Category: 46

Expressions for unity: The 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography

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.

Charlotte Jansen | Exhibition review | 29 May 2025

The dazzling intricacies of Spandita Malik’s mixed-media, photo-based works instantly pull you in. Yet, until I closely encountered three works from her series Jāḷī—Meshes of Resistance, I had not fully appreciated how transporting they are. She is one of four winners of the 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography and is one quarter of the exhibition at Copeland Gallery as part of Peckham 24. Standing there, it was as if I was standing right in the room next to the woman, in her work, who in turn gazes upon her image reflected in the mirror – a clever and rehearsed classical device drawn from a history of painting – often used to create a sense of hushed intimacy, making the viewer think about the gaze and agency. The curtain seems to be moved by a breeze outside the hot light coming in from the window.

Malik has worked with women in rural Indian communities for years, photographing their portraits and printing them on cloth. Here, those photographs are printed onto khadi, a handspun, handwoven cotton cloth, thick and resistant, made using a charkha. Inscribed into the history of this material is the struggle for Indian independence and freedom: it was promoted by Gandhi’s Swadeshi movement as a tool for self-reliance, and to signal a resolute, political return to Indian-made produce. Khadi is coarse and rough, and the slightly fissured surface of these pieces appear almost reptilian. Printing the portrait photographs on the material allows for incredible texture and depth – that portal-like effect. The tactility is heightened by embroidered embellishments – tracing a stitched language of self-reliance. Once the khadi is printed, each of Malik’s collaborators complete the image with their own craft, allowing them to control what of their image is revealed. One subject completely covers her portrait in thread, rendering her figure a crass, simple stand-in. It is a mysterious act of erasure that creates a necessary tension between the photographed and photographer, now equal agents in the image. This silent refusal to be seen is another kind of resistance. I think of Arundahti Roy’s famous lines in The God of Small Things (1997): ‘she wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes. She spoke to no one.’ In the background, a teddy bear sits on the shelf, holding a heart that reads: someone special.

Another reason Malik carefully chose khadi for her works might be that it has become a symbol of unity in an India fractured by the colonial regime. And unity is the theme of this year’s prize, which was established in 2022 to support and sustain the work of women and non-binary artists – acknowledging the skew of statistics that still show the lack of gender equality in the medium and industry at large. Each year four winners are selected by a committee – this year, artist Gillian Wearing, Tate curator, Dr Charmaine Toh, and Instituto Moreira Salles’ Thyago Nogueira. 

The notion of unity in the contemporary context is fragile and fraught, a frail and distant hope. This selection of work tempers this gently, subtly. Like Malik, the American artist Morgan Levy also finds expressions of unity in a collaborative process of image-making, and in the materials she uses to present them. Levy’s collaborators are women and non-binary labourers and construction workers, seldom represented, little appreciated, as far as visual culture goes. Spark of a Nail is a cool, imaginative, ongoing series of staged pictures where real workers perform and re-enact labour. Levy finds in these poetic, Beckettian scenes a way of disrupting the hyper-masculine status quo of these environments, revealing the building site as a site of transformation, not only in a literal, physical sense. It made me think about who builds the spaces we inhabit, how their bodies contribute, inform and physically shape our movements and interactions. Levy’s works are installed, too, like a working building site – a work suspended from the ceiling, mimicking a breezeblock dangling from a crane. Another rests on the floor, like an abandoned slab of concrete. It’s a work in progress, all this, Levy seems to say. How might we all participate, in fitting these pieces together?

From this body-rooted, physical understanding of uniting, to the unconscious, unseen world of hidden universes – Tshepiso Moropa’s scissored dreamscapes of archival and personal photographs create delicate dioramas, staging her dreams as epic adventures. Moropa’s dreamscapes very closely echo the surreal collages of Norwegian-Nigerian artist Frida Orupabo, and also seems to bear the influence of South African artist Lebohang Kganye’s staged sets of archival and family images. I am not quite convinced by the floating figures in their colonial-era dresses, seemingly out of time or place – like a dream, but as vague as one too. Winged pigs fly in through a window towards a nude female dreamer asleep in bed. What to make of these fragmented visions, outside of the personal resonances? The installation is stylish in its deconstruction/reconstruction technique – aligning with the methods of all the projects of this year’s winning cohort – but doesn’t push the idea of unity further.

The final artist selected for this year’s prize is Tanya Traboulsi, whose documentary accounts for her birthplace, Beirut – new pictures and vintage ones, from the family albums are pasted directly as vinyls onto the wall for this presentation, flattened and layered onto each other, creating non-linear conversations between them, across generations. There’s a lyrical, melancholic tenor to Traboulsi’s images, seeing a city that has had to constantly contend with bombing and destruction, but where joy persists as much as the saltiness of the Mediterranean Sea. These images blend Traboulsi’s meandering, fading childhood memories of the place – where she was raised until the family decided to leave in the 1980s – and her confrontation with the city as she found it, returning thirteen years later, in 1995. In terms of unity, it feels like seeking some kind of bond between past, present, and future, to bring generations displaced and those who remain back together, in one place, the photograph. They are pictures that evoke sounds, noisy and nostalgic, bustling cafes on the seafront, young boys after a swim. A man puffs shisha on the beach, the smoke covering his face as the water laps his ankles. In searching outside between these contradictory and fractured glimpses of a city in constant chaos and motion, building and rebuilding, perhaps the best we can hope for is moments like these – fleeting feelings of unity with a wider force beyond. 

The four winners of the 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography each address this year’s theme of unity in subtle and poetic ways, and with varying success – moving between visions of splintered cities, reconstructed through memory and photographs, to quiet contemplations of emancipation and freedom, to the hidden recesses of the physical and metaphysical worlds. Each finds iterative expressions for unity by deconstructing and rebuilding images, seeking unity in a tangible sense.♦

The 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography ran until 25 May as part of Peckham 24 2025.

—
Charlotte Jansen is a British Sri Lankan author, journalist and critic based in London. Jansen writes on contemporary art and photography for The Guardian, The Financial Times, The New York Times, British Vogue and ELLE, among others. She is the author of Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze, (HACHETTE, 2017) and Photography Now (TATE, 2021). Jansen is the curator of Discovery, the section for emerging artists, at Photo London.

Images:

1-Morgan Levy, Jess Shimmering; from the series Spark of a Nail (work in progress). Courtesy the artist and V&A

2-Morgan Levy, Raquel; from the series Spark of a Nail (work in progress). Courtesy the artist and V&A

3-Morgan Levy, Rest Unquestioned; from the series Spark of a Nail (work in progress). Courtesy the artist and V&A

4-Morgan Levy, River’s Breath; from the series Spark of a Nail (work in progress). Courtesy the artist and V&A

5-Morgan Levy, Thirty-nine Moved by Hand; from the series Spark of a Nail (work in progress). Courtesy the artist and V&A

6-Spandita Malik, Meena II, 2023. Courtesy the artist and V&A

7-Spandita Malik, Parween Devi III, 2023. Courtesy the artist and V&A

8>11-Tanya Traboulsi, Beirut, Recurring Dream, 2021. Courtesy the artist and V&A

12-Tshepiso Moropa, Ke Go Beile Leitlho, 2025. Courtesy the artist and V&A

13-Tshepiso Moropa, Stranger Fruit, 2025. Courtesy the artist and V&A

14-Tshepiso Moropa, Who Knows Where The Time Goes, 2025. Courtesy the artist and V&A

15-Tshepiso Moropa, Your Worst Nightmare, 2025. Courtesy the artist and V&A

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Decay in America

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.

