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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more information, please visit OPPO Photography Awards 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Alys Tomlinson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A lot of the work happened before the shoot, in having conversations with people about how they wanted to be shown”

– Francis Augusto

Augusto photographed an impressive 13 people for the project, including two duos, and a group of five individuals shot in similar frames. He was keen to ensure diversity across his images in terms of location, choosing to photograph some sitters in classic settings such as panelled rooms and leafy rose gardens, but others in prosaic offices or against more anonymous backdrops; in this way his work conveys both the fact that iconic Oxford can be – and is – diverse, and that working at the university can be relatable. His photograph of Professor Steve Strand is a good example. Narrowly failing his A-Levels before going on to study at Plymouth Polytechnic, Strand’s route to Oxford doesn’t fit the stereotype, and he has spent the last four decades researching why, unpicking how ethnicity, class and language intersect with educational outcomes. He opted to be photographed by his desk, his doctoral gown hung casually at the door. 

“A lot of the work happened before the shoot, in having conversations with people about how they wanted to be shown,” says Augusto. “For Steve it was important to be in the most meaningful, down-to-earth place, the spot where his work actually happens. He was like, ‘I’d love to give you somewhere amazing, but it’s in my office. That’s where I do my thinking, where I have my meetings, have my coffee, that’s where the best ideas come from’. And I thought ‘Yeah, I totally agree’.” 

When photographing Dr Anne Makena and Professor Kevin Marsh from the Africa Oxford Initiative, Augusto took a different approach. Working in a classically beautiful room, Auguto brought their work with universities across Africa into a celebrated Oxford setting, making it clear that their work – and students from across Africa – belong in the institution. Makena and Marsh collaborate closely – Augusto says they even finish each other’s sentences – and he was keen to bring this sense of symbiosis into the image, capturing both individuals in similar poses, literally and figuratively looking into the light. He was also keen to emphasise the equality of their relationship, deliberately avoiding seating Makena in front of Marsh, and having Marsh sit to keep their heads at a similar height.

Dr Samina Khan, Director for Undergraduate Admissions and Outreach, originally opted to be shown small against elegant buildings at St Hilda’s College, where she studied and where she now works; for Khan this approach showed how her work contributes to something much bigger, as well as having a personal meaning. But on this occasion Augusto gently pushed back, encouraging her to take up more space. Khan moved to the UK from Pakistan at the age of three and grew up with extended family in Leicester’s underprivileged Highfields area; her own journey to Oxford was an achievement, and she regularly travels into communities in Bradford, Oldham, Birmingham, and Cornwall to encourage others and make their paths easier. 

“She’s someone who enjoys doing her work and being of service to people, and her conversation connected to me from the perspective of being a youth worker and wanting to make other people feel included,” says Augusto. “But I also thought, ‘No, we need to celebrate’. That felt really important.”

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

“There’s a vulnerability and strength in how girls move through the world”

Distributed around the space via projector, in frames upon walls, and delicately displayed in vitrines (see, the 2018 Sisters poster), in practice this looks like Lauren Greenfield’s iconic Girl Culture series (2002) and Nigel Shafran’s Teenage Precinct Shoppers (1990); Nancy Honey’s 2001 series Girls Shopping, and Micaiah Carter’s Adeline in Barrettes from 2018. Juergen Teller’s SS07 campaign for Marc Jacobs, starring a pre-teen Dakota Fanning in specially-made catwalk looks, also appears, while Roni Horn’s This is Me, This is You (1997–2000), a collaboration with her niece Georgia, notably features towards the exhibition’s end. “I placed this series in the closing section because it speaks to two meaningful ideas,” advises the curator. “How quickly time passes during that stage of life, and that the most compelling works don’t portray girls as distant, voiceless muses, instead engaging them actively in the creation of the work.” Indeed, Horn followed her niece’s lead throughout the project, culminating in 96 close-up portraits of Georgia going about her life.

Elsewhere, Eimear Lynch’s Girls’ Night (2023), for which she travelled across her native Ireland photographing the ceremony of a night at the local disco – teenagers doing their make-up, gossiping with friends, and getting dressed up – is underpinned by the idea of creating a kind of dialogue between the images and the photographer’s own memories of growing up and enacting similar rituals. “The work comes from a place of recognition; my own experience of girlhood is definitely woven into it,” says Lynch. “I’m also inspired by the honesty and intensity of that stage of life, how everything feels heightened and meaningful. There’s a vulnerability and strength in how girls move through the world.”

