“Honesty makes a good portrait – that moment where they’re confident in themselves, when there’s trust involved. Creating an environment that is relaxed and that has nuances of love creates a great portrait”

“I used to love to go through the family albums as a kid,” he says. “I’m the youngest in my family, so a lot of my relatives had passed away, but to have a way of knowing who they were, of knowing their style, their smile, their eyes, understanding why they were placed in that part of the book, it was all super important to me. My grandmother used to always sit on the front porch too, and go through the family album and offer oral history, which I thought was amazing.

“But I feel like it’s the same for me, that the way I look at Pharrell is the same way I look at my great-uncle in a photo,” he adds. “Not knowing him, but hearing stories about him and being excited about it, especially because the people that I photograph have all inspired me in one way or another.”

Carter’s father was in the air force and was involved in the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers, “able to express himself in the Black is Beautiful movement”, says Carter. Maybe he passed on a sense that everyone has something special because that is what Carter reaches for in his shoots. As his friend and collaborator Tracee Ellis Ross puts it in the introduction to What’s My Name: “He creates a space that is less of a set and more of an exchange; kind of like hanging with a friend in their backyard on a sunny day in that peace that comes after all the food has been eaten, the catching up is finished, and you are just there together without an agenda. This is what he captures – the safety of connection, the beauty of being.”

“You’re just able to be your full self, and not feel ashamed of being a little weird or a little different,” says Carter. “Embracing that is really beautiful. That’s the best, and the most original. If you’re trying to emulate someone else it can feel a little forced. Honesty makes a good portrait – that moment where they’re confident in themselves, when there’s trust involved. Creating an environment that is relaxed and that has nuances of love creates a great portrait.”

Carter’s father died in 2021 and the photographer responded with his first solo show, American Black Beauty, at SN37 Gallery New York, in which he also mixed his own photographs of relatives, family photographs, and professional work. With his book, Carter is keen to continue this trajectory, working on self-assigned projects alongside commissions. He is drawn towards photographing his nieces, he says, towards the feeling of doing the shoot as much as the images.

“I often don’t share the images, it’s my family and I’m protective over them,” he says. “But to see my nieces laugh and smile – to be a little nervous but then, at the end of the session, feel good about themselves because they’re like ‘Wow, I actually am valued’ – I gravitate towards it. But it’s not just from them. It’s honestly everyone that I love to photograph.”

Micaiah Carter: What’s My Name is out now (Prestel Publishing)

“Mixing capitalism and stock markets with the arms trade is one of the worst things that can happen”

In 2020, the estimated value of the global arms trade was $112billion, but the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza have bolstered sales; German manufacturer Rheinmetall’s share price more than doubled in the two months following the Russian invasion into Ukraine. The UK’s arms exports doubled during 2022 to a record £8.5billion, with Qatar the biggest buyer. Nothing Personal shows the full breadth of the equipment behind these numbers. Tanks, armoured suits, rifles and intelligence devices are shown in prototype or unused form, with an unnerving sterility which matches the attendees’ tailored suits.

Most of all, Teryoshin is attuned to the ways the industry justifies itself – a combination of wilful ignorance, profit-chasing and close ties to the security architecture of superpowers such as the US, China and India. By holding these narratives alongside the realities of today’s wars, dark ironies emerge. Slogans are a straightforward example: Kalashnikov Concern rebranded in 2014 under the slogan ‘Protecting Peace’; ITT Inc uses the line ‘Engineered for Life’. Nothing Personal is about conveying these ironies, exposing not just these closed fairs, but the implications of a world in which militarisation is incentivised. A huge battlefield-inspired cake at the UAE’s Navdex fair in 2019 is the most absurd example of these juxtapositions, while red carpets, copious wine and ornate bouquets feature across the series.

“For people working there, it doesn’t actually matter what they’re selling,” Teryoshin says. “You can sell vacuum cleaners, cars, killing machines, as long as you maintain the idea that what you’re doing is good because it’s for security, fighting against ‘bad guys’.” An earlier project, Hornless Heritage, saw him go behind the scenes in Germany’s dairy industry, where cows are genomically selected and artificially inseminated. Teryoshin sees similarities with the arms fairs in terms of ethical triangulation – millions of people eat meat despite knowing about the extractive and abusive nature of factory farming, and people continue to develop and sell weapons while civilians and soldiers are killed.

“These ironies are coming not just from my point of view, this world is isolated from the public,” Teryoshin says. “People are living in a parallel universe.” Even so, he picks out the fairs’ banality as perhaps their most sinister quality: “For a weapons trader, the best thing is to sell to both sides of the conflict.”

Nikita Teryoshin, Nothing Personal – The Back Office of War is out now (GOST Books)

“I would say that the root of my ambivalence about photography, right from the beginning, was the power of the camera over and in the act of representation” – Susan Meiselas

But the authors behind Collaboration include two photographers, both of whom are still active today, and as its subtitle suggests, the project is an attempt to both reshape how we think about images and propose new ways to make and share them. Collaboration is less a condemnation of photography than a thorough reappraisal of how it works and how we have interpreted it, and a bid to find more equitable approaches. As its introduction says: “We hope that this book can inspire you to experiment with and find the joy in being with others with and through photography.”