Peter Watkins | Exhibition/photobook review | 22 May 2025

For weeks, Christian Patterson’s weighty new book, GONG CO., lay unopened on my desk, its cellophane sleeve untouched, waiting for a moment that felt right. His previous two books – Redheaded Peckerwood (2011) and Bottom of the Lake (2015) – became immediate hits, during a period of peculiarly energetic and experimental book publishing within photography. While presenting his books to students recently I was reminded that, despite my best intentions, I still haven’t called the associated telephone numbers linked to his appropriated telephone book Bottom of the Lake – numbers which provide a portal to the artist’s hometown, and consist of archival sound, field recordings and performances. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that I’m taking my time here too.

Removing the book from its brown kraft paper dust jacket, its weathered green, clothbound cover and stained page edges provoke an attention to materiality and to surfaces. This book-cum-object felt strangely reminiscent of a forged tax ledger once fabricated by my teenage employer in the polytunnel of our local garden centre – the book of fictional numbers, nestled roughly in amongst soily platforms of hardy plants, was given the occasional watering and blasts of sporadic British sunshine before attaining a believable enough patina to be presented to straight-backed tax inspectors. Patterson’s book, too, is about surfaces: stories of Americana wrapped in the packaging of nostalgia, commerce and eventual ruin.

Patterson’s work has always operated at the intersection of fiction and documentary, and GONG CO. is no exception. This body of work, developed over a period of two decades – photographic, graphic and humorously symbolic – points us somehow to the forces of late-stage capitalism; the slow death of small businesses, such as the general store featured here, along with all their idiosyncrasies and sense of otherness. The publisher TBW Books writes: ‘It was like an unintentional time capsule, and an uncanny fulfilment of Andy Warhol’s prophecy that “someday, all department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores.”’

The book and Patterson’s recent solo exhibition at Robert Morat Galerie in Berlin are layered with constructed still lifes, object curiosities and interior views of the shop itself. Text-based works framed neatly in cardboard mix with photographs of aged commercial newsprint, and evidence of shop detritus accumulated over decades. In the exhibition, two seductively large prints feature photographic reproductions of old newspapers covering the shop windows, backlit from the outside world. This play of interiority and exteriority is echoed and expanded upon in the narrative unfolding of the book itself. Standing in front of the work, I overhear Robert Morat explaining the technical process in German to a visitor: this backlighting isn’t just an aesthetic choice but a way for us to begin to understand the wider work itself. I look down, and beneath one of these framed photographs, a dog-eared rat trap hugs the wall: ‘Can’t Miss,’ reads the trap, but the trap has already been sprung. The victim is notably absent.

These works are all surface and seduction – the gleam of impossibly dustless anti-reflective glass, the surgical precision of the walnut frames – somewhat antithetical to the content of the works, but make for deeply satisfying art work commodities in and of themselves. One recurring theatrical motif is hands presenting various objects to the camera, this time a stopped watch, which becomes a synecdoche for time itself: artificial, commodified, always on display. The watch is fixed at 12:54. In another work, a white plastic clock held upside down rests at 12:57. The hands that hold them are dirty, worn – workers’ hands, but maybe more likely those of Patterson himself in a studio reconstruction. These images are symbolic of capitalism’s residues, presumably referencing the hardworking agricultural South of the Mississippi Delta, where this project was born. Or is it spelt ‘Missisippi’, as my scrawled first draft read? My misspelling whilst hurtling back on the train between Berlin and Prague becomes part of what I’m trying to get at. These images point toward a place that is as real as it is imagined. For many of us outside the U.S., America exists as a series of signs – visual referents to a land both omnipresent and unknowable. Patterson’s America is one we recognise not necessarily from personal experience this side of the Atlantic, but from TV reruns, movies and childhood sweet wrappers.

GONG CO. nods toward William Eggleston, not only in those bare light bulb ceiling views, but more so in the works’ deliberate lighting and colour palette. Years ago, Patterson was an assistant of Eggleston, himself based in the South, just north of the border in Memphis, Tennessee, and somehow this influence continues to shine through in a way that makes me remember why I love the lineage that photography affords. One photograph of a clapboard house, boarded up and vacant, reads like a façade within a façade; the lighting is rich, thickly seductive, calling to mind the artificial golden hour glow of Hollywood and those flat faced film set constructions from old western movies. It is what it appears to be – and yet it isn’t. The glass from the house has been removed, and the tight crop means we have no reference to depth, no way to move beyond the building’s surface, no way around it.

This sense of staging is everywhere in the show. An aged yellow plastic racket leans in the corner like a prop or a long-lost attic find. A $2 bill is nailed directly through Thomas Jefferson’s head to the gallery wall, a store-opening ritual to bring good fortune. We’re not watching a play here, but perhaps we’re walking through the set after the final curtain. The presence of text works is notable – signs and product lists that punctuate the project performatively. ‘All Day Every Day.’ ‘Anything and Everything.’ ‘Going Out of Business.’

When we glimpse the interior views of GONG CO., you notice the forlorn shelves house objects that don’t necessarily belong to the same time period – some appear to have sat untouched for decades, others feel startlingly recent. A box of Starburst (once named Opal Fruits in the UK, to those of us who remember), an empty pack of King Edward cigars (the kind my father smoked occasionally, and let me try at too young an age), and I perhaps falsely remember a can of soup, which brings us neatly back to Warhol.

For all its rigour, GONG CO. is not cold. It’s not even really nostalgic, at least not in a tired, sentimental sense. It’s energetic with curiosity, with humorous tactility, and with love for the worn and weathered world of the everyday that might tell us something about our shared lived experience. I’m reminded of my grandmother’s long closed Laden in southern Germany, the drawers full of wrapping paper adorned with old typography and faded quaint commercial mottos, accompanied by the distinctive smell of old furniture. Perhaps there’s a kind of post-nostalgia at work here – less about longing for what can’t be recovered, more about the fascination with what that transition looks like.

After the show, I cycled through the Berlin spring sunshine and passed a building scrawled with graffiti in capital letters: ‘HOW LONG WAS NOW.’ The question felt scripted by Patterson himself. His work, like that phrase, collapses time. It’s not about when a thing happened, but how it reverberates – in texture, in colour, in loose metaphor.

In an era where replication and corporate sameness seem to swallow individuality, GONG CO. is both requiem and resistance. It reminds us that every object carries a history, every sign is part of a larger language, and every photograph – at its best – can and should be a small, still rebellion.♦

Christian Patterson: GONG CO. ran at Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin, until 17 May 2025 and is published by TBW Books and Éditions Images Vevey

—
Peter Watkins is an artist and educator based in Prague, Czech Republic. Watkins received his MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 2014, and has since exhibited his work internationally, receiving several awards for his ongoing practice. His work is held in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. His book The Unforgetting was published by Skinnerboox in 2020. He is currently Associate Lecturer at Prague City University.

Images:

1-Christian Patterson, All Day Every Day, 2020

2-Christian Patterson, Bottles and Shadows, 2017

3-Christian Patterson, Coca-Cola Wall, 2013

4-Christian Patterson, Grocery List, 2019

5-Christian Patterson, Hand (a Customer Enters), 2019

6-Christian Patterson, Newspaper Window (Red), 2016

7-Christian Patterson, Shelf Still Life (Pickle Jar), 2016

8-Christian Patterson, Store Lot Tile, 2005

9-Christian Patterson, Store View (East), 2019

10-Christian Patterson, Storeroom Door, 2019

11-Christian Patterson, Storeroom Lightbulb, 2019

12-Christian Patterson, The Clock, 2019

13-Christian Patterson, Tin Side (Silver, American Flag), 2013

14-Christian Patterson, Wastebasket, 2017

15-Christian Patterson, Yellow Dog Doors, 2013

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• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

• Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member 

• Elisa Medde on Taysir Batniji’s images of glitched video calls from Gaza

Reclaiming women’s place in Japanese photography

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 curated by Marc Feustel and Russet Lederman, 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.

Roula Seikaly | Interview |  7 May 2025

Once in a while,

we should look into each other’s eyes.

Otherwise we might feel lost.

I’m so glad you are here.

