that, we finally both saw each other properly, as human beings,” the artist reflects.

Before their career as a social worker, Starskey Butler hadn’t considered delving into their own past. But working in child protection, they started to wonder about their background. “I always knew I had older siblings that had been placed into care,” they say. They also point out that “a person who has had previous concerns raised will have a ‘pre birth assessment,’ so my mother would have had some involvement with social services.” In April 2017, Starskey Butler put in a ‘subject access request’ with Leeds council, expecting to receive a single-page letter and instead finding themselves weighed down with a mountain of paperwork.

Gradually, they were able to piece together more of the jigsaw, but further questions emerged through the information missing in the redacted pages. “Visitors think I redacted them but that’s how I received them,” they say of the documents on display at MAC. “I was interested in them as objects, their textures and how they relate to the photographs.” The council sent the redacted pages, related to events that took place before Starskey Butler’s birth, through with the rest of the documentation, although there was no information contained besides the inclusion of name, place and date of birth and a court date. More intriguing than not seeing anything, these almost entirely blanked out papers remind us of knowledge just outside of our grasp.

This is a theme that recurs throughout Thirty-Six. For example in a series of images shot from trains when Starskey Butler would travel around the UK conducting interviews with individuals to assess their suitability to foster a child to whom they already have a connection, but who cannot reside with their birth parents. The smudged and fleeting landscapes are meditations on the responsibility of making those decisions. “You assess somebody’s entire life from when they were born up until that moment,” Starskey Butler explains. “You think, ‘Who am I to even be doing this?’ And you’d see someone over a long period of time each week for hours.” Moments of optimism and confidence could rapidly give way to doubt with an unforeseen revelation. It is a prolonged process where the assessor must stay open to all possibilities before finally reaching a starkly binary conclusion – a yes or a no.

Thirty-Six takes us on a journey of deep empathy that echoes Starskey Butler’s own experiences, both professional and personal. The intensive discussions that informed Access Subject began in the same way that a foster viability assessment would – although that impartiality was impossible to maintain. In a section of the interview, reproduced verbatim on the exhibition wall, Starskey Butler’s birth mother asks, “Do you think I was a bad mother?” They reply, not as a social worker but as a child: “No… I think people have their circumstances.” In the end, circumstances are all we have, the sum total of our stories, layer upon layer, that make us who we are.

Marley Starskey Butler: Thirty Six is at Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, until 28 January

Header Image © Frankie Mills

From time-honoured rituals, to intimate homes and tight-knit communities, this year’s winning images showcase the diverse faces, traditions and stories that define Britain today

Meet Tasmina Haq as she stands before us in formal pose, a thin blade in one white-gloved hand, a sabre mask in the other. She’s part of Muslim Girls Fence, a grassroots initiative in Birmingham. And here’s Safy perched on a bridge over the Cam as punts pass below. He’s a student at the University of Cambridge, seen behind him beyond a manicured, riverside lawn. And there’s Debbie on the Isle of Skye, getting some sun on her face before she embarks on her fifth round of chemotherapy.

All three are subjects in this year’s Portrait of Britain, a public art project of unrivalled scale, coming to you via JCDecaux’s digital advertising screens right across the UK throughout January.. They feature in three of the 100 winning photographs – revealed today – that make up the Portrait of Britain exhibition.

The winners were selected from an open call last summer asking for images that “celebrate the many faces of modern Britain”, pictures that capture the country’s unique traditions and diversity. Now these winning portraits will appear on high streets, in shopping centres, train stations, airports, roadside poster sites, and iconic London bus shelters up and down the land throughout January, thanks to a partnership between British Journal of Photography and JCDecaux, the world’s largest company devoted to outdoor advertising.

Portrait of Britain does not profess to be a scientifically collected sample of the UK public, nonetheless its representation is wide and far-reaching, with images of people from all walks of life across the country. There are subjects that reveal glimpses of time-honoured rituals and traditions, such as Morton Moss’ portrait of Niallor, photographed as the Jack of the Green in Glastonbury, captured in an elaborate floral headdress celebrating Beltane at the beginning of summer. Elsewhere, we see Euan Myles’ portrait of Rory, a Shetland boy dressed in Viking garb standing next to a replica longship, a proud participant in the Up Helly Aa festival, marking the end of Yuletide.

