“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 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.”

“What I most want my pictures to do is to lead to reflection and then action. The revolution only comes through evolution.”

– Sebastião Salgado

Salgado and Hopkinson discuss images with which his name is now synonymous, including his shots of miners toiling in the Serra Pelada gold mine, which were made between 1986 – 1989, and some of which were published by The Sunday Times in 1987 [BJP’s article by Neil Burgess gives an insight getting it into print]. “I’m a reporter. I only take pictures of people. The important thing is to concentrate on the essential, by which I mean the dignity of humanity,” Salgado tells Hopkinson.

He’s also adamant he doesn’t want to convey vague impressions of generic suffering and – keenly aware of his position as a Brazilian, born outside the West – is alive to the power hierarchies that create inequalities such as the mines. “I admit there’s a very specific message in my work,” he tells Hopkinson. “The Third World has never been as poor as it is today. The cost of raw materials is dropping while that of industrial products continually rises. The developing countries have never been as poor or as dependent as they are today.”

“The West is rich, with many more resources at its disposal,” he continues. “It is time to launch the concept of the universality of humanity. Photography lends itself to a demonstration of this and as an instrument of solidarity between peoples.”

In 1994 Salgado left Magnum and set up his own agency, Amazonas Images, with Wanick Salgado. He worked on Migrations until the late 1990s but after that, he tells Hamilton, he had “seen so much suffering, violence, war and famine, created by the large-scale movements of country people to the cities, of those fleeing armed conflicts, genocide or natural disasters, that I had started to lose my faith in the future of humanity”.

His response was to start work on Genesis in 2004, an eight-year project he described as “a visual ode to the majesty and fragility of the Earth”. Including lyrical landscapes, close-up images of animals, and portraits of peoples living in greater harmony with the planet, this project represented the most important eight years of his life, he tells Hamilton. “I saw probably the most beautiful, the most interesting, parts of this planet – the most incredible relations between the parts of this planet and the species that live on it. 

“I hear everywhere in the world people saying that we are the only rational species on this planet – but it’s a big lie,” he continues. “A huge lie! Each species is rational. I discovered this photographing at very close quarters. They are as rational as we are. They love their babies, they love each other.” Later he adds that a lizard’s hand “is like a human hand, but covered in something like chain mail”.

It’s a view of animals that could be described as anthropomorphic, and this is not the only potential criticism of Salgado’s photography; throughout his career critics questioned whether his images aestheticise and objectify, most memorably Ingrid Sischy in The New Yorker in 1991. In her article Good Intentions Sischy writes of “the unrelenting application of the lyric and the didactic to his subjects”, and asserts that “Salgado’s subjects are too much in the service of illustrating his various themes and notions to be allowed either to stand forth as individuals or to represent millions”.

It’s a factor Hopkinson also brings up in her article for BJP. She references an ad campaign Salgado worked on for Silk Cut in 1988, for example, which was banned by the Advertising Standard Authority on the grounds that it misrepresented an ethnic minority. “That the depiction of Papua New Guinea tribesmen bearing a standard of slashed purple silk might have been a surreptitious manifestation of western neo-imperialism seems to have escaped Salgado’s fierce scrutiny,” Hopkinson writes. 

Hopkinson also asks Salgado about depersonalisation in his images of the Brazilian miners, which she describes as showing “what look like millions of toiling ants endlessly fulfilling the curse of Sisyphus”, throwing into question the “vaunted dignity of humanity” in Salgado’s work. He’s genuinely perplexed, she says, remonstrating that: “It makes no difference whether I photograph one person or a hundred together, I know every one of those miners, I’ve lived among them. They are all my friends.” 

It’s a moot point but also an insight into Salgado’s working method; he didn’t aim for a distanced, anthropological perspective, and preferred to work alone to get closer to those he photographed. “Only by tendering yourself as defenceless as the people you photograph, entering their world as a vulnerable stranger, will they not only tolerate but welcome your presence,” he tells Hopkinson. “There’s no sense in which I am an anonymous voyeur: I live within the phenomenon I document.”

Salgado took a similar approach when making Genesis, sometimes quite literally getting close to the nature, animals, and people he photographed. “With some of these animals I got down on my hands and knees to be close to them, at their level for three or four hours,” he tells Hamilton. Sadly, longer-term Salgado really was vulnerable and living within the phenomenon – his death was caused by leukemia, traceable to a 2010 trip to Indonesian New Guinea on which he contracted falciparum malaria, which permanently impaired his bone-marrow function.