In her essay Girl Code: Conceptualising the Girl of Fashion, which appears in the accompanying catalogue, Morna Laing, a professor at The New School, Parsons Paris, observes that “the concept of ‘the girl’ has elastic boundaries… one can remain a girl long after leaving girlhood; or at least that is what language would have us believe.” It’s a sentiment many of the works on show lean into, including Fumiko Imano’s ongoing twin series (which, coincidentally, appears on the catalogue’s cover enwrapped in a heart-shaped cutout). Beginning during her studies in London in the early 2000s, the Japanese photographer produces self-portraits, cutting and sticking photos together to create a twin in the same image. “I started when I tried to fit into adulthood but I couldn’t,” she explains of the concept’s genesis. “I wished I could stay as a child, because I don’t feel like I’m experiencing womanhood the same as a normal woman – I haven’t given birth [for example]. But I wasn’t necessarily considering myself as doing ‘girls’ things, I have just always been counted in a ‘girls’ category.” 

Steering the wider exhibition is the common understanding that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to examining or participating in girlhood – it means, feels and looks like different things to different people, hence the scope of GIRLS. This is made clear in the exhibition’s finale piece, in a film wherein the director Leonardo Van Dijl gathers a collection of perspectives, interviewing ‘girls’ aged nine through to 80 about how they interpret and engage with girlhood. Lynch speaks further to this point, describing those she met while making Girls’ Night: “In different ways, they all [the teenagers] wanted to be seen,” she notes. “Some were naturally confident, others quiet or self-conscious, which reminded me how layered girlhood really is. Social media can make it feel like there’s one universal version of being a teenage girl, but there are so many nuances.”

GIRLS. On Boredom, Rebellion and Being In-Between is on at MoMu Antwerp until 01 February, 2026

“I prefer to work collaboratively, and I think it’s best to photograph people in a space they feel comfortable”

• Leia Morrison

As these roles suggest, many of Morrison’s sitters were scientific researchers, particularly working within vaccine research, and she had a very personal interest in photographing these individuals – her father is currently unwell, and access to vaccines is playing a large part in maintaining his quality of life. Morrison also typically works in a candid style, capturing people at ease rather than stiffly posing, and both factors meant she was keen to show the people behind the science in her portraits, those who are dedicated to helping others but whose personalities are usually unseen behind their clinical contributions. With this in mind she aimed to speak with each individual before photographing them, and also asked them to recommend locations for the shoot.

“I prefer to work collaboratively, and I think it’s best to photograph people in a space they feel comfortable,” she comments. “And I was also interested in photographing them in a place that was relevant to them. Adrian was very playful, he suggested we go to Kenya to make his portrait [the Jenner Institute focuses on designing and developing vaccines for infectious diseases prevalent in developing countries]. That wasn’t possible, but then we also spoke about the tropical environment, so we went to the Botanical Garden to bring some of that landscape in.”

Professor Thakker was able to give her nearly a day and Morrison says she enjoyed their time together because, while Thakker is a distinguished endocrinologist, he’s also very funny. He was keen to be photographed in Somerville because it was one of the first colleges to admit women and speaks to a wider inclusivity at Oxford; he’s photographed in a library, and is wearing a suit, but his portrait has a warmth that moves beyond still formality. “There are portraits of him that show his academic side, but I wanted to capture his personality a little more,” says Morrison.

Professor Dame Stevens is shown outside The Kavli Institute, where she runs a large team working across regenerative medicine, biomaterials, and biosensing technologies; Morrison has caught her in a pensive moment, but the large building behind her symbolises the scale and importance of her contribution. Teresa Lambe’s portrait is seemingly at the opposite end of the spectrum, depicting her on a staircase within Reuben College, but this location is also significant – Reuben College was established in 2019, and the staircase both literally and metaphorically links an older, more traditional building with a newer construction. Reuben is also the place in which Lambe gained her first college Fellowship at Oxford, and she says she enjoys the quiet determination which Morrison has caught in her expression.

“It’s unusual for me to have chosen something where I’m not smiling, and it’s unusual for someone to have captured it,” Lambe says. “But I recognise that face, that particular look I sometimes have. It says something about being understated, just doing what you do, and that’s certainly part of me. For me the location also speaks to that because, while it’s a beautiful old staircase, you don’t get a sense of the grandeur in the image. It seems more about getting on with it [behind the scenes].”

Capturing group portraits is always challenging but Morrison took the same collaborative approach with REACH and GLAM. Professor Katrina Charles, Dr Sonia Ferdous Hoque, and Professor Rob Hope, three individuals from the larger REACH team, were keen to be pictured outside the Sheldonian Theatre because it’s used for conferences and events, and speaks to the collaborative nature of their work; the seven members of the GLAM team – Susan Griffiths, Jumana Hokan, Hayleigh Jutson, Helen Pooley, Miranda Millward, Beth McDougall and Tegan Bennett – were photographed within one of Oxford’s gardens because these spaces are integral to their programming.

“They must do their work so well because all the gardens were busy!” laughs Morrison. “But we managed to find a quiet spot in Christ Church Memorial Gardens. When they started to arrive I immediately knew who they were, because they were all so lovely and warm. They were so obviously people whose work was about making others feel included.”

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