There’s no doubt that mobile phone cameras have reshaped our visual literacy, the way we see the world, and the way we see ourselves and our own unique histories

Phones’ light weight and large screens are quite literally encouraging new perspectives, as we move away from the eye level shooting that dominated for so long. Their connectivity, which makes it possible to share images on social media  in seconds, influences our subjects and their framing, including emphasising vertical orientation. Our smartphones are now an indispensable tool for everyday cultural storytelling, enabling creative voices from diverse backgrounds to document their world. 

Mobile phone photography has also changed the media world. Phone cameras can now easily produce high-resolution image files suitable for large format printing and imaginative cropping, with pin-sharp details and balanced tones. And yet, while today’s phone cameras can outrun yesterday’s pro DLRs in terms of image quality, it is their more modest features that encourage the most powerful photography. Fast and versatile, phones can also be less threatening or intimidating in sensitive scenarios, due to their sheer ubiquity. After all, in most situations in which people now congregate, at least one individual will probably have a phone in hand. 

The distinction between professional and amateur has essentially collapsed; no longer is it necessary to have specialist equipment, extensive training and a lucrative media contract in order to produce images that can have significant cultural and geopolitical impact. This near-universal ability to tell our own stories through still and moving images, and share these images in a digital arena, can help to foster greater mutual understanding. The smart device brand OPPO is leading in these efforts, promoting mobile imagery as a cultural language, and encouraging young people to use camera phones to document their culture. 

It’s an ethos that underpins Culture in a Shot, OPPO’s partnership with the Discovery Channel, which celebrates cultural complexity and inspires diverse communities to capture and share their culture in a creative way

The theme for 2025, Celebrate the Moment, explored the vibrant spirit of festivals, carnivals and folk celebrations around the world, explosions of collective joy in which traditions are continued and reshaped. Featuring more than fifteen countries and regions spanning Europe, South East Asia, and Latin America, the initiative highlights the ways in which the devices we carry can promote and honour diversity, and celebrate both the ancestral traditions and contemporary adaptations that make our shared planet so extraordinary. 

This year’s theme stands in striking contrast to the hyper-networked, immaterial world we easily associate with digital technologies and smart devices. Festivals – from those associated with fandom, such as the fiestas of Brazilian football culture; to seasonal traditions such as Nauryz in Kazakhstan; to boisterous rituals dating back hundreds of years, such as the Carnival of Venice – unite communities in physical space through shared moments of joy and abandon. More than just visual spectacles, these events engage all the senses, from the aromas of local foods, the pulse of live music and the sensations of bodies pressed together, dancing and parading. Smartphones are uniquely positioned to capture such movement and intensity in a natural, non-disruptive way. 

By amplifying these traditions through visual storytelling, OPPO and the Discovery Channel aim to encourage cross-cultural understanding as well as emphasising the ways in which younger generations – those most typically associated with smart devices and phone photography – are keeping many of these festivities alive, breathing new life into age-old customs. Through mobile imagery, these communities are not only preserving traditions, but reshaping and revitalising them on their own terms.

OPPO’s commitment to empowering young and grassroots image-makers around the world extends to its celebrated Photography Awards, an annual mobile photography competition launched in 2023. Rather than privileging singular masterpieces or technical virtuosity alone, the Awards foreground participation, diversity and everyday creativity. This year’s awards feature a larger prize pool and a more diverse range of awards, including regional categories and enhanced youth recognition, reflecting OPPO’s aim to incentivise visual storytellers globally and make diverse cultural practices more visible.

With a panel of judges including Magnum member Alec Soth and Hasselblad Master Tina Signesdottir Hult, and a combined prize fund of over $127,300, the awards demonstrate a significant commitment to the promotion of smartphone photography as a crucial form of cultural production. 

The technical calibre of the winning photographs also illustrates the capabilities of OPPO’s LUMO Imaging Engine, a suite of computational photography algorithms that enhance clarity, dynamic range and colour balance, while retaining a natural feel. The 2025 competition attracted nearly two million entries from 87 countries and regions, reflecting the growing influence of mobile imaging in global visual culture. As these works travel across countries and regions through the OPPO Photography Awards, they form a dispersed yet connected portrait of everyday life — one shaped by intimacy, observation and cultural presence.

Through continued investment in imaging technology and creator platforms, OPPO is lowering creative and technical barriers to entry and enabling more people to capture authentic moments with immediacy and clarity. Initiatives such as Culture in a Shot and OPPO’s Photography Awards can bring manifold perspectives, often absent from traditional media and official records, into the public arena. Beyond winning categories and the appraisal of judges, projects such as these are about participation, amplifying grassroots voices and cultural practices, from diverse regions and backgrounds.

For more information, please visit OPPO Photography Awards 2025.

“The reception of the exhibition by families of immigrant origins from the neighbourhood has been incredible, far beyond my expectations”

Dalia Al-Dujaili: After showing the work in Rencontres d’Arles, why did it feel right to collaborate with Union de la Jeunesse Internationale in Paris this year?

