©Joshua Atkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“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

“Dance was a completely non-political element in Iranian society”

– Hannah Darabi 

What emerges from Darabi’s investigation is not simply a nostalgic look at the vernacular of Iranian dance, but an examination of how the body has become a battleground in contemporary Iranian politics. The project gains particular resonance in light of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement that erupted in 2022, following the death of Jina Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police. Iranian women are increasingly using dance as a form of protest — breaking into spontaneous choreography in streets and public spaces — and Darabi’s historical research reveals the deeper roots of this resistance.

“Dance was a completely non-political element in Iranian society,” says Darabi in a discussion with Katie Kheriji-Watts in Episode #1 of Photo Elysée podcast, Conversations. “No one would use popular culture or music as a tool of protest…. [But so] many things changed after the revolution of 1979, especially politics towards women’s bodies and how women should be seen, and how they should express themselves, and even what clothes they should wear…. So popular dance and popular culture can become a tool of resistance, because that’s where Iranian women are expressing their womanhood and their bodies.

Darabi’s approach exemplifies contemporary photography’s expanded field, in which images function as one element within a broader constellation of materials. Creating what she describes as ‘collages’ of material, she allows different temporal moments to interact. This methodology proves particularly suited to this subject matter, revealing the continuities and ruptures in Iranian women’s relationship to public expression. “It was a very good solution for me, because I could put images from the 1950s in conversation with images from the 1970s or recent images. It can create a stage where you invite all these ghosts from the past to come and have this conversation altogether.” 

This commitment to layered storytelling through mixed media reflects Darabi’s broader artistic evolution. And the theatrical metaphor proves apt for work that stages encounters between past and present attitudes towards beauty standards and gender expectations, illustrating how political freedoms have shifted across decades. Her attention to the construction of identity gains additional complexity when viewed through Darabi’s own position, shaped by her unique perspective as an Iranian artist working in exile. Having left Iran in 2007 to pursue graduate studies at the University of Paris VIII-Saint-Denis, she describes how distance from her homeland became essential to approaching these charged subjects. 

A careful balance between subjective investment and analytical distance characterises much of Darabi’s practice, which has consistently examined Iran’s political and cultural history through the lens of visual culture. Her methodical approach to historical excavation is exemplified by her publication, Enghelab Street. A Revolution Through Books: Iran 1979-1983 (published by Spector Books to accompany an exhibition at Le Bal in Paris), which draws on her collection of propaganda materials during this formative period of Iranian history.

This project took nearly a decade to complete, and demonstrated her commitment to archival research as both artistic practice and historical recovery. Her subsequent work, Soleil of Persian Square, explores the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles through popular music and visual identity, further developing her interest in how Iranian culture adapts and transforms across geographical and temporal distances.

Darabi’s rigorous research methodology and innovative approach to photographic storytelling has earned significant recognition in recent years. In 2022, she received the Bernd and Hilla Becher sponsorship prize from the city of Düsseldorf, acknowledging her contribution to contemporary photography’s expanded field. The following year, her exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles photofestival earned her the Madame Figaro award, cementing her reputation as one of the leading contemporary voices examining Middle Eastern visual culture from a diasporic perspective.

The recognition from Photo Elysée, the Lausanne-based museum behind the Prix Elysée, represents the latest in a series of significant milestones. Begun in 2014 and supported from the beginning by luxury watchmaker Parmigiani Fleurier, the biennial prize provides eight artists with CHF 5000 (approximately £4500) to start a new project. The winner subsequently receives a further CHF 80,000 (£72,500) to complete and publish the work within a year. This significant support makes Prix Elysée perhaps the biggest photography prize for mid-career artists.

Darabi will preview her work at Paris Photo in November, which will be followed by a publication and an exhibition at Photo Elysée in June 2026. She was selected from a shortlist of eight international nominees which included Roger Eberhard (Switzerland), Rahim Fortune (USA), Camille Gharbi (France), Samuel Gratacap (France), Seif Kousmate (Morocco), Felipe Romero Beltrán (Colombia), and Anastasia Samoylova (USA). The jury panel comprised of Rémi Faucheux of RVB Books, Clare Grafik from The Photographers’ Gallery in London, and Nathalie Herschdorfer, director of Photo Elysée, who praised Darabi’s “very promising step in the expansion of new narratives, offering an innovative voice to contemporary visual culture”.

