“I never understood why people photograph strangers,” Stephen McCoy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“At some point, it became necessary to talk about dance, [especially] when the Woman, Life, Freedom movement began, and dance became a tool of resistance“

– Hannah Darabi

BJP: Congratulations on winning the Prix Elysée. But it’s also a difficult moment, because we are speaking not long after the US attacked your home country, and Iran is currently at war with Israel. Has your family been affected?

Hannah Darabi: My family is there, and we are very worried, because they’re in Tehran and today one of the streets near to their house was attacked. We are living in a very uncertain moment. 

BJP: Do you go back to Iran often?

HD: I haven’t been back since 2019. My parents are very old, and I felt it would be a risk if I went back during Covid. Afterwards, there was the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, and everything was unstable again. Also, the government started making threats towards artists and activists in a kind of random manner. It didn’t matter if you were political or not, which I think was a strategy – to alarm people, [to scare them into thinking] that if you do something, you will be caught. 

BJP: What memories do you have of growing up in Iran?

HD: When I was born [in 1981], it was the time of the Iran-Iraq War… Sometimes, life was horrible. We would get a red siren to go to the bunkers, and a white siren to come out. But in between we lived life. There were still parties and get-togethers, and those were the moments that kept us sane and alive. There were shortages of many things, and we had [rationing]. But, at the same time, we had dinners, and there was music, and there were people dancing. And then, after the war, dancing became really important.

BJP: That relates to your project, Soleil of Persian Square, and its connection to popular music within the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles.

HD: Some of the people were like superstars in Iran, where they had all the equipment, studios, poets – everything to make ‘proper’ music. And then when they went to LA, they lost everything. So, the music changed because of that, but also because, when they emigrated to the States in 1979 after the [revolutionary] war, they would do all this sad, nostalgic music, and they realised that people were sick of it, and they wanted to dance.

This specific music emerged; a mixture of ‘good’ pop music, and the popular cabaret-like music that was [previously] considered really bad and not at all interesting. In Los Angeles they mixed it up. They created this fantastic new genre, which developed in relation to their situation, and which took in other influences, such as Latin music and music from Arab countries.

Then they sent that music to us [back in Iran]. When I was growing up, I was a shy kid, so my parents put me in a dance class. We would do Iranian popular dance, but there were also all these new tunes that we received, as well as new choreography. And one of the choreographers from these times in LA was Mohammad Khordadian, who is one of the three figures that I was inspired by [and whose work I investigate] in Why Don’t You Dance?.

BJP: I read that you felt that it took moving away from Iran to reflect critically on your homeland. How did that manifest?

HD: It took nine years to make peace with myself as someone who has this geographical distance from home, but who still has the need to discuss it. I wasn’t really feeling at home in Paris [where she initially went to study]. So I decided to go back and make peace with Tehran [through my work], even though I thought it would be impossible; it’s too chaotic, there are too many people and too many buildings. But then somehow I saw the beauty and how photogenic this ugly city could be.

And then came Enghelab Street, a Revolution through Books: Iran 1979–1983 [shown in Paris in 2019 at Le Bal, who co-published a book with Spector], which I wouldn’t have talked about if I was in Iran, because the Iranian government identifies itself as being in a constant revolutionary mode. You get all these ideas and propaganda around the revolution, especially in the form of everyday images. But I really wanted to keep aside my own feelings. I didn’t want to make a statement with my work.

And it was the same with popular music. I hated it [when I lived in Iran]. For me, it was too nice. At the time, Iranian punk didn’t exist, but [something like it was] necessary to express our anger… Then, when I left, I had other tools, and I understood the value of this music. I had been looking at it from a very snobbish, intellectual viewpoint. 

BJP: How and when did your work evolve to this form of expanded photography, encompassing your research, and including more collage.

HD: The collage form came from the research into archives and from the materials I found, putting them in conversation with my own photographs, or trying to add some other possible readings, activating the materials. So there is a clear photographic approach, and then there are these archival materials that are treated the same way, and then maybe another visual element, all working in dialogue beside each other.

There isn’t a lot of cutting and gluing going on. Everything is very clean. There are forms of books and pictures, but instead of putting them separately on the page, they’re all together. It comes from my practice in exhibition spaces, using one image as a wallpaper and putting the other on top of it to make a more intimate connection.

BJP: What do these materials look like?

HD: One chapter of the project is based on a book by a dancer called Mahvash, who made a fictional autobiography called The Secrets of Sexual Fulfillment. Everything comes together around the ideas in the book. It starts by mostly giving advice on sexual education to boys and girls of the time. We don’t know if she’s an expert, or if she’s had lots of experiences, and you see this change in Iranian society to a heteronormative mode. 

Then at the end, she starts to unfold her experiences. And it’s subversive. That’s also why I love this book, because it contradicts itself at the end. So, everything we see [in this chapter of Why Don’t You Dance?] is in relation to things that are discussed in the book. It can be questions about polygamy, or questions on how women are seen in popular culture. It’s exploring all these popular ideas: the ones that persist, and the ones that change. It also reflects on different moments of the Iranian women’s movement.

BJP: Tell me about how your last work, Soleil of Persian Square, fed into this latest project.

HD: It’s always like that – the next project comes out of an old project, something that I had noticed but which needed more space and concentration. And when I was doing Soleil of Persian Square, I was looking at all these clips, and dance was so present in them. 