Jean-Marie Donat: First and foremost, it is important to put the photographs presented in the exhibition Ne M’oublie Pas into context. These photographs come from the archives of Studio Rex, a small photo studio in Marseille located in the Belsunce district, wedged between the old port and the Saint Charles train station. This is a very working-class neighbourhood that for decades welcomed migrants arriving by boat or train. For almost 80 years, Studio Rex documented the passage of these migrants who stopped for a brief stay in Belsunce before leaving to work all over France. Many of these men eventually settled in Paris, in the Goutte d’Or, Barbès district neighbourhood in the 18th arrondissement of Paris.

After Arles, Berlin, and Marseille, the exhibition Ne M’oublie Pas is also coming to Barbès at the invitation of Youssouf Fofana, founder of the Union de la Jeunesse Internationale (United Youth International). Ne M’oublie Pas is being shown in the former TATI stores, a huge “ocean liner” of low-priced clothing and household accessories that was frequented assiduously by the working classes and immigrant families living in the neighbourhood for more than 40 years. So, this location makes perfect sense. I couldn’t have dreamed of a better place to present my work than this legendary place. The UJI gave me carte blanche, and I am grateful to them for that. Fifty years later, these photos have followed the same path as their owners. The reception of the exhibition by families of immigrant origins from the neighbourhood has been incredible, far beyond my expectations.

DA: Tell me about the story behind Ne M’oublie Pas – how did the story emerge, and what drew you to it?

JMD: My artistic practice is variable; it can be purely the product of my imagination, or it can be part of a political and social reflection, which is the case for the subject that interests us today. Ne M’oublie Pas does not tell the story of Studio Rex: by presenting this archive, I am showing a history of immigration told by the protagonists themselves. These intimate photos bring to the forefront women and men who have been invisible for too long.  If we take the time to look closely, we see the heartbreak of separation, the wait for a hypothetical return, a hope for the family left behind. Above all, we understand, and this is very important, that for these men, the ticket was a one-way ticket. Their survival and that of their families depended on it. The Studio Rex archives provide an implicit reading of Maghreb and sub-Saharan immigration in the 1960s to 1990s.

DA: I loved the curation and design of the show in Paris – can you tell me how the design aspects were developed? Why did you go in this direction for the curation? For example, the light box in the second room, and the ID photos stuck to the wall individually.

JMD: Not being a photographer myself, I use the photographic medium, and mainly vernacular photographs, as material for my creations. The book, the performance, the exhibition is the work itself. For this exhibition, the scenography is fundamental. Putting more than a thousand documents – “wallet” photographs, photomontages and colourisations, administrative photographs, and studio photographs – “to music” is above all a work of reflection. The multitude of photos that make up the archive (more than 400,000 prints and negatives) must serve to demonstrate the point.

The three monumental frames composed of more than a thousand “wallet” photos (souvenir photos of loved ones who remained in the country) complement the light boxes displaying the negatives of more than a thousand portrait photos taken in France for administrative purposes. The enlargements of 16 portraits made from two 13/18 negatives were not chosen for their aesthetic appeal. These 16 portraits (one woman and fifteen men) explicitly show the male majority that made up the immigration of the 1970s.

The film Les fantômes de Belsunce [The Ghosts of Belsunce] consists of 30 portraits assembled in a morphing sequence lasting over 20 minutes. Thanks to the imperceptible transition from one character to another, this film demonstrates in a very simple way that we see but do not look at these men who are part of our daily lives.

The photos in the display case are framed with boxes of photographic paper (Ilford, Kodak, Agfa). Grégoire, the photographer at Studio Rex, kept the negatives of administrative portraits in these boxes for over 40 years.

DA: Finally, what do you hope the audience will take away from this show?

JMD: Showing people what they need to see to understand, revealing the humanity that emanates from these photographs from the past, will, I hope, serve to change the way we see things today. That is what I have tried to do with this exhibition.

Ne M’oublie Pas is on show at Union de la Jeunesse Internationale, Paris, until 4 January, 2026. The book is available via delpire & co

“You watch an 18-year-old navigating bigger emotions, bigger spaces, intimate relationships”

Dalia Al-Dujaili: Why was this the right moment to publish Davide’s journals?  

Francesca Sorrenti: Now felt like the right time because I could finally approach these journals with a different state of mind, the material was simply too intimate, now I can see it as an essential part of his legacy, and this generation is ready to see him without the noise around his story. We are living in a moment when people crave the real thing, and emotional depth, especially in contrast to the digital world. Davide’s handwriting, his collages, the way he documented his friends and the city – all of it resonates more powerfully now. The journals speak directly to today’s thirst for knowledge, for something real.  

DA: You’ve established a publishing relationship with IDEA. What makes IDEA the right publisher to work with Davide’s imagery and journals?  

