Tag: Dewi Lewis Publishing

Top 10 (+1)

Photobooks of 2025

Selected by Tim Clark and Thomas King

As the year draws to a close, an annual tribute to some of the exceptional photobook releases from 2025 – selected by Editor in Chief, Tim Clark and Editorial Assistant, Thomas King.

1000 Words | Top 10 (+1) Photobooks of 2025 | 5 Dec 2025
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1. Mari Katayama, Synthesis
SPBH Editions

Mari  Katayama gathers six years of her practice, 2019 to 2025, into an artist’s book that reads as both playful and challenging. Those familiar with Katayama’s work will recognise the materially rich choreography. Her body appears, often entwined with hand-sewn sculptures, threaded forms and collaged papers, the objects acting less as adornments than as co-actors in a carefully staged performance of the self. The book’s nine photographic series were made in Katayama’s home studio in Gunma, a conscious return to her ‘rural roots’ after years in Tokyo. Upon return, she became mother. Yet in this turning back, she also looks forward. Synthesis is, in many respects, not a tidy catalogue but a layered fusion of self-portraiture, object-making and the living textures of experience.

2. Phoebe Kiely, She Could See Herself In The Darkness
Witty Books

From Torino’s ever-discerning Witty Books, founded by Tommaso Parrillo, comes a vivid compendium of prints created between 2020 and 2024 by artist Phoebe Kiely. Kiely’s images interlace tight, intimate fragments of the human body, guiding the eye through surfaces, gestures and the subtle slippages between presence and absence. Following her previous book, They Were My Landscape, which explored the anonymity of people, objects and street scenes, this new work continues such investigations, deepening attention to materiality, tactility and intimacy, in which darkness holds the contours of queerness together, producing a long-awaited next-part of her photographic practice. For Kiely, bodies are never the whole story, nor is the idea of a fully realised subject; what takes precedence are parts, textures and the distances between them.

3. Daniel Lee Postaer, Mother’s Land
Deadbeat Club

China’s vertiginous transformation over the past 15 years has been devastating if not dizzying (its high speed rail network now spans over 500 cities, all constructed since 2008, is just one example of this expansion). Postaer, who lived in the country in the early 2000s and returned repeatedly in the latter decade, witnessed the country’s rapid development firsthand (his grandparents fled the communist regime there more than 50 years ago). Mother’s Land, a 15 x 11″ hardcover monograph, documents these shifts with careful eye. The demolition of old structures, the emergence of new architectures, feeling signage and spaces glimpsed in passing… ‘a country in constant mutation’ as one description puts it. And yet, despite the scale of its subject on the surface, the book remains quietly intimate and reflective, an exploration as much of Postaer himself as of the country he photographs. In his words, ‘I could feel my mother. I could also feel that wonder of what it would have been like if I had grown up there.’

4. Rosie Harriet Ellis, The Boyfriend Casting
Libraryman

From the uncertain beginnings of a project while on her MA at the Royal College of Art, thwarted when her ex-boyfriend withdrew consent, Ellis’ The Boyfriend Casting has, over five years, evolved into a work that consummates the journey of its inception. What initially appeared as a personal and professional impasse has, over time, transformed into an act of reinvention. The book documents this evolution through short, diary-like chapters that feel disarmingly intimate, revealing a presence both within and beyond the frame, while testing how photography can function as tool for grief, yearning and reversed objectification. After the initial photographs of her former partner, Chapter 2 takes the shape of a pose guide. True to its titular promise, it functions as a casting, yet one that is inseparably bound to Ellis herself, her desires, her pursuits of intimacy, and her reckoning with what it means both to observe and to be observed.

5. Mimi Mollica, Moon City
Dewi Lewis

Mimi Mollica’s Moon City stages a spectral dialogue between the eternal and the engineered, juxtaposing the silent, cyclical pull of the moon with the stark, relentless ambition of London’s financial skyline. Shot in a film-noir style and loosely inspired by Luigi Pirandello’s Ciàula Scopre La Luna, the series positions the celestial body as a luminous, enduring counterpoint to high-rise towers, indifferent to human schemes. Through telescopic framing picturing deserted office blocks, Mollica creates a tension between vast skies and the city’s scale of power, choreographing space like a careful negotiator, drawing attention to the rhythms, shadows and silences that punctuate the square mile. As in Pirandello’s novel, the moon offers something else, perhaps a quiet resistance, to anyone daring to look up and escape the deceptive halo of capitalism.

6. Katherine Hubard, The Great Room
Loose Joints

In The Great Room, Hubbard is daughter, caregiver, artist, collaborator. Berger is mother, subject, co-maker. This is the first time Hubbard has photographed another person consistently, and the volume, published by Loose Joints, is shaped by that proximity and closeness, and this goes as far as one-to-one scale contact prints and monoprints made in the darkroom from the impressions of their skin. The house in which the photographs were made becomes a kind of palimpsest of life lived, and the book, in some respects, a record of care and change, of memory inscribed in gestures and the objects that fill it. At its centre lies the mother-daughter relationship, which is tender, uneasy, always shifting between attention and distance and Hubbard neither hides the discomfort nor leans into melodrama.

7. Mohamed Hassan, Our Hidden Room
Ediciones Posibles, Fundación Photographic Social Vision, PHREE

Another parental story, and sharing some similarities, is that of Mohamed Hassan, whose Our Hidden Room received the Star Photobook Dummy Award 2024 and was nominated for the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards 2025. At once a response to what some have called ‘the fall of Egypt’s democratic experiment,’ the book draws in part from the photographic archive of his late father, a gifted portraitist diagnosed with bipolar disorder at a young age. Interlacing his father’s surviving images with his own photographs and text, Hassan creates a triptych of inheritance, dialogue and in his own words – a ‘room,’ his and his father’s, as a shared space of return. In a candid conversation with Irene Alison, he reflected that, in photographing, he sometimes feels himself drawing nearer, meeting his father again.

8. Ying Ang, Fruiting Bodies
Perimeter Editions

Jane Simon wrote earlier this year in 1000 Words that Ying Ang’s latest offering (the artist’s third major book and her first with Perimeter Editions) arrives as ‘a provocation to think about abundance beyond the frame of the reproductive body.’ Taking a somewhat more declarative tone than Ang’s previous works, which are notable in their own right, Fruiting Bodies takes us to the unseen networks of mycelium, where ecology and feminist thought intertwine. Neither allegory nor anthropomorphism, it proposes another kind of vitality, subterranean poetics of reciprocity, where decay and regeneration are inseparable. Simon writes, ‘The perspective here is born from the personal, but this is also about a collective experience of how women’s bodies are labelled, classified and devalued over a lifetime.’ The result is strikingly original and surprisingly evocative.

9. Bharat Sikka, Ripples in the Pond
Fw: Books

Fw: Books’ Hans Gremmen continues his thoughtful collaboration with photographer Bharat Sikka, whose sepia-toned studies of Makharda (a peripheral township on Kolkata’s outskirts) and its surrounding landscape form the artist’s latest book, Ripples in the Pond. The softbound volume, with its intentionally unpolished edges, comprises photographs of the area’s many ponds, gently leading the viewer toward the project’s underlying preoccupation with the site’s layered temporal and socio-cultural rhythms. This comes to light in the way that, after each journey to Makharda, Sikka subjects the photographs to an extended practice of scanning and reworking, a slow, deliberate method that mirrors the reflective logic of the ponds themselves. It is a quietly powerful exploration of the ‘semi-rural imaginary’ that leans on the 1980s Indian television series Malgudi Days for inspiration, which portrayed the quiet life of a small town, and, has been described as a ‘personal act of return’.

10. Raymond Thompson Jr, It’s Hard To Stop Rebels That Time Travel
VOID

The ‘rebels’ for Raymond Thompson Jr are the maroons, the runaways, the Black people whose lives moved outside, between, beneath official historical records. Their ‘time travel’ is the movement between the visible and the invisible, the archival and the lived. The project is, in his words, ‘my portal to slip between the past, present and future,’ with focus especially on maroons, enslaved people who escaped but did not go north, instead finding refuge in the wild margin‑lands between plantations, swamps and borderlands, and how their survival practices (what he terms ‘freedom practices’) resonate with Black environmental imagination and presence in the American landscape. Fittingly, the book’s slim, rectangular form recalls a travel guide or field notebook, made to accompany a journey, including archival material such as reward advertisements, quotes, newspaper clippings and truly striking portraits.