Salgado’s work remains, however, as does another important project – the reforestation of some 17,000 acres of land in Brazil, known as the Instituto Terra. Salgado grew up in a cattle ranch which had fallen victim to deforestation and erosion by the end of the 20th century; his father proposed Salgado and his wife take it over and, while at first the couple was reluctant, “Leila had the great idea that we could replant it and recreate the forest that had been there before,” Salgado told Hamilton. 

“We sowed more than 300 species of tree, and as the saplings became trees, insects, flowers and birds began to reappear,” he continues. “In time the reforestation also meant the land could now absorb the water from flash floods and so the rivers and streams could flow all year long. And at last the fish and calmans came back too. 

“Although we were amazed at how nature can fight back, we began to get worried about the threat to the whole planet. There is a strange idea that nature and humanity are different but in fact this separation poses a great threat to humanity. We think we can control nature, but it’s easy to forget that we need it for our survival.”

 Sebastião Salgado 08 February 1944 – 23 May 2025.

“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.

“His images are testament to the centrality of the photograph in memory and in history”

In now iconic images, such as a child playing with a ball next to an anti-tank device on Sarajevo’s frontline, or the string quartet performing in the ruins of the city’s library, or the wounded woman being supported by Egyptian UN soldiers after mortar attacks on the city centre, Paul captured a fraction of a second of human experience that obtained deeper significance over time. His images are testament to the centrality of the photograph in memory and in history; his understanding of its ability to connect past with present is what honed his eye.

Realising frontline photography was unsustainable for the family life to which he was devoted, Paul’s thoughts turned towards teaching prospective photojournalists, and, over time, to what it means to bear witness to atrocity. At Foto8 in London, where I worked as a writer, and where in 2005 we had exhibited his work Bosnians in our gallery, Host, Paul (while dancing) told me about an online course he was setting up at London College of Communication, one of the first of its kind in the UK. He soon persuaded me to jump ship from the institution where I was teaching to join him at LCC.

When I arrived, Paul was running both the groundbreaking online course and the already renowned onsite course in photojournalism and documentary photography, which he had recently been able to accredit as a master’s degree. He referred to intricate matters of timetabling as ‘4D chess’, which was equally a fair description of how his brain functioned, as he established and grew the two courses, which have become world-leading in their field. Paul stretched time far beyond its linear limits; he was regularly, provably, in two places at once, making sense of students’ ideas and working with them long after their period of study, helping hundreds upon hundreds of people realise their potential, photographic and otherwise. This extraordinary ability was born of the fact that he saw the very best in everybody; his exceptional generosity was as unsentimental as it was limitless. The most frequent phrase used about him at work was ‘force of nature’.

Paul’s academic contribution to the discourse of photojournalism and documentary photography centred around the ethics of witnessing. In this, he was in dialogue with contemporary thinkers such as Susan Sontag, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Susie Linfield, Judith Butler, Barbie Zelizer and many others. His rare combination of theoretical rigour and frontline experience brought visionary clarity to his scholarly works such as Photography, Bearing Witness and the Yugoslav Wars, 1988-2021: Testimonies of Light, Understanding Photojournalism and Reporting the Siege of Sarajevo.

Like other photographers in Bosnia at the time, who witnessed crimes against humanity and genocide taking place contemporaneously, he understood that to do so ‘demands a position of moral courage from the practitioner, moving them from detached journalist to active advocate, providing testimonies that celebrate and commemorate the human spirit’. The war in the Balkans engendered a fundamental shift in photojournalism, towards an understanding of images both as evidence and as a call to action, which would contribute to the eventual Nato intervention, and to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Paul was beginning an LCC collaborative project with Amnesty to continue this urgent, essential work on visualising war crimes.

The annual academic conference he co-organised in Sarajevo, Why Remember?, tackled the role of the photographic image and of culture more widely in public memory. This year’s edition focused on reframing trauma, with powerful contributions from War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, and the Imperial War Museum, as well as colleagues from Ukrainian universities, University of the Arts London, King’s College London War Studies, and many other global scholars. Paul’s personal commitment to the city he made his home, and to justice, insisted that all who knew him would care deeply about Sarajevo too; about the dereliction of duty on behalf of the international community during the war, but also about matters of restorative justice and paths towards peace, which became a focus, notably with his work with the Peace and Conflict Cultural Network at UAL. 