FS: IDEA is the right publisher because they understand the human element of youth culture, photography, and fashion in a way few others do. They immediately recognised Davide’s voice and the energy of his generation, and they treated his work with the respect and precision it deserves, not as nostalgia, but as living culture. 

DA: How does your personal relationship with your late son help to shape the pages we see? 

FS: My relationship with Davide shaped the edit simply because I knew him as a teenager, not as the cultural figure he later became after his passing. I could separate the noise from what was really his voice. When creating the book, I focused on keeping the pages exactly as he created them, honest, fast, unfiltered, without imposing my own interpretation. My role was to protect the integrity of what he wrote and saw, not to rewrite it. 

DA: What can we expect from the proceeding Volumes? 

FS: The next volume and the last of his journals continue the same approach. Davide’s pages are shown exactly as he made them. As Journal 2 progresses, you see him change. His understanding of photography becomes more technical and deliberate, and he starts stepping  deeper into the gritty side of downtown New York and the ’90s fashion world. His circle widens  skaters, models, musicians, young artists, other photographers and an important girlfriend  enters the picture, adding another layer to his personal world. You watch an 18-year-old navigating bigger emotions, bigger spaces, intimate relationships, and a growing creative ambition. Together, the volumes show how quickly he was evolving and how naturally he was finding his place in that moment. Journal Two is the evolution of Davide Sorrenti.

Davide Sorrenti Journals: Volume 1 1994-1995 is available at IDEA

©Joshua Atkins

In partnership with MPB, British Journal of Photography delves into the ever-evolving kit that informs Josh Edgoose’s colourful images

“I think about Mrs. Doubtfire all the time!” says Josh Edgoose — AKA Spicy Meatball, his Instagram username — giving an answer I wasn’t expecting when I quiz him about his infatuation with photographing blues and oranges and the nearby hues of ketchup red and egg-yolk yellow.

His very particular sense of colour is the first thing you notice about his work. “My palette is quite restricted,” Edgoose acknowledges. “Maybe it comes from colour film and old family photos from the 1990s: greens with a blue tint, warm yellows, teal blues. And 1990s films [hence Mrs. Doubtfire]. I keep circling for that pre‑internet feel; I want my pictures to look like that era.”

Edgoose still identifies with street photography, mostly shooting candid pictures outdoors, but also stopping people to make portraits. He is mindful of not getting too stuck with genre. “It’s more about your own voice and point of view than a label. But he still gets a buzz from being around complete strangers and using his wits. “I go to lots of quirky British events. Being among a crowd, chatting, taking pictures, it keeps me going.”

“I want to celebrate the lighter, friendlier side of being British. At events, I see people having fun, strangers joking, dressing up, celebrating cars, whatever. I used to think I had to travel, but I’m excited by how much more of the UK there is to photograph.” He keeps a long list of events he wants to photograph each year. “This year I hoped to reach the [Porthcawl] Elvis Festival in Wales; I’ve plotted about 20 dog shows; there’s Kate Bush [themed ‘Most Wuthering Heights’] Day, the Folkestone Air Show, lots of country fairs. When I get there, I shoot some candid shots, some portraits, and some details The hardest bit is capturing the overall mood, but that’s the aim.”

“People say gear doesn’t matter, but I think it does, because different situations need different tools”

Last year he was invited to become a Fujifilm ambassador “They’ve been amazing: fun jobs, open briefs, doing workshops. Three months ago they gathered all the ambassadors and said, ‘We’re taking you to Japan in October’. I cried. It came after a rough personal stretch. I have hardly left the country in the last six years,” he says, his only trip abroad being to open his exhibition at La Gacilly Photo Festival in Brittany this summer.

It’s a dream role for a photographer who has been shooting Fujifilm for years. “People say gear doesn’t matter, but I think it does, because different situations need different tools. I’ve used the Fujifilm X100 series a lot over the years. My main camera is the X‑T5, which is great because I can switch between photo and video for my YouTube channel [Framelines, run with fellow street photographer Shane Taylor]; it’s the best I’ve found for seamless switching while keeping an engaging shooting experience. I like the colours and the speed. I have a couple of GFX bodies too. I love the big RAW files, 16‑bit colour, natural skin tones, and especially the sky gradients.

If he was sent on assignment to shoot street photography in central London, what would be his go-to? “I’d put a zoom in my bag, just in case, but I’d most likely use Fuji’s 35mm f/2 prime (a 50mm‑equivalent). It’s light, compact, very fast, and the image quality is almost up there with the GFX. It’s really sharp. I took that exact setup to the Goodwood Revival recently. It looks a bit vintage and people reacted well. It did everything I wanted.”

He’s used MPB to sell gear “loads”. Since starting his YouTube channel, he’s owned X‑T2, X‑T3, X‑H bodies. “I go through phases, wanting to shoot 28mm all the time, then winter comes and I can’t shoot 28mm, so I sell it. I sell to MPB regularly. It’s super straightforward. I’ve used them for years.”