–Kawauchi Rinko, from the eyes, the ears

Roula Seikaly: Could you describe the state of research or scholarship addressing photography by Japanese women as you found it when this project started?

Pauline Vermare: There were projects about Japanese women photographers made before this one. The most famous is An Incomplete History: Women Photographers from Japan 1864–1997 (Traveling Exhibition Service, Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, 1998) by curator Fuku Noriko. She was researching the who’s who of Japanese photography and came to the same realisation as we did; there were no women to be found in there. Noriko told me about Japanese Women Photographers from the ‘50s to the ‘80s, which was curated by Fukushima Tatsuo and Hans Fleishner and organised by Ricardo Viera at Lehigh University Art Galleries in 1986, that wasn’t well known at all. Viera organised that exhibition after cancelling another exhibition on experimental Japanese photography, when the male Japanese photographers in that show protested the inclusion of work by women. I love that this was his reaction. In Japan, a group of artists including Ishiuchi Miyako curated the all-women exhibition Hyakka ryoran (One hundred flowers in bloom) at Shimizu Gallery in Yokohama in 1974.

It’s very important to note that this project doesn’t come out of nowhere. In Japan, many curators and historians such as Kasahara Michiko and Takeuchi Mariko have written and researched extensively on the subject, and promoted the work of Japanese women photographers, as have Kelly McCormick and Carrie Cushman in the United States. That’s why Lesley and I, as editors of the book, invited them to be part of this project. We knew that the research had been done for years and years.

Lesley A. Martin: As Pauline mentioned, this project served as a catalyst for bringing together a tremendous fount of research that had already been undertaken. I think that was really one of the most rewarding aspects of this project – to be able to tap into work that people had already been doing independently and to give it a larger context. It was an act of gathering rather than discovery. We wanted to unite the many dedicated voices of scholars and gallerists and curators who had been doing this work on their own, of their own volition. This echoes, in some ways, the history of women photographers who were so committed to their own practice that they continued their work regardless of recognition or available platforms.

RS: Is it important that audiences know Japanese photo history before they experience this project?

Takeuchi Mariko: This is exactly what we talked when we started this project. We really wanted to make it open to everybody. So, this is not just for people familiar with Japanese photography.

LAM: There is a very committed audience in the West for Japanese photography, but we wanted to make sure that the book that could function as a way into all this amazing work by women, no matter how much experience one had with the history of photography in Japan. First and foremost, it is informed by the circumstances and the social situation of Japanese women – their lived experiences. What’s been really rewarding is that we’ve gotten enthusiastic responses from people who say, “I didn’t know anything about Japanese photography”, as well as from those who do really know the history.

PV: Charlotte Cotton’s Photography Is Magic (Aperture, 2015) was an inspiration as a playful yet serious invitation to contemporary photography – in this case Japanese photography specifically, which can be a loaded subject. We address that complexity in the essays. I’m So Happy You Are Here is layered: the essays, the illustrated bibliography that Russet Lederman and Marc Feustel put together, the portfolios, all of that combined is designed to address the depth of the subject.

RS: Why is the period 1950 to 2000 an important framing device for this book? 

LAM: Originally, we had the subtitle as Japanese Women Photographers from 1880 to Now. The history begins with the medium’s introduction to Japan. We include essays and reference materials that trace women’s participation from the boom of the earliest, often family-run photo studios in Japan, through the Meiji and Taisho eras, to today. Once we started to focus on the portfolios, we realised that what we really wanted to explore began in the 1950s onward.

PV: I came to this project from Une Histoire Mondiale des Femmes Photographes (Textuel, 2020) and originally thought about a book covering the late 1880s to now. A few years prior, Lesley and Mariko had discussed a book about Japanese women photographers from the ‘90s. But we liked Lesley’s idea to articulate the book around those 25 portfolios, and these photographers had all worked from the ‘50s on. We realised that an encyclopaedic methodology would not work as well for what we wanted to achieve. But the essays do a great job laying out what came before, noting where these photographers came from. We start with Shima Ryū, the first known Japanese woman photographer.

TM: There are a lot of stories, a lot of photographers before the ‘50s, of course. But, to make the best project, the decision to pursue portfolios made the most sense.

PV: I think it did. Mariko’s essay emphasises the importance of experimentation and how these artists pushed boundaries. We needed that to be present in the portfolios as well.

We wanted to show the breadth of the styles and generations and contributions, from classic black and white documentary, like Tokiwa Toyoko, through the post-war era to today’s experimentations, like Tawada Yuki. Because those experimentations, as Mariko writes so beautifully in her essay, mean something beyond the work itself. Something psychological and sociological that needed to be conveyed as well.

TM: As we said, this is not a dictionary. This is not a book just about history. We really wanted to tell stories of individual women. This is not just about Japan. It’s really about individual lives with photography.

LAM: Pauline and I recently had a conversation with Carrie Cushman, who mentioned that as a western scholar in Japan, it has been difficult to get access to some of the research materials. And it was difficult for us to get some of the illustrations for their essay because the materials just aren’t well-digitised, it turns out. I think that also served to shift our focus: the ease of access to the images themselves.

RS: Pauline describes feminism as an incomplete construct through which to understand the book and the portfolios it contains. Has feminism been elevated sort of as a central issue by audiences you’ve experienced so far? How have you addressed that?

PV: As a French woman who grew up in Japan, now living in New York, I struggled with the fact that ‘feminism’ means different things in each of these countries. France and Japan might be closer, in terms of societal structures and gender roles. I felt that our analysis would be too limited, not inclusive enough, if we only looked at the work of these photographers through an American feminist lens. I quote a few photographers in my introduction. Someone like Nagashima Yurie, who studied abroad at some point, in LA, was very interested in the notion of feminism and worked around it in her own way. For others, especially of the generation of Ishiuchi or Sugiura, women who are now in their 70s or 80s, feminism wasn’t the focus. They didn’t want to talk about it. It was a bit of a rejection, at least of the word ‘feminism’. I love what Mariko said, that it’s about individual lives. I think that angle is much more open and fruitful than an approach that would be theoretically or sociologically locking their work in a box.

LAM: We came from very different perspectives on this as an editorial committee. (The editorial committee being myself, Pauline, Mariko, Carrie and Kelly.) Carrie and Kelly would describe their practice as adamantly driven by feminist ideas around the retelling of history. Each of us occupy a different position on how feminism intersects with the act of writing a restorative history. From my personal perspective, I would also argue that it’s unavoidably feminist.

RS: Where did this project start? Was it a collaboration from the beginning?

PV: On my end, it started with a masterclass on Japanese women photographers that the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris invited me to give, which was prompted by a few articles I had contributed to Luce Lebart and Marie Robert’s book published by Textuel in 2020. The Textuel team, whom I had been discussing this project with, knew that Lesley had been working with Mariko on a project focusing on the 1990s, and kindly connected us.

LAM: That’s how I learned that Pauline had been researching this topic. She and I both lived in Japan at different times in our lives. I was there from ‘92-95 after finishing my undergraduate degree and very attuned to dialogues around feminism and culture at the time. I was very impressed by some of the work that I had seen emerging in Tokyo, in particular Nagashima Yurie, Ninagawa Mika, Hiromix. These three artists represented a watershed moment when Japanese women were really coming to the forefront. That stayed with me.

I met Mariko in 2005 or 2006. When I could finally turn my focus to this project, I knew that she was a great resource and someone that I wanted to work with. In 2017, we began a conversation around a book that would just focus on women in the 1990s. Another important collaborator to that conversation was the photographer Nagashima Yurie, who asked all the right questions. I came to realise that the ‘90s is a very important time period, but also really complicated. Making a book that introduced that one historical moment came to feel like releasing a tiny slice of something into the vacuum around a much larger history. Mariko, Yurie and I spent a lot of time talking about what was missing. And it’s thanks to those conversations that the multivalency of the project really crystallised. COVID slowed everything down, but it also gave us time to find Pauline!