+1 Martha Naranjo Sandoval, Small Death
MACK 

Martha Naranjo Sandoval’s debut book is a tactile, iterative object – its vivid red cover encasing not only the weight and texture of a generously bound volume, but that of an artist attuned to the material language of memory and making. Spanning some 300 pages, Small Death gathers photographs from Sandoval’s early years in New York, selected from her original contact sheets and reels, a return to beginnings made urgent in a time when ICE disappears people and sanctuary feels perilous. Sandoval’s images quietly respond to this moment through an intimacy reminiscent of a family archive. Photographs of her brother, parents, husband, cat, landscapes, and nude self-portraits stitch together the smaller stories that, in turn, prompt questions around displacement, border-crossing and the violent architectures of exclusion. ♦

—
Tim Clark is Editor in Chief at 1000 Words and Artistic Director for Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Italy, together with Walter Guadagnini, Luce Lebart and Arianna Catania. He also teaches at The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University.

Thomas King is Editorial Assistant at 1000 Words and currently undertaking an MA in Literary Studies (Critical Theory) at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Images:

1-Cover of Mari Katayama, Synthesis (SPBH Editions, 2025)

2-Mari Katayama, on the way home #005, 2016

3-Phoebe Kiely, She could see herself in the darkness (2025)

4-Daniel Postaer, Shanghai, (Anting), 2016 / 2020

5-Rosie Harriet Ellis, The Boyfriend Casting (2025)

6-Mimi Mollica, Moon City (2025)

7-Katherine Hubbard, The Great Room (2025)

8-Mohamed Hassan, Our Hidden Room (2023-ongoing)

9-Ying Ang, Fruiting Bodies (2025)

10-Bharat Sikka, Ripples in the Pond, (2025)

11-Raymond Thompson Jr, It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel (2025)

12-Martha Naranjo Sandoval, Small Death (2025)

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

Join us on Patreon today and be part of shaping the future of photographic discourse

 

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Geordie beaches

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.

Michael Grieve | Book review | 19 June 2025
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‘The quality that we call beauty… must always grow from the realities of life.’ So wrote Japanese novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. The documentary genre embodies this and seldom are there photobooks to which I feel personally connected, but the ones that do resonate are related to my youth and the region of my hometown of Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK. Tish Murtha’s photographs of the working class districts of Elswick and Benwell, where I was born, are stark reminders of the streets where I played during the 1970s; I could have been one of those scruffy kids jumping out of the window of a derelict terraced house onto a precarious pile of mattresses. Photographs by Chris Killip of The Station (2020), an anarcho punk music venue across the Tyne River in Gateshead, a space I regularly frequented from the very first day it opened back in 1981, capture those spiky haired and familiar faces; a visual portal transporting me back to the frenetic energy and pungent odorous array of hairspray, soap, glue, and sweat. And now, Writing in the Sand from Dewi Lewis Publishing: a homage to the sandy beaches of the North East of England and the people who relaxed there, by Finnish documentary photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen. Photographs of places so familiar to me, inciting a myriad of archived memories including the Spanish City, an amusement park located near the seafront of Whitley Bay that I regularly escaped to while ‘nicking off’ school, eating chips and playing Space Invaders with my mates.

In 1969, before finishing her film studies at Regents Street Polytechnic in London, Konttinen moved to Newcastle upon Tyne and co-founded the Amber Film and Photography Collective, a group of concerned documentarians focused on capturing working class communities and the effects of the rapidly disintegrating industries and the distinct social and cultural identity of the North East. They believed in long-term commitments towards communities spanning years, to integrate as much as possible to achieve an honest representation. Konttinen exemplified this dedication. That said, since it opened in 1977, the collective’s adjunct Side Gallery has always had a hard time keeping afloat. But now it really is sinking into oblivion; as of this time of writing it is ‘currently closed’. The gallery is no longer supported as a National Portfolio Organisation by Arts Council England, which is a disgrace and though the commitment and hard work ingrained in the photographs will forever remain, the momentum of the Side Gallery will halt and disappear just like the communities its photographers faithfully documented, just as the writing in the sand.

There is wonderful footage from 1974 of a young Konttinen featured on the then popular BBC current affairs programme, Nationwide. The reporter is full of praise for Konttinen’s “remarkable collection of photographs” taken of Byker and the tight knit community of working class people who lived there. These Victorian houses in back to back terraces were classified as slums and demolished to make way for a new modern Scandinavian inspired urban design that culminated into the unique one-and-a-half mile long social housing block called the Byker Wall. The reporter is somewhat bemused about this middle class ‘girl’ from Finland who chose to live in Byker and who feels the warmth of the local community, describing the residents as genuine, gentle and worried that the very distinct social unity and character would be lost with people living in atomised flats of the Byker Wall. Such was the level of empathy that Sirkka felt towards the North East of England as she remained stoically dedicated to documenting the region to this day, with a remarkable level of intimacy and affection for the Geordies and their plight in an ever changing socio-political-economic environment. In an interview she told me that the collective “brought us together and served us well is our common goals. Our egalitarian constitution, self-determination, editorial control, creative freedom, sharing of resources, lasting friendships… We moved to the industrial north-east with the aim of giving voice to working class and marginalised communities.” The photobook, Byker, was published in 1983, and ranks as a seminal and important project in the humanist mode of documentary photography in the UK, and certainly on a par with Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street social documentation of the inhabitants of appallingly impoverished living conditions in Harlem during the 1960s.

Writing in the Sand was originally published twenty-five years ago. The book features black and white photographs taken between 1973 and 1998 on the beaches at Cullercoats, Whitley Bay and Tynemouth – all in close proximity to each other. The beach is a concentrated space, a hive of human activity, and these photographs celebrate the eccentricities and odd juxtapositions of engagement. Most telling, especially photographs from the 70’s, and compared to today, is how the English working classes have an awkward relationship to the beach, wearing unsuitable attire for the environment; men smoking ‘tabs’ in their regular heavy twilled suits with trousers rolled up, cardigan wearing grandmothers, mothers and aunts allowing themselves the pleasure of feeling the grains of sand through their stockinged feet. A space to break free and let one’s hair down from the confines of the ‘hoose’ and drudgery of work. This is how it was. And somehow the beach equalises people, feral children turn upside down, metamorphose into mermaids and bury their dads with sand, lovers love and dogs go barking mad. In this uncluttered space people feel the sensuality of nature that allows the potential of unhindered free expression. The sea, sand and sky democratises an experience; the beach is a theatre of improvisation.

With humorous affection Konttinen’s observations embrace the energy and actions of quirky and intimate moments with absolute humility. Her distance is polite and her closeness is honest and balanced. This is photography of the humanist kind, and in skillful hands the emphasis is about the subject, not the photographer. With eloquence she captures the joy emanating from the gravitational pull to the sea, that place from which we crawled from the primordial soup. From time to time Konttinen punctuates the flow of pictures with quiet abstractions of sand, pebbles, seaweed and rocks, as if to accentuate the movement and perpetual cycle of nature, and put bizarre human presence into humbling perspective. Konttinen has a close affinity to these beaches. A few years ago we met at her local Tynemouth beach at King Edwards Bay where, with other women, she ritualistically swims, braving the north easterly weather even in the winter. She emerged fresh out of the sea and I photographed her portrait, wrapped in a terry towelling robe on that chilly morning before heading to the warmth of her home and a cup of tea.

The majority of working class people in the North East have endured a great deal of loss. By the 1970’s the industries of ship building, coal mining and steel manufacturing were virtually extinct and by the 1990’s had gone together with the communities it supported, and so began the onset of the grim reality of there being ‘no such thing as society’ anymore. Not to be sentimental about the good ole days of the working class as for sure it was always tough, but it seems the more we have the less we have; consumerism is an instant, addictive, gratification separating humans apart. Community, as Kottinnen prophesied in the Nationwide programme will be lost, and with it a sense of identity, dignity and bonding.

This is old school, classic documentary photography. Tony Ray-Jones, Homer Sykes, Martin Parr, to name but a few, spring to mind, all of whom focused on the peculiarities of the English at play. Konttinen’s project ended in 1998, and I wonder if such images could now be taken in our protectionist self-image controlled, hyper-ethical cultural environment. How refreshing to see the total absence of mobile phones and lack of homogenous, sweatshop clothing, though only a stone’s throw away as a common sight.♦

All images courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis Publishing © Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen

—
Michael Grieve is a photographer, Director of ArtFotoMode, Hamburg Werkstatt Fotografie (HWF) and lecturer at Ostkreuzschule in Berlin. In 1997 he graduated from the MA Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster and then proceeded to work as a photojournalist and portrait photographer for publications internationally. He was Deputy Editor of 1000 Words and a writer for the British Journal of Photography. Since 2011 he has been Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, Akademia Fotografie Warsaw and the University of Art and Design, Berlin, and currently teaches at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie, Berlin. He is currently working on Procession, a project documenting the peripheral space between Athens and Elifsina, Greece.