Has that ease of buying and selling encouraged him to try out different lenses? “You look at other people’s work — someone using an 85mm, someone else 35mm, or 28mm — and you want to try those styles. But you don’t want to carry seven primes for a day. With MPB, you can pick up a lens, use it for six months, sell it, and try something else. I’ve done that a lot — and ended up with a 24–70mm to cover the bases.”

This openness to trying new things runs through Edgoose’s career. He’s published two books in recent years, despite not setting out to publish his images as a collection. “I was lucky to build a relationship with Keith [Cullen] at Setanta Books. In 2020 he asked if I wanted to do a street photography book [Brilliant Parade, published the following year], and I said, ‘Yes please!’ That got covered in The Guardian and that led to work that ultimately helped me turn this into a living. I’ve been very lucky. Otherwise, I’d still be making spreadsheets.”

joshedgoose.com

In Partnership with MPB

MPB is the UK’s top camera reseller. They are quicker, easier and safer than dealing with marketplaces, all sorted at the right price. Get your instant quote today.

Shop Josh’s Kit

• Fujifilm X100 
• Fujifilm X-T5
• Fujifilm GFX series 
• Fujifilm X-T2
• Fujifilm X-T3

“I do see all the photographs as these portals to different times and space”

He prints everything and returns for a second visit, when those memories are taped and draped across the furniture and fixtures of each flat, forming a temporary installation that he then re-photographs as a single, dense tableau “I don’t create a like a mock up before I enter into the space to do the installation,” he says. “It’s merely between the relationship of my eye, my cameras, the viewfinder – creating a conversation through that in the physical space.”

On screen, the pictures read as busy, collage-like interiors: photographs within photographs, rectangles layered over beds, wardrobes, windows, and radiators. In person, they feel stranger and more exhilarating than that description allows. A bathroom mirror seems to contain a photograph of itself, reflecting a space that might be the same bathroom at a different time. A rental window blooms into an impossible vista, stacked with a printed New York skyline, a waterfall, and yet more images of elsewhere. Veneer wardrobes, laminate counters, and battered doors are so flush with ink and colour that they stop reading as furniture at all.

The effect created from this abstraction is almost four-dimensional: there is the object in front of you depicting objects and places from different times, transforming the work’s material implication. Are they photographs of spaces? Are they archives of time spent? Are they disruptions and tears in time? 

He admits, “I do see all the photographs as these portals to different times and space.” Resident Aliens extends that strategy into other people’s rooms. Most of Xu’s collaborators are immigrants living in spaces that are emphatically not “forever homes” – dorm rooms, sublets, tiny studios – and yet bear the full weight of a life in transition. Their legal status often hinges on bureaucratic performances of intimacy: dossiers of bank statements, certificates, and, crucially, photographs that must convince an immigration officer that a relationship is real, made even more complicated with the works’ explorations of queer immigrants.

“We have to represent ourselves in bureaucratic forms which are just a stack of documents,” Xu says. The visual collages reinforce the scattered, fragmented, and transitional nature of the immigration process. The home is inherently both timeless and mounted in ongoing memories of places far away. 

“If you look closely enough,” Xu explains, “some photographs have folding marks that have to fold because they’re too big to fit into my suitcase.” Once these paper histories arrive in someone’s apartment, they flood the space. Tiny 4x6s cluster around an electrical outlet; a large landscape slides down a headboard; a snapshot of a family dinner hovers beside a bottle of cleaning spray. The installations exist only for the afternoon of the shoot, but their residue lingers: some collaborators later hang the final photograph in new homes. The work is ever-reimplicated within the space as an artistic act, both forgotten and unfinished.

If the classical immigration photograph presents a subject as knowable and neatly contained, Xu insists on the opposite. His images are too layered and contradictory to resolve into a single, legible identity. They’re not depictions of one moment – they are tablets containing coordinates to places and stories that feed each other’s momentum. They are information banks; they are star systems, all from the same origin.

And, as I explain to him during our conversation in which I was overwhelmed by the work’s metaphysical nature, I try to centre them through the metaphor of the mudroom. Those little airlocks of domestic life are built to catch the mess of the outside world before it reaches the soft interior of the home. They bring together objects that are in flux between their coming and going. They are spaces that otherwise don’t exist if there is no one to come and go. What is the tenement apartment in the hours the alien worker labors to keep his status? Is it a home or a space to hold what from outside cannot yet be accepted within? 

And does it exist if not to hold memories? To welcome in loose ends that cannot be resolved until we leave? Do these spaces contain memories – or are the memories necessitated by the inhabitant’s movement? “It’s almost like I’m a median right,” he says. “I’m this in-between person and I create an in-between space through image.”

Resident Aliens is on view at Yancey Richardson, New York until 20 December, 2025

“If I’m knocking on the Pearly Gates and they say, ‘Okay, mate, what have you done? Just show us one book. See if you can get in,’ I’ll still go for The Last Resort.”

