“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 never understood why people photograph strangers,” Stephen McCoy

The warmth and humour underpinning McCoy’s work is born of intimacy, of the proximity referenced in the exhibition title. “I never understood why people photograph strangers,” he says, a view strengthened by his time working on Skelmersdale (1983–1984), a deindustrialised and impoverished Merseyside new town. “It’s a troubled place,” he says. “I felt uncomfortable just going around, even though I explained to people what I was doing and obviously asked their permission. I felt like an interloper.” 

After that experience McCoy decided to avoid portraiture, unless he knew the people involved personally. A workshop with Lewis Baltz led him towards the human impact on the landscape, though his work, shifting into colour, diverges from New Topographic deadpan detachment. River to River (1985–1990) explores land use between the river Mersey and the river Ribble, for example, while Demolition Sites (1981–1986) looks at transient locations that appeared and disappeared as Liverpool underwent regeneration. The Rimrose Valley (2016–2025) focuses on a country park in Sefton, meanwhile, under threat from a proposed dual carriageway. 

People sometimes appear, but their presence is secondary in these series. “It’s not about them as individuals, it’s about their role within that bigger landscape,” McCoy explains. Even in Personal Space, few faces feature. “I wanted them to be… almost symbolic of anybody’s family,” McCoy explains. Even so, a specificity runs through his work. Everything is shot in Merseyside, where McCoy lives, some series over five or even 10 years. McCoy patiently revisits the same spots, working to understand the intricacies of each place.

Few people have the inclination or talent to construct a home from scratch, but we all shape the world around us, and nowhere is this more evident than in Every House My Mother Lived In (2019–2025), McCoy retraces his mother Rita’s life through buildings, photographing her at every one, right up to the detached home in Crosby where she recently died. Today, McCoy’s work takes on its own resonance.  

“When you’ve been taking photographs for 45, 50 years like me, you have got to embrace that sense of time passing, that it will come to an end, that my ability to take photographs will end,” he says. “It’s not a question of looking back, looking forward. Here I am in the present. If someone sees one of my photographs from 45 years ago for the first time, it’s contemporary for them.”

Stephen McCoy: Proximity runs until 21 December at Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol. martinparrfoundation.org

“Bring a print back to people. It’s the best way to open doors”

The images themselves resist easy reading. Miksys’ portraits, often taken with a flash in dim, smoke-thick interiors, show people posing with an intensity that feels both performative and private. “At first, I thought of posing as unnatural,” he admits. “But I realised those pictures were telling me a lot. They’re proud. They’re saying: this is who I am.”

The images are of a proud culture. Resisting patronisation, Miksys allows the community the space to represent themselves how they choose, such as the boxer Spartacus, with his fists up in a loose position, white vest and black bowler hat. “He’s from southern Lithuania and I photographed him in 2006 just before I published my first edition and then in 2019 I went and found him and photographed him again for the second edition.” 

Many images are also of domestic spaces and cultural artifacts, such as radios, wallpaper patterns or photo frames. Here unfurls an archive of a Soviet history that was falling apart around the Roma community. Fogged windows, plastic flowers, a coffee cup on a ledge, lace curtains bright with daylight. “Maybe they seem simple,” Miksys says, “but they have a lot of information about Soviet history, about how things look and feel here. The fog, the damp. It’s all part of it.” In one photograph, a single window glows with the warmth of a lived-in room. The image, he notes, was taken in Taboras, in a house that no longer exists. “People thought that neighbourhood was just a horrible place. But when you were inside, they’d invite you for coffee. They became my new community.”

The heart of BAXT lies in Taboras, a long-standing Roma settlement in Vilnius that once housed some 500 people. Over years of visits, Miksys watched the neighbourhood’s houses be torn down one by one. “The city was slowly demolishing it,” he explains. “Some of the homes just burned. I realised I had to continue documenting it, to have something, at least, as a record of what happened.” The last house was destroyed in 2020.

To preserve what could not be saved, Miksys began salvaging materials from the ruins – charred wooden beams, fragments of doors, children’s toys – and incorporating them into sculptural installations. “I had a solo exhibition at MO Museum in Vilnius,” he says. “We built these twelve doors with photographs on both sides, about what home means and what its destruction means.” The installations have since appeared in community spaces too, including a disused synagogue in Žagarė, the small town on the Latvian border where Miksys now lives.

