Issue 49 - Contents

Resistance – co-curated by artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen after four years of research – follows the mutual shaping of photography and protest in Britain throughout history, debuting at Turner Contemporary and now on show at National Galleries of Scotland. Charting a century of activism in the UK, Resistance gathers a powerful archive of overlooked dissent. Yet, as Mark Durden writes, in stripping protest of its urgency and historical texture, it risks flattening its force through decontextualised display and selective memory.

French writer Hervé Guibert (1955–1991) was the author of twenty-five novels and autobiographical works, but he also took photographs. The Only Face, Guibert’s second and final collection of photographs, was originally published on the occasion of a 1984 solo exhibition at Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris and has now been reissued by Magic Hour Press. Presented in its original sequence, this new edition largely comprises images of small private interiors, revealing itself not merely as an exhibition in book form, but as a novel in its own right, one that speaks to community, friendship and the distances that both separate and sustain them, writes Thomas King.

Ryudai Takano’s photography, now on view at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, asks us to recognise the body not just as a subject of the image, but as an actor, agent and sense-maker within the exhibition experience. Moving through his installations across multiple visits, Duncan Wooldridge writes that Takano’s staging of seriality, surprise and fragmentary montage – spanning portraits, cityscapes, photograms, and experimental display methods – unseats fixed categories of photography to reveal a field of continuous becoming.

Donna Gottschalk and Carla Williams make their French debut in Le Bal’s latest exhibition, We Others, accompanied by an interpretive text by Hélène Giannecchini. Bringing together first-person narrative and a wide range of photographs spanning decades of work to tell stories, explore invisibility and consider intergenerational connections, it is the nuance and fragility that stand out; a quiet yet political manifesto about absent bodies, writes Eve Hill-Agnus.

We speak with the winner of the OD Photo Prize 2025, J.A. Young, who turns to an ongoing body of work wrought from trauma, research and experiments in the darkroom. Between lived experience and occult inquiry, the series, Angels considers how violence, control and intuition inscribe themselves into the materiality of hand-made prints, and what it might mean to summon images from forces that, though invisible, are anything but absent. 

An exhibition at MAST, Bologna, brings together two decades of work by Mohamed Bourouissa, known for granting visibility to lives historically erased from mainstream representation. From Philadelphia’s Black cowboys to staged moments with friends and acquaintances from the French banlieues, Bourouissa explores the codes, postures and poetics of everyday existence. Rica Cerbarano reflects on the question of community itself, on the intricate webs of relationship in which we live and asks what role artistic creation can meaningfully play in society today.

Books

Top 10 (+1)

Photobooks of 2025

Selected by Tim Clark and Thomas King

Features

Excluded or Exoticised? The European Gaze in Indigenous Spaces