At some point, it became necessary to talk about dance, [especially] when the Woman, Life, Freedom movement began, and dance became a tool of resistance. Popular music and popular dance had never been considered political beforehand. My generation would disobey what’s supposed to be conventional behaviour, but we didn’t know that what we were doing wasn’t just a foolish reaction. The generation after us completely changed how we look at resistance.

I thought it was fantastic how they invested [resistance into] this art form, [creating] a solution for a protest that was unthinkable. Protest, getting together, was not possible anymore. There was no possibility of organising, of writing or making posters. So, it was very interesting to me that this specific form of art suddenly became very useful for the purpose [of resistance].

BJP: The prize provides you with the support to focus on completing your latest project, Why Don’t You Dance?, for which you are working on three chapters based around three key figures. You have completed much of the work on the first chapter, based around Mahvash. And you have already mentioned Mohammad Khordadian, the dancer and choreographer based in LA, who is the third chapter. What can you tell me about the second chapter and who it is based upon?

HD: Jamileh was very active as a cabaret dancer in the 1960s and 70s. She represents this moment of shift. Cabaret dancers were seen as deviant… [Yet] she appeared in most of the popular films of her era, always playing this role of the belly dancer. There were all these social conflicts around the figure of the cabaret dancer, but what I really liked is that she represents to me a kind of feminism that is not from the middle class. She [represents] this kind of popular feminism. 

In one film she played the role of a good woman, hiding her real identity to marry a very upper class guy. At some point, she’s sick of it, and she dresses really provocatively. She is in this beautiful house, she is drunk, and she says to the musicians, ‘Hey, play me a tune!’ Then she comes down the staircase doing this provocative dance, and all the bourgeois people are shocked. She was a feminist, but not like an activist. It just comes out in her daily behaviour. 

BJP: You will focus on the jâheli dance, of which she was a pioneer.

HD: The dance reflected and also depicted this group of men in a particular neighbourhood [of Tehran]. They had very specific clothing, and a particular style of talking and walking. They were like protectors of the neighbourhood, and protectors of the weak, but also they would get involved in petty crimes, and were sometimes used by the government to [break up] protests. 

These people were jâhel. It was a subculture, very present in popular films. They wore fedoras, white shirts, black costumes and scarves, but they never put their coats on properly, just on their shoulders. And they did the jâheli dance. But Jamileh made it a dance for women.

This was a very masculine world, in which women were considered weak specimens. And she got that and [met it] with humour. That’s what I really like about her behaviour…. She just did it for fun, and she laughed because she just loved that dance. But it became a political statement. She incorporated something that was absolutely masculine and took it to another dimension.

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“It’s a little bit messy, a little bit untidy, a little bit haphazard, but that’s all deliberate. It’s a show that is properly about London”

– Francis Hodgson, curator

London Lives includes images made at various points in time, with David Bailey exhibiting shots of Jean Shrimpton taken in the 1960s, for example, while Jermaine Francis shows work newly-commissioned by the FT Weekend Magazine (the FT is a fair partner). Some of the photographs are famous while others are less familiar, or show surprising facets of the artist’s oeuvre. Idris Khan is showing an image of Tower Bridge, for example, one of his celebrated composites, while Edmund Clark, who is known for political works around Iraq and Afghanistan, is showing bucolic photographs of areas “deemed to be of special interest because of botanical, zoological or geological features that merit protection or preservation”. 

Hodgson has also deliberately mixed approaches and techniques, and as we speak points out the contrast between Nadav Kander’s posed portraits, made in a shopping mall, and Nick Turpin’s snatched shots of people lost in thought on the bus. Others are more materially varied. Inspired by Sir John Soane’s Museum, Hannah Hughes’ work is part-sculptural and part-collage (and also newly-commissioned by the FT), while Julia Fullerton-Batten presents staged tableaux of historical events from her series Old Father Thames. Heather Agyepong also restages London history, in a series of self-portraits dressed as Mary Seacole. A Londoner and a nurse, Seacole drew on her Caribbean heritage to create natural, herbal medicine. “I guess you’d say contemporary with Florence Nightingale, but not a friend by any means of Florence Nightingale’s,” Hodgson chuckles.

The featured works also vary from huge to tiny in size, which intriguingly Hodgson relates to experiencing London – Londoners see tens or even hundreds of images every day, he points out, ranging from large billboards in the street to tiny thumbnails on their phones. “London is full of people being influenced by imagery in different formats,” he observes. He’s keenly aware London Lives will add to that mix and has thought carefully about its audience, including captions that are “a little wordy” so visitors can “meet” the photographers, but deliberately avoiding anything po-faced. His idea is that the exhibition is like a really good party, he says, a fun and eclectic mix of people and points of view.

“I felt being didactic was wrong for a fair,” he says. “Of course it’s an art fair, many people coming are very experienced in photography and know a lot about it. But it’s also slap-bang in the middle of London – there’s no reason to disrespect a 13-year-old coming in for the first time, or someone pushing a buggy, getting their kid in out of the rain. And there’s a way in which I like those balances to be, again, London balances.”

Of course there’s potentially a political reading; London is one of the most multicultural places on earth and this show actively celebrates that fact, just weeks after Reform UK swept local councils with a tough-on-migration stance. Hodgson says this thinking informs his curation [though we’re speaking before the elections] but adds it’s “absolutely not my business, in an art fair, to smash people on the head, to lecture people”. Instead he hopes to gently insist on London’s messy richness, while deliberately keeping things light – just as some of the artists have done. 