Mariko, is that an accurate description? Because you did a lot of work on that earlier project.

TM: The three of us were on different paths but realised that we were running in the same direction. It was very natural process. I researched women photographers in Japan for a long time. I wrote texts and gave lectures and did shows with some women photographers. After doing the work alone, I feel so fortunate to work with these two. It’s a kind of a miracle for me to realise this.

RS: The care you have for one another as colleagues, as friends, as people invested in this topic really comes through in the book, as does the care for the artists and the work in this project. The world is a terrible place and has been for a long time. For me, spending time with the book and speaking with all of you, it’s very heartening. The book is unapologetically welcoming and driven by love and appreciation, things that we seem collectively low in our reserves right now.

PV: Thank you, Roula, this is so good to hear. This project was driven by a desire to counterbalance what you’re talking about, everything we’ve been going through, and photography is very much a way to do that. The title, I’m So Happy You Are Here, is from a poem by photographer Kawauchi Rinko (published in the eyes, the ears, 2010).  Last year, at the Gordon Parks Foundation gala, Colin Kaepernick was being honoured, and he gave a deeply inspiring speech, saying that we all needed to “open the windows”. And I thought, this is the most beautiful thing to say. And that’s what I think we wanted to do with the project.

RS: Why was Aperture the right publisher for this project? Did their participation signal institutional approval or support for projects like this?

PV: Lesley was Aperture’s creative director at the time and had been working with Japanese photographers for many years. I would say it was a mission for her, a personal commitment she was carrying through. And Aperture, as we know, has always been on the forefront of groundbreaking projects like this one, including Photography is Magic, The Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion (2019) and The Chinese Photobook (2015). It was clear that this is where this book belonged, in that group.

RS: Readers are likely to be interested in seeing more work by the artists featured in the portfolios and the illustrated bibliography. Are there websites – artist websites, museum and exhibition websites, archives, translated books – that readers can refer to? 

PV: Kelly Midori McCormick and Carrie Cushman’s online platform Behind the Camera is a very impressive and important history of Japanese women’s photographers. You could spend hours on it, going through all the bios and chronology. It is a fascinating and extremely valuable resource.

There are also the hundreds of photobooks made by Japanese women, including the ones that Marc and Russet gathered in their bibliography. I am thinking also of a few books made recently by Chose Commune, the French publisher, including Kawauchi, Hara Mikiko and Kodama Kusako.

And we are hoping the project will trigger other publications, including a translation of Nagashima Yurie’s very important book “Bokura” no “onna no ko shashin” kara watashitachi no girlie photo e Yurie Nagashima (Daifuku Shorin, 2020) that is partially translated in our book for the first time.

RS: If there were any challenges in realising this project, what were they and how did you address them?

TM: Ah, so many challenges. I always think that the challenge is good, though.

As you know, I’m based in Japan. And I am so familiar with a so-called Japanese mentality and idea of photography. I was aware that I needed to push the boundaries. I’ve been working on Japanese photography abroad a lot, and feel like I’ve always worked in between, like I have to explain it to both sides. But I enjoy it. I do it because I believe in it.

PV: The main challenge I would say was cultural. How to approach this subject in the most universal way. Nagashima Yurie was asking important questions, about gender and social class in Japan. What does it mean to be Japanese, what does it mean to be a woman, what is “a Japanese woman”? But we knew where we were going, and we were all going in the same direction, with the same intention. That fed the whole project and drove it to its destination.

RS: Thinking about the medium’s historiography, how it’s taught, and about the blind spots that you’ve spoken to throughout this interview, how would you like this book to be used? Do you see it as a textbook? How would you like the work of these artists incorporated into the wider photo canon, if at all?

MT: This book is open, welcoming everyone from different approaches. It can be used in any way. Not just in classrooms, but as a visual source for historians and for students. My wish is to hand it to everyone, that’s all.

PV: I see this book is a conduit. It would be wonderful to see it being used in classrooms, to trigger optimism and creativity in students, to empower them. As a student, you want to be pushed in a direction that’s new, that will open something inside of you. That could become a lifelong thing. I would love for Japanese and Asian studies programs in the US and France to use it. I feel like people would know and understand so much more about Japan just by looking at the work of those photographers and reading about their experiences.

I open my essay with this quote by Annie Ernaux: ‘My story as a woman is not only a woman’s story’. This project is about adding vantage points and perspectives to the story. I think it is fundamental to open the field of vision, to see the reverse shots, the counter views. We go back to opening the windows. Sometimes, we fail to look at, or to even think that there’s another way of looking at the story. And for me, this is the goal of this project: to say, let’s look at these other perspectives.

TM: That’s a very crucial point. And that reminds me of our conversation, Pauline. When we started, you asked me what I would want to prioritise for this project, and I replied that I just want to break the cliche stereotype of Japanese women – always smiling, soft, nice, and never saying no. I’m really fed up with this. As you can see in the book, each of us are brave, individual and independent.♦

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now runs at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, Germany, from 24 May–7 September 2025 and is published by Aperture.

—
Lesley A. Martin is Executive Director of Printed Matter and former Creative Director of Aperture.

Takeuchi Mariko is a writer, critic and curator of photography, and head of the art studies programmme at Kyoto University of the Arts.

Roula Seikaly is a curator, writer and co-founder of Print Study for All. Seikaly’s curatorial projects have been hosted at venues across the US, including Berkeley Art Center, Colorado Photographic Arts Center and SF Camerawork. Her writing has been published through KQED Arts, Hyperallergic and Photograph.

Pauline Vermare is the Philip and Edith Lenonian Curator of Photography at Brooklyn Museum, New York.

Images:

1-Asako Narahashi, Kawaguchiko, 2003; from the series half awake and half asleep in the water. Courtesy PGI gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

2-Eiko Yamazawa, What I Am Doing No. 77, 1986. Courtesy Third Gallery Aya, Osaka, and Aperture

3-Hitomi Watanabe, Untitled, 1968–69; from the series Tōdai Zenkyōtō. Courtesy Zen Foto Gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

4-Michiko Kon, Inada + Bōshi (Yellowtail and hat), 1986. Courtesy PGI gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

5-Lieko Shiga, Mother’s Gentle Hands; from the series Rasen Kaigan, 2009. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

6-Mikiko Hara, Untitled, 1996. Courtesy Osiris Co., Ltd., Tokyo, and Aperture

7-Miwa Yanagi, Elevator Girl House 1F, 1997; from the series Elevator Girl. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

8-Miyako Ishiuchi, mother’s #39, 2002. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

9-Momo Okabe, Untitled, 2020; from the series Ilmatar. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

10-Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, 2004; from the series the eyes, the ears. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

11-Sakiko Nomura, Untitled, 1997; from the series Hiroki. Courtesy the artist and Aperture

12-Tamiko Nishimura, Mitaka, Tokyo, 1978; from the series Zoku (My Journey II). Courtesy Zen Foto Gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

13-Tokuko Ushioda, Untitled, 1983; from the series My Husband. Courtesy PGI gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

14-Yurie Nagashima, Full-figured, yet not full-term, 2001. Courtesy the artist, Maho Kubota Gallery, Tokyo, and Aperture

1000 Words favourites

• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique and activism

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

• Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member 

• Elisa Medde on Taysir Batniji’s images of glitched video calls from Gaza

Guido Guidi: more moments, more points of view

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.

Rica Cerbarano | Exhibition review | 10 Apr 2025

Guido Guidi’s major retrospective at MAXXI in Rome is a rare example of an artist’s decades-long body of work being presented without grandiosity, allowing for an appreciation of its true artistic and cultural significance. Structured across two interconnected planes – the vertical display of the walls and the horizontal arrangement of the display cases – Col tempo, 1956-2024 traces the evolution of Guidi’s artistic vision, revealing that he is far more than just a photographer of vernacular architecture and Italy’s marginal places. This is not merely due to the variety of subjects he has captured – always with an obsessive attempt to seek a seriality of photographic procedure – but, more importantly, because of the depth of study and research that have shaped his thinking.