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

Join us on Patreon today and be part of shaping the future of photographic discourse

 

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

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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

Fotografia Europea 2023 highlights

1000 Words Editor in Chief Tim Clark reflects on the 18th edition of Fotografia Europea held in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia with a programme anchored in the theme ‘Europe Matters: Visions of a Restless Identity’, confronting the politics of inclusion and exclusion and the presence of history and culture in the present moment. Across 20 exhibitions, the curatorial proposition considers the relationship between conceptions of nationhood and democratic community, as well as the multicultural realities of European countries for the purposes of reconstruction, solidarity and alternative ways of existing together. We profile Mónica de Miranda, Simon Roberts and The Archive of Public Protests (A-P-P) – artists and collectives defined by their commitment to social change.

1. Mónica de Miranda, The Island
Chiostri di San Pietro

Upon entering the first floor at Chiostri di San Pietro, the vast sprawling 16th century monastic complex that serves as the hub for Fotografia Europea, visitors are confronted by an enlarged reproduction of the work from Mónica de Miranda entitled Whistle for the Wind. It figures the central protagonist from The Island series who is seen overlooking a vast expanse of water, sombre and subdued, as if expectant for answers. It leads into an exhibition of work comprising photographs, film and installation from the Portuguese-Angolan artist, known for her metaphysical investigations that unify postcolonial issues of geography, history and subjectivity related to Africa and its diaspora.

Though de Miranda has summoned an imaginary island to enact her fable, the reference is in fact the crudely named “Ilha dos Pretos” (Island of Blacks) – a denomination of oral tradition given in the 18th century to a community of people of African heritage that settled in the riverside area of the Sado River, southern Portugal; a place where the ghosts from Portugal’s colonial past intersect with the geological forces of deep time. Therefore, one might assume that what lies beyond in Whistle for the Wind are the vestiges of the past, those easily forgotten by a hegemonic system.

The creative and philosophical perspectives of alternate gazes, such as the queer gaze, the Black gaze and the female gaze, break with the idea of a white patriarchal heterosexual system – the many social clases that are ‘othered’ and too often treated as inferior – in order to find a new grammar or expression. They offer subversive counterpoints to the violence in the act of looking and consuming gendered imagery and ensuing reductive representations, whilst seeking beauty, empathy and valorisation of less prevalent experiences.

Political rebellion and resistance against the repression of a Black person’s “right to look” is what underscores bell hooks’ notion of the ‘oppositional gaze’. The late feminist, scholar and social activist first coined the term in her 1992 essay collection, Black Lives, to refer to a gaze that denies a spectator pleasure from looking, combating voyeurism and submits itself to a self-determined subject. It is not about scopophilia but defiance; looking as a form of communication, understanding and recognition. Therefore the ‘oppositional gaze’ affirms a right to identity and to see and document the world one knows or lives in. Perception can be a political act, as James Baldwin once ventured in a speech: “In the case of the American Negro, from the moment you are born every stick and stone, every face, is white. Since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of five, six or seven to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you.”

Indeed, de Miranda commands a way of storytelling and coherent cultural memory as a means of empowerment. Holding up a mirror to project and reflect her model’s face, the four photographs entitled Mirror Me literally bring this into sharp relief: across the suite of images an assertive Black women is depicted wearing a captain’s cap, a cowboy hat and a horse-riding helmet. Costume and masquerade work together to form a protective mantle and the duality of the mirror allows us to discover a new system of reality. It evolves a possibility to imagine a different past, present and potential future – coalescing the women’s complex and multiple ideas of identity. There’s power, prestige and performance at work for these are portraits to dream in; an image gallery of internal visions and outward views, a ‘manifesting device’, a looking glass of self and otherness, an apparatus for transformation.

2. Simon Roberts, Merrie Albion: Landscape Studies From A Small Island
Chiostri di San Pietro

Simon Roberts’ Merrie Albion: Landscape Studies From A Small Island was first released as a monograph with Dewi Lewis in 2017 in the wake of the nationalist triumph of Brexit. Inside its pages, Roberts takes the temperature of the UK, offering insights into notions of identity, belonging and, specifically, what it means to be British at this significant moment in contemporary history. With his customary elevated perspective and tableaux style, we oversee views of places and the people that populate them to form a survey of a nation: on the one hand of the spaces and evolving patterns of leisure, the consumption and commodification of history, militarisation and to the lines of demarcation and exclusion in the landscape; and, in parallel, of subjects and events that have an immediate and enduring significance to Britain’s drastically changing trajectory of the past decade. As David Chandler has written in the book’s introduction: ‘[there is] an overriding sense of uncertainty and anxiety in Roberts’ national chronicle as it moves slowly towards the referendum and Brexit, and then culminates in the terrible iconic image of social inequality, injustice, and trauma formed by the blackened high-rise tomb of Grenfell Tower.’

Chandler goes on to point out that at its heart, Roberts’ work seeks to quell the visceral drama of events, not through immersing his camera in the drama of a scene but rather by stepping back. That way, the artist encompasses a fuller view of what’s unfolding, creating photographs that resolve into a multi-layered and nuanced array of comparative and linked information – tea parties, Eton College boat races, army recruitment stalls, Stonehenge, the London 2012 opening ceremony, the Royal Wedding, ‘Occupy London’ camps or trading floors of Lloyds Banking Group.

The cumulative effect of Merrie Albion is an offering; a poignant socio-political mood piece, the power and urgency of which never subsides with every year that passes amidst the continual calamities of the current UK government. Leading up to the exhibition installation, England football legend Gary Lineker was forced off BBC’s Match of the Day programme in a row over impartiality after comparing the vile language used to launch a new government asylum policy with 1930s Nazi Germany – the latest debacle in the so called ‘culture wars’, a clear distraction from the actual pressing issues facing the country today, chief among them: the cost of living crisis, wealth hoarding, inflation, energy bills, public health care systems at breaking point, criminalising the right to protest, taking away freedoms, multiple politician scandals and, of course, the failed and immensely costly project that is Brexit.

Roberts’ photograph Beachy Head, Seven Sisters Country Park, East Sussex, 24 March 2017, may serve as a useful coda here. Roberts says it best: ‘Taken in the very same week that the former UK prime minister Theresa May triggered Article 50, the start of the two year negotiation period to take Britain out of the EU, it shows ramblers exploring the chalk cliffs on the country’s south coast. An instantly recognisable symbol of Britain, the cliffs were recently voted one of the top 20 breath-taking views in the UK. But they also represent a boundary, between land and sea, high and low, the known and unknown, Britain and the outside – a potent symbol of Britain’s increasing isolation and political separation from Europe.’

3. The Archive of Public Protests, You’ll never walk alone
Chiostri di San Pietro

The Archive of Public Protests (A-P-P) was founded in 2019 by Rafal Milach, together with other photographers, academics and activists. Its mission is to examine social and political tensions in Poland from 2015 onwards, particularly among the young generation who have taken to the streets in great swathes with increasing regularity to demonstrate against the country’s leadership. A-P-P has now created a significant repository of work via its semi-open online platform and free newspapers centred on particular events or happenings. Dealing with the mounting complexities that define our troubled times, A-P-P’s stated aim is a “duty to archive” matched with a need to study the visual aspects of protest in the struggle against breaches of the law, discrimination and violence of various kinds. Its results articulate various states of ‘unfreedom’. Through a mix of raw footage, slogans used by protestors, bold design, sound and photographs, their exhibition You’ll never walk alone, as a biodimensional experience, is akin to being amongst a protest. It explores issues and inequalities long silenced by the Polish government, ranging from topics including state and police oppression, climate emergency protests, the LGTBQIA+ community, pro-choice Women’s Strike, Belarussian solidarity protests in Poland, the refugee crisis at the Polish-Belarussian border and anti-war and solidarity with Ukraine protests in Poland. The context is the Anthropocene, and histories unfold individually and collectively, at a hyper-local level but, of course, also resonating on the global stage.

Many members of A-P-P are active participants in the demonstrations whilst also observing the events with a critical eye, noting the shifting characteristics particularly around the use of language, which is said to have become more radical, vulgar even, given the levels of frustration and anger. And though the marches are peaceful, the message is always a bold one. The word “Wypierdalac” [Get the fuck out] is routinely shouted from within the crowds. This is combined with a distinct visual spectacle: people marching to the sound of drums and chants, banners hoisted high, flamboyant costumes as well as spontaneous performances throughout city streets and in front of monuments in the heart of Warsaw and beyond. The tools for intervention are both animated and artful. So too is the iconography, such as the symbol of a crimson-coloured lightning bolt that proliferates most notably throughout the Women’s Strike: as both face and body paint, projected onto building and even as fashion accessories. Similarly, red is the colour of choice: red ink, red clothes, red paint – the visual language of solidarity.