Other photographs take us inside people’s homes, such as Margaret Tyler, whose lifetime obsession with the royal family is on prominent display in her flag-dressed front room, as photographed by Callum O’Keefe. In another image, we visit Nino and Olivia, a couple with Down’s syndrome, photographed at their home in Bristol as part of a series, Us, by Rona Bar and Ofek Avshalom.

In other pictures, home is the backdrop, as in Ellie Ramsden’s portrait of Reiss Nelson, who plays for Arsenal, photographed on a return to where he grew up on the Aylesbury Estate in south London to open a new outdoor football pitch. It is one of many that speak of tight-knit communities. Other examples include Keiran Perry’s candid portrait of Luna and Paula, two members of an off-grid community in the Scottish Highlands. Or Francesca Mills’ photograph of Olena, Paulina, Valentyna, Tanya and Valeria, five Ukrainian women photographed taking a break while walking on Dartmoor during their first summer in the UK under the Homes for Ukraine sponsorship scheme.

The winning pictures also evidence many diverse approaches to portraiture itself. Take, for example, the “assisted self-portrait” of Mauvette Reynolds, shot with the help of Anthony Luvera, an Australian-born artist who has developed a collaborative practice, often working with homeless people on long-term projects. There are celebrity portraits, such as the unmistakable profile of Bill Nighy in London, as photographed by Craig Fleming for the Los Angeles Times. There are photographs of Don Letts, Jo Brand and Lily Allen. Many other pictures are drawn from long-term projects that tell the stories of British community, such as Mico Toledo’s portrait of Abraham, from his series, A Brighter Sun, documenting the remnants of the Caribbean exodus in east London, or which address contemporary issues, such as Zuzu Valla’s portrait of Lauren, part of a series that aims to “empower diversity through photography”.

Portrait of Britain was launched in June 2016 in the tumultuous months surrounding the Brexit vote, conceived as a site-specific public artwork through which the British public would encounter versions of themselves on JCDecaux’s nationwide network of digital advertising screens.

“It is in each other that we see ourselves and form our sense of place,” says Mick Moore, CEO and Creative Director of British Journal of Photography, reflecting on the social value of the initiative. “Portrait of Britain captures the quirky, the mundane, the here and now of the extraordinary everyday in which we live.”

The public exhibition gives the photographers “a place to be seen and be visible in a world where so many pictures reside”, says Nadav Kander, one of this year’s judges, who is himself one of the world’s leading portrait photographers. “It is an opportunity to be recognised and celebrated by your peers, and the public,” adds another judge, curator Sebah Chaudhry.

The winning portraits in this latest edition can also be seen in an accompanying book, alongside another 100 shortlisted photographs. Portrait of Britain Volume 6 is published by Bluecoat Press, the photobook publisher that in recent years has focused solely on the work of UK-based photographers, including that of Tish Murtha, Daniel Meadows, Markéta Luskačová and many others. 

“We couldn’t imagine a better way to kickstart the new year than with the Portrait of Britain exhibition on our digital screens,” says Dave McEvoy, CMO at JCDecaux UK. “We love this joyous, inclusive and thought-provoking celebration of what it means to live in Britain today.”

JCDecaux’s network of out-of-home digital screens are located in major transport hubs, roadsides, shopping centres and high streets across the UK, giving unrivalled visibility to the country’s biggest annual public art event. According to McEvoy, its screen network reaches more than 90 per cent of the UK each week.

“Giving back to the community has always been at the heart of our business,” he says, “ever since our founder Jean-Claude Decaux had an idea to provide and maintain bus shelters free of charge, paid for by the advertising posters displayed on them… Our JCDecaux Community Channel enables not-for-profit, community, charitable and arts organisations to access out-of-home, in line with our purpose and values.”

Indeed, community is a theme that runs throughout this year’s Portrait of Britain, such as Felicity Crawshaw’s picture of Joseph, a community activist working with his neighbours to improve their local habitat, or Steve Bright’s photograph of John, one of many portraits made of the Windrush generation. Together, these portraits highlight not just a nation of individuals; they recognise also that we all exist within constellations made up of family, neighbours and shared values and interests.