The exhibition – curated by ​​Simona Antonacci, Pippo Ciorra and Antonello Frongia – features over 400 works, including numerous previously unpublished pieces and archival materials, following a curatorial narrative that offers precious insight into the ‘behind the scenes’ of art-making. At its core is a concept that proves to be illuminating for curious minds: his archive, adopted as a guiding framework for exploration, is highlighted also as a physical space through the account of the role that his home in Ronta di Cesena has played, as both a living space, a studio and a meeting place for emerging artists – a space where ‘personal biography and artistic process intertwine’.

Opening the show, the Preganziol series (1983) encapsulates the essence of Guidi’s artistic inquiry. Shot in an empty room in the province of Cesena, this work comprises 16 images, all taken within the confines of four bare walls. As the external light shifts, subtle transformations within the room become visible. Through this meticulous study, Guidi explores the passage of time and the way photography both interprets and transforms its subject. This symbolic introduction seamlessly leads into an exploration of Guidi’s evolving relationship with photography through 40 photographic sequences, curated by the artist himself, a three-channel video filmed inside his home-studio-archive – and an extensive collection of archival materials displayed in centrally positioned display cases.

This third level of the exhibition is crucial in fully grasping the depth of Guidi’s artistic vision, revealing how each image embodies a meditation on perception and the passage of time. The reconstruction of Guidi’s material universe begins with a selection of books from his personal library. These volumes – some of which are available for the public to browse – offer insight into the development of his research methodology. This collection extends beyond artist’s books and photobooks (including the catalogue from the Walker Evans exhibition at MoMA in New York, a pivotal reference for his practice) to encompass works on philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and a vast array of art history. Among the texts, one finds Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927) alongside James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), John Cage’s For the Birds (1981), and Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel (1948). Essential influences such as Piero della Francesca, Giorgione and Paul Klee are also present, underscoring the diverse intellectual foundations that shape Guidi’s work.

These elements are all traces of what Guidi himself calls “eternal sonship” – an artistic practice rooted in imitation, references and citations. The study of his masters manifests as a meticulous formal investigation, a repertoire of subjects and compositions, echoes and correspondences that suggest the existence of a mental world woven from visual associations across distant epochs and disciplines. For instance, it is extremely fascinating to learn how, in his notes on two photographs by Walker Evans – prepared for a lecture on the American photographer – Guidi establishes a striking parallel between Evans’ Cottage at Ossining Camp Woods, New York, 1930 and Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection. In both works, as he notes, there are ‘on the left, trees without leaves; on the right, trees with leaves,’ highlighting a shared compositional structure that bridges photography and Renaissance painting.

Walker Evans’ profound influence on Guidi’s work becomes particularly evident in his exploration of façades, or “facce vista”, as noted in one of his commentaries – often accompanied by sketches and drawings analysing the composition of the works he discusses. As we can see in the sequence of façades presented in the exhibition, spanning 1970–1983, they mark a return to the square format and a more classical serial approach after a period of freer experimentation (for instance, the Di sguincio series), where photographs were instead the result of a ‘performance of the encounter’, unrefined and ‘rude’, allowing ‘to break out of the etiquette of aesthetic rules’, as Antonello Frongia writes in the book accompanying the exhibition, published by MACK in 2024.

Yet, this ‘rude character of his photography’ – what Guidi himself describes as the ability ‘to show things as they are, without refinement’ – also emerges in his study of façades, a subject that captivates him like a lover. Using a Hasselblad 6×6, he examined the ordinary postwar architecture of Italy’s provinces, capturing subtle variations in form shaped by shifting viewpoints and light conditions. Rather than adopting a taxonomic approach in the style of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Guidi’s method feels almost anthropological, evoking the portraiture of August Sander, as he emphasises the anthropomorphic qualities of these structures – that through the photographic frame turn into thinking entities, or more precisely, into observers.

This interest in vernacular architecture served as an entry point into Guido Guidi’s long-standing engagement with architecture, which actually began during his studies at the University Institute of Architecture in Venice. In the 1990s, his collaborations with the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal marked the first major international recognition of Guidi’s work as an artist, resulting in the start of a deeper engagement with architecture – leading to a series of commissions, exhibitions and publications.

Among the series dedicated to architects’ designs is the well-known documentation of the Brion Tomb by Carlo Scarpa, who was also his teacher. Guidi returned to this site for a decade, studying the interplay of light on surfaces and architectural geometries in what can be seen as a ritual of time. In this suspension between life and death, between light and shadow, Guidi’s definition of photography as ‘a form of prayer: a way to dignify things, to grant them presence’ is what resonates. It’s a process of waiting, in which the visible reveals the intangible essence of things.

Moving from one series to another hung up on the walls (from the early photographs collected here in Esercizi, Al mare and Attesa, to the research of the 1970s in Avanti e ritorno and Coincidenze; then from the works on Gibellina and the many other cities in the world, grouped here under the name “In Between Cities”, to the section dedicated to the “Officina cesenate”, his home-studio, and the study on the spaces of the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna, one of the schools where he taught), one can’t help but pause, observing the vitrines with curiosity and delight, where the theoretical and practical background of the artist unfolds. For example, alongside notebooks, early drawings and sketches of photographic compositions, we explore the technical aspect of his passion for photography, learning that in the early 1980s, he built several self-made prototypes of cameras using plywood. His experiments with printing are equally significant: after initially working with black-and-white photography in the darkroom and large-format techniques, over time Guidi fine-tuned his method of photographic printing and came to favour chromogenic contact prints.

Towards the end of the exhibition, some additional printing materials are presented, such as contact sheets and photocopies, selected by the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione, revealing the significant attention Guidi gives to post-production and the organisation of images. The experience is like being momentarily in the photographer’s studio, feeling his hands on the proof prints, carefully focusing on selected photographs or portions of images to be used. Finally, a number of display cases present the meticulous work that Guidi carried out in preparation for his lessons, all focused on visual motifs central to his thinking: the idea of collimation and the logic of sequences and symbols like arrows, stains, shadows, graphemes, letters, and façades.

If this exhibition leaves a lasting impression, it is not so much due to its size (undoubtedly the largest anthological exhibition ever dedicated to Guidi) or the quality of the works on display, but rather for its ability to convey the complexity behind the artistic research of an artist who has played a hugely significant role in transforming how we perceive landscapes and approach photography today. By opening the doors to the artist’s archive – both physical and mental – the exhibition reveals to the public that photography is not a matter of moments, but of time. “There’s something about Bresson’s decisive moment that doesn’t convince me,” says Guidi in an interview, who prefers “more moments, more points of view,” clearly distancing himself from the notion of the “unrepeatable image.” His images are endlessly repeatable – always the same yet subtly different, slow, where the time that accumulates is not just that of the gaze and light, but also of thought, built over a lifetime.

Even if you have never attended a lecture by Guido Guidi, it is evident that one of the most important lessons his work offers is the value of taking time to think, develop one’s practice without haste, and observe and listen carefully, to build a web of references that ward off the danger of self-referentiality. There is hope that young artists visiting this exhibition will leave with at least a fragment of this awareness. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and MAXXI Rome. © Guido Guidi

Guido Guidi. Col tempo, 1956-2024 runs at MAXXI Rome until 27 April 2025

–
Rica Cerbarano is a curator, writer, editor, and project coordinator specialising in photography. She writes regularly for Vogue Italia and Il Giornale dell’Arte, where she is the Co-Editor of the Photography section. She has also contributed to Camera Austria, Over Journal, Hapax Magazine, and Sali & Tabacchi, amongst others. In 2017, Cerbarano co-founded Kublaiklan, a collective that has curated exhibitions at Images Vevey (Switzerland), Gibellina PhotoRoad (Sicily, Italy), Cortona On The Move (Italy) and Photoszene Festival (Cologne, Germany), amongst others. In 2022, she was a member of the Artistic Direction Committee at Photolux Festival (Lucca, Italy), where she curated Seiichi Furuya: Face to Face, 1978 – 1985 and Robin Schwartz: Amelia & the Animals.