Parr accepted that The Last Resort would forever be his calling card. And, after his passing, the talking points returned to his position as an interloper from the Home Counties poking his lens around the detritus of a working-class seaside town in Merseyside. Few ever mention that he was living in Wallasey at the time, of which New Brighton is a suburb.

“If you think about the early days of Martin’s work, he was photographing the areas where he was living and working,” says Dewi Lewis, who has known Parr since the mind-1980s and published many of his books, including the first reprint of The Last Resort, which had initially been self-published in 1986. “When he was in Hebden Bridge, he was doing local stuff,” most memorably with the series, The Non-Conformists shot in Calderdale’s Methodist chapels, published by Aperture in 2013, some 33 years after it was completed. “And New Brighton was local.”

Time has smoothed the edges off The Last Resort’s very palpable rupture from the dominant humanist documentary tradition. Yet it’s easy to see how the photographs appeared different; not just because they were shot in colour with the clarity of medium format, both of which were more closely associated with commercial imagery, but because they were unromantic. “Our historic working class, normally dealt with generously by documentary photographers, becomes a sitting duck for a more sophisticated audience,” wrote David Lee in Arts Review when it was exhibited at Serpentine Gallery in London. “They appear fat, simple, styleless, tediously conformist and unable to assert any individual identity.”

Parr’s defenders argue that the ugliness in the pictures lay in the eyes of the beholders. “I was brought up in Rhyll in North Wales, which is very similar to New Brighton,” says Lewis. “I worked in the amusement arcades. I did all the summer jobs that you do in that sort of place. So I knew all those people. And I knew that there was no sense of it being exploitative.”

Neil Burgess showed the work at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, before the Serpentine exhibition, alongside Tom Wood’s photographs of New Brighton. “It was seen by some as taking the piss out of the working classes, which to a certain extent it was. But I don’t think the working classes gave a fuck, really. They came into the show and thought it was hysterical. We didn’t have any complaints from people who saw themselves in those pictures at all.”

Parr remained grateful that the work was still being talked about decades later. The show at the Serpentine and then at Rencontres d’Arles festival in 1986 put him on a new trajectory towards the figure we know today. He is one of the few photographers to transcend his medium and become not just an internationally celebrated artist, but an instantly recognisable figure in wider popular culture. However, The Last Resort tends to overshadow the work he made over the next 15 years, when he was at his prolific peak, putting out an extraordinary series of books, including The Cost of Living, One Day Trip, Signs of the Times, Bored Couples, Small World and his magnum opus, Common Sense. 

Published by Dewi Lewis in 1999, Common Sense was — and still is — a wildly original and audacious take on consumer culture, focused in extreme close up. It’s the book he said he’d be holding in reply at the Pearly Gates, in case they asked for another chance to get in. “It’s when I put together the experimentation I’d done with the macro lens,” he recalled in the Zoom talk in 2020. “One of the dangers of being me is that I get lazy and complacent and repeat myself ad infinitum, which I could do pretty easily. So the thing is to give yourself challenges. I’ve always used the beach as my experimental lab. I first started the medium format pictures in New Brighton. I then applied the macro lens to the beach. Then I thought I’d challenge myself and use a telephoto lens [for Beach Therapy, published in 2018] because in the world of art and documentary photography, it’s generally frowned upon.”

Lewis says that even Parr was unsure about Common Sense, and that it might have all been different. “He said that he had a new project that he wanted to show me, but he wasn’t quite there with it. He was still weighing up in his own mind whether it was something that he wanted to keep going on…. Before things really started taking off for him, around 1997 to 98, he was getting properly interested in book collecting. He turned to me at one point and said, ‘I’m getting a bit fed up with photography, but I really love books. I should go and open a bookshop.’ How serious he was, I’ve no idea. And within two or three months, he started making films. That must have also been about the same time that he was developing Common Sense. So, in a sense, it all ties in that he hadn’t quite worked out where he would go next with work.”

He persevered, and this time the world was ready to embrace the shock of the new. Alongside the book, Common Sense opened as a simultaneous exhibition in 41 venues around the world, from Janet Borden in New York, the first commercial gallery to fully represent him, to the Australian Centre for Photography and the House of Filmmakers in Moscow. Parr would be the first to admit that his very best work was now behind him, but he remained prolific, especially after becoming a full member of Magnum Photos in the mid-1990s, embracing a new role as an in-demand fashion and commercial photographer. Meanwhile, his public profile grew far and wide, much of it on the back of his 2002 retrospective initiated by Barbican Art Gallery and the National Media Museum, curated by Val Williams, which toured Europe for the next five years.

In this next overlapping phase of his career, Parr turned more of his attention towards curating and collecting. He was Guest Artistic Director for Rencontres d’Arles in 2004, and arguably that edition of the festival has never been bettered. The same year saw the publication of the first volume of The Photobook: A History, a serious and scholarly research project completed with Gerry Badger, challenging the dominant narrative of the medium. Parrworld opened at Haus de Kunst in Munich in 2008 featuring his collection of objects, postcards, prints by other photographers, and his vast archive of photobooks, later acquired by Tate and the Luma foundation. 