This move from photography into sculpture reflects how BAXT has expanded in scope and intention. “I still feel there is a lot of the erasure of Roma culture and a limiting discussion about it especially with state institutions. I found that very frustrating and I felt I really had to make this document for the history books, at least to have a record of what happened.”

“With all my connections with the Roma community, we do everything together,” he says. “At the exhibitions, the openings, the closing parties, bands are playing, people are talking about everything. It’s important that they have that space.”

Representation – how and by whom it is made – has always been central to BAXT. In the beginning, Miksys spoke no Lithuanian, Russian, or Romani. Communication was mostly “sign language,” he laughs, or photographs themselves. “Larry Clark once told us, at school: photograph once, then bring a print back to people. It’s the best way to open doors.” The gesture proved crucial. “The Roma are a very oral culture,” Miksys explains. “Family history often survives only through photographs. So when I gave them pictures, they used them – put them in their homes, transformed them. Sometimes they’d even tear their page out of my book and hang it on the wall.”

Designed anew by Claudia Küssel in Düsseldorf, the book now adopts a vertical format and introduces unpublished photographs alongside essays and interviews with members of the Roma community. Its publication coincides with upcoming events, including one at The Photographers’ Gallery in London.

The BAXT book launch will take place at the Photography’s Gallery on 06 November, 6:30 – 8:00. A talk will be followed by a book signing in the Bookshop, with copies of BAXT and a limited number of rare, out-of-print copies of DISKO available. 

“We want this to be a grown-up festival that embraces complexity”

Geoffrey Batchen, professor of the history of art at Trinity College, is curating Surface Tension, a group exhibition at Kendrew Barn Gallery, St John’s College, mostly drawn from his personal collection. Beginning with early daguerreotypes and moving through to contemporary works, it explores the materiality of the photographic surface, the idea of where the image is held. “The truth of the image is often found in what the photographer has done to the surface: the surface of the daguerreotype, the negative, the print,” says Barron. “This is something people don’t often think about when they consider ‘truth’.”

A contemporary festival about truth would not be complete without considering AI, and Photo Oxford will exhibit work by two artists confronting it head-on: Haley Morris-Cafiero and Michael Christopher Brown, both on show at Maison Francaise d’Oxford. For What Does an Ideal Employee Look Like? Morris-Cafiero collaborated with web developers to mimic current employment software that analyses faces to generate employability metrics. “She uses her own face, manipulating it to show how the metrics shift as she appears to move closer to the so-called ‘ideal’ employee,” says Barron.

“The software relies on a specific set of training data, which exposes the troubling biases embedded in both the data and the metrics. As Haley alters her face, the metrics change in real time. The work also references phrenology and 19th-century pseudoscientific ideas around race and eugenics,” she says. “The public will be able to interact with it, placing their own faces in front of the software to see the results.”

Michael Christopher Brown used AI in his series 90 Miles, to depict Cubans travelling to Florida for work. Conscious he needed to protect their identities, it was a way to show them without showing them, in combination with documentary materials. “In this case, AI is used to tell a story that otherwise couldn’t be told safely,” Barron explains. “It’s actually a powerful example of how AI can be used in a positive, thoughtful way. In neither of our AI-focused shows are we simply generating images from prompts. That, to me, isn’t especially interesting. Instead we’re trying to interrogate how AI can be used.”

Accompanying the exhibitions programme are panels, artist conversations, portfolio reviews, film screenings and events, including a symposium, a chance to theoretically drill down into the theme which will include a paper from BJP editor Diane Smyth. “I see it as an opportunity to really explore the question of truth, to have meaningful conversations, and to learn something along the way,” says Barron. “We want this to be a grown-up festival that embraces complexity.”

Photo Oxford takes place from 25 October to 16 November 2025. photooxford.org

© Balazs Gardi

For its 11th edition, Prix Pictet delves into a dramatic expression of nature’s wild side and the defining characteristic of our age: Storm. Considering phenomena both meteorological and social, the work produced by this year’s shortlisted photographers acts as a reminder of the fragility and force of our world.

From the climate emergency to war and unrest, the world seems caught in a state of permanent turbulence. And it is this shared condition that is explored throughout the work of the 12 photographers exhibited in Prix Pictet: Storm, presented at Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, some 14 months the theme was announced. The exhibition will go on to tour to Dubai, Tokyo and Zurich over the next six months.