The 100 winning images will be exhibited on JCDecaux digital screens across the UK from 08 January, while 200 shortlisted images are featured in the Portrait of Britain Vol. 6 photobook, available now on Bluecoat Press. 

How does Sapiland fit into your wider practice? 

Sapiland is documenting the world around me. It’s staying true to some traditional principles of documentary photography that influenced me when I was young. I think most of my projects are also little worlds I escape to, or inhabit for a while.

To me photography is an unspoken language where you can communicate without the use of words. And like in most art forms, it has the potential to reach the conscious and the subconscious. So in my opinion, it doesn’t really matter which form of photography is used – or if you use a brush, or a chisel or a pen. As long as you can express yourself freely and get in touch with yourself, it’s a win. If other people get something out of it, that’s the icing on the cake.

You’re interested in existentialism – can you explain this a little?

After many years of photographing what I emotionally react to, and finding out what goes on in my subconscious, I have figured out that most of my themes deal with some sort of existentialism. I didn’t have the easiest of upbringings, even though I come from a stable family, and I guess part of my internal self is questioning: am I even allowed to be here?

As such, existentialist themes come very naturally as they are part of my inner psyche. It therefore shows up in my photography projects, as I try to be honest with myself and because I photograph what I react to. Thus, themes like family, religion, alienation, beauty and searching come to the surface, as they are all things that I have dealt with (or am dealing with) in my life.

“Photography is an unspoken language where you can communicate without the use of words… And like in most art forms, it has the potential to reach the conscious and the subconscious”

How did you become involved in the Indian Photo Festival – and where does Sapiland fit in the programme? 

 I found out about the Indian Photo Festival many years ago, through the Head On Photo Festival in Australia. In 2016 I submitted my series Heaven and Earth and was lucky to be selected and exhibited at IPF which unfortunately, I couldn’t attend. I continued to submit and was lucky to be selected again for the last edition. This time I made sure that I was able to finally visit in person. My time at the festival was extraordinary. I was very well looked after and met some wonderful people and found the exhibitions beautifully curated. On top of that I fell in love with India.

There were many themes presented at the festival, and many unique viewpoints. A number of the exhibitions centred on nature and what humans do with it. I feel that Sapiland fits in well as it is important that more of us realise that we only have one planet.

What are you working on currently? Will Sapiland lead to any related work?

 For now, Sapiland is finished. That doesn’t mean that I won’t take pictures of the human footprint when I see it, but I am actively working on putting together another project I shot over many years. I’m also working on putting together my projects from the last 15 years into a slideshow format. I recently presented this to my family and friends as a test run, showing my photography in a more holistic way and explaining the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’. I am thinking of maybe extending this and hiring a cinema to show my work to a wider audience.

Indian Photo Festival is at various venues across Hyderabad until 7 January 2024

Now in its 16th edition, Photo50 provides a critical arm to the Islington-based art fair, a space in which contemporary photographic practices can be studied and championed. “We were seeking a timely, defining curatorial voice, a strong visual statement and pertinent converser to speak on photography today,’’ Sarah Monk, director of London Art Fair, explains on the eve of its 36th edition. “We wanted to ensure that this Photo50 was distinct from recent editions in format, subject and curatorial approach. Revolv provided such an opportunity, and were invited to guest curate through their unique perspective as an artist-run collective.’’ 

Comprised of artists Krasimira Butseva, Lina Ivanova, Lucas Gabellini-Fava, Victoria Louise Doyle, and Alexander Mourant, Revolv is a non-hierarchical collective concerned with collaborative practices, creative education, and photographic innovation. They specialise in ‘Expanded Photography’ – a “sensorial and intellectual challenge” that begins in photography before pushing beyond understandings of the medium. “[Expanded Photography] practitioners retain a certain photographic thinking as they move away from photography as the sole form of expression,’’ the collective says. “They might incorporate moving image, sculpture, drawing, performance, installation, and other media.” The camera, “haunted by its mechanical nature,’’ becomes an epistemologically distanced parent, a rule to be broken, a house to escape.