He points to Bailey’s image of Shrimpton, for example, which was shot in the East End not the King’s Road; Bailey grew up in the bomb-damaged, impoverished East End and was keenly aware that “the haves had not looked after the have nots” and his image, shot in his mother’s house, gets that point across. Bailey just chooses not to caption it in that way. Similarly, Joy Gregory is showing the series Alongside Matron Bell, which was commissioned by Lewisham Hospital in 2008 to celebrate 60 years of the NHS. It’s centred around Marjorie Bell, the first matron at the hospital under the NHS, appointed in 1948; it also records some of the many nurses and healthcare workers she helped train, who left the Caribbean to work in the nascent NHS and were critical to its success. 

“Joy is a very serious person,” says Hodgson. “She’s very good at race and gender, and this is an absolutely, profoundly serious work. But you know it was commissioned by a hospital to entertain the staff and patients as they walked down the corridors. It’s both serious and light, and that absolutely stands for the whole of the show.”

London Lives is on show 15–18 May in Embankment East & West Galleries, as part of Photo London. The VIP preview is on 14 May. photolondon.org

“Sometimes you see a picture which is famous and iconic, and it’s not a good picture, and so there is always the question, ‘Why did it become so iconic?’”

Initially FOTO ARSENAL WIEN had a temporary home in the MuseumsQuartier Wien, where it hosted work by cutting-edge image-makers such as Laia Abril and Karolina Wojtas. But the plan was always to move into the Arsenal, which is based in south-east Vienna and also hosts a military museum, the archive of the Austrian Film Museum, opera rehearsal studios, and apartments. Hoffmann points out it is only a 10-minute walk from the main train station, but concedes it is less central than the MuseumsQuartier and will need to become a destination. 

“The Arsenal is like a village in the city, and we’re thinking how to develop it,” he says. “The site is quite big, and some of the other buildings are empty; it also includes green space and is next to a park, and that brings another element. I am hoping to activate those areas with public installations, particularly during FOTO WIEN.”

FOTO WIEN takes place every other year and is part of the European Month of Photography; one of Hoffmann’s early tasks was to organise the 2023 edition, and FOTO ARSENAL WIEN will look after it in 2025 and beyond. Taking place across the city, FOTO WIEN includes events in private galleries, studios, and institutions, with well over 100 programme partners involved last time. The 2025 edition will be similarly expansive but Hoffmann plans to make the FOTO ARSENAL WIEN a focal point, organising a book fair, a symposium and other exhibitions and events there. The 2023 FOTO WIEN discussion programme focused on Ukraine and Poland and he plans to expand on that this year too, particularly as EMOP includes many Eastern European capitals, “and as Eastern Europe is an interesting place, politically”. 

In the ‘off’ years when the EMOP is not happening, FOTO ARSENAL WIEN will organise another festival, Vienna Digital Cultures. It is part of an ongoing partnership with Kunsthalle Wien, the city’s state-run contemporary art museum and FOTO ARSENAL WIEN’s ‘sister’ institution; put simply, Kunsthalle Wien and FOTO ARSENAL WIEN will take it in turns to organise the annual Vienna Digital Cultures. It is a new venture but based on an existing model – originally conceived of in 2020 as the Festival of Media Arts, the festival explores the intersection between contemporary art, lens-based media, digital culture, and technology. 

On top of this, FOTO ARSENAL WIEN is joining Futures, the network of European institutions which champions emerging image-makers. Co-funded by the European Union, it also includes organisations such as CAMERA (Italy), FOMU (Belgium), and Void (Greece). “Futures is very interesting and so vivid,” says Hoffmann, adding, “I have a small team, five or six people, so we will not get bored [at FOTO ARSENAL WIEN]. It’s really a challenge to build up this structure.”

This challenge is partly what attracted him to the job, having done something similar with C/O Berlin; the German institution gained the name ‘C/O’ because it moved venues so often in its early years, before settling in Amerika Haus in 2014 (another converted 1950s venue, Hoffmann jokes he loves construction sites). Unlike C/O Berlin, FOTO ARSENAL WIEN does not have a permanent collection, instead following the ‘kunsthalle’ exhibition model popular in northern Europe (and also followed by The Photographers’ Gallery in London). Hoffmann will spend about 50 per cent of his budget on staff and another 25 to 30 per cent or so on the venue, leaving 25 per cent or less for the programme; he will need to raise additional funds via ticket sales and donors, he says, adding that one of the reasons he wanted to co-organise Vienna Digital Cultures was that it gave him budget to employ a digital curator, in a co-hire with the Kunsthalle. 

More philosophically, working on the festival involves exploring images as they are now most often encountered – online – expanding on the FOTO ARSENAL WIEN’s remit to cover the everyday and the near-future more broadly. “For the 2026 Vienna Digital Cultures we will be focusing on immersive, digital questions,” he explains. “Of course we will also do that at the FOTO ARSENAL WIEN, but where that is related to photography and lens-based media, on the other hand we have the question of what is surrounding us.” 

This question still underpins much of Hoffmann’s thinking at the FOTO ARSENAL WIEN, because he believes the ready online availability of photography has shifted the role of institutions. Where once galleries offered places to encounter images, now at least part of their responsibility is to stop the visual flow “for half an hour, maybe 20 minutes – we have to work fast”. Similarly, now that we encounter so much information via images rather than text, we need to learn media literacy as much as basic literacy. He is planning a strong educational programme at FOTO ARSENAL WIEN, encouraging visitors to think how to handle this “inflation of visual culture”, including how to organise their digital archives “or even how to just delete some images”. 

