“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

“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

“The essence of performance art is that it’s ephemeral, artists use the camera to make it last through time”

The show also draws parallels between historic photographic innovation and today’s technological leaps, such as artificial intelligence. “In 2025 we have this new invention of AI, we have been desperate to develop new things with it, where else we can use it,” Sotillo observes. “The camera was like that in the arts – this invention which is a machine, artists started thinking of what advantages it could have for art.”

Performance art, a central theme of the exhibition, is explored through photography’s unique ability to capture impermanent moments. Sotillo describes how the camera preserves the transient nature of performance: “The essence of performance art is that it’s ephemeral, artists use the camera to make it last through time, allowing it to be reexamined which has changed perspectives on these performances throughout time.”

A standout piece in the exhibition is a large-scale work by Brazilian artist Andrades, whose project is inspired by film and explores the concept of “mestizo,” a term referring to mixed race. Sotillo explains, “This is a huge piece, we’ve only been able to show a fourth of the work, this time we’re showing three quarters. All the words you see on the wall are exploring the idea of ‘mestizo’”. Andrade’s background in film heavily influences his photographic work, which Sotillo calls “an homage to film, since its birth came from this medium.” The presentation of his photographs changes their meaning, echoing the dynamic nature of performance and cinema.

Reflecting on the exhibition’s broader message, Sotillo hopes the exhibition leaves visitors with not only a deeper appreciation of photography’s development in fine art but also an understanding of the artist’s creative process. “The essence of the show is that not only will viewers leave with a better understanding of the evolution of photography in fine arts, but leave with an understanding that artists have this ability to create from nothing.”

Language and Image: Conceptual and Performance-Based Photography from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection is on at Pérez Art Museum Miami until 11 January 2026

“I’m not interested in making luxury fine art objects – I’m interested in the industrial, and manufacturing, and the actual techniques rather than mimicking them”

Hammond works closely with photography – she was awarded the Single Image Award in British Journal of Photography’s 2016 International Photography Award – but from some of her earliest efforts as an artist, was thinking into three dimensions. “It became as much about architecture, and politics of urban space, and gentrification, and ruin as it was about photography, and the screen, and the lens,” she explains. “What happens when you turn the lens of your camera back on the computer-generated image and make it photographic, and then materialise it? It’s all about these feedback loops and cycles between image and material and sight and screen.”

Hammond has always worked in and from studio spaces: straight after art school she moved to a live-work warehouse in Tottenham with some of her coursemates, which she describes as “chaotic and fun”. “I was very nomadic,” she adds, detailing moves over the course of a few years from Tottenham to Hoxton to Hackney Wick and through various residencies, often living on top of or alongside her work. Her airy current studio, in Sydenham, south-east London, has had many different lives. “That office used to be my daughter’s bedroom,” she says, gesturing towards a room full of monitors, where her partner now works. Before it was a bedroom, Hammond used it as a recording space during her time playing in bands. She and her partner still often collaborate with artists in the building’s other studios, and the whole community has put on nights in the project space on the ground floor.

On the day I visit the sun is shining, casting light through the leaves of plants on both sides of the space, the sky blue from the top floor. Hammond and her family eventually moved out of the studio in 2022, after the intensity of living and working in the same few rooms during the pandemic, and when she started to receive more commissions. Suddenly, living on top of her work was no longer feasible. Today, the studio is full of works in progress: a huge print, almost the length of the room, laid across a table; the flattened side panel of a car, a high- gloss navy blue, mounted; and the bulk of a new piece, Rigged, from her recent project, bolted to a tall, orange frame.

This latest work, Variations, is the result of the Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship, a £15,000 award that gives mid-career artists the opportunity to develop an original project. Hammond applied after the culmination of her 2021 solo show, Remains in Development, which toured from C/O Berlin to Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp. “I formulated a new research question around data-mining and geological mining,” she says of the application. “To me, it felt like there were these two worlds, and there was potential to interrogate them through collage – collage being this perfect place for investigating potentially disparate things that have a relationship.”