“Each artist’s angle is unique, although they all share a certain care for the land’’

“Making and viewing involves playing, experimenting, and challenging what the artist and viewer think they know about art,” Revolv says. This is evidenced across Grafting, with traditional landscape photography barely featuring. “Landscape as a genre falls short as an experience of the land,’’ Revolv states. A photograph can “capture’’ land as a passive subject, they argue, uprooted and churned through a singular perspective. Cognisant of this controlling, dominating and potentially colonial dynamic, this year’s Photo50 recenters photography beyond the human body, inviting land into the creative process. Revolv hope this perspective shift will “allow us to tap into the land’s slower temporality and interconnected forms of knowledge.’’ Through this grafting between artist and subject, human and landscape, artwork and site, photography expands, bears new fruit. “More than just prints on the wall,’’ Revolv says. 

“Each artist’s angle is unique, although they all share a certain care for the land,’’ Revolv says. Anthropogenic themes are ever-present yet never monolithic, the climate emergency invariably “lurking in the background” when not in full focus. Marie Smith’s bleached cyanotypes form a transtemporal dialogue between the artist and Anna Atkins, the first woman photographer and cyanotype pioneer. Atkins’ family owned slaves on a plantation in Jamaica, Smith’s motherland. Smith illuminates this dark history, documenting plants on the premises of the Horniman Museum and responding to Anna Atkins’ books in the collection of the museum. For Jackson Whitefield’s Imprint I, the artist buried steel plates for three months. The ground becomes markmaker, an experiment in cameraless photography made in collaboration with the earth. For Joshua Bilton, collaboration with the students of the Ferry Lane School in Tottenham led to Seed Pod, a collection of stories, poems, wishes and offerings built over two years of workshops and canal walks.

When selecting the 13 artists in Grafting, Revolv played a game of “Where’s the labour?’’ The production process of each project was located, contextualised and credited. “Photography is still viewed as a less laborious medium than painting or sculpture. It’s seen as the click of a button,” the collective says. With Photo50, the collective hopes to “connect [the fair’s] audience to photography as an indispensable medium within contemporary art.’’ With an awareness garnered in their own practices, Grafting spotlights all that “goes into” an image before, during, and after the click. Sometimes there isn’t even a click. From sewing to burying to non-toxic plant-based darkroom chemistry, each artist shows their working out in their presentations. 

Revolv is currently transitioning from a collective to an organisation to better support early-career artists. Guest curations such as Photo50 provide a chance to work differently, to expand in new directions. “LAF supported our vision from the beginning,” Revolv says. “We have day jobs freelancing and teaching in addition to our own practices. The photography industry is like an ecosystem – multiple ways of thinking and creating can thrive together when resources are shared.”

The collective is uniquely positioned within this ecosystem, built on a series of successful grafts – still budding new leaves. Grafting brings their interest in expanded photography to ecological contexts – concerned with the artist not just as maker, but as a piece of nature. Here the photographer is not a landscaper, but a worm in the soil, a leaf on the wind.

London Art Fair is at Business Design Centre, London, from 17 until 21 January. BJP editor Diane Smyth will be taking part in the conversation ‘New Representations of the Land’ on 19 January

The exhibition title foregrounds the artistic and social relationship Lê has maintained between the Mississippi and the Mekong. Delta (2011) shows Vietnamese women in New Orleans and Ho Chi Minh City, vibrant colour portraits that emphasise similarity as well as difference. New York City is home to around 20,000 Vietnamese Americans, 60 per cent of whom were born abroad. Showing these works at MoMA speaks to Lê’s global consciousness; she mentions the dislocation of diaspora life, as well as the shakiness of the US’ democratic experiment. “Living through the war and being a refugee continues to reverberate today with immigrants from Latin and South America,” she says. Her past becomes a vehicle for empathy, the photographs public tokens of solidarity.