Founded in 2008, the prize is the world’s leading award for photography and sustainability, each cycle focusing on a theme intended to frame urgent issues through the eyes of artists and visual storytellers. With a worldwide network of more than 350 nominators and a jury chaired by Sir David King, the former UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser, it highlights how images can help us better comprehend the forces reshaping our planet. Each of the series in the exhibition was shortlisted from the nominators’ longlist and, presented together, they speak of artists who continue to find new languages of witnessing, resistance and renewal — engaging viewers in ways that photographs of polar bears stranded on ice floes no longer can.

Several of the shortlisted photographers turn directly to the weather for this edition, the literal storms of a warming world. Alfredo Jaar, this year’s laureate (who collected 100,000 CHF, approximately £93,000, at the awards night at the V&A on 25 September), approaches the subject with characteristic restraint. His winning series, The End, depicts Utah’s Great Salt Lake, now reduced by drought and human extraction to what scientists call an “environmental nuclear bomb”. Jaar presents his photographs of the lake’s desolation in prints small enough to demand close attention – a “visual whisper,” as he puts it – transforming environmental catastrophe into quiet lament.

The dialogue between beauty and danger is rendered in elemental form in Luciferines—Between Dog and Wolf, photographs of bioluminescent plankton along Brittany’s Atlantic coast, made by German artist Tom Fecht. These fragile organisms, whose light may soon vanish as ocean temperatures rise, give off an electrical effect only visible at full moon, on the surface of the stormy sea. Fecht’s photographs capture this effect from above, rendering a literal and metaphorical eye of the storm.

Similarly, Roberto Huarcaya’s Amazogramas surrenders authorship to nature: long strips of photosensitive paper exposed in the Amazon jungle during a lightning storm, in which flashes of electricity etched imprints. Both Huarcaya and Fecht encourage natural forces to become the camera’s collaborator, fusing art and environmental record.

Elsewhere, photographers reflect on the shifting thresholds of landscape and memory. In the Italian Alps, Marina Caneve considers the Dolomites’ vulnerability to future floods and landslides in a repeat of the hydrogeological devastation experienced in 1966. Are They Rocks or Clouds? hovers between evidence and poetic uncertainty, anticipating rather than documenting disaster in the artist’s home region. 

Sixty miles away, fellow Italian Patrizia Zelano turns to Venice, rescuing waterlogged antique books from the great floods of 2019 to create Acqua Alta a Venezia, an elegy to knowledge and regeneration. Camille Seaman’s The Big Cloud captures spectacular supercell thunderstorms across the American Midwest, monumental formations that embody both the sublime and the terrifying. Each image feels like a portrait of power, nature’s capacity for creation and annihilation intertwined.

Across these projects, the camera functions less as an analytical tool of control than as one of reverence. The works document a planet heading towards breaking point, but also affirm the possibility of collaboration. But if these series face outward, others confront the political and environmental storms that define contemporary life. 

Balazs Gardi’s The Storm traces the assault on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, depicting the collapse of civic order as a kind of meteorological event. In his images, smoke, dust and flags merge into a single, unsettled atmosphere. Gardi sees the episode as a warning, about the ease with which democracy can descend into chaos. In Gaza, Belal Khaled transforms devastation into testimony. Living in a tent outside a hospital after his home was destroyed, he began to photograph hands – those of survivors, rescuers, mourners. Hands Tell Stories becomes a study in endurance, each gesture a fragment of collective grief. 

Laetitia Vançon’s Tribute to Odessa turns attention to Ukraine, portraying the defiant normalcy of daily life in a besieged city. Children swim, couples embrace, the theatre opens its doors in acts of quiet resistance that assert continuity amid war. In the Republic of Congo, meanwhile, Baudouin Mouanda’s Seasonal Sky revisits the floods of 2020 through collaborative re-enactments with locals. The result is both document and performance, a way of restoring dignity to experience by retelling it.

These photographers work at human scale rather than spectacle, engaging with conflict and catastrophe but avoiding journalistic urgency. Rather they depict – or call for – moments when communities must work together. For Swedish artist Hannah Modigh, the storm moves inward. Hurricane Season, set in Louisiana, traces the psychological residue of violence and poverty, when fear and anger circulate like invisible weather systems. Her muted portraits evoke both intimacy and unease, capturing the sense of a society perpetually on the verge of breaking. 