The FOTO ARSENAL WIEN educational programme will also drill down into the history of photography, and the building will include an analogue darkroom, accessible via its own entrance, in which users can literally get to grips with the medium. The next generation is fascinated by analogue and alternative processes, Hoffmann points out, valuing their sheer physicality over the ‘virtual’ on-screen world. “When I started in C/O Berlin in 2005, the first thing we moved out and put on the street was the darkroom, because these were digital times – we didn’t need a darkroom!” he says. “Then the first thing we reinstalled was a darkroom. This chemical process on a piece of paper is a kind of magic – something happening there, not just ink laying onto a piece of paper.”

But thinking through visual culture also goes deeper than the contemporary moment or the physicality of images, and through the programming and curation at FOTO ARSENAL WIEN, Hoffmann hopes to prompt broader questions about photography and power. During Paris Photo he co-organised a conference at MEP with Magnum Photos, for example, in which Magnum photographers, and curators such as Florian Ebner (Centre Pompidou) and Simon Baker (MEP) discussed archives and their use; part of the build-up to the forthcoming exhibition at FOTO ARSENAL WIEN, it also highlighted the circulation and distribution of images – key issues that often get lost or overlooked.

“Sometimes you see a picture which is famous and iconic, and it’s not a good picture, and so there is always the question, ‘Why did it become so iconic?’,” Hoffmann muses. “The answer is, it became iconic because we know it, because it circulated so much. Say there’s a photograph of Nixon and Khrushchev during the Cold War, it’s not a good photograph but it’s transmitting something, and then it’s enormously circulated, it’s published in Life magazine. You know, in the period before TV, Life had a distribution of 6 million magazines per week, and there were something like eight people reading each magazine. Certain images were just burned into our consciousness – this is important to recognise.”

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“I am forever finding Alan – he’s physically part of the machines”

– Christopher Sutherland, Metro-Auto-Photo

After servicing each model, Adler photographed himself to check it was working; he ended up running the photobooths for 50-plus years, and thus created a life in portraits. “He built up this incredible archive of images of himself over the years,” says Christopher Sutherland, who now runs Adler’s old booths with his partner Jessie Norman, under the name Metro-Auto-Photo. “He says he took these photos to test the machines, but yet he kept them.”

“Hoarding may be one angle of it,” explains Norman. “But I do feel a lot of it was his late wife, Lorraine. I think she was responsible for at least organising them all and putting them away in some sort of preservation. Because he would have taken 10 times more than what we have, so not all of them were kept. Theres only so many you can realistically find a reason to keep.”

Together, the images create a funny, poignant record. Adler was not a follower of fashion so his clothes remain the same for long stretches, yet the years inexorably pass. In many of the photographs he has his eyes closed, shielding them from the flash, in some shots he looks serious, in others he is goofing around. In one strip he sports a fake moustache. Members of his family – including cats – appear in a few images, photographed in machines that were in a very bad way, and that he had to take home to repair. The passage of time also unfolds through technical aspects of the medium, colour coming in – after Adler bought six or seven Prontophot booths – then quite literally fading. Adler never upgraded to digital, and in the book tells Sutherland and Norman to stick with monochrome. 

“Black-and-white was always more popular than colour,” he observes. “I suggest you just stick with the black-and-whites, rather than get involved in the colour, but that is up to you… The colour is far more corrosive, it just eats through everything.”

Sutherland and Norman got to know Adler in 2018 and the story of how they met is great; passport photographs went digital in Australia years ago, but Adler’s analogue booth in Flinders Street Station has remained popular, a spot for couples and friends to have fun and record themselves. Sutherland and Norman visited to mark their first date, and spotted a note taped to the booth stating it was going to be removed. Station managers had decided to move some barriers, and had given Adler just 10 days’ notice to take the machine away. The note included a phone number so Sutherland called it and decided to help. He launched a Facebook campaign to save the booth, which gathered so much support the City of Melbourne and its mayor stepped in. The photobooth ended up being relocated to another spot in Flinders Street Station, where it remains to this day.

From this auspicious beginning, Sutherland and Norman stayed in touch with Adler, intrigued by the man, his photobooths, and what turned out to be his huge cache of images. When Adler retired they took over the booths, and when they realised quite how many portraits he had taken, they gathered and scanned them. Sutherland and Norman’s work has helped make the book, Auto-Photo, and an exhibition which will take place next year. “The photographs were literally just in shoe boxes, or loose among other things,” says Sutherland. “I still find them now, wedged inside machines, because they were such a perfect medium to fold and use as a spacer or to screw in a part or something. I am forever finding Alan – he’s physically part of the machines.”

Getting to know Adler better, Sutherland and Norman eventually got to see his family photos; they expected to be shown holiday snaps, but what he brought out was a series of images, mostly by Lorraine, depicting him checking out photobooths around the world. There are Japanese photobooths, American photobooths, Brazilian photobooths; there is even a Chuck E Cheese photo ride, and the low-quality snap it produced. There is something humorous about these busman’s holidays, which are included in Auto-Photo, but they also testify to Adler’s love of the booths – and the hard graft of keeping his business alive. 