Alongside these collages, she began to generate AI images as tests to understand the technology, and became curious about the way she was presented with four options: versions one, two, three and four of a given prompt. She wondered how that system might be applied to a curatorial framework. “I knew I wanted to somehow materially enact the processes that generative AI uses and draw our attention to it through a different lens,” she explains. “I was interested in the fact that there are global logistics, and global territory, of this particular technology. It’s not isolated to our screens, and in order to create the hardware to use it, we need minerals from one place, they need to be shipped from here to there, we need data centres elsewhere. There is this expansive territory.”

With this premise as a starting point, the first variation, Content Aware, took the form of a shipping container, exhibited in Brighton last October during the Photoworks Weekender; the second, Rigged – the one which currently stands in progress in her studio – will go to QUAD in Derby in spring. For the third variation, Model Collapse, which will show at The Photographers’ Gallery in London not long after that, Hammond will use images and data gathered from security cameras fitted to the first and second variations, the installations imaging the viewers and, thanks to a reflective wall opposite, themselves.

“The idea is that there are some people trying to hack the machine and to infect it with its own images,” Hammond says of the third iteration. “But what happens when AI-generated images that aren’t real, physical things in the material world are fed back into it? How does it interpret that data, and how do they start to shift and almost poison the machine?”

The exact form of Content Aware is yet to be determined, as it will depend on this gathered data; Hammond will have to work fast to interpret it and re-imagine the next variation in real time, as there are only a couple of weeks between the installation in Derby and the next in London. “I’m less interested in actually what it does to the system and more interested in that as a framework, or concept,” she says. “So that’s why I’m re-enacting the images; and I still don’t know what that’s going to look like.”

The final work, Repository, considers the idea of the archive, where all of these generated images are housed, where the data is stored, and what happens when these endless machines are discarded and go back into the ground. Crucially, none of the Variations have been conceived as documentary or realistic, instead they reflect on aspects of the AI machine as a place for speculative engagement. “None of these are descriptive about the process, it’s more a sort of theatre,” Hammond explains, “or a sort of collapsing and bringing together, creating stagings and sets for us to imagine.”

Given the questions, and even critiques, Variations implicitly raises in its exploration of mining (digital, material) and decay (digital, material), I was surprised that Hammond is using generative AI as part of her process. “I’m actually battling with that as we speak,” she tells me. She remembers receiving the first couple of days’ worth of data from the camera attached to Content Aware in Brighton, and preparing to use AI tools to work with it. “As I started doing it I was like, ‘What am I doing? I don’t want to be doing this’.” She began to wonder about the possibility of using it as a training set for herself instead, as though she was the generative AI system that her work is staging. “I don’t need this,” she recalls thinking. “I’m enacting it.”

“I feel like I have to engage with it, but I don’t feel like I want to use it as an integral part of the machine of art production,” she says of her current take on AI-generated imagery. “Maybe it’s similar to travel – I fly, but if I don’t have to fly I’ll get the train. I feel like maybe it’s the same for AI. I need to use it for this part of the process in order to be able to interrogate it further, but I’m not going to sit and make thousands – or tens of thousands – of images, just training training training, data data data. Firstly it’s not useful for me, but I feel uncomfortable doing so.”

Aside from environmental concerns about the technology, Hammond takes a pragmatic view on the impact of AI-generated images. “I don’t really think it’s too different from CGI,” she says. “It’s just an extension of non- lens-based ways of making photographic works – and by photographic, I mean in the broadest sense of their relationship to the real, and all of those dialogues that have taken place throughout photographic history.

“Whenever we’re using a medium, we need to be reflecting on what that medium is, and how it relates to the subject matter that we’re working within,” she continues. With AI, as with any other technology, the medium must be at least part of the message. “I’m really sure that I don’t want to use it on this surface level. The context and medium are so interlinked, so I feel like the idea of making work that uses a camera that doesn’t somehow reflect on or interrogate the photographic… Well, somehow I feel like that has to be a part of the field that is being investigated. The same absolutely goes for AI-generated images. If you’re using it, it has to reflect on the technology. It shouldn’t just be a means to an end.”

And so it follows that her works meticulously make tangible the processes they examine – the process by which, for example, the digital degrades and is eroded just as the physical is, which is hard to feel as truth even as it is understood intellectually. Works such as Variations stage and concretise the ruin of the digital and, as a result, the viewer can experience that truth as embodied, physical. “I’m asking how the ideas of the work interact with the material world,” Hammond explains.