Conference delegates dined together each evening in the atmospheric restaurants of the city’s Baščaršija, and, memorably, at the restaurant in the mountains overlooking the city which is the setting for the charged, joyful image of the couple kissing – they were just married – that forms the cover of Bosnians. The luminous city descends below, looking eternal. Sarajevans loved the four mountains which encircled them, yet this geography facilitated sniper positions and turned the city below into a sitting target. Eleven thousand people died in the siege. 

This summer, Paul’s photographs of the siege were exhibited, for the second time, in the grand octagonal hall of the Vijećnica, Sarajevo’s City Hall, destroyed by Serbian incendiary shelling during the war, in an attempt to wipe out Bosnia’s cultural heritage. Though hundreds of irreplaceable documents were burned, including some from Ottoman times, the library itself was completely rebuilt, reopening in 2014. Paul’s film of the siege – still images set to music – was also on show, in Gallery 11/07/95 Memorial Museum in the city. Watching it with colleagues and strangers, tears fell from every eye.

Everyone who ever worked with Paul will understand that to do so was to become his friend. Paul took us all with him, creating constellations of people all over the world, who now share community and creativity, not least among the photographers of VII, of his prior agency Panos Pictures, and even at Magnum, where he was nominated as an associate member in the early 2000s.  

This expansive capacity extended into other areas of his life. He was a dedicated and accomplished runner; an activity he also wanted to share. In the first week of term, the 2015 cohort and I accompanied him as he led a chi-running event around Elephant and Castle, London with his customary enthusiasm. He completed marathons and ultra-marathons with similarly motivated alumni and colleagues, and ran daily, whether along the Miljacka River, up snowy Mount Igman, or in Clissold Park. He even won first place in a recent race in Sarajevo for runners and their dogs. His passion for dancing ran the gamut from Northern Soul to ABBA to a fine salsa step. He would appreciate being remembered for posterity as a sharp dresser too. 

Paul’s death is a gaping wound for those of us who knew and loved him, but a generation of students, photographers, writers, academics, NGO and cultural workers, journalists and artists has been forever changed by encounters with the award-winning photographer, who became a visionary educator, and, fittingly, Professor of Conflict, Peace and the Image. His photographic and academic legacy is assured, yet it is his matchless energy and indestructible spirit that will survive in all of us, in the images we make, the stories we tell, and the friendships we nurture.

Paul Lowe, Professor of Conflict, Peace and the Image, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, 06 November 1963–12 October 2024. He is survived by his wife and sons.

Photography, Bearing Witness and the Yugoslav Wars, 1988-2021: Testimonies of Light by Paul Lowe, Routledge, 2024

Reporting the Siege of Sarajevo by Kenneth Morrison and Paul Lowe, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021

Understanding Photojournalism by Jennifer Good and Paul Lowe, Routledge, 2019

Bosnians by Paul Lowe, Saqi Books, 2005

“A visitor to the Summerfield home would often find Paddy ensconced in writing, reading or discussion with friends and photographers”

Although Summerfield had been making pictures since the late-1960s – and had exhibited extensively across the UK and even internationally – Mother and Father was his first major publication, establishing his groundbreaking use of a unique and emotional photographic perspective. His work became representative of what became known as the ‘psychological perspective’ – in which the artist’s compositions place the viewer at the scene’s emotional apex, blurring the boundaries between the subject, the photographer and viewer.

Several more books were to follow including The Oxford Pictures 1968-1978 (2016), Empty Days (2018), The Holiday Pictures (2019) and Home Movie (2021). Each subsequent title added to Summerfield’s reputation as one of the most important contemporary British documentary photographers. In his final years, Summerfield worked mainly in colour, using an old flip phone to photograph the garden and the people who surrounded him. Some of these were published in his final book The Beginnings of Eternity (2024), an “apparent travelogue” which also concludes in a garden.

In 2019, Summerfield married his partner, Patricia Baker-Cassidy, who by this time had become his de-facto producer. Baker-Cassidy brought order to the chaos of Paddy’s now notorious bins of thousands of negatives that he had accumulated over the decades. A visitor to the Summerfield home would often find Paddy ensconced in writing, reading or discussion with friends and photographers while Baker-Cassidy worked diligently with a film scanner, as together they put together numerous maquettes for planned publications.