“Being in Australia [pre-internet], he had to be boots on the ground, researching what other people were doing,” says Norman. “The only time he went on holiday was to research these booths with his family.”

It is an interest that was perhaps practical rather than cultural. Auto-Photo was edited by photo historian Catlin Langford, and includes a fascinating history of photobooths written by her (drawn on in this article), plus an essay by artist and vernacular photography collector Patrick Pound, sketching out an artistic history of these machines, and their use by the Surrealists and others. But Adler is not particularly interested in this history, say Sutherland and Norman. When they mentioned the forthcoming exhibition, he said, “Great”, then asked after the booths; when they showed him photographs of them getting engaged – taken in the Flinders Street Station machine – he immediately checked the image reproduction. 

“Chris proposed in the booth, you can see my shocked face. Alan looked at the pictures and said, ’Oh, this is a rather good quality strip’,” laughs Norman. “It’s good, he keeps us in line [as they now service the booths]… He’s a man on an island, physically and mentally. I mean, he’s quite a solitary person. He does know the industry, and has friends in it, but he drove around all day servicing machines for decades. He spent a lot of his time just by himself, basically.” 

“Even the group discussion included in the book, it’s heavily edited because every few sentences he would ask how the machines are running,” agrees Langford. “And then compare the quality of the strips, saying, ’This one’s not as good’.”

Adler has become famous in Australia, and Auto-Photo came about when Daniel Boetker-Smith, director of Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography, got in touch with Sutherland and Norman. Originally the idea was for the book to launch at the same time as an exhibition but, with the CCP recently forced to move to a temporary space, the show will now be co-presented with RMIT University Gallery in 2025 – the centenary of the invention of the photobooth. Langford, former curator at the CCP, will curate the 2025 exhibition alongside editing the book; she particularly enjoyed the images with cats, she says, and was keen to zoom in and out, showing both particular images and something of the extent of Adler’s collection. She also spent hours working with the book designer, Clayton Walker, trying to put the images in chronological order.

Langford also wanted to untangle the history of photobooths in the publication, as it is a narrative that has gone under-researched – particularly the story of booths in Australia. “We wanted the book to be very accessible and dynamic and exciting for a general audience, but hopefully also, with my referenced essay, there’s a value for scholars too,” she says. The book and exhibition were supported by the Gordon Darling Foundation, a charitable organisation which supports visual arts in public institutions in Australia.

In short, there is wide interest in this project but despite this, and despite being photographed so many times, Adler somehow remains enigmatic. Photobooths were originally associated with passports and identity cards, but the sheer number of images render this logic absurd, suggesting the difficulty of pinning someone down, not the ability to fix identity. More enigmatic still are the questions of what these photographs meant to Adler, and what to make of this archive. Langford says Adler did not intend to make art but points out his images suggest creativity; technically he did not take any shots, and yet he is also the author.

“He was expressing himself,” she muses. “It’s so interesting that we think of photobooths as not having photographers, and yet so many people are drawn to play with them.”

Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits is published by Centre for Contemporary Photography and Perimeter Editions, priced £26. ccp.org.au perimeterbooks.com

All images from Akram Zaatari: Objects of Study: Hashem el Madani/Studio Practices, 2004–2007 and Footnotes, 2018. Photographs by Hashem el Madani, Saida, 1950s–70s © Akram Zaatari. Courtesy of the AIF/Beirut.

Opened by Hashem El Madani in 1953 in Saida, the studio documented many sides of the Lebanese community, a legacy that Akram Zaatari is on a mission to preserve

Lebanon, 1950s. Two young men imitate a newly-wed couple. A young woman wears sunglasses and holds her bike, moving towards the camera. A resistance fighter poses with his gun, gazing up and out of the frame. On the Arab side of social media, images from and references to Studio Shehrazade have filled timelines and platform pages for years. Never intended to encompass a wider imagination of Arab visual culture, these images have nevertheless become central to the conversation around photography in the SWANA region.

Born in 1928, Hashem El Madani began photographing his hometown Saida’s inhabitants in 1949, from his parents’ house in the old city. His services were advertised in the grocery shop nearby. Later, when Madani had raised enough money to open his first studio in 1953, he moved to the first floor of a commercial building, named Shehrazade. Subjects were liberated from being under the watchful eye of Madani’s parents, free to pose as they chose, but they were mostly inspired by what they watched in the cinema; Egyptian and foreign films, love stories, dramas, suspense and comedies. Studio Shehrazade peaked in popularity in the 1960s and 70s, when Madani took up to 100 portraits a day and, according to his own estimates, he photographed 90 per cent of Saida’s population.

Akram Zaatari is a Lebanese artist also from Saida (the city takes its name from the Arabic word for ‘fishing’, owing to its historic fishing industry) who co-founded the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) in 1997 with Fouad El Koury and Samer Mohdad. Since 2017 he is no longer associated with the foundation but he continues to publish and work on the outcome of his research (1997–2002) preserved at the AIF. The book Studio Practices accompanied Zaatari’s first exhibition of Madani’s work at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in 2004. It was co-published by The Photographers’ Gallery, Mind the Gap and the AIF, revealing and exploring Madani’s work on a large scale for the first time, taking the images from the sidelines of history to a major body of work. 