For many in the photography community, this is his most important legacy. “Martin is the reason for the photobook revolution,” says Lewis. “Someone may have come later, but it’s really all down to Martin and his enthusiasm for the book form. And, if you think about it, who else could it be? He got it going.”

The sale of his photobook collection, for a middling seven-figure sum, helped pay for the focus of the third and last phase of his career, opening a foundation in Bristol supporting emerging, established and overlooked photographers who have made and continue to make work focused on Britain and Ireland. The Foundation’s collection holds more than 5000 prints, from postwar figures such as Marketa Luskacova, Charlie Philips, Tony Ray-Jones, Joy Gregory and Chris Killip, to emerging artists from the last 10-15 years, such as Clementine Schneidermann and Rene Matic. International photographers are represented with major works shot in the UK and Ireland, such as Eugene Smith’s Three Generations of Welsh Miners, alongside book maquettes which includes dummies made in the production of photobooks such as Chris Killip’s In Flagrante and Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh.

“In a strange way, Martin’s work has been slightly overlooked at the Foundation because he was so eager and excited to discover and promote the work of others,” says Jenni Smith. “We hope to spend time exploring Martin’s archive and exhibit more of his work in the gallery in the future. At the moment his Common Sense work is on display in the Foundation toilets, which he always found amusing. There is so much work that remains unseen. During Covid, Martin spent time revisiting his contact sheets and selecting new images, so scanning those negatives feels like a good place to begin that exploration.”

Find out more about Martin Parr and his Foundation here martinparrfoundation.org

“I want you to be confronted with your own desire and the frustration that comes from not finding what you’re looking for”

Afshar embarked on a research project on de Clérambault’s archive at Musée du quai Branly, asking to access the works through the digital repository. Saving the images she wished to use, she later returned to them, only to find that the museum software had protected the files, creating crops capturing only a fraction of the image, around the cursor where she had clicked. This created an unexpected effect; a mosaic of hundreds of image fragments. 

These ‘screengrabs’ make up The Fold, now on show at the Musée du quai Branly as part of Afshar’s first monographic exhibition in France. Performing the Invisible comprises two bodies of work – Speak the Wind, which was published as a book by Mack in 2021, and The Fold, published by Loose Joints in September 2025. 

Afshar’s project potently reveals that the archive is never a neutral collection of documents, but rather a constructed apparatus shaped by power, desire and the political conditions in which it was made. De Clérambault’s Morocco photographs may at first appear to be anthropological or ethnographic studies. Yet Afshar shows that what they really expose is the photographer himself – his compulsions, his gaze, his inability to see the women as anything more than surfaces for projection. The Fold, says Afshar, is not about the nature or environment of Islamic women, but rather the one who sees and tries to represent them.

“I found it fascinating to look at the archive because when you look at these images, they show you nothing about the subject,” Afshar explains. “The image-maker is so removed from the context that these bodies are situated in… You don’t get anything from the images but what you get is an idea of the image-maker.” 

At first, the cropped details of fabric folds and shreds of gesture that Afshar accidentally obtained were frustrating. But eventually she came to see the accident as a gift. “It’s like zooming into de Clérambault’s obsession with the fold of the fabric, but also the inaccessibility of the archive,” she says. By enlarging these fragments in the darkroom, she was able to return the material to the analogue processes de Clérambault once used. The result is both tactile and forensic, a deliberate dissection of his gaze.

Afshar stresses that the work is not about reproducing the French photographs, but about dismantling them. “This is a project that works against the images that it’s referencing,” she says. “You would see the cover [of the book] and assume this is what you’re going to get – veiled women. But after flipping through, you soon realise that what you’re looking for is not there. I want you to be confronted with your own desire and the frustration that comes from not finding what you’re looking for.” 

This strategy positions The Fold in dialogue with Afshar’s broader practice. Speak the Wind deals with ritual, possession and the unseen – winds believed to inhabit bodies in the Strait of Hormuz, between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Both projects circle around invisibility and absence, and question how photography can render what is normally unseen. In one case, it is the invisible force of the winds; in the other, the invisible but ever-present colonial gaze. Afshar also draws attention to how such images still shape political life. “The obsession towards the bodies of women, in particular Islamic women, is often used as a symbol,” she explains. “To show the oppression of certain places, or the barbarity of certain places, to justify the bombing or occupation of certain countries.” The female body – veiled, unveiled, disciplined – becomes a site on which power is asserted. Patriarchal forces inside colonised nations use women’s bodies to resist, while colonial powers use them to legitimise conquest.

This double-bind is particularly acute in France, where the veil remains a flashpoint of debate. Afshar links this fixation to a deeper historical wound. During the Algerian War of Independence, Frantz Fanon noted that women’s veils could conceal weapons; bombs were transported into French venues by women, little suspected by the authorities. For Afshar, contemporary bans on veils in France may not simply be about secularism or feminism, but about a lingering trauma rooted in that revolutionary history. 