The well respected Oxford Photography Group was often hosted by Summerfield and Baker-Cassidy at his home. He supported the group and worked closely with individual photographers, many of whom went on to enjoy their own success. Almost ten years after the publication of Mother and Father, a new body of work was made by a group of photographers (including myself, Vanessa Winship, Siân Davey, Matthew Finn, Alys Tomlinson, Nik Roche and Jem Southam) who wanted to preserve the garden where Mother and Father had taken form – and to pay homage to Summerfield’s work. The resulting images were published last year as Pictures from the Garden (as ever by Dewi Lewis) and an exhibition was staged in Oxford, supported by The Photographers’ Gallery.

Summerfield’s work was supported by curators, academics and other photographers such as Richard Ovenden, Nicholas Serota and Martin Parr, Bill Jay and Peter Turner, who edited Creative Camera in the late-1980s. Summerfield’s own exhibition list is long and varied. He showed in group presentations alongside the likes of André Kertesz, John Goto and Gerry Badger (who has written extensively about Summerfield’s work). His work is held in national, international, private and institutional collections, with the Bodleian Library recently completing their acquisition of Summerfield’s extensive archive and plans for a major exhibition next year.

It was a great honour for me to give Paddy what would turn out to be his final solo show, The Holiday Pictures, at Flow Photographic Gallery in 2019. Sue Davies, the founder of The Photographers’ Gallery, then in failing health herself, made the journey from Surrey to North West London to see the show, one of the last she would visit before her own passing. Paddy was the most photographic person I have ever known. It was as impossible to distinguish the man from the medium as it is, sometimes, to discern the sea from the sky on a blue day, when both seem to merge into one.

In his early career, Griffin introduced a bold new visual language to corporate photography, going on to create truly audacious campaigns that went well beyond any normal brief. Meanwhile, his work was exhibited in galleries, museums and festivals, starting with some key shows in Britain in the 1970s that were milestones in the acceptance of photography into the mainstream art world. 

The 1980s were his peak years, when he produced some of his most famous images and he came to wider international attention. (The Guardian named him “the photographer of the decade” in 1989). In 2003 he returned to image-making after a 12-year segue into music videos and TV commercials. The photography landscape had changed, and there weren’t the riches of before, but there were garlands. 

“He had a completely unique vision,” says Martin Parr, who met Griffin at Manchester Polytechnic in the early 1970s, establishing a lifelong friendship. “The kind of portraits he did, no one had seen anything like them before. He was a real innovator.”

Life in light 

Born in Birmingham in 1948, Griffin had grown up in Lye in the Black Country, leaving school at 16 to work as a trainee pipework engineering estimator for British Steel. He remained there for four years, later saying that the clash and flash of nearby metalworks was a major influence on his imagery (the symbol of the heroic worker would figure throughout his 50-year career). At Manchester, Parr recalls that the pair “immediately connected and became friends.” Alongside Daniel Meadows and others, they formed a kind of salon, challenging each other in photographic games and studying the work of a new wave of self-styled documentary photographers such as Tony Ray-Jones.

Griffin moved to London to pursue a freelance career, and taking a portfolio of black-and-white photographs of ballroom dancers to Roland Schenk, the celebrated creative director of Management Today, proved crucial. “It was an important meeting,” says Anne Braybon, who years later was art director of the magazine, and later still would commission Griffin for the National Portrait Gallery. “Schenk was the first to commission Brian, seeing in his work a new Robert Frank. He also introduced Brian to fine art and film, and those influences continued.”

Griffin repaid Schenk’s faith with extraordinary, theatrical, subversive portraits of otherwise nondescript business leaders. This bold approach formed the basis for an multi-award-winning and lucrative career that flourished in the boom years of the 1980s, working for design and advertising agencies while shooting cutting edge imagery for the music industry.

He was a virtuoso when it came to lighting, but the basis of Griffin’s imagery was observation, finding some small detail in his subjects to magnify and playfully twist. Perhaps his most famous album cover, Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp! (1979), was one of his quickest to shoot, capturing the singer’s bright white winklepickers in a shaft of sunlight while trying to find a location to make a portrait on London’s Southbank.