Lê spent the period between 1999 and 2004 tracing the ways in which war is alive in the American psyche, whether real or imagined, imminent or deferred. In Virginia and North Carolina, she photographed men who re-enact the Vietnam conflict for Small Wars, while in the arid Californian desert, she made intense studies of military training exercises on the eve of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars for 29 Palms (2003–04). Films relating to both series appear at MoMA. Events Ashore shows the prowess of the US Navy, the colour shots gesturing towards a sense of misplaced adventure. (Lê was invited onboard by a colonel). People often ask whether she is fetishising the military. “Of course not,” she tells me. “People throwing that word around without understanding what it means” motivated her to explore the history of erotic imagery, the thin line which can separate desire and violence. Gabinetto (2016) – pictures of erotic artefacts from Naples’ Secret Museum – and new porn-inspired embroideries explore this at MoMA.

“I’m thinking about what it means to group together a multitude of pictures inspired by poetics, rhythms, dissonance and breaks – remembering the first image and carrying that impression on to the next photograph”

While visiting her mother in Orange County during the pandemic, Lê began returning to the Twentynine Palms training base, nearly two decades after she first observed exercises there. She had access to a raised viewing point, the swirling dust drifting across the desert as it had done in her black-and-white shots of mortars and gun drills. “I had a quasi out-of-body experience and remembered why I was there,” Lê recalls. “I saw the span of my mother’s life flashing across the landscape, from her birth in Hanoi in the early 1930s and through various occupations.” Lê’s mother had been awarded a scholarship to study in France in the 1950s, returning to a divided Vietnam after the Geneva Accords in 1954. But her health was now deteriorating, accelerated by Covid isolation. “She would shuttle back and forth with this fragmented life defined by American geopolitics – which was also my life,” Lê says. As the vision faded, helicopters circled and another training exercise began.

Lê describes the experience as confusing, but was struck by the power of a 360-degree vista. She began discussing the potential for a new immersive work with Marcoci. The resulting installation, Fourteen Views, consists of vertical panels stitched together from Lê’s “library of clouds”, inspired by the work of JMW Turner and the sublime. The cyclorama is derived from negatives, but Lê used Photoshop and other digital tools to stitch images together, a departure from her typical hands-off approach. The new work helps answer a genre query often put to Lê, whose method is sometimes compared to photojournalism or documentary. “There was always this question of ‘Where’s the art?’ and ‘Where does the art reside?’ in my work,” she says. “It’s an open question… with Thomas Demand, you know where the art is.”

Between Two Rivers showcases Lê’s mixed-media practice in a way that her first US institutional solo show did not. On Contested Terrain featured more than 125 photographs organised in juxtaposing series clusters, opening in 2020 at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art before travelling to Fort Worth and Milwaukee, concluding in March 2022. Speaking now, Lê views the show as something of a research exercise in anticipation of a more experimental outing. “That idea of looking at the work on the wall is always very clarifying,” she explains. “I was able to see clearly the connections between my ideas and my concerns throughout projects – some are different iterations; some are completely new ideas; and some are extensions.”

This makes the MoMA show a pivotal moment, a chance to disrupt a linear way of looking, whether via series mash-ups, embroideries or digital alterations. Silent General (2015–ongoing) epitomises this; a roving, agile series suitable for state-of-the-nation New York Times picture essays and shots of high-school students alike. The work moves in motion with the country, as it did when debates around the southern border shifted either side of Trump’s election in 2016. The task at MoMA is to capture that variety without drifting.

“I’m thinking about what it means to group together a multitude of pictures inspired by poetics, rhythms, dissonance and breaks – remembering the first image and carrying that impression on to the next photograph,” she observes. Lê’s mindset suits river flow or current analogies. “I’ve been around long enough to see that history is cyclical,” she says. “We always talk about how the Vietnam War was a lesson learned, but it wasn’t.”

An-My Lê, Between Two Rivers/Giua hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières, is at MoMA, New York, until 16 March

How has the Indian photography scene changed since 2015

Since 2015, the Indian photography scene has undergone significant transformations, driven by visual storytelling, technological advancements, democratisation of access, and an eagerness among photographers to bring untold stories to light. The rise of social media platforms has provided photographers with more opportunities to share their work and connect with audiences.