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“Just as we divorce ourselves from the natural world and destroy it, we do something extraordinary – we create staged-managed versions of the very thing that we’re losing. It offers us reassurance, a collective self-delusion, a mask to what we’re really doing”

The sequence of 70 or so images in the dummy provides some evidence of this, such as a sadly poignant picture of one of only two surviving northern white rhinos – both female – together with one of the rangers responsible for protecting it at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. But this is not just another photography project about our destruction of the planet, the language of which, Nelson recognises, has “become somewhat clichéd or overly familiar”. He alludes to the kind of photographs we have all seen countless times before – polar bears surviving on a shrinking piece of ice; burning smokestacks in China – and says while it is still important to document such things, “I wanted to approach the issue from a different visual and psychological angle.

“I have always appreciated the capacity of photography to become a historical artefact. But that’s not why I’m doing this,” he continues. “I am less interested in preserving some image of what is lost than considering the world that we are creating through our behaviour, through our politics, through our environmental priorities. To me, it’s not all done and dusted. It’s not just a matter of photographing the last parakeet in Borneo… I want the work to not just be a historical record, but to be a motivating, thought-provoking piece in the puzzle that we’re all engaged in.”

The Anthropocene Illusion is Nelson’s latest long-term project exploring the human impulses that underlie some of our most pressing sociopolitical problems. It follows his breakthrough series, Gun Nation, made in the late 1990s and exploring America’s deadly love affair with guns in the wake of the increasing prevalence of mass shootings. The multi-award-winning photo essay, book and touring exhibition marked a step away from strictly documentary work towards a more analytical approach. For his next book and exhibition project, Love Me, which debuted in 2009, he turned his attention to the global obsession with western beauty ideals, setting the blueprint for his latest series by shooting in many different countries to tell a nuanced, multidimensional narrative about a complex contemporary issue.

His project Hackney – A Tale of Two Cities (2014), was shot close to home, interrogating “hyper-gentrification” and the “bizarre juxtapositions of wealth and poverty, aspiration and hopelessness” in the borough in which he grew up and he still lives close to. He went on to make a feature-length film, The Street (2019), examining similar issues but focusing on just one east London street over a four-year period.

Nelson explains the common thread to his work as “driven by a critical interest in the intersection of modern capitalism and human psychology”. His newly completed project is no different in that it is less concerned with evidencing environmental catastrophe than exploring how and why we let it happen. But the idea for The Anthropocene Illusion was sparked a little more than a decade ago by a trip to Tromsø in northern Norway, which he was visiting to attend the opening of Love Me at Perspektivet Museum. While there he went to Polaria, an Arctic aquarium on the edge of town. 

“They had a seal living in this very artificial environment under sodium lighting in a pool surrounded by fibreglass rocks,” he says. “And I found it very, very depressing. Not only because of the plight of the animal and the conditions it was living in, but the fact that here we were in the Arctic, on the northern edge of Europe, in a place actually built onto the rocks of the coastline, and there were the same creatures living in freedom just close by. I didn’t understand why that would be.”

Later, having decided to explore the question in depth and after visiting and photographing similarly artificial spaces around the world, he came to a grim revelation: “Just as we divorce ourselves from the natural world and destroy it, we do something extraordinary – we create staged-managed versions of the very thing that we’re losing. It offers us reassurance, a collective self-delusion, a mask to what we’re really doing.” 

When we think of virtual reality, the images that come to mind tend towards an imaginary world mediated by technology, not the often dilapidated scenes of synthesised reality Nelson has photographed. Yet, as he shows, this illusion is more compelling to us than any science-fiction or computer-generated simulation – compelling to the point of banality. Over the course of 70 or so images, embellished with the anecdotes, quotes, facts and short texts that run throughout the dummy book, we discover a world designed to provide comfortable familiarity in its recreation of nature.

Nelson takes us on a journey that begins at Chimelong Ocean Kingdom in south China, home to the world’s largest aquarium, showing us a crowd of visitors silhouetted in front of a vast screen that provides an underwater portal to a marine paradise. We visit the Tropical Islands holiday resort outside Berlin, eerily reminiscent of The Truman Show, home to Europe’s largest indoor rainforest and artificial beach. Then it is on to Disney’s Animal Kingdom theme park in Florida with its easily digestible cartoon version of Africa, complete with “real animals roaming free” and Donald Duck in a colonial-era safari suit.

We see a picture-perfect lunch laid before us in an ‘Out of Africa champagne picnic experience’ on a luxury safari in the Masai Mara in Kenya. “You fly to Kenya, pay thousands of pounds for a curated safari, and are shadowed by a Masai warrior employed to be picturesque and give the experience authenticity, while creating a scene from a movie with an already idealised and colonial view of Africa,” Nelson explains.

We sit among the patrons at a hotel restaurant in Guangdong Province where the backdrop is a live penguin display. We get a car-seat view of Longleat, one of the first so-called safari parks to open outside Africa, and a monkey is peering through the window at us. “There’s an element of ’Who’s in the zoo?’ There’s a point where we also become trapped in something of our own creation,” Nelson ponders.