Images:

1-Guido Guidi, Tomba Brion, 2007

2-Guido Guidi, Cervia, 1979

3-Guido Guidi, Rimini Nord, 1991

4-Guido Guidi, San Giorgio di Cesena, 1985

5-Guido Guidi, Fosso Ghiaia, 1972

6-Guido Guidi, Palazzo Abatellis, 1997

7-Guido Guidi, Preganziol, 1981

8-Guido Guidi, San Mauro in Valle, 1956

9-Guido Guidi, Porto Marghera, 1988

10-Guido Guidi, Ronta, 2016

11-Guido Guidi, Ronta, 2004

1000 Words favourites

• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique and activism

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

• Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member 

• Elisa Medde on Taysir Batniji’s images of glitched video calls from Gaza

Mahtab Hussain’s ode to muslim communities

Mahtab Hussain’s major solo exhibition, a joint commission by Ikon and Photoworks, confronts the layered realities of community and belonging. Through portraiture, video and a suite of 160 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 in 2010 – and other institutional and media-driven initiatives continue to shape the Muslim experience in the UK. The artist discusses the exhibition’s structures and meanings with Anneka French.

Anneka French | Interview | 20 March 2025

Anneka French: Your new commission by Ikon and Photoworks, What Did You Want To See?, documents 160 mosques in Birmingham, each with its own architectural style. Is that your estimation of the total number?

Mahtab Hussain: It’s an incredible number of mosques or masjids. All the masjids in Birmingham have been plotted on Google Maps, so I followed that map, cycling or driving to tick off each one. I’d say I’ve covered about 98-99%, though the number continues to grow. Some masjids are very grand with minarets and huge community funding; others are next to small, run-down shops. The variety reflects the tenacity of the community and the messy identity of Birmingham as a whole. I told myself that if I never picked up a camera in Birmingham again, it would be important to close this chapter with the city’s masjids, playing with photography’s strength within the archival.

AF: What’s the relationship as you see it between photography and the archival?

MH: The relationship between photography and the archive goes beyond mere documentation; it creates a visual record that holds space for stories that might otherwise be forgotten. Archives are not neutral; they are selective and tell us what is deemed important enough to preserve. Photography has the unique ability to shape that narrative. It provides a lens through which we can revisit, reinterpret and reflect on history. The act of photographing isn’t just about preserving the present; it’s about creating a bridge to the future in ways that words or written documents sometimes can’t.

In the context of the masjids, it’s also about questioning how history is archived and who gets to shape it. Often, communities like mine are excluded from dominant historical narratives, and photography gives us the opportunity to shape our own story. By making the masjids part of that narrative, I present an alternative archive – one defined by the experiences of the people who built and use these spaces. This kind of photography isn’t passive; it’s an active engagement with history, placing value on what has long been undervalued and overlooked.

Photography becomes an archival tool that captures the moment and resists the erasure of these communities. These images serve as a form of resistance, a statement of identity and an assertion of belonging in a city that often forgets the communities that shape it. It’s about creating an archive that is dynamic, grows, changes, and responds to the shifting realities of these communities.

AF: How has Project Champion shaped the work?

MH: The cameras are no longer there, and not all their locations are known, but there was a time when the community felt spied on. Some cameras were pointed at masjids, others directly into people’s bedrooms. For the exhibition, I’ve created a large format photograph tiled Neighbourhood Watched (2025), with a crew, which looks into my mother’s home, imagining a camera placed outside. The work features a car, a couple standing outside the home and a young boy looking through the window. I’m using a smoke machine. It’s very cinematic and hyper-staged; it explores the tension between truth and fiction. I’ve often used direction or control within my work but I’ve kept it minimal in the past. This new piece re-creates the moment of discovering surveillance, when the community’s safe spaces were breached. I wanted to transport viewers into that image so they could feel the injustice themselves, and the best way to do that was through my imagination.

AF: You’re best known for your portraits. How have you approached portraiture in other of your works for the exhibition?

MH: I’m a big fan of Richard Avedon. I fell in love with the iconic American West series when I was a student. I wanted to go back to the simplicity and the range of black and white portraits. I don’t think there’s been a series created like that relating to the Muslim South Asian experience. I wanted to have that conversation in my work and celebrate the individual.

AF: Can you share more about the sitters?

MH: I did my usual thing, stopping people in the street and going into community centres, but I also reconnected with people I’ve met over the years and photographed before – though perhaps not shown – whose stories I wanted to share. One chap, Shaf, has a tyre shop and when I used to walk the streets or cycle for shoots in Birmingham. The shop was one of my safe spaces where I would go and hang out. I wanted to celebrate Shaf. I walked around with a white backdrop and had his son or one of his friends help hold it while making the portrait.

AF: They look like studio portraits.

MH: Yes, but they’re made on the streets with natural daylight. When you work with a community its difficult to encourage someone to come to a studio. It’s easier for me to go and try to create the studio in their space. My middle brother is in one of the works, my daughter in another and my mother – she’s the lady smoking the cigarette. I want to share the room with the community and the people I know in Birmingham. I did consider including myself in the show while exploring Avedon’s self-portraits. There’s something deeply reflective and revealing about self-portraiture, and I love how his portraits express the passage of time through his own aging. Ultimately, there wasn’t enough space to include myself, but with my family featured in the series, and given that this work stems from a personal experience. I’m present in every part of it.

AF: You’re present through your family and those friendships, conversations and observations.

MH: The work comes from a deeply personal place, and while there is an intentional international conversation happening, there is also a sense of Birmingham throughout the work.

AF: What goes through your mind when you are making a portrait?

MH: When I’m making a portrait, I’m thinking about the relationship I’m building with the person in front of me. It’s not just about pressing the shutter; it’s about the conversation, the trust and the shared space we’re creating together. I want the portrait to reflect not just how they look but who they are and how they want to be seen. It’s collaboration. This isn’t just my interpretation of them, but a mutual exchange of energy and understanding. I want to celebrate the sitter in front of my lens and help them be seen, while evoking a sense of power and beauty.

AF: Can you say more about the two videos made in collaboration with journalist, filmmaker and novelist Guy Gunaratne and some of other images in the exhibition?

MH: One of the videos is a prayer sequence. The other looks at Muslim hysteria and systematic abuse, exploring what it means to use labels like “extreme” and how these are projected onto Muslim communities in the UK. The video is quite heart-wrenching and gut-wrenching at times. It’s a kind of historical mishmash of images of 9/11 and the July 7th bombings – world events and images from popular culture that I’ve grown up with and understood – interwoven with family gatherings and birthday celebrations. I hope visitors get a chance to sit with the work and begin to question what it is that we’ve been told, to start to understand each other’s pain a little.

There are also painted statements, declarations in text, framed or in vinyl, along with photographs of graffiti postcode tags displayed throughout the gallery. Some of these are from my archive, going back years. Rather than viewing these tags as gang-related symbols, I see them as connected to ideas of place – sites tagged because the person feels they belong in those spaces. It becomes, in a way, a study of semiotics.

AF: You’ve touched upon it but how are you approaching the exhibition from a curatorial and audience perspective?

MH: I’ve been thinking about how the work can be experienced as a journey, reflecting the themes explored. The installation is not just about individual pieces but about creating a space where the audience feels immersed, where stories come together and allow for deeper connections. I want visitors to feel as if they’re stepping into a living, breathing narrative, where they can look, reflect on and even challenge what they’re seeing. The exhibition’s flow is designed to guide them through different layers of complex emotions – fear, reluctance, scepticism, resentment, compassion, empathy, and hope to name a few – each section contributing a different aspect of the story I want to tell. I want the audience to feel it, both in their body and mind.