A similar interiority shapes Takashi Arai’s Exposed in a Hundred Suns, composed of hundreds of small daguerreotypes of nuclear sites in Japan and the Pacific. The silvered surfaces of his images seem to hold ghosts of radiation – a meditation on unseen histories and the lingering storms of the atomic age.

Following its presentation at the V&A until 19 October, Prix Pictet: Storm will travel to the Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai (17 October – 13 December), the TOP Museum, Tokyo (12 December – 25 January 2026), and Luma Westbau, Zurich (6 March – 5 April 2026). A publication by Hatje Cantz accompanies the exhibition.

Portrait of  Alfredo Jaar © Andrea Rego Barros

In a time of censorship and climate denial, what is the role of photography? Now on show at V&A South Kensington alongside 11 shortlisted photographers for the Prix Pictet, Alfredo Jaar reflects on feelings of hope and helplessness in the midst of environmental disaster. 

Between the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Basin Desert sits Utah’s Great Salt Lake. As the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere, it is a vital part of the region’s ecosystem – except, now, what was once a formidable expanse of water and nature is dwindling to stretches of dry, cracked mudland; what used to be a thriving hub for wildlife is now littered with the corpses of thousands of birds.

Due to global warming and rapid population growth, the Great Salt Lake has lost 73 per cent of its water and 60 per cent of its surface area since the mid-19th century. Experts have called it an “environmental nuclear bomb” for the profound – and near – threat that it poses to Utah’s lifeblood. If the trajectory continues, communities will be exposed to dangerous levels of toxic dust. One of the great bird migratory routes of North America may well vanish. And Utah’s industries will lose their much-needed minerals supply.

“I’m always looking for the perfect balance between information and poetry”

– Alfredo Jaar

It is a stark reminder of the knock-on effects of ecological crises; how, thread by thread, they can unravel the fabric of our lives and societies, impacting public health, habitat and the economy in one pull. Such is the subject of Alfredo Jaar’s 2025 Prix Pictet-winning series, The End. The Chilean-born, New York-based artist has been named the latest winner of the prestigious photography award for his poignant documentary images – which capture the beauty of the Great Salt Lake, coupled with the tragedy of its impending demise.

In The End, dwindling streams peter out across parched ground. Industrial smoke permeates the air. Yet mountains rise resolutely, as pastel pinks and blues melt across the sky. It is a portrait of what we have lost, and the fragility of that which remains; the latest instalment to Jaar’s uncompromising oeuvre which, for some 35 years, has acted as an antidote to indifference.

First and foremost a conceptual artist, Jaar has used text, images, installation and architecture to explore the most urgent social, political and humanitarian questions of our time. He is perhaps best known for The Rwanda Project, which shone a harrowing light on the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

“I’m always looking for the perfect balance between information and poetry; information and spectacle,” Jaar says of his work. “That balance is very difficult to achieve. If it is too informative, it becomes boring, dry, didactic… If it is too poetic, it becomes too sweet, too decorative, and it loses its power.” It is that delicate equilibrium, in Jaar’s view, that can move and illuminate audiences, stirring thought, feeling and action.

For the 11th edition of the Prix Pictet, a global network of over 350 nominators identified artists whose work aligned with the theme ‘Storm’. From the persistent threat of hurricanes in Louisiana to the strength and resilience of people in Gaza, the shortlisted work collectively explores both literal and metaphorical ‘storms’ – the many forces uprooting today’s world, whether environmental, political, economic or social. The exhibition is currently on show at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London until 19 October 2025.

Jaar was nominated by Colombian curator María Wills Londoño. He had initially shot his winning images for research purposes: he was pitching for a commission from the Salt Lake City Arts Council to stage a series of public interventions for the lake crisis. His pitch was rejected, which he suspects was due to his criticism of, and directness towards, Utah’s politicians. But in hindsight, he found a story in the photographs.

The sequence starts out panoramic, with sweeping views of the landscape’s austere beauty; gradually, the scenes shift to close-ups of the lake’s desolate details, and finally, the viewer is left with the sun setting on a flock of birds – a quietly devastating metaphor for creatures that, in Jaar’s words, are “condemned to death”.