Her working process is an extension of this commitment to the tangible: the objects, installations and sculptures she makes, whether she makes them herself, or works with others to bring them to life, are conceived and designed with these principles in mind. “I work a lot with non-photographic spaces, places that work with industry as opposed to the arts,” she says. “When I get something spray-painted I go to somewhere that spray-paints machines, as opposed to a fine art fabricator. I’m not interested in making luxury fine art objects – I’m interested in the industrial, and manufacturing, and the actual techniques rather than mimicking them.

“That’s perhaps why the work is never slick,” she continues. “It has these elements that might be very slick, but there is still a sort of roughness – you can see the bolts. I want it to somehow be true to the material that I’m responding to and the context I’m responding to, rather than a sort of fetishisation of it.” This materiality and attention to the industrial is personal for Hammond, informed by her early life – she grew up in Birmingham, where her father worked in a factory. But it is also a response to her lived environment.

“I’ve lived in industrial spaces for the last 10 years of my life, so I’m strongly informed by the materials that I’m around a lot,” she says, looking over at Rigged. “So, thinking about things like the bolts, they just feel like part of my material world.” 

@flisshammond

“His introspective approach reflected a movement in British photography that sought to use the medium in a more meditative way”

– Paul Hill

This persona came with an ever-increasing interest in Eastern philosophy and tantric practice (his brother taught yoga in the West Country). But John was not an aloof mystic or guru. He had a sharp, acerbic wit, but was also very shy. I remember him telling me that when he started teaching in Derby, he wandered the corridors at the Kedleston Road campus summoning up courage to face his first class of students.

This will surprise those photography students and workshop attendees at my Photographers’ Place in the Peak District, who clung to his every word as he talked eloquently about his work and sensitively critiqued their photographs for hours. His introspective approach reflected a movement in British photography that sought to use the medium in a more meditative way. Nature and the landscape were the leitmotifs. Spirit of Place was replacing a moment frozen in time. However, from time to time the black dog descended and you would not hear from John for a while. 

I knew he would emerge when asked to give a talk about his work or run a workshop – which we did, often. John was not a self-promoter. But when someone opened the door and offered a platform, he came alive and entranced his audience with deep philosophical insights and immensely useful tips on how to improve photographically. He also possessed great curiosity and an impressive intellect. An example of this came when Derby offered him a sabbatical in the late 1980s and, instead of using the period to work on a new project, he enrolled on the MA Film Studies course at the University of East Anglia.

His renowned large format work surfaced following time spent in Wales in 1968, unsuccessfully running a cafe with Penny (his second wife) after the breakdown of his first marriage. Influenced by the Transcendental Movement and the work of American photographer Minor White, John returned to Wales and the Mawddach Estuary, where he used the natural world to make emotionally deep black-and-white images that were wonderfully gestural and metaphoric, about ideas not things. 

During mentally challenging periods later, he often took nature indoors and made large format photographs that beautifully chronicled the life cycle of cut tulips in and out of vases, and arranged thistles and pampas grass still lifes that reminded me of Roger Fenton’s fruit and flowers prints made 140 years earlier. 

Like many photographers of that postwar era, John stumbled on photography before pursuing it professionally, seeing the seminal Family of Man exhibition in the pages of Picture Post while he was doing his National Service as an RAF nurse in Libya in 1956. He recalled in John Blakemore: Photographs 1955–2010 (Dewi Lewis, 2011): “I saw photographs not as speaking of sameness but of difference. Of disparities of wealth and poverty, of war and peace.” He immediately ordered a camera and revelled in the excitement of looking through its lens.

Many see John as an artist who uses a camera, but I always think of him as a photographer who made art. This is not a semantic conceit; it defines a particular empirical practice that is camera-based, where the maker thinks and sees photographically and focuses on making the final print the event, rather than a record of what is in front of the camera. John made his landscape or still life prints with great, almost fetishistic concentration on craft and immaculateness. He was a consummate fine printer, rewarded by transmitting the sensitivities of his seeing into a tangible form. 