Collaboration was dreamed up more than a decade ago by Meiselas and Ewald, who have both worked with photography for over 50 years and have long had concerns about the medium’s power dynamics. Meiselas’ first major project, Carnival Strippers, included extensive interviews with the women she was photographing, for example, while in Portraits and Dreams, started in 1976, Ewald handed cameras to children and asked them to shoot their own lives.

“I would say that the root of my ambivalence about photography, right from the beginning, was the power of the camera over and in the act of representation,” says Meiselas, who joined Magnum Photos in 1976 and became a full member in 1980. “It was right away problematic for me, and I know it was for Wendy too. We’ve known each other for a long time and, one time when Wendy was staying at mine, we started to reflect on our practice. We found we had similar reference points, and that was very interesting to us. That was an important premise, so we stayed in touch on it, and really reflected on it over the years.”

“Then we started to think, ‘Well, who’s going to write about this?’” laughs Ewald. “Because we knew it wouldn’t be us. We met Ariella at around the same time, and both instinctively said, ‘OK, we have to talk to her’, because she seemed to match and complement the ways we were thinking. We had been focused on our own timeframe, on becoming makers and the work we had seen around us, but she forced us to think about deeper history. We started to see real potential for the project to grow, so we invited Laura and Leigh to join.”

The finished book includes images dating back to the start of photography, from 19th century images of female ‘hysterics’ taken in Salpêtrière Hospital in France through to Dorothea Lange’s iconic images of the ‘migrant mother in California’ and beyond. As the accompanying texts point out, these images are iconic yet somehow unseen, the people they depict made visible yet also overlooked. The ‘hysterics’ are seen in terms of symptoms rather than as women or even individuals, while Florence Owens Thompson in Lange’s famed image is described by her social position, and usually deprived of her name.

Collaboration includes a quote from Owens Thompson, in which she eloquently explains why she disliked her portrait. “I’m tired of being a symbol of human misery; moreover, my living conditions have improved,” she states. “I didn’t get anything out of it. I wish she hadn’t taken my picture… She didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.”

The book also includes a spread on the portraits of ‘Papa’ Renty Taylor and his daughter Delia, which were at the centre of a milestone lawsuit against Harvard University in 2019. The case was brought by Tamara Lanier, who demanded restitution of the daguerreotypes of her ancestors on the grounds that the images were seized from them while they were enslaved; these images were made through a collaboration between Louis Agassiz, the head of Harvard Scientific School, who attempted to use photography to support his racist beliefs, and the photographer JT Zealy. A quote from Lanier in the book states: “For years, Papa Renty’s slave owners profited from his suffering, it’s time for Harvard to stop doing the same thing to our family.”

The changing dynamic 

Each chapter in Collaboration is arranged chronologically, but the book also features plenty of contemporary work, more positive examples of which include series by Meiselas and Ewald plus self-portraits by Nona Faustine, collaborative portraits by Endia Beal, shots gathered from Iraqis by Geert van Kesteren after the Iraq War, and Carolyn Drake’s participatory work with the Uyghur community in China, in which they drew on her images. Each project is given a spread and, where possible, the accompanying texts include comments from the people in the images and their names, as well as comments from the photographers. There are also texts by writers such as Abigail Solomon-Godeau, David Levi Strauss and Mark Sealy, plus voices from a new generation of thinkers.

“We have not stopped with the photographers’ ‘intentions’ or ‘statements’, but rather we look at those photographic events as they unfold over time,” explains the book’s introduction. “Attending to the mode of participation of the photographed persons, in particular, enabled us to reconfigure also the participation of the photographers, not as solo masters but rather as parties to the event of photography. We have refused to diminish or deny the collective effort.”

This approach de-centres the photographer, and the eight chapters emphasise this with titles such as The Photographed Person Was Always There, or Reshaping the Authorial Position. Other ‘clusters’ draw attention to more negative uses of the camera, with tags such as Sovereign and Civil Power of the Apparatus. This de-centring and re-reading of photographers’ work was not always easy for the featured image-makers to accept. “When the writing was edited, we always went back to the photographer,” says Meiselas. “And there were some who felt that the writers had not understood their work. It was challenging for them to feel not seen in the way that they see themselves, especially if they’re more used to being celebrated.”

“But that was very deliberate from the beginning, the idea of it being first person from the photographed person, and the photographer, and of having an additional commentary or interpretation or consideration,” adds Ewald. “We were trying very hard to keep those balanced, to have the voices come from all sides.”

Collaboration picks out some cautionary examples such as surveillance shots by Prague’s secret police, as well as more positive approaches, such as LaToya Ruby Frazier’s community-based work. But the book is not intended to pass judgement, or even assume an authoritative take. Instead it argues that photographs’ meanings are never fixed, and aims to open them up further. It intends to sensitise people to what might be inappropriate, explains Meiselas, but also inspire further questions and a new evolution of work. “It’s not a fixed set to be mimicked, it’s much more to inspire the next stage of exploration,” she says.