“These photos would be seen as a solution that tricked the forbidden to illustrate the kiss, enabling its figuration by staying in line with social norms”

Zaatari met Madani in 1999 through a mutual friend when Zaatari was working on an exhibition and book for the AIF, The Vehicle: Picturing Moments of Transition in a Modernising Society, which retraces signs of modernity in photographs. Upon entering Madani’s studio, Zaatari realised the older photographer had amassed around half a million images, taken from 1949, through the opening of Studio Shehrazade in 1953 and up to the early 80s, using various formats and cameras. “I could see how he was learning and advancing and could see his mistakes in the early days,” Zaatari tells me. He made audio and video interviews with Madani extensively between 2000 and 2008; the entire fieldwork extended from 1999 until the last scene Zaatari filmed in Madani’s studio in December 2013, while making the film about the photographer, Twenty-Eight Nights and a Poem.

Although the scenes in Madani’s images are confined to the studio, they sometimes echo the environment outside, with now widely popularised images of Syrian and Palestinian resistance fighters in traditional dress wielding guns. In some images, men imitate scenes of violence with fake knives, fake guns, and expressions of what look like stage-fright. The 1970s and 80s were a period of upheaval not dissimilar to today’s Lebanon – while writing this article, I am unable to speak with Zaatari due to the Israeli invasion, and we must conduct the interview through email.

During the Lebanese Civil War from 1975 to 1990, Israel invaded the country in 1978 and again in 1982, and Saida saw much of the fighting, owing to its seafront location and proximity to both Israel and the Lebanese capital, Beirut. Even so, Madani’s images have a pervading sense of playfulness. In them, one finds both a nation witnessing violence, and a people with an ineffable sense of humour. In one setup, two maids sit shoulder-to-shoulder with large glamorous sunglasses, as if celebrities caught in public by the press.

Five years later, when Zaatari had a gallery, he and the AIF decided to put editions of the work on sale, signing a three- way agreement with Madani for Zaatari’s Objects of Study/ The Archive of Studio Shehrazade project. In 2016, a year before Madani died, Zaatari agreed with him and the AIF to acquire his copyrights, and today remains the copyright holder.

Interestingly, Zaatari insists that the studio remained local and that, at least during his active years, Madani did not circulate his images widely. “We are talking about a local photo studio, the photos of which were mostly printed on inexpensive 6×10cm paper that mainly stayed with their people. Madani was known in Saida… but not elsewhere,” he points out. That does not at all reduce his significance today, Zaatari stresses. Madani trusted Zaatari with his work “entirely”. 

“His business had reached a dead end when I met him in 1999,” says Zaatari. “He would go to his studio and sit all day without any customer knocking at his door… The question for me remains, how to wrap up a practice that spanned 69 years. This is my mission.”

The legacy of Studio Shehrazade therefore comes mostly posthumously, through Zaatari’s ‘archaeological’ and documentary intervention. It also owes something to its accidental queer liberatory visual language. It is hard to find queer imagery from the SWANA region, even more so from the 20th century, so Madani’s images of same-sex kisses have been reappropriated. Yet they have never been what they appear. “Neither kissing between individuals of the same sex, nor the circulation of its photographic documentation later, would be interpreted as an affirmation or celebration of homosexuality in Saida during the 1950s,” affirms Zaatari. “These photos would be seen as a solution that tricked the forbidden to illustrate the kiss, enabling its figuration by staying in line with social norms.”

In other words, it is hard even by today’s standards to visually depict physical intimacy in the Arab world; ironically, queerly coded visuals are a loophole for the depiction of romance. “Kissing would alternatively be performed between friends of the same sex,” says Zaatari. “Men would kiss men, and women would kiss women.”

Lebanon was also at the height of Arab ‘cool’ during the 20th century, despite its period of war. The country was at the forefront of the SWANA world’s interaction with globalised visual media during this time and – with its generally more ‘liberal’ approach to nightlife, music and style – was arguably the first to introduce European fashion and living aesthetics to the Middle East. “I had to make a comparative assessment to understand exactly the changes that photography brought to society, promoting fashion and a mode of living that leaked easily from one culture to another thanks to photographs and films, and the changes society brought to pictures,” Zaatari says of his own motivation to work with Madani. 

“So, part of my interest was in documentation. In general, the life of a photo studio is very similar everywhere in the early-to-mid 20th century,” he adds. “The smell of a photo studio is the same everywhere as well, due to the chemicals used in it. And I loved that smell!”

As an artist and documentarian, Zaatari is fascinated by the ways in which these studios differ also, especially around their size and location, since some places attracted far more work than others, such as Jerusalem or Cairo, “both so heavily visited and fantasised about,” Zaatari tells me. A studio’s clientele, whether local or transient, is key. “My main interest in Madani’s profile was that he dedicated himself to a local working-class clientele, and he built his network closely with his subjects so he became, in a way, their magician,” he says.

In one image, we see a woman with her face scratched out. She was Mrs Baqari, whose jealous husband admonished the photographer for taking pictures of his wife without his knowledge. Mr Baqari insisted the photographer scratch the negatives, so that they became useless in the future. Tragically Mrs Baqari later burned herself to death, after which her husband asked for these damaged images to be printed for him to keep.

Working with the archive is not straightforward. “The question of authorship remains the most essential to me while working on someone else’s images, taken sometimes before I was born,” Zaatari says. “It was essential for me and for the AIF to understand that we are complicating captioning, for example, not because we like complexity, but because authorship is not simple – especially in photography, where the person who clicks the button is the author.”