Afshar describes her project as “a forensic investigation of the psyche of de Clérambault”, but adds that he is more than an individual; he embodies the colonial gaze. To step into her installation is, she suggests, like stepping into his mind. “In Being John Malkovich there’s a door that lets you see the world through his gaze,” she says. “When I started making the work I was thinking about that film a lot.” 

The installation opens with a short animation of de Clérambault’s death, his body slumped in his fabric-filled room, gun by his side, mannequins draped in hayek around him. From there, viewers enter a mirrored corridor in which archival images are printed on panels. As you look, you also see yourself reflected into their surfaces, implicating your own gaze in the act of looking. A sound installation deepens the immersion, while video works present interviews with five scholars dissecting de Clérambault’s persona from different perspectives. 

“Such archives are never about the subject. They’re about the purpose the colonial photography was serving – to classify, to justify colonisation.” This is why theorists such as Ariella Aïsha Azoulay have described the camera’s shutter as an “imperial shutter”, summing up how, from the beginning, photography served empire. 

Afshar does not let the archive rest silently in its drawers. By fracturing it further, reprinting it, and forcing audiences to confront their own expectations, she turns the colonial gaze back on itself. The Fold is not simply about de Clérambault or a past gaze, it is about the structures of seeing that persist today in politics, the media and our own imaginations. 

When Performing the Invisible closes, The Fold will enter the collection of the Musée du quai Branly, where future researchers may return to it as part of the long conversation around archives, images and power. “It makes me very happy to know that it will be part of that history,” Afshar says. “Someone else could come and have a dialogue maybe 100 years later.” 

Her work raises a final, unsettling question: what do we really see when we look at images of veiled women? Do we see the subjects themselves, or only our own projections staring back? Afshar’s answer is to hand the question to the viewer, mirrored in the folds of fabric, fractured across thousands of tiny fragments. 

Performing the Invisible is on show at Musée du quai Branly, Paris, until 25 January 2026. The Fold is published by Loose Joints

Niyū Yūrk is structured somewhat chronologically but also tries to group work into loose themes, using only material from the library’s Middle Eastern collections. Using photography as well as film, sound and print media, Abid says she “wanted it to be a proud celebration of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) cultures, of their contributions in different fields, from businesses that serve daily lives of New Yorkers, to the earliest music recordings in New York City.” She references artists such as Iranian-American theatre director Reza Abdoh, “and these are things that you probably don’t expect when you go see an exhibition like this. You probably expect it to be these timelines of immigration to New York. But I wanted to show the breadth of all these contributions and in areas where you probably didn’t expect MENA people to be at the forefront of theatre or electro-acoustic music.”

This celebratory tone is carried throughout the show to the photographic series by Mahka Eslami, Bodega Boys, highlighting moments of daily life and joy in Yemeni corner stores around New York City. Elsewhere in the exhibition, there are clips from In My Own Skin, which documents the aftermath of 9/11 as experienced by five young Arab women living in New York.

When Abid began her role in 2022, she was asked to identify the library’s earliest Arabic diasporic materials from New York City, items that have been collected since the founding of the Oriental Division in 1897. The institution’s initial request for the exhibition – to focus on early 20th-century immigration – felt too narrow for Abid. “I considered that wouldn’t be inclusive of the more diverse waves that came later after Christian Syrian immigration,” she explains. “I really wanted to tell that story, especially at this moment now when there is a need to be seen, to be represented in these institutions.” Her insistence expanded the exhibition all the way to the present day. 

The process also raised questions about institutional responsibility. The library, Abid says, has taken seriously the matter of who shapes these histories. “We’re a public library and the library had to fight and advocate to have a Middle Eastern curator,” she says. “It was a priority… to have someone from a Middle Eastern background to tell these stories.” That work includes addressing inaccuracies inherited from earlier cataloguing. Images by immigrant-era photographers like Lewis Hine and Augustus Sherman often arrived with limited information. “These photographs… were collected as they were described by these photographers,” Abid explains. “But today we’re in 2025. We have curators with subject expertise. We also hear from the public.”

One example is a portrait long labelled “Armenian Jew,” corrected only after the man’s descendants contacted a museum exhibiting the photograph. “They said this is our great-grandfather and he’s a Yemeni Jewish rabbi from Jerusalem,” Abid says, and the record was later updated. “That’s very important,” she adds, “because all these identities are conflated under one label. It’s our responsibility to complicate these histories… and that’s also what the exhibition is about.”

Some histories required different approaches altogether. Abid searched for materials documenting the Muslim experience in New York after 9/11, a defining period for many MENA communities, and found few. “Our collections had gaps in that regard,” she says. But she discovered In My Own Skin. “It allowed me to tell that story,” she says. “The experience of those who were identified as Muslims in that moment of New York history that extends to the present day.”