“Our dialogues, practices and conversations with other thinkers and practitioners across geographic locations have generated many meanings of collaboration in all its various iterations – utopic, dystopic, messy, complex”

Origins of a project 

In fact, the project avoided hierarchy more widely, and was put together collaboratively in practice as well as in name. Collaboration did not start life as a book, though this form helps spread it; originally it was a collection of interesting photographic projects, which cohered into groups or ‘clusters’. These sets were assembled into grids, which the group used with students and workshop participants. Finding that these grids prompted open-ended, thought-provoking discussions, Meiselas, Ewald et al decided to make them more public.

Collaboration popped up as a lab at Aperture Gallery, New York, in 2013, for example, then as a more formal presentation at the Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto. Visitors, students and collaborators were all actively encouraged to contribute, their insights helping build the project and book. One visitor in Canada suggested considering images of nature, and what they say about cameras and their use in surveying and commandeering places, as well as people. Collaboration includes a handful of these projects, including Public Studio’s Palestinian Landscapes.

Meiselas, Ewald, Azoulay, Raiford and Wexler also robustly discussed among themselves, and Meiselas and Ewald point out that they reached a consensus rather than achieving group think; Ewald urges me to watch an online discussion made with Milwaukee Art Museum in 2021, to see that Raiford and Wexler “have their own minds” (Azoulay was unable to attend). It is on YouTube and is fascinating, particularly as it ends and the women swing into a clearly familiar debate. As in my interview with Ewald and Meiselas, they riff off each other and jointly narrate stories, like any group used to speaking together. “I’m laughing because I feel like in our last couple of meetings we just had these ongoing arguments, not arguments but debates, about contact sheets,” chuckles Raiford.

“We do have differences of opinion,” Meiselas tells me. “That’s exactly the challenge. For example, Wendy and I are trying to find ways to wrestle through it [photography and its power dynamics], whereas Arielle is sometimes condemning it fundamentally. We’ve tussled that together in a number of ways.”

Of course, achieving consensus is not easy, and that is one reason Collaboration took more than 10 years to complete; in a deeper sense, perhaps, that is why it can never be finished. The introduction to the book ruefully reflects, “we feel we could continue this work for another decade”, but the group decided to hand it over so others could continue the discussions “in classrooms, workshops, community centres, in union meetings and at home”. Similarly, the issues and themes are ongoing for the five authors as the introduction also makes clear.

“Our dialogues, practices and conversations with other thinkers and practitioners across geographic locations have generated many meanings of collaboration in all its various iterations – utopic, dystopic, messy, complex,” it reads. “We are striving for nuance and inviting questions rather than offering final answers. We continue to learn from the work of others and are engaged in ongoing conversations with those who are included here as photographers, photographed persons, writers and other contributors to the event of photography.”

As Ewald and Meiselas tell me, the discussion is also evolving because the media landscape is changing. With digital imaging, the internet and social media, it is no longer only ‘hysterics’, ‘migrant mothers’, or young women under forcible arrest who find their images taken and circulated beyond their control. It is all of us – and most of us are also complicit. “It’s important, because people with camera phones have absolutely no sense that there is any responsibility,” says Meiselas. “There is no social contract at all.”

Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford and Laura Wexler, is out now (Thames & Hudson)

Their struggle began in 2006, when Donald Trump – then a developer and still a decade away from the presidency – jetted into Scotland. Trump purchased the Menie Estate and declared that he would “build the greatest golf course in the world” there. He then set about attempting to purchase the homes of Monro and her neighbours, and working to build his golf course on the protected land that surrounded them. As the people of Menie refused to bow down, sell up, or be pushed around by the reality TV star, Alicia Bruce began documenting their resistance.

In her photobook I Burn But I Am Not Consumed, the photographer combines portraits of Monro – shown smoking amidst her beloved sand dunes – and other Menie residents, with images of vast, rolling landscapes. Working collaboratively with the community as they fought relentlessly against Trump’s plans, she acted as a conduit for social change. As a child Bruce had played on the dunes of Menie, and now as an adult was documenting the fight to save them.

In the introduction, the Aberdeen-born artist writes: “My wish is that others will see through this lens the importance of integrity, compassion and stewardship of our natural world above profit, power and TV personalities.” It’s a defiant and frank sentiment, one that is mirrored by many of Menie’s residents, whose words often appear next to their portraits. An image of Mike Forbes, standing sentinel next his wife’s memorial on the day her ashes were buried, carries a particularly poignant caption. “Trump said my hoose [sic] was a pigsty when they tried for compulsory purchase orders,” reads the quote from the crofter and quarryman. “Well it’s my pigsty. I said, it’s my home and they won’t put me out of it. There’s been nae positives. He’s ruined the dunes; he’s just ruined everything.”