“He took chances, he pushed the envelope,” says Paul Hill, a leading figure in British photography by the 1970s who selected Griffin’s work (alongside Parr and Thomas Joshua Cooper) for Three Perspectives on Photography at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1979. It proved one the most important UK institutional shows of the decade at a time when the mainstream art world began waking up to photography.

“As well as having a great eye and an extraordinary sense of things coming together within a single frame, he used lighting in a very original way,” Hill explains. “Brian’s mission was to make unique images. Whether he was photographing Depeche Mode or Margaret Thatcher, he wasn’t trying to make a likeness or do a PR job. He was trying to make an important, unique photograph.”

Another key exhibition was at the 1987 Rencontres d’Arles photo festival. The festival’s director, François Hébel, had shown Parr’s The Last Resort the year previously, and Griffin’s former college mate suggested his work for the next edition, where it was exhibited alongside Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The festival opened new opportunities for Griffin to exhibit across Europe, and he worked with Hébel again many times over the years in different guises.

“He was one of my closest friends in photography,” says the Frenchman. “I really admire his work, and I don’t think he gets the recognition he deserves. He had a way to get his subjects to do anything he wanted. There are very few photographers that have this ability to create signature images in the very short time [you have to shoot a portrait]. You instantly recognise a Brian Griffin picture. There is a consistency, even though he changed over the years, moving from black-and-white film to colour digital.

“I have seen him shooting, and he had such concentration in front of the people he was taking pictures of. I think that’s why they would always do what he wanted them to do; here was this guy in front of them with his eyes so intense.”

London calling

Griffin was also a pioneer in the field of photobooks. Parr reckons he was the first photographer in the UK to go the self-publishing route as an act of creative independence, collaborating with his great friend and “soul brother”, the acclaimed graphic designer, Barney Bubbles. There would be many more books throughout his career, and one of them, Work, marked a highpoint and in some senses a closure to the first half of his career. It was published in 1988 alongside a one-man show at the National Portrait Gallery, and went on to be awarded the best photography book at the Barcelona Primavera Fotografica in 1991.

Much of it was drawn from his best known corporate commission to photograph the new Broadgate development in the City of London. Typical of Griffin, he chose to elevate not the new buildings or the financiers, but the workers who built it. “Rosehaugh Stanhope, the developers, were erecting sculptures around Broadgate but none of them paid heed to the workers building the project,” Griffin wrote in his 2021 self-published biography, Black Country Dada. “So, Peter [Davenport, the designer who commissioned him] and I decided to create our own sculpture. However, this was a living sculpture using one of the project workers, Eric Foster, a steel erector.”

Griffin spent the 1990s shooting music videos and TV commercials, co-founding his own production company. In 2003, he was invited to support Birmingham’s bid to become the European Capital City of Culture. His return to photography after 12 years away sparked newfound interest in his back catalogue. Art Museum Reykjavik staged a retrospective in 2005, followed by large-scale exhibitions focusing on various aspects of his practice in Arles, Birmingham and Bologna, along with dozens of smaller shows. Griffin became a patron of Derby’s Format Photography Festival in 2009 – the same year he was honoured with a major retrospective in Arles – and four years later received the Centenary Medal from the Royal Photographic Society and an Honorary Doctorate from Birmingham City University.

A ‘rare’ generosity

Yet his hunger to make unique images never diminished, and he remained prolific as both a photographer-for-hire and an artist in his own right. His personal projects were more tightly conceptualised and yet more varied in their focus, ranging from Gary, a series on his neighbours in Rotherhithe, where he lived and worked for more than 40 years; The Black Kingdom, based on his early years in the 1950s and 60s; and Spud, inspired by a residency in Béthune-Bruay in Northern France, marking the centenary of the end of World War I.

There were more major commissions too – notably for Reykjavik Energy, another for HSI and the opening of St Pancras station, and best of all, to his mind, for London’s Olympic Games Road to 2012, which he was determined to shoot, and was commissioned by Braybon for the National Portrait Gallery. “He was bold. He always went his own way,” s he recalls. “At the opening, Nadav Kander walked in to see Brian’s work, naming him ‘the master.’”