As a project dedicated to the relationship between archival practices and publication-making as a site of learning and solidarity (‘solidarity’ being the operative word as it was name of Poland’s first trade union founded in 1980), A-P-P is not interested in representing resistance or “going viral”. Instead, there is a strong desire to correct firmly established and outdated narratives that are propagated from the confines of mainstream media, the latter now almost entirely controlled by the state. Nor is it an attempt at objectivity, especially given the fact that the many far-right marches that frequent Poland’s streets and public spaces are not documented here. It is a partial account – selective and subjective. Yet A-P-P draws us into the efforts of those individuals and groups who are pushing back, those who are laying bare the ideological tactics of control and manipulation through a different kind of massification of images. Milach himself has explained in a recent interview: “By releasing the newspaper and creating this alternative circulation of images, we control the narrative and their usage. This is crucial, especially today – facing all the fake news or half-truths that influence our political and social life more and more. By creating a distribution channel – one of many – we can crystallise the message. It’s a coherent, closed document, which is manifesting certain clear ideas.” ♦

Fotografia Europea 2023 ran from 28 April – 11 June 2023.

—
Tim Clark is Editor in Chief of 1000 Words and Artistic Director for Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Italy, together with Walter Guadagnini and Luce Lebart. He also currently serves as a curatorial advisor for Photo London Discovery and teaches at The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University.

Images:

1-Mónica de Miranda, Whistle for the wind, Portugal, 2022. © Mónica de Miranda, Commissioned by Autograph London.

2-Mónica de Miranda, The Lunch on the beach (after Manet), Portugal, 2022, 350 x 230 cm (6 parts of 115 x 116.50 cm) © Mónica de Miranda.

3-Mónica de Miranda, Double force, Portugal, 2022. © Mónica de Miranda.

4-Simon Roberts, Beachy Head, Seven Sisters Country Park, East Sussex, 14 March 2017. © Simon Roberts.

5-Simon Roberts, Equestrian Jumping Individual, Greenwich Park, London, 8 August 2012. © Simon Roberts.

6-Simon Roberts, Broadstairs Dickens Festival, Isle of Thanet, 19 June 2008. © Simon Roberts.

7-Rafal Milach, Women’s Strike Protest against nearly total abortion ban, Warsaw, Poland, 22.10.22. © Rafal Milach, courtesy The Archive of Public Protests.

8-David Zieliński, Protest in defence of free media, Krakow, Poland, 12.08.21. © David Zieliński, courtesy The Archive of Public Protests.

9-Rafal Milach, Women’s Strike Protest against nearly total abortion ban, Warsaw, Poland, 22.10.22. © Rafal Milach, courtesy The Archive of Public Protests.

Laia Abril counters the silence around rape

On Rape: And Institutional Failure, Laia Abril’s latest instalment in her ongoing History of Misogyny, uses text and image to offer a carefully orchestrated, rigorously executed journey of photographic investigation into the omnipresent threat of rape, and violence against women in broader terms, writes Jilke Golbach. The Catalan artist currently presents her broad-ranging, research-based work at C/O Berlin until 21 May 2024.

Disbelief. It leaks from the pages of Laia Abril’s book On Rape: And Institutional Failure, published by Dewi Lewis, lingering in the air like a horrid smell. Disbelief, not because the countless stories of rape recorded here are unfamiliar (hardly so) or the facts fail to be loud enough, but because they lay bare, page after page, the nauseating extent to which practices, materialities and cultures of rape pervade societies whilst rape victims continue to be discredited and disputed.

An involuntary question, close to denial, keeps popping into my head as I process the most archaic, most barbaric forms of sexual abuse and silencing made visible here: surely, not still? To which the answer is: yes, still. And all the time, everywhere.

The day I write this, accounts of rape emerge from war-torn Ukraine, the London metropolitan police and Iran where, horrifyingly, virgins “must” be raped – in the name of religion – before being executed for protesting in the streets. If Abril’s project makes one thing clear, it is that rape, and violence against women in broader terms, is an omnipresent threat, not confined to borders or circumstances, and one which is to a great extent internalised by 51% of the global population. A frightening UN statistic asserts that as many as ‘one in three women will suffer domestic or sexual violence in their lifetime’.

Covered in bloodred cloth and printed on ink-black paper, this latest chapter of Abril’s ongoing History of Misogyny is a carefully orchestrated, rigorously executed journey of photographic investigation. It was sparked by the Manada, or Wolfpack, story in Spain, Abril’s country of birth: a widely publicised case of the gang rape of an 18-year-old woman in 2016 that mirrors many of the issues Abril uncovers: extreme brutality against women, video-recordings of rape, toxic masculinity, victim-blaming, questions of evidence and consent and a lack of justice for survivors – but also glimmers of hope in the form of feminist protests, the reform of sexual assault laws and ultimately increased sentencing for perpetrators.

‘Why do we still have a society that rapes?’ asks Abril in a conversation with Joanna Bourke, author of Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence (2022); a crucial, momentous question that drives the project. Through image and text, Abril seeks answers, all the while unravelling a web of myths and misconceptions, tracing the ancient and historic roots of present-day narratives about women, women’s bodies and what can be done to them. There is the persistent myth of the ‘broken hymen’, the ‘two-finger test’ to assert ‘vaginal tightness’, the fable that rape eroticises women and the excuse that ‘boys will be boys’.

Rape does not only happen to women and girls, but they do constitute the vast majority of victims. The crux of On Rape, following Abortion (2016) and preceding Mass Hysteria, resides in its powerful subtitle: institutional failure. Integrating materials ranging from biblical maps to WhatsApp groups, the work demonstrates that rape is systemic; symptomatic of patriarchal cultures in which male bodies can be weaponised and female bodies subordinated. Rape finds fertile ground in unequal societies and their long male-dominated institutions, where gender violence intersects with class, race and sexual orientation. ‘For centuries, men have made the rules’, notes Bourke, and our laws (as well as criminal and medical protocols) thus fail to protect women. Rape, domestic abuse, murder and forms of institutional misogyny are all leaves from the same book of gender violence.

Nowhere does this become more obvious than in Abril’s testimonies of survivors of rapes which took place in institutional settings (school, the army, a convent), presented alongside black-and-white photographs of the victims’ items of clothing. Modest on the page but displayed life-size in gallery contexts, as the recent Photoworks / V&A Parasol Foundation Women in Photography Project exhibition at London’s Copeland Gallery demonstrated, these forensic-feeling images leave the viewer in no doubt about the confrontation with a real human body.

Rape constitutes bodily harm, but its most grievous effects are the result of psychological trauma; trauma that might cause a lifetime of suffering or may be perpetuated over time, even becoming transgenerational by causing pregnancy or taking place within marriage. In the words of Lluïsa Garcia-Esteve, a doctor of psychiatry specialised in women’s mental health, the trauma of sexual violence constitutes ‘a crack, a rupture in the biography’.

This rupture, Abril shows, has long been pitted as a kind of robbery, as stolen virtue, lost purity; rooted in patriarchal conceptions of women as property. In many societies, rape victims are punished or even killed for bringing ‘disgrace’ to their communities. In certain places, marry-your-rapist laws continue to be legally practised. And yet, only a few years ago, two women in India had their hair shaved off for having the guts to resist a sexual assault by a group of men.

Guilt and shame are powerfully intertwined with sexual abuse and often coerce women into silence. Victim-blaming and victim-shaming are amongst the main reasons why most rapes do not get reported, let alone convicted. On Rape documents a dizzying array of excuses that seek to discredit or delegitimise those who speak out against rape, many of which are so ridiculously mad they’d be laughable if it was not for such a deadly serious subject: ‘If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down’… ‘If you wouldn’t have been there that night, none of this would have happened to you’. She had to be corrected for being a lesbian. She was wearing a lace thong. She had a few drinks. She had her eyes closed.

Silencing women is integral to rape culture. In The Mother of All Questions (2017), Rebecca Solnit writes how it maintains that ‘women’s testimony is worthless, untrustworthy… that the victim has no rights, no value, is not an equal’. And thus, ‘[h]aving a voice is crucial. It’s not all there is to human rights, but it’s central to them, and so you can consider the history of women’s rights and lack of rights as a history of silence and breaking silence.’

Abril follows in a lineage of women artists chipping away at the silence over sexual violence, alongside Zanele Muholi, Ana Mendieta, Tracey Emin, Kara Walker and Margaret Harrison. This work – to make public, to make visible, to make literal, to make undeniable – is an act of resistance, a refusal to cower in the face of oppression and control. On Rape’s remarkable power (and empowerment) resides in accumulation: by laying down the facts, counting the numbers, assembling the pieces, Abril has built a fortress of voices, and it leaves no space for disbelief. ♦

All images courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis © Laia Abril

Laia Abril: On Rape – And Institutional Failure now runs at C/O Berlin until 21 May 2024.