“The loss of the lake would be a tragedy of incalculable magnitude,” the artist says, and yet his images are characteristically minimalist; there is restraint in the simplicity, which he doubled down on in format. He chose to print them in a small, unspectacular size – “a visual whisper,” he calls it – about the width of his head. “The issue of our broken planet is so huge, and there is so much noise around it, that I didn’t want to keep yelling,” he explains. Rather, “it’s about forcing the audience to look very close. To come face to face with this tragedy.”

Other artists shortlisted for the 2025 Prix Pictet include Camille Seaman, Hannah Modigh, Tom Fecht, Belal Khaled and Balázs Gardi. Jaar does not characterise himself as a photographer, but it is an immense honour to be included among them, he says; at a time when “images have become more important than ever,” it’s a medium and discipline he has the utmost reverence for.

“We are going through an era of censorship, genocide, of killing of journalists, and killing of photographers… There’s an attempt by governments to blind us,” he says. “What photojournalists are doing, what photo-documentarians are doing, is maybe the last space of resistance and the last space of hope.” It is a statement applicable to multiple crises and contexts today. Including that of our climate – when just recently, President Donald Trump stood before the UN, and dismissed global warming as the “greatest con job” in the world.

As an artist concerned with sounding the alarm on injustices and crises around the world, Jaar has described himself as “idealist and a utopian” in the past. Yet The End is an undeniably bleak title. Does he feel hopeful for our rapidly deteriorating planet – or is it despair? The answer is a bit of both. In the mid-1900s, the Italian philosopher and Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who had been imprisoned under Mussolini’s regime, wrote his Prison Notebooks, in which he spoke of the pessimism of his intellect, but the optimism of his will. That is how Jaar feels.

“When I look at the world around me, I am extremely pessimistic. Intellectually pessimistic. But the only antidote to that is to be an optimist with my will; to continue working, hoping to change that bleak reality.” That is what The End – and Jaar’s work – is about.

“My ambition is to change the world, which is something I will never reach,” he says. “I have discovered it to be true that art cannot change the world. But art can show us that the world can be different.”

Prix Pictet Storm is at V&A South Kensington until 19 October 2025. Then Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai 17 October – 13 December 2025; TOP Museum, Tokyo 12 December 2025 – 25 January 2026; and Luma Westbau, Zurich 6 March – 5 April 2026

“I talk about facts and not the truth, the truth is an aspirational ideal“

– Anna Skurczynska

The Australian project’s sense of veracity prompted one audience member to ask why AI had been chosen for this project in the Q&A, rather than illustration or some other media. The eyewitnesses themselves had requested it, said Kanis; her presentation had included their heart-felt messages of thanks. Elsewhere on the same panel, Anna Skurczynska, a solicitor and LCC lecturer in media ethics and law, outlined the hoops through which photographs have to go if used as evidence in court, however, musing of Exhibit Ai that; “I think a court would struggle with the emotional impact that the images will have… that it would contaminate objectivity.”

Skurczynska stated that English law works in degrees of probability when analysing information, seeking to prove “beyond reasonable doubt” rather than establish 100% certainty. Walking the audience through images associated with the Charlie Kirk shooting, her presentation highlighted just how hard it is to go from images to knowledge – and just how many assumptions we might usually make about what they show of the world. “I talk about facts and not the truth, the truth is an aspirational ideal,” she said.

The idea of degrees of probability recurred in other panels, as did the difference between making narratives that move audiences, and building convincing cases. Kiana Hayeri won the 2024 Carmignac Photojournalism Prize for a project on women’s lives in Afghanistan, for example, created with Melissa Cornet, a researcher and human rights lawyer who has worked in Afghanistan for nearly a decade. But while much of Hayeri’s work is documentary, she and Cornet also collaborated on staged images with a group of young Afghan women, helping picture their aspirations and dreams. Hayeri and Cornet are now publishing this work as a book, No Woman’s Land, including images by Hayeri and texts, drawing and polaroids by Cornet. A joint publication between the duo and Raya Editorial, it will be launched at Paris Photo. 