Hyman, who had planned to work with Griffin on a new retrospective this year, is certain of his importance in the story of British photography. “He’s got a central place in that history. He was also a very individual voice.” Like everyone else contacted for this article, Hyman mentions Griffin’s vivacity and generosity of spirit. Magdalena Shackleton, who supported Griffin’s work for years and showed two solo exhibitions at her MMX Gallery in South London, fondly remembers exhibiting his work at art fairs – and Griffin surrounded by friends in their local pub. “He always met people on the same level, whoever they were, and wherever they fitted into the business world or the art world,” says Hébel. “He would pull out a little something of his subjects so you would understand their role. But there was no hierarchy. And that is incredibly rare.”

The young Critchlow took a different path, joining the merchant navy at age 15. “By the time I was 18 I’d been around the world a couple of times,” he remembered. “The Med, Australia, India, the USA. The furthest north was Baffin Island.” While travelling, Critchlow developed his interest in drawing, pursuing a correspondence course in art history through the Seafarers Education Service. Upon returning to the North East in 1977, he signed up for a foundation course in graphic design and art history at Ashington College.

“They thrust this 35mm camera in my hand and told me to take pictures,” Critchlow remembered. One exercise in the photography module was to go out and take images of the angles of local buildings. But Critchlow’s eye was drawn to the people who inhabited these spaces – the passers-by and varied characters. His photography lecturer “hated his stuff,” Critchlow recalled, complaining that he had veered from the brief. But his art history teacher recognised his ambition. “You’re doing social documentary photography here,” he told Critchlow. Almost by accident, he had found his form. His subject was all around him, and Coal Town, his long-term project about Ashington, was born.

Critchlow’s photographs show industrial life in the half-light, the shadows of welfare clubs and pubs, back alleys and church halls providing space for his characters to go about their business. The variety of settings in Coal Town speaks not just to Critchlow’s photographic appetite, but also to the trust that existed between him and his subjects. Women allow him to photograph them having their hair done; men barely look up as he captures them playing dominoes; others laugh in the changing room baths after a match at Ashington Football Club. His photographs of children are particularly well-observed, documenting their playtime at school and in the streets with a genuine belief in the importance of their lives.

“They showed me that ordinary people’s lives could be important and could be seen as art”

Critchlow was initially inspired by The Ashington Group of artists (also known as the Pitman Painters), having seen an exhibition of their works at Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool in 1977. The collective was made up of local miners who came together in 1934 to pursue artmaking, mainly through sketches and vibrant, detailed paintings. “They recorded their lives with such honesty, painting the ordinary, the mundane, the everyday,” Critchlow recalled. “They showed me that ordinary people’s lives could be important and could be seen as art.” It was a philosophy Critchlow lived by for his whole career. When local people would query why he was photographing them, he would tell them that they had created the wealth in Ashington; that they were an important part of its history. “Every frame’s like an act of remembrance, for future generations,” he said. “People trusted me. I was part of the tribe.”

Around the same time, Side Gallery in Newcastle was developing its programme, having shown photographs by Graham Smith, Chris Killip, Homer Sykes and August Sander in 1977, the year of its opening. Critchlow visited an exhibition of works by Henri Cartier-Bresson the following year, a travelling archive from the Victoria and Albert Museum organised by Killip. He became friendly with the gallery team, gratefully receiving their mentorship and recalling the impact of Tish Murtha’s Juvenile Jazz Bands at Side in 1979. His work was exhibited at the gallery for the first time in 1987, and then several times thereafter, most recently in 2019 in Work & Workers alongside Daniel Meadows, Graham Smith, Walker Evans, Nick Hedges and a long list of renowned documentarians. 

When Killip had trouble accessing the seacoaler community of Lynemouth Bay in the late-1970s, it was Critchlow who introduced Killip to his cousin, Trevor, who in turn gave Killip access to shoot there for two years from 1982. Fourteen pictures from Killip’s Seacoal series were included in his book In Flagrante in 1988, while Critchlow’s own Seacoalers photographs show the toil – and beauty – of the workers and their daily rhythms. Using horses and carts to transport the coal, they represent a different time, caught between tradition and impending modernity. “They were suspicious that anyone with cameras worked for the Social Security,” Critchlow remarked. But they trusted Critchlow, his liaison and artmaking based upon respect and resolute aesthetic judgement.