—
Jilke Golbach is an independent curator specialising in photography. She was previously Curator of Photographs at the Museum of London. Alongside her curatorial practice, she is completing a PhD project at University College London on the subject of heritage, neoliberal urbanism and the right to the city.

Images:

1-‘Ala Kachuu’ from Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

2-‘Military Rape’ from Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

3-‘Mulier Taceat in Ecclesia’ from Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

4-‘Merkin’ from Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

5-‘Shrinky Recipe’ from Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

6-‘School Rape’ from Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

7-‘Penis Truth’ from Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

8-‘Rapist Brain’ from Laia Abril, On Rape: And Institutional Failure (Dewi Lewis, 2022). Courtesy the artist and Dewi Lewis.

Top 10

Photobooks of 2020

Selected by 1000 Words

An annual tribute to some of the exceptional photobook releases from the tumultuous year that was 2020 – selected by 1000 Words.

1. Andy Sewell, Known and Strange Things Pass
Skinnerboox

Readers of 1000 Words will recall last year’s feature on Known and Strange Things Pass. Now published in book form by Skinnerboox, Andy Sewell’s meditation on the complex entanglement between technology and contemporary life seems more apposite than ever given the socially-distanced times in which we exist – not to mention the illusory propinquity of screen-based connection. Within a kinetic, non-linear sequence of images that aptly push and pull, ebb and flow, cables – carries of immeasurable quantities of data – weave across the Atlantic Ocean’s bed, and resurface on either side in alien concrete facilities; so rarely seen, these are the material infrastructures that both literally and metaphorically underpin our hyper-connected world. Ambitious, understated and fleeting, Known and Strange Things Pass explores the ways in which the ocean and the Internet speak to each other and speak to us, whilst probing photography’s ability to render visible such unknowable entities, infinitely vaster than we are.

2. Poulomi Basu, Centralia
Dewi Lewis

It has been quite the year for Poulomi Basu, whose docu-fictional book Centralia has earnt the artist the Rencontres d’Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award Jury Prize, and a place on the shortlist for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2021. Beneath its blood-red, sandpaper-rough cover, Basu takes us through the dense jungles of central India, where a brutal war between the Indian state and Maoist insurgents over land and resources has waged for fifty years, in turn casting light on the woefully-underreported horrors of environmental degradation, indigenous and female rights violations and the state’s suppression of voices of resistance. Embracing a disorientating amalgam of staged photography, crime scenes, police records and first-person testimonies – all punctuated by horizontally-cut pages and loose documents – Centralia traces the contours of a conflict in which half-truths reign over facts. Though not for the faint-hearted, this open-ended account of an ongoing war affords us space to reflect on what we have seen, and to choose what we believe.

3. Buck Ellison, Living Trust
Loose Joints

A worthy winner in the First PhotoBook category for the 2020 Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Awards, Buck Ellison’s Living Trust, published by Loose Joints, requires us to study the visual iconography of privilege as embodied by white, upper-middle class lives – or W.A.S.P. – in the United States. In these carefully constructed and performative photographs, insignia such as wooden cheeseboards, organic vegetables, acupuncture bruises, car stickers, lacrosse gear and even family Christmas card portraits examine how whiteness is exhibited and ultimately sustained through everyday structures, internalised logic and economic prowess. Deftly drawing on the language of advertising and commercial photography, Ellison conjures an uneasy world where the “whiteness project” manifests itself over and over again all the while perpetuating deadly inequality both in material and ideological terms.

4. Antoine d’Agata, VIRUS
Studio Vortex

As the title suggests, this book squares up to our present moment amidst the global health crisis with an unflinching intensity characteristic of the famed Magnum photographer. As soon as Paris entered a lock-down in March, Antoine d’Agata took to the emptied streets with his thermal camera. Here, civilians, medical workers and hospital patients are rendered as spectral, flame-tinged figures that flash across the pages. With temperature the only marker differentiating each pulsating body from the next, d’Agata proffers a haunting yet visceral mood piece laden with an existential dread that is befitting of our times. Beyond the limits of reportage, VIRUS is ultimately borne out of an impulse to get to the heart of things, to make sense of the incomprehensible and to visualise what the naked eye cannot: an invisible enemy, at once everywhere and nowhere. A dystopian masterpiece, these images refuse to be shaken off quickly.

5. Lina Iris Viktor, Some Are Born To Endless Night – Dark Matter
Autograph

Although there is no equivalent experience to witnessing the allure and intricacy of Lina Iris Viktor’s paintings up close, her debut monograph more than makes up for it through its fittingly-regal design. Published to accompany her solo show at Autograph in London earlier in 2020, it takes us into the British-Liberian artist’s singular world, embellished with luminescent golds, ultramarine blues and the deepest of blacks. Drawing from a plethora of representational tropes that range from classical mythology to European portraiture and beyond, Viktor’s practice playfully and provocatively employs her solitary body as a vehicle through which the politics of refusal are staged, and the multivalent notions of blackness – blackness as colour, as material, as socio-political awareness – come to the fore. Some Are Born To Endless Night – Dark Matter is a spelling-binding survey of an artist who is paving the way for new and unruly re-imaginings of black beauty and brilliance.

6. Antoinette de Jong and Robert Knoth, Tree and Soil
Hartmann Books

The intrinsic splendour of the natural world takes centre stage in Antoinette de Jong and Robert Knoth’s first book since their highly-acclaimed Poppy: Trails of Afghan Heroin (2012). Following the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011, the Dutch duo set out on a five-year-long project to examine the devastation wrought on the region’s biosphere. Expertly edited by curator Iris Sikking, Tree and Soil combines photographs depicting nature’s reclaiming of the deserted spaces with repurposed material from the archive of German explorer, Philipp Franz von Siebold, which includes a collection of botanical illustrations, animal specimens and woodblock prints amassed during his trips to Dejima, a Dutch trading post, in the early 19th century. The result is an enigmatic yet radical dialogue between two distinct histories – the post-colonial and the post-nuclear, respectively – which speaks of the hubris of humankind and the value of nature, in the process ruminating on the disturbed relationship between the two.

7. Amani Willett, A Parallel Road
Overlapse

Another book of first-rate investment in narrative forms of photography comes from artist Amani Willett. Chronicling the oft-overlooked history of black Americans road-tripping, A Parallel Road deconstructs the time-worn myth of the ‘American road’ as a site in which freedom, self-discovery and, ultimately, whiteness manifests. The book’s direct point of reference is Victor Green’s The Negro Motorist Green Book (1936), a guide which provided newly-roving black road-trippers tips on safe spots to eat, sleep and re-fuel at a time when Jim Crow laws subjected them to heightened oppression, hostility and fear of death. Whilst maintaining the original’s scrapbook details – from hand-held dimensions to sewn binding – Willett has adroitly juxtaposed archival material with photography, media reproductions and Internet screenshots from the present day to lay bare the ongoing realities of systemic racism in the United States. A harrowing yet urgent title in a year in which the dangers posed to black people when out-and-about have been undeniable.

8. Diana Markosian, Santa Barbara
Aperture

In yet another dazzling year for Aperture’s publishing arm, with Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures and Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph amongst notable releases, perhaps the standout is Diana Markosian’s Santa Barbara. Here, the Armenian-American photographer reimagines her mother’s leap of faith as she abandoned her husband in post-Soviet Russia to start a new life in the United States with her children. Family snapshots, film stills and re-enactments by actors play out alongside a script written by the original screenwriter of the 1980s soap opera Santa Barbara, which, for a generation of regime-weary Russians tuning in through their television sets, embodied the promises of the American dream. For all its experimental edge – rigorously merging fact and fiction – this book retains its deeply intimate take on the themes of migration, memory and personal sacrifice. With the project slated to show at the SFMOMA in early 2021, Markosian’s work continues to enthral audiences.

9. Yukari Chikura, Zaido
Steidl

Also excavating personal histories is Yukari Chikura in this strong contribution to the year’s offerings. Shortly after his sudden passing, Chikura’s father appeared to her from the afterlife, imparting the words: “Go to the village hidden deep in the snow where I lived a long time ago.” Committed to honouring this wish, Chikura embarked on a voyage to the remote, winter-white terrains of north-eastern Japan. The resulting publication documents what she found: Zaido, a good fortune festival dating back to the 8th century. Printed across an exquisite array of papers under the direction of Gerhard Steidl, images imbued with magical realism reveal costumed villagers gathering before shrines and performing sacred dances. Whilst the accompanying ancient map and folkloric parables lend this book an ethnographic feel, there is something more incisive at work too. Intertwining the villagers’ spiritual quests with Chikura’s own journey through the darkness that pervades mourning, Zaido is a tale of collective soul-searching that seamlessly traverses cultures as well as centuries.