It was an intensely personal journey as the photographs are emotional and evocative – and an escape from domestic problems and relationship difficulties. From time to time, he came to stay in my caravan in the Peak District and went out alone every day with his trusty MPP 5×4 and tripod. “To be alone in the landscape was a release, a return to the pleasures and pursuits of my childhood which had been lost to me,” he said. 

John had left school at 16, going against his parents’ wishes to work on farms in Shropshire, my native county. He would talk about working with horses under the shadow of the iconic Wrekin, a hill near what is now Telford. Up until that time he had been a city boy. He was born in 1936 into a house without books, but became an avid reader obsessed with birdwatching, drawing and painting. He was influenced by his grandfather who had been a carter (someone who transported goods by cart). Perhaps that is why he always headed for the stables when he came to visit me. 

On one of those visits he came with a handsome young man in his twenties, one of his two sons from his marriage to first wife Sheila. He had not seen him since the youngster had been a child and part of the reconciliation was visiting his photographic world. John was not a mystic in my experience, though he was mysterious. But if you want to discover this complex, gifted and generous person, you need only look at his photographs.

John was married to Sheila and Penelope and had two long-term partners, Catherine and Rosalind. He leaves behind three sons, Jay, Paul and Matthew, and two daughters, Gita and Orla. An open celebration of his life will take place later this year.

“AIPAD needs to continue to evolve and grow with the market it represents, which includes encouraging the next generation of dealers, artists, curators and collectors.”

– Lydia Melamed Johnson, Director, AIPAD

Discovery shines a spotlight on emerging galleries and fresh or rediscovered talent through single-artist and tightly curated thematic presentations, reflecting AIPAD’s commitment to evolving with the medium while providing a platform for the next generation of photographic voices. “AIPAD needs to continue to evolve and grow with the market it represents, which includes encouraging the next generation of dealers, artists, curators and collectors,” reflects Melamed Johnson. First-time exhibitors like Galerie Alta (Andorra), Galerie Julian Sander (Germany), LARGE GLASS (UK), and Ungallery (Argentina) will join a roster of long-time participants, creating a dynamic interplay between contemporary perspectives and the historical giants of photography.  

“We want to ensure that AIPAD stays encyclopaedic for the medium… Last year truly showcased contemporary photography in all its current forms, breaking the prevailing thought that AIPAD has been more historically oriented,” continues Melamed Johnson.

Returning favourites such as Bruce Silverstein, Howard Greenberg Gallery, and Michael Hoppen bring decades of expertise and iconic works to the fair, complementing the energy and experimentation of newer participants. Together, these exhibitors create a fair that bridges photography’s legacy with its future.  

This year’s fair also features a revamped layout and a renewed focus on photobooks. For the first time, publishers will be integrated into the main exhibition space, underscoring the critical role of photography publishing in shaping the medium. Among the participating publishers are GOST Books (London), Setanta Books (London), Thames & Hudson (London) and Atelier EXB (Paris), who will share space in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall alongside galleries, fostering a unique blend of visual and printed storytelling.  

Beyond the exhibitors, The Photography Show 2025 offers a robust slate of programming. Four days of AIPAD Talks, led by thought leaders in the arts, will explore the intersections of photography, culture, and history. Guided walkthroughs and educational events will add depth to the visitor experience, providing opportunities for deeper engagement with the works on display.

The panels will include conversations between first-generation immigrant artists, “as well as a great panel on 19th Century photography,” Melamed Johnson tells me. New partnerships include PBS All Arts and its new show Portrait Mode with Sophie Elgort, and AIPAD is also in the process of launching a podcast partnership with Subtext & Discourse and Michael Dooney.

AIPAD will honour a transformative figure in photography with its annual award, presented during the newly introduced Opening Night Party on 23 April. The award, known for recognising individuals who have reshaped the way we perceive photography, reinforces the fair’s mission to champion innovation and excellence in the field.  

From emerging voices to established names, from thought-provoking talks to the tactile pleasure of photobooks, this year’s fair offers an inspiring exploration of photography’s potential.  

Looking forward, AIPAD hopes to continue its support for its members and broaden awareness and audiences for the medium of photography. “This means using new modes of media and collaboration,” says Melamed Johnson, “while keeping to the standards we are renowned for and hold the industry to.”