Artists are now using photography as a tool to tell powerful stories, spark social movements, and bring attention to important issues. Sinking Sundarbans by Supratim Bhattacharjee aims to raise awareness of Climate Refugees and the impact of mangrove cutting; Subhajit Naskar’s In The Forest of Lie addresses the issue of the increasing number of wildlife deaths and the decreasing number of greens in urban areas. The democratisation of photography has also led to a diverse range of perspectives and styles within the Indian photography scene, while technology has also played a crucial role in shaping how photographers capture and present their work.

How do you balance the inclusion of local – and Indian – photographers with the need for the programme to have a global scope

Finding the right balance between showcasing local photographers and maintaining a global scope is crucial. While it is important to highlight the works of homegrown photographers to provide a local context and celebrate their talent, it is equally essential to recognize that many issues faced today have a global resonance. By incorporating the works of international photographers, the festival can bring diverse perspectives and stories from across the world. SAPILAND by Australian photographer Johannes Reinhart draws attention to the human footprint and highlights the paradoxical relationship modern humans have with nature, for example. This not only adds depth and variety to the program but also allows attendees to gain a broader understanding of different cultures, experiences, and global issues.

This creates a dynamic platform that showcases artistic excellence while fostering cultural exchange. Moreover, featuring global photographers alongside local talent can inspire aspiring photographers in India by exposing them to different styles, techniques, and creative approaches. This exposure can help them expand their horizons and push boundaries in their work. This approach allows us to showcase diverse narratives, encourage dialogue on universal themes, and promote a deeper appreciation for photography as a powerful medium of storytelling. Ultimately, striking a balance between local and global perspectives at the Indian Photo Festival ensures that it remains relevant on both regional and international levels. It creates an inclusive space where diverse voices are heard, stories are shared, and connections are made across borders.

Can you talk a little bit about D Ravinder Reddy’s exhibition – why is it important to show documentary work in a photographic art festival?

Ravinder Reddy has garnered considerable attention and acclaim. His work, deeply ingrained in the sociopolitical realities of our time, offers a compelling narrative that resonates with today’s climate. His photographs capture the essence of society: his images of the Maoist movement, also known as PWG, illuminate the harsh realities propelling this communist struggle, providing a rare look into life within PWG camps, as well as the impoverished villages that support their armed uprising.

The work serves as an inspiration, a mirror held up to society, inviting viewers to engage in dialogue and reflection. The exhibition is a call to action, a prompt for viewers to question societal norms and seek out diverse perspectives. His work acts as a catalyst for change, fostering understanding and empathy in our increasingly complex world.

How have you found balancing digital and in-person programmes?

The festival has successfully balanced digital and in-person programs to reach a wider audience. The National Geographic-supported portfolio reviews are conducted online, providing a platform for regional photographers to receive guidance and feedback. In contrast, the art discussions and exhibitions offer more intimate offline experiences. Digital programs have enabled the festival to connect with photographers, artists, and industry professionals globally. However, in-person programs offer an immersive experience where attendees can physically interact with artists face-to-face. The energy and atmosphere of being present at a physical exhibition or workshop cannot be replicated digitally.

It is clear that having both digital and in-person programs is crucial for ensuring inclusivity and reaching a wider audience. While technology has enabled us to connect globally, there is still value in fostering personal connections through physical interactions. Ultimately, finding a balance between these two formats allows us to leverage technology while preserving the essence of human connection.

Palani Kumar’s project tackles India’s socioeconomic and caste realities head on: what does it mean to show the work in a festival context?

Showcasing Palani Kumar’s project is an opportunity to bring attention to pressing societal issues. It allows for a platform where audiences can engage with the subject matter and confront these realities. Art has always been a powerful medium for sparking conversations, raising awareness, and provoking introspection. The project has the potential to reach a wider audience, including policymakers and authorities who have the power to initiate meaningful change. It serves as an encouragement for creatives to use their craft as a means of amplifying marginalised voices and bringing attention to societal injustices. Exhibiting Kumar’s work offers an opportunity for collective reflection – it has the potential to challenge preconceived notions, ignite dialogue among viewers, and inspire action towards creating a more inclusive and equitable future.