AF: In another, separate sculptural commission for The Line, Please Take a Seat (launching in East London, April 2025), developed with members of their youth collective, you further extend the invitation to connect. What does working across different media afford you?

MH: Working across different media allows me to expand the conversation and experiment with how my work can engage people – and me – in varied ways. As an artist, it’s important to experience growth and embrace the resistance that comes with it. Photography has provided me with a powerful tool to communicate and shape my practice. It has allowed me to move beyond the still image and think about how an artwork can interact with its audience. There’s something special about printing and framing a photograph – it transforms into a physical object, a presence in space – and this tactile element has opened the door for me to explore other forms.

Portraiture itself carries a sculptural quality, so it felt like a natural progression to step into this realm with sculpture and installation. With projects like Please Take a Seat – a cast-iron Victorian-style bench that creates a moment of stillness in a busy world – I can invite people into the work in a more participatory, embodied way. It was designed with the idea of inviting conversation on place and reflection. It’s about giving the audience the space to engage and interact, allowing them to become part of the narrative. By expanding my practice, I can create a deeper connection – physically, emotionally and intellectually – between the work and its viewers. Art and photography spark dialogue, enable difficult conversations and build bridges. This is a very big part of my practice.

At Ikon, I’m putting my own experience into the show. It feels quite vulnerable. I’ve always talked before about ideas of community, masculinity and hybridity – about being Pakistani or something –but never really “Muslim”. I’ve danced around this previously. There is a strong focus on that within the work at Ikon but I still find it difficult to find my own label because of how it’s been hijacked and positioned. This is my way of grappling with the uneasiness I feel about the word and the power structures surrounding it.♦

All images courtesy the artist and Ikon. © Mahtab Hussain

Mahtab Hussain: What Did You Want To See? runs at Ikon until 1 June 2025

—
Mahtab Hussain is an artist whose work explores the relationship between identity, heritage and displacement. His themes develop through long-term research articulating a visual language that challenges the prevailing concepts of multiculturalism. Hussain has published four artist books, including You Get Me? (MACK, 2017), Going Back to Where I Came From (Ikon, 2017), The Quiet Town of Tipton (Dewi Lewis, 2015), and The Commonality of Strangers (New Art Exchange, 2015).

Anneka French is a writer, editor and curator based in Birmingham. She is Project Editor at publishing house Anomie and contributes to Art Quarterly, Burlington Contemporary and Photomonitor among other titles.

Images:

1-Mahtab Hussain, Faizal Islam Masjid, Birmingham, 2024

2-Mahtab Hussain, Imtiaz, 2024

3-Mahtab Hussain, Car drivers were monitored via ANPR Cameras, 2010

4-Mahtab Hussain, Eid Prayer in Birmingham, 2018

5-Mahtab Hussain, Alisha, 2024

6-Mahtab Hussain, Acts of Defiance Postcode Tag B12 Sparkbrook, Balsall Heath, 2014

7-Mahtab Hussain, Aqeel, 2024

8-Mahtab Hussain, Bilal Mosque, Birmingham, 2024

9-Mahtab Hussain, East Birmingham Central Masjid, Birmingham, 2024

10-Mahtab Hussain, Daddy Shaf, 2024

1000 Words favourites

• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique and activism

• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age

• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect

• Discover London’s top five photography galleries

• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto

• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani

• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För

• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community

• Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member 

• Elisa Medde on Taysir Batniji’s images of glitched video calls from Gaza

Tate Britain’s 80s: Too much, not enough

From the gritty realism of the miners’ strike and anti-racist protests to the subversive art of staged portraits and image-text works, Tate Britain’s latest show, The 80s: Photographing Britain, attempts to bring to life a decade shaped by Thatcher-era turbulence, revealing the stark divisions within photography throughout the process. Yet, with nearly 350 images from over 70 photographers, Mark Durden asks if Tate Britain has taken on an impossible challenge?

Mark Durden | Exhibition review | 27 Feb 2025

The 80s was undoubtedly very much an important decade for photography in Britain. To a certain extent the political, economic and social turmoil during the Thatcher years was echoed in the seemingly irreconcilable divisions that characterised photography at that time. What comes across from this show is that the core contest and split was centred on the photograph’s role as a document, as the decade saw the emergence of a critical relationship to more traditional observational modes of documentary in favour of staged images, montage and/or the use of text.

For the purposes of this exhibition, the 80s are stretched back to 1976 and forward to 1994. The result is nearly 350 images by a long list of photographers, over 70. While the list is long it is still selective – there are many who are not included, Shirley Baker, Helen Chadwick, John Kippin, Fay Godwin, Susan Trangmar, Nick Waplington, Graham Smith, Hannah Collins, John Goto, Roger Palmer, Raymond Moore, Craigie Horsfield, for example.

Experiencing an image heavy show like this does raise the question as to whether photography is best served by being presented in such large quantities. What does it say about the value given to photography? Might it not suggest that there is still a problem with photography in exhibition form? Part of the agenda is to show the “multiplicities of practices” in the 1980s but what we get is an overly directed and steered “sampling” of photographic work, with lots of captioning labels and explanations, that are not always helpful and add to the informational weight of this show. 

The Tate Gallery (as it was then called, it became Tate Britain when Tate Modern opened in 2000) only collected photographs by artists in the 1980s. Even now, as Tate Britain celebrates work it basically ignored at the time, there still seems to be a certain unease about the document itself. The show begins with documentary, but in doing so uses the work of a range of photographers as an illustration of the events of the turbulent decade – including anti-racist movements, the Handsworth riots, the Miners’ strike, Greenham Common, and the 1990 Poll Tax riots. This busy display of black and white photographs presents a direct use of images as representation, a model later reconfigured or disassembled throughout the exhibition. There are however some continuities of this approach – a room entitled Reflections of the Black Experience, for example, includes powerful documentary pictures by Vanley Burke, whose work is also included in the opening room. His extensive and affiliative portrait of Black life in Birmingham is crucial, as he has said, in “writing our own history”. There are also Roy Mehta’s tender depictions of Afro-Caribean communities in North London. Despite this, I was still left feeling I’d like to see more space and presence given to such photography in this show.

The exhibition opens with David Mansell’s 1977 portrait of Jayaben Desai facing a line of police, during the second year of a strike for union representation at Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories. The inclusion of this industrial dispute at the outset is a nice acknowledgment that photography itself involved worker exploitation. Mansell captures Desai’s dignified presence well – her resistance contained in her look back at the line of white policemen at kerb edge, with her arms crossed like theirs, it is as if she is inspecting them, sussing them out. Subject and content dominate our interest here. But as with pictures like Mansell’s, we are also made aware of the craft of documentary. Pogus Caesar’s pictures of the Handsworth Riots move between the observational, amidst the action, and the more reflexive: a portrait of the artist John Akomfrah reading its newspaper coverage headlined Riot of Death. Ceaser’s photographic detail of an advertising hoarding, collides the marketing slogan ‘Guinness Pure Genius’ with a message from the street scrawled beneath, informing us of an experienced reality that triggered the riots – Police Harassment on Blacks. Simple, direct, yet resonant and memorable.

The following room with fewer pictures, in part because it included photographs that were bigger and in colour, marked a shift in documentary approaches. One wall contained more traditional black and white pictures – by Don McCullin, Tish Murtha and Markéta Luskačová – while three walls were given over to larger colour works by Martin Parr, Anna Fox and Paul Graham. The room is named after the title of Parr’s book of his representation of the “comfortable classes”, The Cost of Living. But his turn to this class, his own class, was in part a consequence of his earlier well-known Last Resort, a depiction of working-class holidaymakers packed into a litter-ridden seaside resort in New Brighton, which is in Merseyside (the show’s catalogue essay gets it wrong and says the pictures were taken in Brighton). Last Resort was presented in a later room centred and themed on the impact of colour photography in the 1980s. The context and delayed presentation of this work is a problem. Class and consumerism are the issues that run through Last Resort and to separate that work out from The Cost of Living tends to downplay this.  

