Issue 47 - Contents

Originally published 25 years ago, the revised and expanded edition of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Writing in the Sand from Dewi Lewis Publishing reintroduces the lively, eccentric spirit of Geordie beachgoers into the present. With a deft balance of nostalgia and immediacy, Michael Grieve writes that Konttinen’s photographs not only celebrate the quirky nuances and contradictions of working-class life but also reveal an awkward yet tender relationship with the beach – a place both distant and intimate.

From visions of splintered cities to the hidden recesses of the physical and metaphysical, the four winners of The 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography offer distinct approaches to this year’s theme of unity. Writer and curator Charlotte Jansen reflects on the works that were recently on display at Copeland Gallery as part of Peckham 24 – their forms, the politics that shape them and the varying degrees to which their subtle and poetic gestures succeed.

A time-warped book-object of dust, detritus and déjà vu, Christian Patterson’s GONG CO., published by TBW Books and Éditions Images Vevey, with a recent exhibition at Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin, stages the slow decay of a family-run grocery store in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Weaving the personal into a broader reflection on how images collapse time and space, Peter Watkins approaches it as a work that mourns and animates the past simultaneously: a meditation on surface, obsolescence, corporate homogeneity’s erosion of the singular and the distant engagement with a mythologised idea of ‘America’ from afar.

I’m So Happy You Are Here, a travelling exhibition and accompanying book, showcases seminal works by Japanese women photographers from the 1950s onward, underscoring their often overlooked contributions. Published by Aperture, it features 25 portfolios, an illustrated bibliography and essays from a range of writers, including Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick. Ahead of the exhibition at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, Germany, Roula Seikaly speaks with curators Lesley A. Martin, Pauline Vermare and Takeuchi Mariko about their expansive collaboration, key works that informed the project and the importance of centring individual women’s stories in Japanese photographic history.

A major Guido Guidi retrospective at MAXXI in Rome, featuring over 400 works, including rare, unpublished pieces and archival materials, demonstrates the artist’s depth of study and preference for “more moments, more points of view” in which the visible reveals the intangible essence of things. Rica Cerbarano writes that the exhibition offers illuminating insights into the behind-the-scenes of ‘art-making’ and hopes young artists will take away the lesson that, for Guidi, practice is something carefully thought out and built over a lifetime.

Mahtab Hussain’s major solo exhibition at Ikon confronts the layered realities of community and belonging. Through portraiture, video and images of Birmingham mosques, What Did You Want To See? explores how surveillance cultures including Project Champion – a counterterrorism initiative in which hundreds of covert CCTV and ANPR cameras were installed in two of the city’s predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods – continue to shape the Muslim experience in the UK. The artist discusses the exhibition’s structures and meanings with Anneka French.

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What We’re Reading #4: Summer 2025