Here are the exhibitors at AIPAD’s Photography Show this year:

• 19th Century Rare Book & Photograph Shop | New York, NY
• Andrew Smith Gallery | Tucson, AZ
• Bildhalle | Zurich, Switzerland | Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Bruce Silverstein | New York, NY
• Candela Gallery | Richmond, VA
• Catherine Couturier Gallery | Houston, TX
• Cavalier Galleries | New York, NY | Greenwich, CT | Nantucket, MA | Palm Beach, FL
• Charles Isaacs Photographs | New York, NY
• CLAMP | New York, NY
• Contemporary/Vintage Works | Chalfont, PA
• Daniel / Oliver Gallery | Brooklyn, NY
• Danziger Gallery | New York, NY
• Deborah Bell Photographs | New York, NY
• Echo Fine Arts | Cannes, France
• Form. Gallery | Dinard, France
• Galeria Alta | Andorra
• Galerie Johannes Faber | Vienna, Austria
• Galerie Julian Sander | Cologne, Germany
• GALERIE XII | Los Angeles, CA | Paris, France
• Galerija Fotografija Gallery | Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Gilman Contemporary | Ketchum, ID
• Gitterman Gallery | New York, NY
• HackelBury | London, UK
• Hans P. Kraus Jr. Inc. | New York, NY
• Higher Pictures | Brooklyn, NY
• Holden Luntz | Palm Beach, FL
• Howard Greenberg Gallery | New York, NY
• Ilaria Quadrani Fine Art | New York, NY
• Jackson Fine Art | Atlanta, GA
• jdc Fine Art | San Diego, CA
• Joseph Bellows Gallery | La Jolla, CA
• Keith de Lellis Gallery | New York, NY
• Koslov Larsen | Houston, TX
• La Galerie de L’Instant | Paris, France
• LARGE GLASS | London, UK
• Marshall Gallery | Los Angeles, CA
• Michael Hoppen | London, UK
• MIYAKO YOSHINAGA | New York, NY
• MUUS Collection | Tenafly, NJ
• Monroe Gallery of Photography | Santa Fe, NM
• Nailya Alexander Gallery | New York, NY
• Obscura Gallery | Santa Fe, NM
• Olivier Waltman Gallery | Miami, FL | Paris, France
• Patricia Conde Galería | Mexico City, Mexico
• Paul M. Hertzmann, Inc. | San Francisco, CA
• Peter Fetterman Gallery | Santa Monica, CA
• Photo Discovery | Paris, France
• POLKA Galerie | Paris, France
• Richard Moore Photographs | Oakland, CA
• Rick Wester Fine Art | New York, NY
• Robert Klein Gallery | Boston, MA
• Robert Mann Gallery | New York, NY
• Rose Gallery | Santa Monica, CA
• Sasha Wolf Projects | New York, NY
• Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd. | Santa Fe, NM
• Scott Nichols Gallery | Sonoma, CA
• Staley-Wise Gallery | New York, NY
• Stephen Bulger Gallery | Toronto, ON
• Stephen Daiter Gallery | Chicago, IL
• Throckmorton Fine Art | New York, NY
• Toluca Fine Art | Paris, France
• Ungallery | Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Vasari | Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Weston Gallery, Inc. | Carmel, CA
• Yancey Richardson | New York, NY

Photobook + Partners

• 10×10 Photobooks | New York, NY
• American Photography Archives Group | New York, NY
• Aperture | New York, NY
• Atelier EXB | Paris, France
• Convoke | New York, NY
• Datz Press | Seoul, South Korea
• GOST Books | London, UK
• Gravy Studio | Philadelphia, PA
• KGP MONOLITH | New York, NY
• L’Artiere | Bologna, Italy
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Find out more at aipad.com/show

Over those long months stuck at home over the past two years, the pair immersed themselves in a mythical vision of NYC as portrayed by visionaries such as EB White, Gordon Parks and Alfred Hitchcock. “We had visited and fallen in love with the City before. But during this period of constant daydreaming, it became something of an obsession, like the ultimate form of escapism for the both of us,” they agree. They began making plans to visit New York as soon as they could. 