Parr’s flash-lit, fractured social world of middle-class garden parties and private views in The Cost of Living, offers a foil to Paul Graham’s pictures of people redundant and looking for work in the florescent-lit bleak interiors of the UK’s unemployment benefit offices (as they were known in the 1980s): the fall out of deindustrialisation and the effects of Thatcher’s embrace of an American-style market economy. Anna Fox’s portrait of a suited office worker shovelling bacon in his mouth offers a good symbol of the greed and avarice that marked certain sectors at this time. Such ironic and satirical pictures are marked by distance in contrast to the humanism underpinning so much of the photography that starts this show. Tish Murtha’s black and white pictures of unemployed youths – in states of distraction and ennui – in the estates of what were once the centre of heavy industry in the North East, offered a certain continuity from room one. It would have been good if her unemployment pictures had been given more space and presence as a counterpoint to the more familiar and bigger pictures by Graham.

Landscapes taps into another tension and opposition around photography at this time, between a more Romantic approach, exemplified by the beautifully crafted pictures of dramatic and often remote landscape formations by Thomas Joshua Cooper – an influential teacher at Glasgow School of Art in the 1980s – and a more literal disassembly of the genre by Ingrid Pollard. Her polemical multipart The Cost of the English Landscape, with pictures of the artist climbing a stile combined with signs saying PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT, NO TRESPASS, as well as postcards, maps, text, and photographs of the area of the Lake District National Park and Sellafield, informs us of the exclusions and omissions integral to the construction of an English Idyll. Topographic views by John Davies, record the social and industrial changes in British Landscapes, as he titles them. In one photograph the rocks in the foreground are daubed with the name of the pop band, Duran Duran, another layer in this rich, subtle and detailed registering of Britain’s deindustrialised and deindustrialising landscapes in the 1980s.

An entire room is given over to work that falls under the heading Image-Text and the captioning information panel rightly signals the importance and influence of Victor Burgin, who taught several of the photographers whose work is shown alongside his. But I’m not quite sure why he is represented only by part of his series UK 1976. The catalogue essay even mistakenly states that the images in this series are appropriated. They are not. He took the photographs. Burgin’s later, more intertextual and very influential work from the 1980s is absent. Was this because it was not “Photographing Britain”?     

There is much constructed, studio-based and appropriationist work in this show. A whole room is given over to work by Maud Sulter and Jo Spence. In Sulter’s Zabat, 1989, large gilt-framed colour photographic portraits celebrate Black female artists, writers, musicians, including herself, each staged as a muse from Greek mythology and counteracting their representation in Western art as white women. Jo Spence’s brilliance was that she used performance and comedy to cut to the chase, enlivening and energising a medium that did tend to be used with sobriety in the 1980s: as in Terry Dennett’s deadpan depiction of her standing topless on the doorstep of a terraced house, broom in hand, challenging and mocking photography’s reduction of women and the working class to an exotic spectacle.    

The use of colour in Grace Lau’s back-lit transparencies accents the celebratory tone of her photographs of London’s cross-dressing community. In one portrait taken out of doors in the sun, her subject poses by a soldier of the Life Guard regiment; it’s a nice interaction between them, with his flamboyant military outfit more lavish than the floral dress worn by the person smiling beside him.

Given the extraordinary nature of his rich and extensive portrayal of people in Merseyside in the 80s, it seemed odd to limit Tom Wood’s presence in this show to just four pictures from Chelsea Reach nightclub in New Brighton – exhibited as was Lau’s in the room centred on colour photography (despite Wood fluently moving between colour and black and white in the 80s). There does seem to be an unevenness about the way in which a photographer’s work is shown in this exhibition. Some “sampling” is more selective and limited than others.

In a room given over to three photographers, Black Bodyscapes, there is a strong American influence and presence. Both Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Ajamu X draw upon and subvert Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of Black male nudes. Fani-Kayode’s colourful pictures, mixing the erotics of the Black body with sacred Yoruba rituals and Ajamu X, queering presentations of pumped-up masculinity through dress and performance as in his Body Builder in Bra. Lyle Ashton Harris’ iconic Man and Woman, a picture of the artist and a college friend, both Black and naked, wearing whiteface, evokes a history of racialised representations and also the act of passing as white, forsaking one’s ethnicity as a result of fear or duress. Harris is a US photographer but is shown here because he was included in Autograph’s first exhibition at London’s CameraWork gallery in 1990.

The show closes with a room Celebrating Sub Cultures, including a reconstruction of Wolfgang Tillmans’ first installation with photos and tearsheets taped directly to the wall. He is an artist who is somewhat of an outlier to photography in 80s Britain. He is there to signal the future and a shift from much work from the 1980s, when art and the commercial realm was kept separate or treated ironically. Art’s boundaries with fashion from the 90s were no longer to be so separate – as borne out by a 1991 series by Jason Evans and stylist Simon Foxton for i-D Magazine, mixing a documentary mode and fashion as young Black men are dressed as country gents and posed in settings that evoke white middle-class suburbia. All this seems well and good, but in a show so full and so unwieldy, do we really need this addition to the narrative?  

It is probably an impossible show to do well and there was, certainly on my part, a sense of fatigue and depletion as it went on and on. But it could have been more engaging, more pleasurable. Since the 1980s was notable for its diversity and conflicts over photography, it may have been better to allow for more of the mix and collisions between differing practices, greater “multiplicities” and more surprises. Grouping like with like did not always help. Perhaps it would even have been better to let the work of the photographers recording the tumultuous “long” decade of the 1980s in the first room run throughout the show, colliding with and disrupting our encounter with many of the other works. From Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 in 2002 onwards, documentary photography has regularly played an important part in biennales and art galleries. A pity it should be so contained and underplayed here at Tate Britain.♦ 

The 80s: Photographing Britain runs at Tate Britain until 5 May 2025

—
Mark Durden is an academic, writer and artist. He is Professor of Photography and the Director of the European Centre for Documentary Research at the University of South Wales. He works collaboratively as part of the artist group Common Culture and, since 2017, with João Leal, has been photographing modernist architecture in Europe.

Images:

1-Jason Evans, Simon Foxton, from the series Strictly, 1991.

2-Syd Shelton, Darcus Howe addressing the anti-racist demonstrators, Lewisham, 13 August 1977.

3-Anna Fox, Friendly Fire, target (Margaret Thatcher), 1989.

4-Chris Killip, ‘Critch’ and Sean, 1982.

5-Paul Graham, Union Jack Flag in Tree, Country Tyrone, 1985.

6-Paul Trevor, Outside police station, Bethnal Green Road, London E2, 17 July 1978. Sit down protest against police racism, 1978.

7-Melanie Friend, Greenham Common, 14 December 1985.

8-Albert Watson, Orkney Standing Stones, 1991. Courtesy Hamiltons Gallery

9-Anna Fox, Work Stations, Café, the City. Salesperson, 1988. Courtesy the Centre for British Photography

10-David Hoffman, Nidge & Laurence Kissing, 1990.

11-Ting A Ling, from Handsworth Self Portraits, 1979 © Derek Bishton, Brian Homer & John Reardon. Courtesy The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

12-Maud Sulter, Zabat, Terpsichore, 1989 from Zabat, 1989. Courtesy Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow

13-Paul Reas, Hand of Pork, Caerphilly, South Wales, 1985-88.

14-Peter Fraser, Untitled, from Arnolfini Series, 1984.

15-Zak Ové, Underground Classic (John Taylor), 1986.

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