“My wish is that others will see through this lens the importance of integrity, compassion and stewardship of our natural world above profit, power and TV personalities”

Forbes’ words illustrate a sad reality: that despite the determination of Menie’s residents, Trump International Golf Links opened on what was the Menie Estate in 2012. In 2020, Scotland’s Nature Agency confirmed that the sand dunes around the luxury development had been stripped of their protected status as a result of the damage caused by the resort’s construction. And in the same year, Aberdeenshire council granted permission for another golf course to be built on the same site.

Despite this, the subjects in I Burn But I Am Not Consumed remain non-compliant. One image shows a tractor shed, the words “no more Trump lies” scrawled on its outer wall. Another, taken in 2022, shows the Trump International Golf Links sign, the “T” conspicuously missing from its owner’s name – leaving only “rump” behind.

Bruce’s images often poke fun at the ex-president in their composition. A portrait of Mike Forbes, clearly taken years earlier than the last, shows him accompanied by his late wife. They stand outside of the Mill of Menie, him grasping a garden fork, her staring, brow furrowed, into the distance. The image’s likeness to Grant Wood’s seminal 1930 painting, American Gothic, is striking even to the casual observer.

As Louise Pearson, curator of photography at National Galleries of Scotland, writes in the book’s latter pages: “Mike and his wife Sheila’s confrontational portrait breaks the mould. In contrast to others in this series, theirs ‘trips up Trump’ on his home ground through an oft-parodied American painting in an American collection. This choice offers a witty riposte to the personal remarks made [by Trump] about the Forbes family property.”

Following these observations, a timeline of the now 18-year dispute between Menie residents and Trump spreads across the book’s final pages. Maps, newspaper headlines and even a letter from the fake news aficionado himself detail key moments in what has often been a high-drama tale. A document from Grampian police, issued in acknowledgement of “Threatening or Abusive Behaviour” experienced by Bruce at the hands of one of Trump’s security guards, details the photographer’s own role in the David and Goliath-style saga.

Publishing this document now feels like an act of ongoing defiance – as does this entire volume. The collaborative nature of Bruce’s images offers a resounding and uncompromising rebuke to a man who Pearson describes as a “global bully”. “This is a form of protest. A quiet, dignified act of rebellion,” she writes. “The motherland won’t forget.”

Photographs from I Burn But I Am Not Consumed are on show as part of LOVE: Still Not the Lesser at MoCP, Chicago, until 22 December. Bruce’s book is out now (Daylight Books [USA])

Keisha Scarville, Lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound (Mack Books) 

Lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound is a great title for a photobook – intriguing, impressionistic, and near-collage in effect, much like Scarville’s images. The cover is literally a collage and there are similar works and layouts inside; the image sequence also combines Scarville’s striking monochrome shots with archival images, family photos, and even an X-ray of a jaw. Within her photographs are multiple layers too, heavily patterned fabrics piling on top of each other, the black-and-white film and the 2D effects of photography combining to dizzying effect, or showing the ravaged surfaces of rocks.

Scarville’s work is conceptually layered and polyphonic, combining popular culture with references to her Guyanese heritage in the fabrics and her sparse texts. “To jump the fire three times/To bend towards the sun/To clap roti/For the couch to absorb your scent,” reads one, a prose poem that stretches across a spread.

Born in 1975 in Kings, New York, Scarville has studied at Rochester Institute of Technology, and taught at Bard College, New York University and Parsons School of Design. In Lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound, her sophistication and technical skill are clearly on show. The monograph strikes an intimate, emotional chord, the images of fabrics recalling an earlier series, Mama’s Clothes, in which she photographed herself wearing her deceased mother’s dresses. Scarville covered her face in those images, as if in mourning too deep to show, and there is a similar sense of melancholy here, plus the same decision not to show faces in her own work.

Lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound also features aspects of Black Backstage, an essay by poet Harmony Holiday which picks up the anonymous theme to consider the right not to be seen. “We understand departure not as some maudlin tragedy that threatens to undermine a governing codependency, but as our resistance to overexertion, and refusal to waste energy on static or leak life force into a vat of chaos and trend,” Holiday writes. “The Black backstage is where we go when we disappear.” (Diane Smyth)

No Sovereign Author & The Patients of La Fabrique du Pré, An ABC of Psychiatry (The Eyes) 

According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, anxiety is defined as “an uncomfortable feeling of nervousness or worry about something that is happening or might happen in the future”, or alternatively as “a medical condition in which you always feel frightened and worried”. For anyone who has lived with the sometimes debilitating condition, it is likely that neither interpretation fully captures the breadth of their experiences.

In an attempt to bridge this gap between definition and lived experience, An ABC of Psychiatry takes the interpretation of psychiatric terms out of the hands of medical professionals, and places them instead with patients and artists. A collaboration between attendees at Belgium’s La Fabrique du Pré day centre and the duo behind No Sovereign Author, Maroussia Prignot and Valerio Alvarez, the book offers a vision of psychiatry rooted in life.

Following the familiar form of a dictionary, An ABC of Psychiatry is organised alphabetically, but its pages are not filled with neat lines of uniform text. Instead collages are made up of photographs, paintings and cuttings from medical textbooks, accompanied by scrawled reflections from their creators. Sometimes these artworks speak to a recognisable definition – an image of screaming fans of The Rolling Stones appears as part of the entry for ‘hysterical’, while ‘narcissism’ is illustrated, in part, by a woman staring blankly at her own reflection. But elsewhere an image of two firemen battling to extinguish a blaze appears under ‘schizophrenia’. It is these less obvious connections that speak most closely to the book’s intentions.