We get to be close to the most majestic of ‘the Big Five’ at The Elephant Bay Hotel in Sri Lanka. “Instagram influencers flock here to photograph themselves in the infinity pool with the elephants behind them,“ says Nelson. “The elephants are in nature, in a river, but are not free. They are part of an illusion. They are the largest captive herd of elephants in the world, and they are chained to the rocks beneath the water. Meanwhile, wild elephants are being poisoned by villagers because there’s not enough land to share.”

Nelson also takes us beyond man-made tourist destinations. We go to Singapore, known as the greenest city in Asia, with its hanging gardens and hotels covered in dense foliage. “In some ways, it’s rather beautiful,” says Nelson. “But the reality is that pesticides are sprayed three times a week throughout the city because they don’t want any insects. It’s a version of nature without reality.”

And we go to Yosemite National Park, one of the world’s first national parks, whose rugged beauty was famously captured by Ansel Adams, his photographs becoming icons for a burgeoning movement to preserve America’s wild and scenic spaces. “At the beginning, I was more focused on the artificial,” says Nelson. “But then I became more aware that even so-called natural environments are in some way so staged, managed and controlled that they become like a glass-cased museum display.”

“The reality is that pesticides are sprayed three times a week throughout Singapore because they don’t want any insects. It’s a version of nature without reality”

The pictures in The Anthropocene Illusion describe a fantasy. But it is a fantasy that only needs to hold our attention momentarily. It soon fades under scrutiny. And it becomes unsettling when we see these spaces put together in the sequence of a book; the natural utopia they are meant to evoke revealed as merely a shoddy version of reality, a poor facsimile of our natural habitat.

This is not a novel concept, as Nelson acknowledges. The book dummy is peppered with prescient citations from key thinkers from two generations past. “Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation,” he quotes from Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, published in 1967. “Everywhere animals disappear,” he quotes from John Berger’s seminal essay from 1980, Why Look at Animals?. “In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.” Nelson’s photographs are the embodiment of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of Simulacra and Simulation (1981), which stated that, in contemporary society, “artifice is at the very heart of reality”.

Nelson also references historical antecedents to the current situation, such as his photograph of the last surviving Passenger pigeon, which died at the Cincinnati Zoo 110 years ago. It is accompanied by a short but illuminating anecdote, which ends: “Martha became a celebrity due to her status as an ’endling’, and offers of a $1000 reward for finding a mate for her brought even more visitors to see her during her last four years in solitude.”

The difference is that, while Nelson’s photographs point to an artifice long in the making, it has now become the norm, supplanting much of that which it copies. In one of the many short texts in the dummy, Nelson drops in the fact that there are now more tigers living in captivity than in the wild. “It’s great that places like Yosemite exist,” he reflects. “It’s beautiful. But millions of visitors flock there every year in their cars, and I found myself in a queue of SUVs, engines running, windows up, air conditioning on. Here humans are on a kind of pilgrimage to experience nature. The nature is real, but it’s choreographed and highly controlled. The problem is that it allows us to deceive ourselves. We get our fix of nature and go back home feeling that all is well. But, actually, nature is only out there to be experienced in these increasingly prescribed, diminishing outposts. And that is what my project is about.”

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.”

Header Image © Frankie Mills

From time-honoured rituals, to intimate homes and tight-knit communities, this year’s winning images showcase the diverse faces, traditions and stories that define Britain today

Meet Tasmina Haq as she stands before us in formal pose, a thin blade in one white-gloved hand, a sabre mask in the other. She’s part of Muslim Girls Fence, a grassroots initiative in Birmingham. And here’s Safy perched on a bridge over the Cam as punts pass below. He’s a student at the University of Cambridge, seen behind him beyond a manicured, riverside lawn. And there’s Debbie on the Isle of Skye, getting some sun on her face before she embarks on her fifth round of chemotherapy.

All three are subjects in this year’s Portrait of Britain, a public art project of unrivalled scale, coming to you via JCDecaux’s digital advertising screens right across the UK throughout January.. They feature in three of the 100 winning photographs – revealed today – that make up the Portrait of Britain exhibition.

The winners were selected from an open call last summer asking for images that “celebrate the many faces of modern Britain”, pictures that capture the country’s unique traditions and diversity. Now these winning portraits will appear on high streets, in shopping centres, train stations, airports, roadside poster sites, and iconic London bus shelters up and down the land throughout January, thanks to a partnership between British Journal of Photography and JCDecaux, the world’s largest company devoted to outdoor advertising.