Working with early ethnographic portraits also brings mixed feelings for her. “Yes, they are very ethnographic and they sometimes bother me,” she admits. But she finds value in using them to address cataloguing practices and inherited narratives. “What do we do with these materials? I love the challenge to almost subvert them and use them in a different way… than the stories we’ve heard already.”

Visitors have been responding strongly. “I was surprised to see friends or visitors getting very emotional,” Abid says. “They said we never felt seen or represented and here we’re on the walls of a New York institution.” For many, the library’s grand architecture can feel imposing; the exhibition seems to loosen that. “I’ve never seen this much diversity in the building,” Abid notes. “People who might feel intimidated by that majestic building… now see themselves here.”

And in that shift, the exhibition speaks not only to MENA communities but to many others whose histories in the city have been under-recognised. These are stories of contribution, erasure, cultural work carried out quietly, brilliance that has gone uncredited. “Absolutely,” Abid says when I suggest the show connects to a broader immigrant experience – the hidden labour, the silenced identities, the people whose influence shapes New York while their stories remain unnamed. Here, those stories are given space. The Algerian man on the wall is no longer a footnote. 

Niyū Yūrk: Middle Eastern and North African Lives in the City is on until 08 March, 2026 in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at the New York Public Library

“I aimed to show glimpses of Oxford and carefully placed each subject within the natural environment, framed by gardens, trees, or the distinctive Oxford stone“

– Alys Tomlinson

Tomlinson approached the project in her signature style: “I used black-and-white film and a large format camera and tripod, which slows down the process and requires thought and precision.” The resulting portraits carry a stillness that borders on contemplative, something many of the academics welcomed. “A few even said they enjoyed the quiet and methodical photographic style, finding it a meditative experience to spend time outdoors, instead of dealing with the daily pressures of answering emails or attending meetings.”

The setting of Oxford also played an essential role, but one which Tomlinson chose not to foreground. “The Oxford colleges and landscapes provided beautiful backgrounds, but I was aware they have been documented extensively in the past. I aimed to show glimpses of Oxford and carefully placed each subject within the natural environment, framed by gardens, trees, or the distinctive Oxford stone.”

Each portrait is paired with a still life that embodies the sitter’s field of research, visual pairings which for Tomlinson were as vital as the portraits themselves. “Some are abstract and others symbolic, creating a visual dialogue between the individual and their subject area,” she says. “After a period of research, I identified objects or details that symbolised the academics’ fields of specialism and then put images together to make pairings.”

For Professor Philip K Maini, a mathematical biologist whose work often explores pattern formation in plants and animals, Tomlinson drew directly on organic motifs. In contrast, Professor Krina Zondervan’s diptych is anchored by a marble torso of Aphrodite from the Ashmolean Museum – a nod to her research into reproductive and genomic epidemiology. 

Usefully, Tomlinson’s access extended into the Bodleian’s own rare holdings, making Professor Alain George’s most of the most historically resonant. “As Alain specialises in Islamic Art and Architecture, I was grateful to be granted access to photograph one of the oldest versions of the Qur’an manuscript,” says Tomlinson. Other symbols emerged from direct encounters: Shadreck Chirikure’s artefacts from African archaeological digs; Anne Davies’ scales of justice; Rachel Upthegrove beside the dark, reflective waters of the Cherwell.

Working with researchers whose ideas shape global conversations left a deep impression on Tomlinson, and she adds that discussions covered everything from the architecture of the world’s oldest mosque to children’s mental health and labour rights. “Working with such brilliant minds was an exciting prospect, and I found everyone to be incredibly approachable and down-to-earth,” she says. “I learnt a great deal making these portraits and have an enormous amount of respect and admiration for the six brilliant men and women whom I photographed.”

The sitters themselves also reflected on their experience of the commission, and Tomlinson’s working style: “I usually say that I hate having my picture taken, but this was a really enjoyable experience,” says Anne Davies, a Professor of Law and Public Policy and a professorial fellow of Brasenose. “Tomlinson works with an old-fashioned large plate camera so the camera itself is a thing of beauty and it was fascinating to watch her process and all the different things she has to take into account – lighting, random gusts of wind and so on. I also had to stand still for quite a long time for each picture so it was quite a meditative experience.”

Professor Davies is paired with an image of a carving of personified charity and justice, “and that’s a good reflection of my work as a legal scholar,” she says. “One of my main areas of interest is employment law, and my work is driven by a concern for the dignity of working people – ensuring that they are treated fairly and, where that doesn’t happen, that they have access to redress. I struggle to come up with visual representations of my work but I think Tomlinson has chosen really well.”

For Tomlinson, it was a privilege to have access to quieter areas of the university, which often remain hidden from public view. “I was keen for the portraits to be different from typical academic headshots,” she reflects. “It was important that the images expressed something unique about each person.”

This commission was created in partnership with Bodleian Libraries to celebrate Oxford University’s leading innovators whose work is reshaping health, society, and the environment worldwide. Find out more about Bodleian Libraries here