Detaching each word from its historical interpretation, An ABC of Psychiatry centres the knowledge of the patients involved, and offers a platform for their experiences. Through physically jumbled but emotionally linked images, we are offered invaluable insight into the thoughts of those who experience psychiatric illness – and challenged to reconsider the narrow definitions we ascribe to both people and words. (Philippa Kelly)

Ronit Porat, Hunting in Time (Sternthal Books) 

Hunting in Time begins with an extended essay by Ines Weizman, founder of the Centre for Documentary Architecture, which sets the scene for Porat’s project. Based on her three exhibitions in Israel between 2016 and 2018, it is a “detective yarn evidence board” centred on the murder of a Berlin clockmaker in 1930. Fritz Ulbrich also ran a photography studio at the back of his workshop, making pornographic pictures of young women and girls, and meticulously archiving the results. He was murdered in a robbery gone wrong, by Lieschen Neumann, her boyfriend and a friend. Neumann had been photographed by Ulbrich, adding a layer of scandal to the crime, which helped spread news of it across the continent, and fascinated psychologists, criminologists and sociologists alike. “A murder synchronises multiple narratives and experiences,” Weizman writes.

The opening inscription is ‘everybody knew’ accompanied by one of Ulbrich’s portraits, a woman clasping her hand across her chest in a striped dress. What follows is a compilation of archive photographs, first in assemblages which Porat calls ‘index sheets’, and then in sparser, more associative arrangements. Pictures of women blur and fold into image ephemera drawn from contemporary psychiatric, jewellery and surgical instrument catalogues, as well as early designs of corsets and chastity belts. Also interspersed are photographs by Martin Munkácsi, August Sander, Clare Strand, Batia Suter and Francesca Woodman; all bearing the shadowy, ashen palette which gives the book its visual continuity. 

The scope of Porat and Weizman’s research is where the book’s achievement lies, though the essay’s length and historical details – though absorbing – at times unbalance the volume, adding a thick layer of prescription which draws attention from the archives. There is no resolution or “solving of the puzzle” here, Weizman reminds us. Instead, Hunting in Time lies somewhere between a sociocultural study of the ominous late-Weimar period and a captivating archive presentation, which reflects this time of intrigue, suspicion, visual innovation and shifting morals. (Ravi Ghosh)

Jacob and Sara Aue Sobol, Hunting Heart (Dewi Lewis Publishing) 

Jacob Aue Sobol shot to fame when he was in his twenties, after publishing Sabine in 2004. Named after his then-girlfriend, who lived in a remote area of Greenland, the book’s photographs were made over two years in her village. Gritty and emotive, showing time at home but also the tough realities of fishing in the Arctic Circle, Sabine tapped into the Scandinavian idiom of JH Engström or Anders Petersen, but with an intimacy that was Aue Sobol’s own. Aue Sobol was accepted into Magnum Photos shortly afterwards, but shied away from publishing such personal work – photographing people in bed, or even making love, but avoiding showing his own life. He also went through periods where he avoided taking pictures altogether, starting to fish again, getting married, and having kids.

Hunting Heart is therefore an interesting proposition, once again finding Aue Sobol photographing those near and dear. It includes Jacob’s photographs of his wife, Sara, showing her pregnant or cuddling the kids, as well as the children on their own, and scenes from his everyday life. Hunting Heart also includes images by Sara, a talented photographer in her own right, shot on her travels in Russia, US and Mexico. Jacob generally favours inky black-and-white, whereas Sara is given to working in colour. The images are presented as a small box of 24 prints, the couple’s photographs displayed in pairs on either side of each card, with an appealing sense of equality; perhaps it might feel intimidating, partnering with a Magnum photographer, but Sara’s work stands up alongside his. As for Jacob, it is his work at its best; photographing those close to him with a disarmingly open heart and eye. (Diane Smyth)

Tony and Tami Aftab, The Rice is on the Hob (WePresent)

Tami Aftab and her father grew up in vastly different parts of the world. While Tony Aftab spent his formative years in bustling, inner-city Lahore, Tami spent hers in west London – one of the city’s more genteel areas. Throughout the pages of the pair’s co-authored photo-slash-cookbook, these varied connections to their cultural heritage take centre stage, as does their shared passion for food, and their love for each other.

The Rice is on the Hob is a book that father and daughter dreamed of for many years. Throughout her childhood, Tami found that food offered the strongest connection to her Pakistani heritage; as author Jyoti Patel writes in the book’s poetic introduction: “One mouthful takes you back to a thousand moments already lived. Your body stays here, in London, but your mind is in Lahore.” For Tony, who has experienced short-term memory loss for more than a decade, it is the recollections – and recipes – of dishes from his youth that have endured. 