Julia Kochetova gave her very personal account of war in Ukraine, meanwhile, arguing against statistics and traditional war photography in favour of something more involving. “War is an immersive experience, you need to feel it; journalism is not enough any more,” she said, later adding: “It’s not enough to see the work, if you have an image you can always look somewhere else. You really need to look, see, hear, smell, touch; you need to feel to remember.” Yiel Lual Awat and Sahat Zia Hero, who creates Rohingyatographer Magazine, also advocated for insider-perspectives in their presentations, emphasising the importance of their lived experience of refugee camps in Kenya and Bangladesh. 

And Sarah Eckinger, a photo editor on the international desk at The New York Times, ventured into similar territory in a panel on The Attention Economy. Aware that social media users are drawn to the (apparent) authenticity of first-person narratives, NYT has been encouraging its photographers to include themselves, she said, referencing a report by Saher Alghorra published online on 25 March. It started: “I am a photographer from Gaza City, and I have been documenting the aftermath of the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Many of the buildings in my city were destroyed.” Eckinger also presented a story which featured the image-maker on-camera, describing it as part of NYT’s ongoing effort to “break that fourth wall a little bit”.

Jo Webster, Global Managing Editor for Visuals at Reuters, gave insights into the organisation’s work, meanwhile, including a first-person account from Reuters staff photographer Hannah Mackay on making images in a press scrum; Webster also emphasised the importance of fact-checking and independence though, of serving as “a lens on reality”. Webster’s presentation included the jaw-dropping fact that Reuters had to kill a widely-disseminated image of Catherine Princess of Wales and children, after identifying signs of digital manipulation in it. The image had been issued by Kensington Palace, she said, and Reuters subsequently tightened procedures around third-party material.

Webster added that Reuters will never create or publish images made with AI, but said the organisation already uses AI for everyday tasks such as transcribing interviews and keywording. It has also experimented with using AI to identify people – though it has “yet to be satisfied with facial recognition”. As with Kanis’ presentation, it was a member of the audience who picked up a key point in the Q&A, asking if Reuters could therefore potentially identify anyone. Webster said it had tested with better-known individuals, and her presentation had emphasised its role in “holding power to account”. But with some 2600 journalists across 165 countries, the potential of the technology and the network is sobering. 

Elsewhere were other presentations on information and how we gather, interpret, and disseminate it, including insights into alternative imaging from Giles Price and Forensic Architecture, and on using open-source data from Crofton Black, all of whom featured in BJP’s September issue. As Daniel Alexander, Director of LCC’s Photography Programme, stated in his introduction, there is sometimes a gap between theory and what is happening in the photography industry; this event fostered dialogue between theory and practice, and also with audiences who so urgently need to interrogate what they see.

Lines of Engagement, How Technology, Ethics and Trust Shape Photojournalism Today was organised by Alexia Singh, Daniel Alexander and Vicki Thornton, and hosted by the Photography Programme at London College of Communication. The accompanying exhibition, Lines of Engagement, was curated by Daniel Alexander with curatorial support from Alexia Singh. For more information, and to access recordings of the talks and discussions, visit www.linesofengagement.net

“I don’t believe photography can change anything, but I do believe it can stand as a record”

“Part of the idea I had at the time was that civil disturbances could escalate into the situation we had in Northern Ireland,” he continued. “The streets in west Belfast were battle zones with soldiers with live ammunition on the corners, and I thought this could happen in mainland Britain.”

In 1979 Steele-Perkins published The Teds (1979) with writer Richard Smith, a book now regarded as a landmark of British social documentary for its affectionate portraits of the cultural codes of working-class youth and identity amidst economic decline. “It is a very truthful book,” he later said. “I was never interested in taking the piss out of them.”

Steele-Perkins joined Magnum Photos the same year, and by 1983 was a full member, placing him within the co-operative’s tradition of socially-engaged reportage. He reported widely abroad, working in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, then photographing famine in Africa, war in Lebanon, and rural life in Japan, where he later made his home with his wife, the photographer Miyako Yamada. His 2001 book Fuji traced the mountain’s presence in Japanese culture and landscape, while Imperial War Museum commissions saw him return to conflict themes, contributing to the institution’s visual record of Britain’s military history.

Steele-Perkins also continued to examine the UK, photographing the far right throughout the 1980s; he later came to question his approach to depicting them, however, arguing that focusing on a ‘short hair short hand’ makes for eye-catching images but misrepresents the issue. “The far right is depicted in photographs as the burly boys because it’s easy to do it that way,” he explained. “Skinheads shouting perhaps looks more intimidating than people with long hair shouting. The real problem is the people who don’t talk – the political classes behind it are really to blame.”