10. Raymond Meeks, ciprian honey cathedral
MACK

No annual ‘best of’ book list seems complete without a monograph from skilled book-maker, Raymond Meeks. Characteristically poetic and perceptive, his new release with MACK invites readers into the domestic world shared between he and his wife, Adrianna, during a period in which they were packing up their home. Opening with a flurry of photographs which depict Adrianna asleep, bathing in the soft, early morning light, both the tone of imagery and its rhythms sets forth an experience that is akin to a waking dream. What follows is an intercourse of image and verse that pairs the quiet, quotidian rituals that populate each passing day with topographical observations of a house laid bare: mounted stacks of dishes, cracked walls and overgrown tendrils. Herein lies the melancholic undercurrent which vibrates throughout ciprian honey cathedral, a bittersweet evocation of the things memories cling to, and the things we leave in our wake. ♦

—
Alessandro Merola is Assistant Editor at 1000 Words.

Tim Clark is Editor in Chief at 1000 Words, and a writer, curator and lecturer at The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University. He lives and works in London.

Louis Quail

Big Brother

Book review by Alice Zoo

An aptronym is a name that is amusingly suited to the person who wears it. For example: Justin Quail loves birds. A keen birdwatcher, he spent his adolescence hitching and twitching up and down from south England to Scotland, only to turn back again as soon as he’d seen and marked the bird he was searching for. But then: he also practices yoga and meditation, writes poetry, has a long-term girlfriend called Jackie, and is the subject of his brother, Louis’ debut book: Big Brother. Justin is an adult living with paranoid schizophrenia. As the photographs show, this condition is far from the whole story; like a name, one detail about a person can only reveal so much.

Louis Quail has spent the past eight years documenting Justin, the way he lives, his rhythms and his interests. The result is a book that sets out this study, interleaved with Justin’s own poems and artwork, dialogue between the two brothers, and inserts that range from birdwatching documentation, to social workers’ case notes and police reports. In one of the book’s few close-up portraits, a weary-eyed Justin looks up towards us from the end of a sofa. The colours are muted, and the light soft enough to give the image the gauzy effect of a painting: Justin, uncannily, resembles Rembrandt’s Self Portrait at the age of 63, that famous picture of human frailty. His expression is gruff, tired, almost intolerant; it is rare that photography is able to capture this kind of gaze, or that a photographer has the requisite intimacy with their subject – the requisite boldness – to record it on film. Quail’s tones throughout, in fact, recall Dutch Golden Age paintings, with warm, brick-like reds and yellows often throbbing in the frame. The approach is dignifying: Quail’s project demonstrates, again and again, that his brother and his brother’s partner are important subjects, worthy of sustained representation.

Justin’s girlfriend Jackie is depicted throughout the project, not as an accessory to the narrative, but as a full-blooded subject in her own right: her home, her elaborate, carnivalesque make-up, her drinking, smoking, and her shared experience with schizophrenia. Together, Justin and Jackie almost resemble one another: their dishevelled ease in one another’s company, and their reciprocal tolerance of the other’s caprices. Their twenty-year relationship has caused problems for both of them, to the point that, more recently, Justin has been incarcerated for various altercations after Jackie has called the police. Despite this, Quail asserts that Big Brother, at heart, is a love story – a portrait of two people’s bond, their “need to love and be loved.” The book follows them as they go on holiday to visit Jackie’s family in Ireland, and pictures of the couple are interspersed with gorgeous natural vistas, clean air, and archive pictures of Jackie as a young girl.

Photographers often turn to their families to make work, and projects documenting mental illness or personal strife are not uncommon. When making work of this nature, there can be a danger of falling too close to one of two poles: exploitative at the one end, or overly gentle or romanticising at the other. Quail is at risk of neither. The project is deeply tender and respectful, whilst at the same time presenting the chaos of his brother’s health without flinching or sensationalism. One image, for example, depicts Justin’s flat, the floor invisible beneath clothes, papers, other detritus. It takes a while, or a glance at the caption, to realise that Justin is there too, on the bed, his face obscured by a book he’s reading. He’s a part of the mess, which seems to grow out of him. An image that could be shocking instead becomes a picture of a person at leisure, surrounded by their environment. It is still disquieting, but the picture is anchored in a sense of reality and of personhood. A picture of Justin’s feet, each one wearing a different shoe, strikes the same careful balance: it is funny, sad, tender.

One reason for Quail’s documentary assuredness is his regret that he hadn’t photographed his mother, who also had schizophrenia, before she passed away in 2010. Photography throws up questions about power dynamics and vulnerability. Is it right to photograph somebody whose boundaries are blurred, who might, at times, be unsure of what they are consenting to? Ultimately, Quail explains that he is now “inclined to think that being ignored is worse than being intruded upon.” And what function does ignorance serve, in any case? Only a society that turns away from those who don’t meet its expectations, that gathers them all in a monolith of non-functionality. Besides, Big Brother is a collaborative work. The book is peppered with Justin’s commentary on the images; his consent, input, and active engagement are writ large, not least in the inclusion of his own artwork: watercolours and pencil drawings of himself, the birds he loves, a man who had him arrested. And Justin instigates boundaries where necessary. At one point, he won’t reveal the age he lost his virginity, “cos it’ll end up in the book.” In all these ways, Quail walks a confidently sensitive line throughout.

Another of the great successes of the work is its sense of humour. Quail’s inclusion of his own voice, in dialogue with Justin and Jackie, is indicative of the good-natured kind of teasing common to any sibling relationship. At one point, Justin describes being “good at the lottery,” having won £5 from £20 worth of scratch cards. Louis responds: “That’s not really that good though is it, Justin?” The photographs often have the same lightness of touch. In a picture at the doctor’s, Justin’s hands are over his face; we take in the quiet drama of the scene for a moment, before we notice that a small top hat is perched on the table next to him, unexplained.

The book moves neatly through Justin’s childhood and adolescence, to the revelation of his mental illness, then his hobbies, his relationship, a holiday, and the crisis point of his self-harm and string of arrests. At times, I wonder if the structure is too neat; if it leans too close to the temptation to narrativise a life which is still ongoing, to organise it into some kind of arc. One thing that Justin’s story demonstrates is how chaotic life can be, how hard it is to make it fall into a pattern – mental health conditions aside – and I wonder if the structure of the book might be strengthened if it reflected this, if it were less straightforward. Despite the tidiness of its storied presentation, though, it is not simplistic: it doesn’t suggest easy answers to the governmental and structural failures that worsen or problematise the lives of people like Justin and Jackie, instead provoking questions about the ways we discuss mental illness, support for the vulnerable, and the balance to be struck between ‘care and control,’ as Quail puts it in the epilogue.

We’re told the book is a love story. Quail depicts his brother’s love for his girlfriend, for his health, for the birds he watches, for nature. All of these things, heaped together over time by the camera, tell us so much more than Justin’s name or his diagnosis could; years spent together coalesce into a rich and aptly fragmentary story of a person in his fullness. However, one thing to which Quail does not draw explicit attention, and which is, perhaps, the most striking kind of love of all, is that fraternal love evidenced by the photographer’s documentation itself. Quail’s concern for his brother, and his dedication – not only to Justin’s support and survival but his enjoyment of life, his ability to live well and fully, and his wish to tell his story – underwrite the narrative. All the while, Quail is there, watching over him. In the last photograph in the book, Justin strides out across a field with his binoculars, hunting for a glimpse of the birds he loves so much, and reaches a hand out behind him for Jackie, who follows him. A short way back, Quail is there too, taking pictures of it all, committing the life of his brother to film, and saving it up for this labour of love: a book. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist and Dewi Lewis Publishing. © Louis Quail

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Alice Zoo is a photographer and writer based in London, working with national and international publications such as BBC News, the British Journal of Photography, and the Washington Post. She is also a freelance photo editor at the FT Weekend Magazine, and co-founder of Interloper magazine.

Paddy Summerfield

Empty Days

Book review by Gerry Badger

Empty Days is Paddy Summerfield’s third book for Dewi Lewis, but the first I can review, because I wrote texts in the other two. So this is hardly an impartial view, I have known Paddy and admired his work for decades. I am pleased, however, that the books have begun to bring him the wider recognition he deserves after being one of British photography’s hidden gems for so many years.

One reason I think, why his light has been hidden under a bushel – apart from a natural disinclination to push himself outside Oxford – is because his work is difficult to classify. He is neither an obvious documentary photographer nor an art photographer; neither surrealist nor diarist, but a combination of all these things. In three pages of notes he once sent to me, he refers to himself a documentary photographer, but one who, in Empty Days, ‘weaves the images into a personal document, a subjective story where everything is tragic, but there is also hope.’