In February 2023, the pair finally returned together to Lahore, and began creating images for The Rice is on the Hob. Brightly coloured, sometimes overwhelming cityscapes speak to the disorientation that Tami felt in the unknown and yet somehow familiar city. Tender, intimate portraits of the photographer’s father illustrate the strength of her connection to her family, and her ancestral homeland. 

Woven between these images are the recipes of Tony’s childhood. Printed on paper more reminiscent of a notebook than a photobook, and accompanied by handwritten notes, a family history can be sensed between the measurements, timings and instructions. These recipes are designed to be torn from the book, to be passed on and used to forge new connections. Despite this, the volume is not truly a cookbook but rather a love letter to food – the memories it can hold, and the important role it can play in lives lived across two cultures. (Philippa Kelly)

George Maund, Plastic Flowers (self-published) 

Every now and then, a new image-maker appears and their name immediately gains traction. George Maund, a recent University of the West of England graduate, is a good example. Having previously shown in a graduate exhibition at the Arnolfini and in group shows at Serchia Gallery and the Royal Photographic Society (all in Bristol), his series was one of the standouts at Fold, a 2023 summer graduate event organised by the UWE tutors at Copeland Gallery, London. His images also featured in Common Ground, a book published by Vessel Editions in August, and at London’s Photobook Cafe in November, in an exhibition of work of the South West Graduate Photography Prize shortlist. In addition, Maund has published a very limited-edition book of his UWE final project, Plastic Flowers.

Maund has an aesthetic that is popular at the moment, as Common Ground shows. It is a collection of delicate black-and-white shots by emerging photographers, all focused on the natural world (the tagline is ‘An Ode to the Forest’). There are some particularly striking images by Iollann Ó Murchú, Luke Spencer and Jodie Wilkins (one of the book’s publishers, along with Sam P Cashmore and Lyle Ingram, also talented artists). But Maund is one of the most striking, with two images taken from Plastic Flowers.

His series has a strong conceptual base, exploring his “relationship to the construction and performance of forms of masculinity” through staged imagery with close friends and family, and depictions of scenes and spaces in which ideas of masculinity are questioned and reimagined. It is an interesting topic handled in interesting ways. Maund’s photographs of plants and landscapes do not seem immediately on-topic, but then consider the Barbican’s 2023 show Re/Sisters and its links between ecology and gender, which draw on theories of ecofeminism – the idea that women and the natural world have both been exploited by a capitalism yoked with patriarchy. The argument is valid, but, as Re/Sisters also shows, men too have been exploited and stereotyped. To move forward to a more balanced future, with each other and the planet, men and the masculinity expected of them also need a fundamental rethink. 

Maund’s images suggest a different way of looking at men, a more sensitive regard for something softer – moving and familiar, yet seldom displayed. It is perhaps surprising that this work is by a man in his early-twenties. What is less surprising is that Maund’s name is recurring. It will doubtless pop up again in the future, and where his work goes is something to watch. (Diane Smyth)

Ibrahim Azab, Ev3ry(Th1ng’5)_Mov1ng: But_im (Still) H3re (Folium)  

Ev3ry(Th1ng’5)_Mov1ng: But_im (Still) H3re is a reinterpretation of Azab’s 2019 magazine-based collage work FOPDTMM, but a slower, more deliberative intervention. The book features photographs of paper offcuts and trimmings, often arranged in sculptural forms in which rips, tears and gaps become deliberate invitations to speculate on boundaries and utility. The images are laid out in a traditional photobook format, including double-page spreads, offset crops and plenty of blank space. This design encourages us to understand paper not just as a compositional material, but as a photographic subject in itself. “It’s about seeing without being seen,” Azab says cryptically, in curator Rodrigo Orrantia’s short accompanying text.

Several images in Ev3ry(Th1ng’5)_Mov1ng: But_im (Still) H3re nod to Azab’s position as an artist of assembly, best demonstrated by his ongoing Hyperdeath-Drive (HDD) series. But those digital collages rely on a digital recontextualisation and recoding of familiar objects: AirPods, a bike tyre or disposable coffee cup estranged by their inclusion in his synthetic prints. This book, on the other hand, creates a contrived alienation between page and viewer by keeping a strict focus on paper itself. What are we looking at? And will turning the page offer us more information – the typical model of accumulative, left-to-right reading – or will we instead be confronted by a new mode of thinking about materiality?

The puzzle-style envelope which encases the A5 volume is the first clue that the book will continue the self-referential method that defines Azab’s practice. Images of cutting boards feature throughout, a nod to the book-making process at a time when artists’ studios – albeit typically painters’ – are being romanticised and seen as sites of art historical significance. The importance of tactility and, crucially, trial-and-error to book and printmaking is referenced throughout, processes in which remnants, scraps and dummies are as important as the final artefact. “Is that the paper, or the image?” is Azab’s opening query. This book does not offer an answer, but instead multiplies the question. (Ravi Ghosh)

Jason Koxvold, Engage and Destroy (Gnomic Book) 

A British photographer based in Portland, Oregon, and upstate New York, Koxvold takes a cool look at his adopted country. His work circles around the US military and prison systems, considering the culture which produces and underpins these institutions and the effect they have on society. His 2017 book Knives, which features an essay by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, is a deep dive into New York State’s Hudson Valley, an area dominated by the Schrade knife factory until 2004, when it closed suddenly, putting 700 people out of work. A maximum-security prison became the town’s biggest employer, but it continued to decline, with drug abuse, mental health crises, and white nationalism all rising.