When they finally got there, however, their expectations and reality collided. “We felt exhilarated to have arrived, but we quickly realised it wasn’t the New York we’d imagined and over-romanticised. Instead, we found a city in recovery, once again picking up the pieces of a crisis.” For the next five weeks, the duo sought to capture the essence of a city they had dreamed up in their minds, and the reality that presented itself before them. Exploring the streets together, they photographed similar scenes, capturing the locations from multiple perspectives.

The resulting images are layered and dreamlike, with a richly cinematic feel. The reflections of tall buildings and blurred images of passersby create movement. We feel as if we are pacing along the street and stealing glances side by side with the photographers. Noticeable icons of New York such as the Empire State Building are present in the pictures too, but they often appear abstracted. Precedence is given to smaller moments, and the everyday denizens who inhabit these streets. 

“Where most people would see only an abandoned office building, or a lonesome mannequin standing in an empty store window, we chose to look for beauty instead,” they explain. “We sought to capture the unstaged and almost indefinable elements of the city, be they vague silhouettes of people, or the vast amount of colours, abstract shapes and poetic rhythms the city itself consists of. The result is a shared perception of a place that transcends time – and a deeply personal love letter to an endlessly magical city.” 

Van Rij and van der Leeuw often roam the streets together with their cameras, sometimes seeking their own images, and sometimes working together on commissioned projects. A City Fantastic, however, is their first personal work together. Now, they’re looking forward to future projects. “Since we are both mostly inspired by cinema, we’re planning to shoot our first short fictional movie in the near future,” they reveal.

sarahvanrij.com

davidvdleeuw.com

Born in 1970 in Stavanger, Norway, the photographer began drawing as a small child, and by his late-teens, was contributing editorial cartoons to his local paper. Although he grew up with a dark room in his home — built by his father, an amateur photographer — he did not take up photography as an artistic medium until later on. At 21, he enrolled onto a Cultural Studies degree at Rogaland University Centre in Oslo. “That’s when I switched over,” says Rødland, who later went on to study photography at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts. “My photography was closer to the artistic impulse than my drawings.”

Still, paintings and drawings provide a source of inspiration, or reference point, in Rødland’s process. “I always look to what painters do, while pushing for photography to constitute equally complex and layered visual expressions of—and statements for—our time,” says Rødland, in a statement provided by the gallery. Removed from the intrinsic here-and-now of the photographic medium, part of the success of Rødland’s images in igniting multiple emotions in his viewers lie in their timeless quality. “Photography is no longer a young medium. Like painting, it can help us empower the past and reconnect with the archaic, the living mystery.”

Torbjørn Rødland: More Than Tongue Can Tell is currently on show at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, until 20 February 2021.

As a multidisciplinary artist working in installation and collage strategies, Winant uses found imagery to create a setting that asks the question, ‘What does a free body look like?’ Her practice, one that is messy, alive and impeccably thorough, interrogates this idea with an intense and energetic curiosity. Her work exists as a continuum, with each project profoundly interrelated. “It’s an informative flow that amounts to a larger practice,” she reflects. “Notes on Fundamental Joy very much arrived through My Birth [2018], in that I was thinking about [the questions] – What does it mean and look like to build a family? What are women and feminist-centred worlds? What are women’s possibilities for representations therein?” 

“Their joy disarms me. They live without the threat of sexual violence and harassment. Occupying a body that is neither a weapon or a target.”

Notes on Fundamental Joy is her most recent book, published by Printed Matter in 2019. Seeking the elimination of oppression through the social and political transformation of the patriarchy that otherwise threatens to bury us, Winant curates a visual manifesto using photographs from the Separatist archive, and explores notions of equivalence and safety, crucially examining how those experiences can be represented. Indeed, for these feminist, separatist communes, picture-making was at the centre of their liberation. The groups held workshops, known as Ovulars – a playful take on the etymological meaning of seminar, to spread seed, with ocular, connected to the eye – led by artist members including Tee Corinne, Joan E Biren, Ruth and Jean Mountaingrove, a poet and photographer respectfully, Clytia Fuller and Carol Newhouse. Together, they orientated women on how to use the 4Å~5 camera, how to develop film in their makeshift darkrooms, and how to publish their work. The camera became a tool for living. A visual strategy not just to reclaim how they were pictured and represented, but as an agent of radical optimism.