Zaatari stresses that his work on Madani is not a collaboration with the photographer, but rather an artist’s documentary project that addresses the practice of a local photographer. “It’s like making a film about an artist,” he explains. “This is an artwork about a photographer and his images. So, we had to live with two names, mine and his, two dates, the taking of the photo and the making of the project.”

Currently, Zaatari is working on developing a large cabinet that would represent the life of Studio Shehrazade, including cameras, flashes, photos, postcards, AV material representing scenes from the studio, parts of his interviews, films, and so on. The Madani project runs parallel to Zaatari’s other work; both he and the AIF were heavily impacted by Lebanon’s economic collapse in 2019, and they are still slowly recovering.

Zaatari is currently researching material made by Madani’s brother Hussein, who was a few years older but worked for him as an itinerant photographer in the 1950s and early 70s. “Hussein was a marginal character, who worked only to cover his debts,” says Zaatari, adding that the older brother was sadly run over and killed in Beirut in 1973. He left a substantial number of 35mm film negatives of youngsters, leaving movie theatres after watching Bruce Lee films and practising martial arts. “I plan to work with this material as well soon.”

@akramzaatari
arabimagefoundation.org

Work by Lydia Saidi on show in Assembly at Jaou Tunis 2024. All installation shots © Mehdi Ben Temessek

The Tunisian festival seeks to connect the SWANA region and its creatives with the diaspora, reflects Taous Dahmani, who curated two shows at this edition – Unstable Point and Assembly

“If I put my academic cap on, I would say the need to work in that region started with the decolonial and post-colonial subject,” says Taous Dahmani. “Decentralising the art world, decentralising where the conversation is happening, decentralising where exhibitions are happening. There’s a long legacy in South East Asia – Kochi-Muziris, Guangzhou, Shanghai, etc – and of course also on the African continent, with the vibrancy of scenes flourishing in Lagos, Dakar, Bamako and so on. Tunis would aspire to follow these important ‘Other’ capitals of the arts and photography. 

“On a more personal level, there’s the urge to give back to a specific region and community,” she continues. “And as someone from Algerian heritage who grew up in Europe, there’s something quite refreshing and soothing to not be constantly trying to explain your position, prove that it matters, constantly explain, constantly provide subtitles. In the West, when you come from ‘elsewhere’ you have no right to opacity, as Édouard Glissant phrased it.”

We’re discussing Jaou Tunis, an art biennale currently on show in the Tunisian capital, for which Dahmani has curated two shows. Themed Resistance as the Deepest Form of Love and including nine exhibitions in total, Jaou Tunis has a heavy (though not exclusive) emphasis on photography and lens-based media, and a commitment to artists and issues from the Global South and its diaspora. Rima Hassan’s photography project Fragments of a Refuge – Fragments of Home, curated by Kenza Zouari, focuses on Palestinian refugees for example, while Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s The Song Is the Call and the Land Is Calling, includes a multi-channel audio-visual installation, sculpture and textiles, and was started during the Arab Spring and Tunisian Revolution.

Dahmani’s exhibitions are titled Unstable Point and Assembly, and are both group shows; Unstable Point is inspired by a quote by sociologist Stuart Hall, stating; “Identity is formed at the unstable point where the ‘unspeakable’ stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture”. It includes 12 artists from Africa, SWANA, and their diaspora, all of whom were invited to take part via an Open Call – Lina Geoushy, Adam Rouhana, Yasmine Belhassen, Ethel Aanyu, Louisa Babari, Ilias Bardaa, Jasmin Daryani, Sameer Farooq, Amina Kadous, Maram Nairi, Mobolaji Ogunrosoye, and Farren Van Wyk Farren.

“I suggested we do the call because we wanted to focus on emerging artists,” says Dahmani, who is French-British-Algerian, and now based in London. “It was a great way to discover new practitioners but also see patterns and recurring themes that we could then weave together. I’ve been living with this quote from Stuart Hall for a while, it always spoke to me, partly because of who I am and ultimately because of what I care about. There’s this constant friction and tension between being able to become someone, to have this intimate sense of self, and being constantly reminded of the context of a culture, of a history, of a social-political context. And I guess the artists I invited to join me grapple with exactly that in their own unique way.”

Dahmani adds that the location of Unstable Point also influenced her curation, as it is installed outside on the busy, central Habib Bourguiba Avenue. Tunisia has a strong outdoor culture, she explains, but showing work in the street means competing against advertising hoardings, street signs, and many other attention-sucking aspects of everyday life. “I kept saying to the artists, we are no longer thinking about a white cube gallery or fine-art context,” she laughs. “It’s a really different way of thinking.”

For Dahmani it felt particularly relevant to talk about these moments in Tunisia, where president Kais Saied was re-elected on 06 October with some 91 per cent of the vote. Younger Tunisians do not remember the revolution of 2011 and say they feel they missed this moment, Dahmani observes; she hopes they will “see their own agency” via this exhibition. Featured artist Driss described to Dahmani how, “the presidential portrait was everywhere in Tunisia; this omnipresent force and power was then torn apart during the revolution”, and that insight is at the core of his series. Dahmani adds that; “This rejection of narrative through images, or politics through images, was something I wanted to take into account”. 