He is no doubt a singular photographer. Each of his books is different, yet linked by an absolutely distinct voice. One might say that it’s an odd voice, and it certainly is, although I do not mean that in any pejorative sense – quite the opposite. I have often thought that Paddy Summerfield was a kind of British Ralph Gibson, but much less calculating or mannered. His ‘oddness’ is the real deal.

This is clear, I think, in Empty Days, which by Summerfield’s own admission explores the darker side of his psyche, encompassing religion, depression, sex, alienation, and Rock ‘n’ Roll (in the shape of his beloved Beatles) but you hardly need to know him to get a clear sense of this. The book explores aspects of the human condition, of a troubled soul, in a beautiful series of always surprising and quirky images, chosen from fifty years of work. It can be regarded therefore as an autobiography, or a fragment of an autobiography, because all Summerfield’s work is essentially biographical – as, essentially, is most photography – and the other two books, Mother and Father (2014) and The Oxford Pictures (2016), which are quite different from this new work, show other sides of his personality.

As I have intimated, his aim in Empty Days is quite clear: ‘I show the sadness in the world – I don’t know if I show it to push it away or hold on to it.’ If that sounds excessively gloomy, remember that this is a work of photo-literature, not a stream-of consciousness confession to a therapist. These are photographs, woven into a loose, suggestive narrative, and both their formal and symbolic qualities are there to be enjoyed. The imagery covers a number of photographic genres, from landscape to portrait to nudes to still-lives to Paddy’s inimitable ‘street photography’, which is usually done on a beach, and unlike the work in the recent show of British beach photography at the National Maritime Museum, London, which he would have graced, generally features single figures, which only shows he doesn’t go to the beach on Bank Holidays. The single figure shot is a striking feature of the book. Frequently, although he gets close, their facial features are indistinct, turned away from the camera or photographer’s gaze, so the sense of sadness and alienation is underscored. Indeed, Summerfield may well be one of the best photographers of loneliness around.

Summerfield also tackles religion, though whether he sees this as solace or a cause of our modern ills, is, like much in his work, left tantalisingly open to question. ‘In the book,’ he writes, ‘beneath the surface there’s a strand of spirituality implied, a layer of religious symbolism.’ It’s hardly beneath the surface. We begin with a cross tattooed on an arm, and progress through a stature of Christ, a child lying in a crucified position to another cross in a cemetery. His attitude to sex is also far from clear. There are a number of sexualised images, nudes or semi-nudes, but again, it would seem that, in a manner similar to religion, sex leads only to melancholy and disappointment rather than ecstasy or fulfilment. These figures seem to find little sense of connection in what should be the most connective act of all.

This all sounds like an incessant catalogue of gloom, but there are many consolations in Empty Days. Firstly, many photographers make diaristic books, but much of them are superficial, narcissistic views showing little self-awareness or questioning – neither exploring an inner life nor the potentialities of the camera. If Empty Days is diaristic or biographical, it is not in a me, me, me onanism, and one gets the impression that, although the story is important, so too was the making of the images. Summerfield gets his own joy and consolation from making striking and distinct photographs, and so can we. It is so good to see a photographer concerned with photographic picture-making in the basic sense. Engaging his eyes with the world, and making elegant, simple photographs that, when put together using a keen brain, are not as simple as they look. Empty Days is not so much documentary or diaristic or whatever but a visual poem of great beauty and useful meaning.

I end with a musical analogy (not the Beatles I’m afraid). Ludwig Van Beethoven had an extremely difficult life, his renowned deafness being only one aspect. He was in constant pain and was increasingly isolated towards the end of his life when – completely deaf – he composed his late string quartets. In these searching, elegiac works, there is every emotion, from bubbling joy to profound sadness, except one – there is never despair. While hardly seeking to equate him with Beethoven – John Lennon is enough – the same could be said about Paddy Summerfield. He makes sure to end Empty Days with two images of hope – a bird wheeling and dancing in the sky. As I have said, this is not a wholly impartial review, but this has to be a strong contender already for one of the best photographic books of the year. ♦

All images courtesy of Dewi Lewis Publishing. © Paddy Summerfield

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Gerry Badger is a photographer, architect and photography critic of more than 40 years. His published books include Collecting Photography (2003) and monographs on John Gossage and Stephen Shore, as well as Phaidon’s 55s on Chris Killip (2001) and Eugene Atget (2001). In 2007 he published The Genius of Photography, the book of the BBC television series of the same name, and in 2010 The Pleasures of Good Photographs, an anthology of essays that was awarded the 2011 Infinity Writers’ Award from the International Center of Photography, New York. He also co-authored The Photobook: A History, Vol I, II and III with Martin Parr.

Simon Roberts

Merrie Albion: Landscape Studies of a Small Island

Essay by David Chandler

Imagine walking along a crowded street in any British city. It is morning, and the people around you are in a hurry. Most will be on their way to work and have a purposeful stride and an air of thinking ahead about them, and most are looking at their mobile phones. Some are smiling as they work their fingers across the handsets; others are talking loudly into the morning air, spoken names, places, and events conjuring that fleeting sense we all know so well of multiple lives – instantly recognisable but remote – colliding briefly with our own. Now imagine being in a shopping mall. It is later, maybe the weekend, and the pace here is less frenetic. People are ambling with their bags, looking in shop windows, lingering, waiting around and relaxing (retail having long since been resold to us as a space of recreation, as a kind of therapy). Many of the shoppers are also using phones, involving those elsewhere in their leisurely acts of looking and choosing. And all around, the amblers hold long, remote conversations as they move slowly through the mall, waving their arms in exclamation, making open demonstrations of their connectedness, as if being connected was an expression of their well-being and their relevance.

We have become accustomed to this distractedness, and it is a central paradox of our public experience that those drawing most attention to their physical presence on the street or in the mall are often openly declaring an absence of mind. Being there but not there, being explicitly detached, would seem to be a common sign not only of an increasingly affectless public realm, but also of fundamental shifts in the way we understand and value communal experience. It would be tempting to assert, as many have done, that new technology has begun to radically alter our behaviour, diverting us away from physical contact with others towards immobile screen-based forms of communication in a digital space where constant competition for our attention undermines our ability to concentrate, and dissolves or complicates the distinctions we make between what is public and private, social and intimate. Whether or not this is true, it is becoming clear that we now inhabit a plurality of publics and communities, manifest in overlapping physical and digital spaces that have reconditioned our senses of belonging as well as changed our patterns of social interaction.

The nature of public, communal experience has been an implicit theme of Simon Roberts’ photographic work of the last ten years or so. Since he embarked on his project We English in 2007, he has documented events and places across Britain that have drawn people together, all the while compiling evidence that the desire for common presence and participation, for sharing a sense of being ‘in place’, not only endures but might also harbour something distinctive about our national character and identity. That these gatherings are also set in specific landscapes and are embedded in unfolding social histories of place has been a distinguishing feature of Roberts’ investigation, one that has enabled him to critically conflate elements of a British landscape tradition – in which the land is seen as central to the idea of a national culture and identity – and those of social documentary photography in this country, drawn at particular moments in its history to exploratory national surveys. Roberts’ work presents the viewer with complex relationships between people and places, and incongruous juxtapositions of history and contemporary culture that create gentle ironies and underlying tensions across the images. Played out through particular local and regional contexts, it is these tensions that ultimately deny any consistency of mood and resist the coherent, and possibly seductive sense of binding national characteristics.

This decade of work has reflected debates in art and cultural geography that understand landscape not simply as territory or a mode of representation but as an active process, shaped over time by politics and economics as well as by geological and environmental forces. This process is largely one of incremental change, manifest in different ways and at different speeds across diverse spaces, and, in Britain, Roberts interests have gravitated towards evolving patterns of leisure, the consumption and commodification of history, militarisation, and to lines of demarcation and exclusion in the landscape. But in parallel to this, he has also chosen to photograph events and places that have a more immediate, topical significance in the turning of Britain’s recent history, and which – again summoning the sense of a national survey – might collectively offer a form of pictorial chronicle of these times. It is these particular photographs that provide the structural focus and thematic substance of this book. 

Merrie Albion ranges across various projects, both commissioned and independently produced over the last ten years, from single photographs made around the time of We English, to Roberts’ subsequent photographs of the General Election of 2010, his series The Social: Landscapes of Leisure (2013) and National Property: The Picturesque Imperfect (2013–15), and his photographs from the 2012 Olympics in London. The book also registers a distinct shift in approach, and tone, from We English. In Merrie Albion, Roberts has exchanged the element of discovery and revelation that came from his prior speculative journeying around England to many new and, for him, unknown sites, for a form of ‘reporting’, where he has responded to subjects and places that have already entered the public consciousness and can be seen as defining locations in the recent national story.