Steele-Perkins also continued to examine the UK, photographing the far right throughout the 1980s; he later came to question his approach to depicting them, however, arguing that focusing on a ‘short hair short hand’ makes for eye-catching images but misrepresents the issue. “The far right is depicted in photographs as the burly boys because it’s easy to do it that way,” he explained. “Skinheads shouting perhaps looks more intimidating than people with long hair shouting. The real problem is the people who don’t talk – the political classes behind it are really to blame.”

Sykes adds that, when in London, they often covered the same political demonstrations: “never together but always in a friendly competitive manner. At the time Chris lived in Homer House in Brixton, I too was a south Londoner so in those days we got together on a regular basis whenever Chris was in town. We discussed photography and played very competitive squash. We were equal, though he was slightly more competitive – a  little faster on his feet than I. Only four years ago over a drink or two, we still couldn’t agree on who usually won those friendly games!”

Later Steele-Perkins returned to questions of British identity with different approaches, his 2009 book England, My England juxtaposing portraits of aristocrats with depictions of inner-city youth and migrants, and his four-year The New Londoners project documenting families from 187 countries living in the UK capital. “I hope it’s a more nuanced way of dealing with immigration,” he said, adding: “I don’t believe photography can change anything, but I do believe it can stand as a record.” 

Magnum Photos announced Steele-Perkins death on 08 September 2025, recording “with great sadness” that he had died peacefully at the age of 78. “Very sadly he was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia some years ago, a progressive, complex and challenging condition,” added Sykes. “He died peacefully with his wife Miyako at his side in Tokyo.”

Later Steele-Perkins returned to questions of British identity with different approaches, his 2009 book England, My England juxtaposing portraits of aristocrats with depictions of inner-city youth and migrants, and his four-year The New Londoners project documenting families from 187 countries living in the UK capital. “I hope it’s a more nuanced way of dealing with immigration,” he said, adding: “I don’t believe photography can change anything, but I do believe it can stand as a record.” 

Magnum Photos announced Steele-Perkins death on 08 September 2025, recording “with great sadness” that he had died peacefully at the age of 78. “Very sadly he was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia some years ago, a progressive, complex and challenging condition,” added Homer Sykes, a fellow photographer and friend for 50 years. “He died peacefully with his wife Miyako at his side in Tokyo.”

“I first met Chris at a private view in 1971 at The Photographers’ Gallery in Great Newport Street which Sue Davies had recently established; in the very early 1970’s, when we were both starting out on our photographic journeys, our paths were very similar, and we learned how to make photographs that told stories and sold. Not just street photographs but work that documented aspects of society that interested us and we felt would interest others too; sociological imagery that would have value long into the future. 

“In those early years we both often covered Saturday afternoon political demonstrations and events in London. Neither of us had picture agents to sell on our behalf. You made prints and took them around to newspapers or magazines and tried to make a sale or and get a commission. For both of us it was a serious learning curve. Secondary sales if you were lucky were often made through personal contacts with different picture researchers, who worked on behalf of magazine and book publishers. Those were very different times and the market for our work was tiny and competitive.

“When in London we often covered the same political demonstrations, never together but always in a friendly competitive manner. At the time Chris lived in Homer House in Brixton, I too was a south Londoner so in those days we got together on a regular basis whenever Chris was in town. We discussed photography and played very competitive squash. We were equal, though he was slightly more competitive – a  little faster on his feet than I. Only four years ago over a drink or two, we still couldn’t agree on who usually won those friendly games!

“I spent several Christmases with Chis and his family and many years later when times had changed as they so often do, Chris and Miyako lived in my office-flat for a while. We still played squash together until our late fifties, had dinners in Indian curry houses, we drank beers, discussed life, work, our respective agents, what was going wrong – often plenty and what was working well. 

“I remember one evening very clearly, when Chris was telling me, unknowingly, about the most terrible nightmares and night-time hallucinations that he was having constantly. Very sadly we now know this was a precursor to Lewy body dementia. We just enjoyed each other’s work and the business of making it work, and the competition.”

Askam-in-Furness opens 19 September till 1 November 2025 at Cooke’s Studios, Barrow-in-Furness