In these works, a camera often meets a camera, as tenderness plays out within the frame. Nude women photograph each other, together and in community; an astute reclamation of the inherent and problematic power dynamic of the medium. What is radical about these images is the ease with which their bodies move through space. Soft, untethered from shame and expectation, existing purely in each other’s loving gaze. “Their joy disarms me,” says Winant. “They live without the threat of sexual violence and harassment. Occupying a body that is neither a weapon or a target.” This potent redefinition of photography as a tool for collective rather than individual recognition feels dynamic in our current vernacular. As an artist who uses photography for all of its feminist potential, these photographs create a map for a world Winant was searching for but never knew existed.

In continuation of the exploration of these found families, Winant turns to physical closeness in her new body of work, Togethering. ‘Togethering’ is a word invented by the residents of womyn’s lands to describe the practice of living united. “The idea of being together as a political act founded in tenderness was really moving to me,” explains the photographer. “This was the genesis for the way I collected images, really thinking about bodies coming into contact with other bodies.” The resulting work is an immersive experience that seeks to translate the sensation of touch, with multiple lines of enquiry and concurrent impacts. Found images depicting bodies in protest, bodies making love, and bodies enveloped in paternal embrace; each experience bleeding into each other. “I’m trying to process pleasure,” says Winant. “How we account for, and represent the most ineffable thing. This deep internal state, and how it is teased up through being together and in the process of consuming each other, becoming one body.”

“The idea of being together as a political act founded in tenderness was really moving to me.”

Winant’s source material is vast. In this work alone, she gathered images from books and magazines on consciousness-raising, feminist healing practices, nudist colonies, the women explorers of Mesopotamia, civil rights liberation struggle and protracted lovemaking, to name a few. Many of the photographs are imperfect, scratched, stained and some scribbled over, which makes them all the more precious in Winant’s eyes. These are mounted together, with the shape and framing based on a mandala, a diagrammatic form that represents the cosmos. Each one unique, yet together building a constellation of touch, an open-ended potential of ‘togethering’. 

There are so rarely hero images in Winant’s work; she favours multiple frames on a single plane informed by the work of Joan E Biren. JEB, as she prefers to be known, spoke out about decolonising patriarchal seeing, a reimagining of compositional strategies as feminist. “In her work, there is a unanimous tenderness but also no privileging of one or the other,” says Winant. “It does feel like composition and design strategies can be politically salient, meaningful and informative as much as the aboutness of the images themselves.”

In the context of a global pandemic, the axis of ‘togetherness’ was further galvanised. The lack of intimacy and community affected us all in some way, and Winant’s project metamorphosed to validate those vital human experiences. “We all feel it in different ways, depending on our geo global contexts, but the ground is moving beneath us,” she says. “I’m interested by this in my work, but also my life and my consciousness. The power and efficacy of political movements are what happens when we see 100,000 people from above, taking to the streets and looking like a single ocean. It’s powerful in action and in its visual potential.” The world impresses itself upon us, and like many of us in this moment, Winant is reckoning with the impact of her output. “I see people who are so brave, putting their bodies on the fucking line,” she says. “As I look at the women who left everything behind to live on the land, I think, ‘Would I do that?’ I don’t think so. There is a romance with the prospect of demonstrative bravery, to use your body as a political instrument in service of progressive values. Bravery, when paired with imagination, is explosive. That’s at the heart of it all. I’m always driving towards that in my work.”

If the feminist imperative is to believe that a radically different world is possible, Winant’s work exists as its evidence, while also teasing out the contradictions that remain unresolved. Though utopic in aspiration, these communities were often exclusionary in premise, mirroring the lack of intersectionality still rife in feminist movements today. The work asserts that there is no single way to read a narrative into the project, it is both joyful and contradictory. It is continuous ongoing dialogue emboldened by imagining as a primary life force. Winant asserts, “Art is not here, in this project or across my life, a tool for resistance, but rather a method of documenting an idea.”

carmenwinant.com