Roberts’ work on the 2010 General Election can be seen as representative of this change of emphasis, and its photographs assume a pivotal role in Merrie Albion. Importantly, they distinguish Roberts’ particular manner of recording events from that of the photojournalists and reporters who often appear in his pictures, as one not primarily concerned with capturing newsworthy aspects of the election but with observing what might be called the broad and multifaceted choreography of the electoral process as it unfolded in British social space. One abiding effect of this approach is that the photographs undercut the sense of politics constructed for us by the media, both by revealing that process of construction taking place and by giving equal status to scenes that would be deemed un-newsworthy, affording a monumental quality to the prosaic drama of the election embedded in the everyday fabric of British life. As Roberts steps back with a large-format, five-by-four-inch camera to take up his customary elevated, detached viewing position, the activities and incidents of the election, the jostling, walking, waiting groups of people, are not simply diminished in scale by the expansive space surveyed by the camera lens, they appear now as figures set against a much broader arc of social time, that slower course of history within which the towns and villages they live in – the housing estates, the communities, the streets, pathways and networks of communication – have developed into the familiar landscape of this country. This is the dialectical space/time of Merrie Albion’s social panorama.

Roberts’ apparently quiet, detached chronicling of the events and public atmospheres of Britain’s recent past – charting the mood swings of a diverse national culture – is also a discreet opening up of a set of complex ideas about places and their histories, and about the abiding influence of the country’s past on its present. In his comparative observations and contextual annotations Roberts provides his own form of narration here, and invites us to look with him, to think again, and maybe to think differently about Britain at a time when ideas of our national identity, our national culture and our international relations have never been more fiercely contested.

The world of Merrie Albion is a subdued, anti-theatrical space, with its slower time and sometimes daydreaming sense of duration, and its social panoramas displaying the consciously style-less, apparently detached and indifferent attitude that declares the photographer’s sociological interest as he journeys through the landscape of Britain over the course of its recent history. Yet, as this book so quietly suggests, this history is one of dramatic change and extreme social contrasts, and it is precisely that drama, the drama of difference and upheaval, matched against Roberts’ dispassionate recording of its representative events, places, and social gatherings, which gives his photographs their distinctiveness and unique value.

In many ways these marked shifts of place, culture, and atmosphere create, in themselves, an overriding sense of uncertainty and anxiety in Roberts’ national chronicle as it moves slowly towards the referendum and Brexit, and then culminates in the terrible iconic image of social inequality, injustice, and trauma formed by the blackened high-rise tomb of Grenfell Tower. At its heart Roberts’ work seeks to quell the visceral drama of events. He does not thrust his camera into the action, but steps back to see the wider picture, to create photographs that embody a kind of weighing up of complex tableaux of comparative information – whether that be a political rally winding away down a city street or a family on a beach, pausing for a moment to stare out to sea. Merrie Albion is a partial account; it is selective and subjective; but Roberts’ pictures draw us into the slow unfolding of social time and provide points of connection that encourage us, from one image to another, to think not only about the varied scenes as part of a unified historical process but ultimately to reflect on our own place in that history. ♦

All images courtesy of the artist. © Simon Roberts

This essay is adapted from one of the accompanying texts for Merrie Albion: Landscape Studies of a Small Island, published by Dewi Lewis and has been reproduced with kind permission. An exhibition of the works runs until 10 March 2018 at Flowers Gallery, London.

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David Chandler is a Professor of Photography at University of Plymouth. Since 1982 he has held various curatorial roles in museums and galleries, including the National Portrait Gallery, London (1982-88) and The Photographers’ Gallery, London (1988-95). Now he works principally as a writer, editor and curator, in the fields of contemporary photography, photographic history and the visual arts. He was also Director of Photoworks, Brighton (1997-2010).

Piotr Zbierski

Push the Sky Away

Book review by Max Houghton

My eyes deceive me sometimes. I look at an image and see only the negative space, or decipher a creature or shape that it is not really ‘there’. I like to think my perception is enriched by the play of this optical unconscious, and that my sustained impulse towards the image is borne of such mis-looking.

The images created and sequenced by Piotr Zbierski amplify these visual glitches; his preference is for cameras that in some way distort the image. The ensuing instability of the image is used as a strategy here, to transport the viewer into the realm of the senses or emotions; to fold us in. Photography permits special access to this non-geographical place, Zbierski believes, and with Push the Sky Away, an ambitious book published by Dewi Lewis, he shows us the magic of the image. Or, at least, how the image can help us connect to such concepts, and to ritual, myth and the stories that bind us.

The title of the collection is shared (coincidentally, I imagine) with an album by Nick Cave, whose music mines the uttermost reaches of the soul. So if we Push the Sky Away, what’s behind it, above it, beyond it? Without the celestial, how would we comprehend our earthliness? What would happen if the sky was no longer our limit, and instead, we dwelt in a house without a roof? For Hamlet, famously, ‘This brave o’er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with gold fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.’

Zbierski to be sure sees more than pestilence. He focus is towards being (as opposed to not being) and he has pushed on our behalf, to reveal our raw, unfettered selves. His is a play of three acts, or a triptych, which follows an unfamiliar rhythm, as though from a half-remembered dream. He collects fragments from a brutal though sensual present, which he seems to want to connect to a wilder, more spiritual past. He is a wanderer, a photographic Odysseus, collecting images from the wide, wide world. His accumulated knowledge has taught him that images alone vanish from our tenuous grasp, and this book’s power arises from the sequencing; that is its logic. It is as though Zbierski is trying to impart something urgent, using non-verbal language, to those who look.

Dream of white elephants, the book’s first section, is populated by black and white images, the first of which is a child, emerging from water, eyes closed – perhaps to symbolise how, wet and alone, we enter the world. Further images flit between playful and perturbing scenes, enticing the viewer to enter to find out more, accessing a space at once strange and familiar. The palette extends to incorporate colour in the second section, Love has to be reinvented. Bodies merge with the landscape; the domestic cat of section one has metamorphosed into a leopard, a cut-out dove floating benignly above its head (unless my eyes are playing tricks). Dogs nuzzle each other, rivers flow, the piper plays his tune. The distinction between people and animal blurs.

Zbierski’s vision becomes increasingly anthropological as the book unfolds, in that images of ritual, of holy men proliferate in the third section, Stones were lost from the base, alongside much more mysterious, fragmentary imagery. An image encased in a circle depicts an inosculation, or an en-kissing, as Robert Macfarlane recently described it, in which tree branches grow into each other. This, and the cover image, also featured across a double-page-spread, operates as some sort of key to this complex work. The cover image looks like an ancient settlement, but is in fact located in his native Poland, and the tents are hewn from local canes and palms. The emulsion on the negative was somehow damaged, resulting in rents swirling across the image, rendering it one of a kind. This kind of play between difference and similarity is also a hallmark of the work, and attests to its unsettling power. Zbierski appears to be reaching beyond religious and scientific interpretations of the world, to a more animistic view, in which everything in the universe possesses a soul.

In Totem and Taboo, Freud brought together animists, obsessional neurotics and children, describing their ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, which, combined with ritual, led to magical beliefs about the impact of their thoughts in the world. He might have included artists into this category, but instead it formed the basis of a later paper on narcissism. This observation is not of course a swipe at Zbierski, but might offer insight into the drive to create per se.

It is surprising in a book of images in this realm to see so much text. The first is a poem by Patti Smith, which I am predisposed to like. Its dedication reads ‘-for Piotr’, leaving my imagination to ponder the nature of the relationship between photographer and high priestess of rock poetry, which would be idle conjecture, or between image and text, which I am better placed to pursue. The poem is pure dreamspeak; conjuring oneiric visions from the depths by locating mental images, and positioning them as links in a chain. In this way, poet and photographer are one. The book also hosts an excellent essay by Polish academic Eleonora Jedlinska, which takes the reader on a philosophical journey through Zbierski’s images, in order to contemplate, among other things, what comprises the sacred, and, equally importantly, what constitutes the profane. Since David Campany created the removable essay, in his outstanding work a Handful of Dust, it seems desirable for all works to have the with/without option. This essay does enhance the experience of the extended photowork, but (how could it be otherwise) also points the reader in certain directions, sometimes away from, the flow of the image. Zbierski’s own introductory essay is thoughtful and interesting, but offers up a doubling with the ensuing chapters of images. As I suggested earlier, he is developing a different kind of language, without words, and must now apprehend his own authorship. Zbierski asks if such elements as pain or ecstasy can be tamed by a photograph. He makes his own question redundant by unleashing the wildness of the image with every turn of the page. After much looking, I am still not sure what it is that I have seen. It makes me want to look again. ♦

All images courtesy of Dewi Lewis Publishing. © Piotr Zbierski

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Max Houghton writes about photographs for the international arts press, including FOAM, Photoworks and The Telegraph. She edited the photography biannual 8 Magazine for six years and is also Senior Lecturer in Photography at London College of Communication – University of the Arts, London.