A sister publication, YWRAA (You Were Right All Along), collated monologues from some of the characters in Knives, featuring business letters and online comments. The images in it were located using military grid references to Bagram, Afghanistan; sniper training camps in Utah; the site of a mass killing in Las Vegas, and more. These books suggested something about violence and competition, about a dream of opportunity that has turned red in tooth and claw.

Engage and Destroy picks up on the theme. Made at Fort Moore, Georgia, between May 2021 and 2023, it depicts male US Army recruits at the beginning and end of their basic training cycle. The results of this training are not easy to detect, though a few of the men do look thinner. Perhaps the point is that the training is not visible, because in the centre of the book is a more shocking section. The carefully posed portraits break down into stark monochrome in documentary shots of hand-to-hand combat in which the men are sweaty and injured, grappling and choking. Here is competition at its most raw, yet the men still appear put-together in the colour portraits. In the US, the military is still celebrated, its soldiers heroes. 

A text taken from the Soldier’s Creed runs underneath the black-and-white reportage with lines such as “I will never accept defeat” and “I am an expert and I am a professional” sounding alarmingly similar to both war cries and motivational mantras. As elsewhere in Koxvold’s work, what is suggested is a common mindset which underpins both combat and capitalism. (Diane Smyth)

“I don’t think historical material should be celebrated to the detriment of contemporary documentary work, but I do think it’s important to look at history”

What was it like making work in the 1960s and 70s?

I always maintain I was fortunate to be born when I was, because in the 1960s we believed a revolution was possible. I was working with people who thought it was possible to change the situation the country was in. It was invigorating and exciting. I still think that is necessary, it still exists today. It’s particularly interesting now to see issues to do with race, gender and sexual identification coming forward and being expressed strongly. That’s very encouraging. I still believe we can change the world.

How do you feel about your campaigning work now? Can this kind of work sometimes stigmatise the people it tries to help?

That was an issue we discussed, especially at Camerawork and Ten.8. It’s one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed making the books because I’ve been able to correct that to some extent – to include photographs that show a wider view.

Why did you make Home and Street?

I had a major medical incident and stopped teaching in 2003. It gave me time to look at my archive, and I realised I had a significant amount of material that had never been published. Over the last few years I’ve been looking back rather than producing anything new. I don’t think historical material should be celebrated to the detriment of contemporary documentary work, but I do think it’s important to look at history. I want my work to be accessible to the public, not just to academics and researchers, because it’s part of a people’s history, and interpreting our past can help us understand our present and predict our future. We shouldn’t forget that. Since its beginning, photography has been used to document people’s lives. If you go back to the 17th century, images were very exclusive, the preserve of the rich. Photography is much more democratic.

nickhedgesphotography.co.uk

bluecoatpress.co.uk

bluecoatpress.co.uk

How do you remember your mother, as a photographer?

My mam was motivated by the desire to document real people with humanity and compassion. I grew up with her pictures as our wallpaper and was often in the darkroom with her as a child. She was in her element there, listening to her favourite music; she loved the whole process, and I’m happy that I got to share that with her.

She was fearless but also incredibly sensitive. Her approach was informal, generating an understanding of what she was doing by giving prints to the people she photographed. She was calm and was able to sit back and observe her surroundings. She learned how to read a situation from an early age – she had an education in people long before she picked up a camera.

How important was this series to your mother?

Youth Unemployment was extremely personal to my mam. The images come from a place of anger and love: anger at the situation, and love for the people. The work was a desperate plea for help for a generation of kids who were being abandoned to a lifetime of unemployment, or being nothing more than part of a cheap labour market. She shows us the bitter reality of surviving on subsistence benefits, but also the strength, and how people come together when times are hard.

What is the relevance of these photographs today?

We’re living through incredibly divided times where working-class people have been manipulated, just like the class warfare my mam warned about. She foresaw that the repercussions would be felt for years and we seem to be feeling those effects now – we are at crisis point.

Is there a photograph that was particularly meaningful to her?

Cops Piss Off [above]: the lad on the left is Tish’s youngest brother Carl, with his friends Robo and Tony, and the message on the wall is symbolic of their alienation. There was a void between them and their parents’ generation, who treated them like skivers, nagging them to get jobs when there just weren’t any.

Youth Unemployment by Tish Murtha is out now (Bluecoat Press)

How did you discover photography?

My dad was a keen amateur photographer, so I used to help him develop films in our kitchen from an early age. I left school and worked in a series of labouring jobs, where my fellow workers encouraged me to find a career. Rather than getting trapped in a cycle of unskilled labour, I bought my first camera and went to art college.

How has Bradford changed over the past 45 years?