Coal Town was published as a photobook in 2019 by Bluecoat Press, and an exhibition ran in 2022 at Woodhorn Museum on the site of the old colliery, which closed in 1981. The book reveals Critchlow’s strengths as a portraitist – the ability to lift subjects momentarily from their surroundings without entirely erasing their livelihoods and social contexts. Colin Wilkinson, founder of Bluecoat Press, remembers Critchlow’s sensitivity in particular. “Tom Stoddart called me shortly after its publication to ask why the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 had not been included,” Wilkinson says. “Mik was unequivocal in his response: even after 35 years, memories of the strike were so bitter, he knew that inclusion of photographs would only cause great pain.”

It is natural that several of Critchlow’s photographs would transcend his vast archive, becoming emblems of the period he witnessed. ‘Last Man Out’ shows colliery deputy George Miller Davison leaving the mine for the last time in 1981; his photograph of his father “crying into his beer” on the day of his redundancy is perhaps the most poignant. “My father always said he’d been left on the scrapheap,” Critchlow observed. He died of emphysema, a result of years of dust inhalation. “There was such an incredible sense of belonging,” Critchlow remembered of the mining communities in Coal Town. “It was a shared existence, everybody had nothing, they all had nothing, yet it was rich in humanity.”

An accomplished blues guitarist and, later in life, a music shop owner in Ashington, Critchlow’s legacy is secured through his images – and the fondness with which he is remembered in the North East and beyond. The testimony of artist Narbi Price, who studied the Ashington Group of painters, reflects Critchlow’s achievement in emulating the group’s humanity. His photographs are “more than just social documentary,” Price says. “They are beautiful time capsules that elevate the everyday into something else, something that speaks intensely of what it is to be human.”

Joanna Lumley with models backstage during Jean Muir fashion show. All images © Marilyn Stafford

Curator Julia Winckler looks back at the photographer’s extraordinary life and work following her death earlier this year

The professional career of pioneering photographer Marilyn Stafford (1925–2023) began in New York in 1948. She had moved there hoping to become an actress on Broadway. One day, friends at the Screen Actors Guild gave her an old Rolleiflex camera and encouraged her to take up photography. As a result, she was asked to accompany them for an interview with Albert Einstein to take his portrait. At the age of 23, and with limited photographic experience, Stafford’s first commissioned portrait was of the world’s most famous physicist, whose relaxed and inquisitive gaze she captured so wonderfully and instinctively.

Stafford, who died in January at the age of 97, leaves behind an extraordinary collection of photographs and an extensive archive spanning four decades, reflecting her dedication to social reportage, street photography, fashion and portraiture. I had the pleasure of knowing Stafford personally, and interviewed her on multiple occasions: in 2017, when I curated an exhibition of her early Paris photographs at Toronto’s Pierre Léon Gallery, and in 2020, when I organised an online international photographic symposium at the Sorbonne, Paris, to mark her 95th birthday. Throughout her long photography career, Stafford sought to engage her visual creativity and intuition. As she explained to me in 2016: “I liked to allow things to flow with feeling rather than mechanically.”

Stafford grew up in a secular Jewish family during the 1930s in Cleveland, Ohio, where she performed at the Cleveland Play House before attending drama classes at the University of Wisconsin. Her family’s origins were rooted in Eastern Europe, and her deep affinity for migrants, displaced people and communities living on the margins of society stretched back to childhood. Growing up during America’s Great Depression, she witnessed first-hand people being forced out of their homes. 

She was deeply moved and influenced by images made by Dorothea Lange and other photographers commissioned by the Farm Security Administration of destitute sharecroppers and farm labourers. In December 1948, aged 23, Stafford accompanied a friend to Paris and instantly fell in love with France. She moved to the French capital the following year and for a while performed as a singer at Chez Carrère, near the Champs-Élysées, where she met Édith Piaf and became friends with Robert Capa. Encouraged by Capa, she took her Rolleiflex and discovered the city by bus, immersing herself in her new life. She had a couple of jobs assisting and studying with studio photographers, but much preferred to go out and make street photographs. 

In doing so, she joined an already established tradition of urban street photography in Paris, which stretched back to Eugène Atget’s pioneering photographs of the city at the start of the 20th century, a time when it was undergoing large-scale transformation. Unlike some of her contemporaries, Stafford never posed any documentary street scenes. Instead, she tried to capture spontaneous moments.