Portrait of Britain does not profess to be a scientifically collected sample of the UK public, nonetheless its representation is wide and far-reaching, with images of people from all walks of life across the country. There are subjects that reveal glimpses of time-honoured rituals and traditions, such as Morton Moss’ portrait of Niallor, photographed as the Jack of the Green in Glastonbury, captured in an elaborate floral headdress celebrating Beltane at the beginning of summer. Elsewhere, we see Euan Myles’ portrait of Rory, a Shetland boy dressed in Viking garb standing next to a replica longship, a proud participant in the Up Helly Aa festival, marking the end of Yuletide.

Other photographs take us inside people’s homes, such as Margaret Tyler, whose lifetime obsession with the royal family is on prominent display in her flag-dressed front room, as photographed by Callum O’Keefe. In another image, we visit Nino and Olivia, a couple with Down’s syndrome, photographed at their home in Bristol as part of a series, Us, by Rona Bar and Ofek Avshalom.

In other pictures, home is the backdrop, as in Ellie Ramsden’s portrait of Reiss Nelson, who plays for Arsenal, photographed on a return to where he grew up on the Aylesbury Estate in south London to open a new outdoor football pitch. It is one of many that speak of tight-knit communities. Other examples include Keiran Perry’s candid portrait of Luna and Paula, two members of an off-grid community in the Scottish Highlands. Or Francesca Mills’ photograph of Olena, Paulina, Valentyna, Tanya and Valeria, five Ukrainian women photographed taking a break while walking on Dartmoor during their first summer in the UK under the Homes for Ukraine sponsorship scheme.

The winning pictures also evidence many diverse approaches to portraiture itself. Take, for example, the “assisted self-portrait” of Mauvette Reynolds, shot with the help of Anthony Luvera, an Australian-born artist who has developed a collaborative practice, often working with homeless people on long-term projects. There are celebrity portraits, such as the unmistakable profile of Bill Nighy in London, as photographed by Craig Fleming for the Los Angeles Times. There are photographs of Don Letts, Jo Brand and Lily Allen. Many other pictures are drawn from long-term projects that tell the stories of British community, such as Mico Toledo’s portrait of Abraham, from his series, A Brighter Sun, documenting the remnants of the Caribbean exodus in east London, or which address contemporary issues, such as Zuzu Valla’s portrait of Lauren, part of a series that aims to “empower diversity through photography”.

Portrait of Britain was launched in June 2016 in the tumultuous months surrounding the Brexit vote, conceived as a site-specific public artwork through which the British public would encounter versions of themselves on JCDecaux’s nationwide network of digital advertising screens.

“It is in each other that we see ourselves and form our sense of place,” says Mick Moore, CEO and Creative Director of British Journal of Photography, reflecting on the social value of the initiative. “Portrait of Britain captures the quirky, the mundane, the here and now of the extraordinary everyday in which we live.”

The public exhibition gives the photographers “a place to be seen and be visible in a world where so many pictures reside”, says Nadav Kander, one of this year’s judges, who is himself one of the world’s leading portrait photographers. “It is an opportunity to be recognised and celebrated by your peers, and the public,” adds another judge, curator Sebah Chaudhry.

The winning portraits in this latest edition can also be seen in an accompanying book, alongside another 100 shortlisted photographs. Portrait of Britain Volume 6 is published by Bluecoat Press, the photobook publisher that in recent years has focused solely on the work of UK-based photographers, including that of Tish Murtha, Daniel Meadows, Markéta Luskačová and many others. 

“We couldn’t imagine a better way to kickstart the new year than with the Portrait of Britain exhibition on our digital screens,” says Dave McEvoy, CMO at JCDecaux UK. “We love this joyous, inclusive and thought-provoking celebration of what it means to live in Britain today.”

JCDecaux’s network of out-of-home digital screens are located in major transport hubs, roadsides, shopping centres and high streets across the UK, giving unrivalled visibility to the country’s biggest annual public art event. According to McEvoy, its screen network reaches more than 90 per cent of the UK each week.

“Giving back to the community has always been at the heart of our business,” he says, “ever since our founder Jean-Claude Decaux had an idea to provide and maintain bus shelters free of charge, paid for by the advertising posters displayed on them… Our JCDecaux Community Channel enables not-for-profit, community, charitable and arts organisations to access out-of-home, in line with our purpose and values.”

Indeed, community is a theme that runs throughout this year’s Portrait of Britain, such as Felicity Crawshaw’s picture of Joseph, a community activist working with his neighbours to improve their local habitat, or Steve Bright’s photograph of John, one of many portraits made of the Windrush generation. Together, these portraits highlight not just a nation of individuals; they recognise also that we all exist within constellations made up of family, neighbours and shared values and interests.

The 100 winning images will be exhibited on JCDecaux digital screens across the UK from 08 January, while 200 shortlisted images are featured in the Portrait of Britain Vol. 6 photobook, available now on Bluecoat Press.