The city has struggled with the demise of traditional industry, poor transport links and a lack of investment. It has slowly declined into one of the poorest areas in the UK. Over the last 45 years I have documented this demise of industry in the north, its impact on society, and the closure of the mills, mines and foundries. My work is part of the wider picture on how northern industrial cities have been affected by the political and financial decisions made in Westminster.

Who is your work for?

I take photographs for the people – working people, who are often overlooked. I always try to give people a print when I have photographed them, and having a connection with the people I am photographing is at the core of my practice. I also try and keep in contact with many of the people I have photographed. It’s only fair if I am going to exhibit or publish their photo that they should be kept informed.

Could you tell us the story behind the image above?

I took this photo in the late-1970s. I spent days walking the streets of inner-city Bradford photographing children playing street games. This group were playing marbles. Their mother came out to see what I was doing. I told her the purpose of the photos and she was quite happy to chat. The boy at the back with his hands in his pockets got in touch this year after he saw the photo on the BBC. He couldn’t remember me taking it, but he recalls his mum speaking of a strange man with a camera, and how she saw him off with a yard brush. He always wondered if that was true as she had a copy of the photo on her mantelpiece. In October, he came to my exhibition at Salt Mills in Bradford with his family and took pride in showing his grandkids where he used to live.

Life is available to purchase from the Bluecoat Press website

The project became Chanarin’s passport to venture beyond these enclosed environs, granting him access to the lives of migrant workers collecting potatoes for gourmet chips, to meetings of the Casualties Union – which, since 1942, has been staging disasters to teach emergency preparation – and to couples who champion adult breastfeeding as a means to emotional wellbeing. Working with eight arts organisations across the UK, the photographer met groups at the heart of each institution’s community, leading to a scattered record of human encounters that speak to a modern British identity in flux.

The many faces of Chanarin’s collaborators are characterised by his approach to the images themselves. Incomplete but beautiful, filled with errors but with the possibility for change, they retain his notes and scribbles. The latter is a feature that, he admits, is partly related to his lack of experience in the colour darkroom, which occasionally presented him with a dilemma.

While Chanarin strove to make his image-making collaborative, he struggled to resolve the tension between the expectations of his collaborators and his use of their portraits. Once an image is made by mutual agreement, and once that moment of collaboration has passed, to whom does the image truly belong? To the sitter, whose likeness it shows, or to the artist, who develops, prints, frames and recruits it to their own world view?

All of this, Chanarin acknowledges, is a question of consent – a topic I am almost as keen to discuss as I was to address the spectre of his collaboration. Again, the reason for this lies in the essay that accompanies A Perfect Sentence in which he writes of a workshop he conducted in the north of England – one that ended with the involvement of the host venue’s lawyers. “In retrospect, it fills me with horror,” the photographer says, tentatively.

He goes on to explain how, while teaching large format photography to teenagers, he took the portrait of a helpful older woman, whom he mistakenly believed was not a workshop participant but an assistant provided by the venue – an arts organisation he declines to name. He posted the image to his Instagram with a message of thanks. “The next day I looked at my phone and I saw that she had written to me directly to say ’take it down’,” he recalls. “I deleted it, said sorry, and I thought that would be the end of it.”

“I don’t think Adam and I could have made any of the work that we made in today’s context. I might even be finished with working in the documentary mode entirely”

It was, however, very much not the end of it. The photographer describes being called to a meeting with the venue, where he was told he had breached their safeguarding policy, and that their collaboration was subsequently over. “It’s an experience that came to shape everything that happened after,” Chanarin says. Evidence of this can be found in the opening pages of A Perfect Sentence, where lines from the safeguarding documents are printed: “Don’t reduce me to tears as a form of control… Don’t allow my allegations to go unrecorded… Don’t capture my image without consent…”

Perhaps inevitably, our conversation turns to wider issues of access and representation, and to who has the right to make images of whom. Chanarin’s thoughts on the topic are long, considered, and clearly impacted by his error. “I don’t think Adam and I could have made any of the work that we made in today’s context,” the photographer admits, referencing early projects in psychiatric hospitals and refugee camps. “I might even be finished with working in the documentary mode entirely.”

It is a conclusion that, Chanarin explains, his work on A Perfect Sentence allowed him to reach. The project has reshaped his understanding of his gender, race and age, and forced him to consider how the space he occupies – both physically and metaphorically – is intrinsically linked to his role in documentary imagemaking. “I think if you feel that you’re moving through the world in a neutral and frictionless way, that is cause for concern. It’s a reason to pause and to consider what your impact is,” he explains.

Chanarin raises concerns that this final statement may read as somewhat glib – and perhaps he is right – but in the moment he sounds purposeful and sincere. As I leave his still-sundrenched studio, I reassure him of this – speculating privately whether, despite his anxieties, these revelations may become the very things that finally lay past partnerships to rest. More than two years on from his ’death’, we may be soon witnessing the resurrection of Oliver Chanarin.

A Perfect Sentence by Oliver Chanarin is out now (Loose Joints). An exhibition of the work, produced by Forma, is at the Museum of Making, Derby, until 3 September