In this, Unstable Point, Assembly, and Jaou Tunis are perhaps part of a wider effort in Tunisia – and beyond. Founded by the Kamel Lazaar Foundation in 2012 and organised in partnership with the French Institute since 2022, Jaou Tunis “serves as a bridge that unites local and international creators, fostering critical reflections on universal themes and celebrating the transformative power of cultural métissage”, as the official release states. Partly that’s helping create a local infrastructure of people and skills, as well as physical spaces such as the warehouse, and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation’s B7L9 Art Station. Less tangibly, it’s creating a network of artists and curators in Tunisia and beyond. 

At the festival opening there was a sense of excitement among the artists, says Dahmani, some of whom find it hard to exhibit in the SWANA region – but who have also, over the last year, seen opportunities in the West dry up. “There was a real sense of meeting each other, sharing ideas, and grieving together,” she reflects. “There was a sense of OK, so we are celebrating the opening of these shows – which could feel futile compared to what’s going on in that region right now, but instead felt empowering. It was deeply emotional and liberating in gathering, in thinking and feeling together.” 

“If it ever comes to a point where I can’t walk, at least I can still get to the studio in a wheelchair”

Katayama works from a one-story studio located in her home-prefecture Gunma, a mountainous region in northwest Japan. “It would have been near-impossible for me to afford a studio in Tokyo,” says the 37-year-old artist, who lived in the capital for two years after graduating with a masters from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2012. “If I was going to take my craft seriously, I had to go back to Gunma.” Katayama rented out a two-room apartment, where she spent her formative years as a working artist, kneading plaster, stitching cushions, and decorating the ornate frames she uses to exhibit her portraits.

She moved to her current studio in 2019, just before her breakthrough exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale. She shares the space with her husband, a DJ and musician, and adjacent to their home, it is split into three rooms – Katayama’s atelier, her husband’s studio, and a shared office with DJ decks and a collection of thousands of records. The couple have just one rule, never bring the work home. “I’m finding that hard to stick to,” Katayama admits, with a laugh. “I do a lot of my sewing work without my prosthetics, on the floor. Sometimes it’s more comfortable to spread the work across one of the spare rooms in the house.”

For Katayama, accessibility between the house and studio is essential. She was born with congenital tibial hemimelia and, at nine years old, opted to have her legs amputated. “If it ever comes to a point where I can’t walk, at least I can still get to the studio in a wheelchair,” she says. Her plastic toolboxes are all marked with silver heart-shaped labels – cute, but also practical. On days when she is tired or in pain, even her six-year-old daughter can collect the materials she needs.

Katayama is eloquent, charismatic and effortlessly cool. She wears fishnet tights over her tattooed prosthetics, which she has been painting herself since her teens. Growing up with a disability was not easy, and art was her lifeline. “All I wanted was normal legs like everyone else,” she says. “I tried so hard to walk normally so people wouldn’t realise I was wearing prosthetics.” Katayama spent her early teens hiding her legs under baggy trousers, but her high school required girls to wear skirts. “I thought, ‘If I can’t hide anymore, I’ll just avoid people altogether.”

Katayama retreated from the physical world but found a haven online. In the early ’00s Myspace was King, and she made countless friends by sharing her music and art. Teenage memorabilia is scattered across her studio, from paintings and beaded cushions to her first guitar, a 1980s Les Paul Photogenic, bought second-hand when she was 16. “I couldn’t afford to buy everything I wanted. I had to find and create them myself,” she says. Katayama’s mother and grandmother are both talented seamstresses, and her grandfather was an art enthusiast. “It’s thanks to them that I became an artist,” she reflects.

In the beginning, photography was a tool for Katayama to share her creations, and in many ways, it still is. Her process usually begins with constructing installations, which can take up to a week to set up. The photographic process is comparatively short, she says, 30 minutes to an hour at most. None of this is to say that Katayama is a complacent photographer. In fact, there was a time when she was obsessed with camera gear. The photography world, particularly in Japan, can be dominated by older men who tend to fixate on technical details. As a young artist, Katayama was often condescended and questioned by these men.

“These people were more interested in how you handle the camera, your technique and knowledge, rather than what was in the picture, or what it was trying to express,” she says, and this ignited a fire inside her. She tested digital cameras by all the major brands, studied printing techniques, and experimented with darkroom processes. “If someone questions me now, I’m confident that I know so much more than them,” she grins.

Throughout the day, the artist constantly chews on gummy bears. “It’s not even like I absolutely love them, it’s just become a habit,” she shrugs. This is an understatement, because there are at least 30 identical prints of Haribo packaging dotted around the studio. Katayama’s love of the sweets dates back to when she was 18, and spent a few weeks in a homestay with the professor of aesthetics at Dusseldorf’s fine art university. The professor’s husband was a painter and he was always stress-eating Haribos.

“Before I left, he said he would take me to his favourite place. It turned out to be the Haribo shop. I kept one of the empty packets I bought that day, and took a photo of it,” she says. Almost 20 years later, Katayama still uses the image in her installations. “Haribos were there for me at an important turning point in my life,” she says. “I had no intention of becoming an artist back then, but I loved art. [The professor] said I should carry on in that path… Every time I see Haribos, it reminds me of that.”

Poignant but playful, this anecdote is emblematic of Katayama’s approach. Her work is always personal and is propelled by a genuine love and admiration for artistic expression, be it literature, painting, music, or her grandmother’s handmade garments. “Many people tell me I have so much courage, showing myself ‘as I am’,” says Katayama. “I’m not making art with that intention at all. It’s not about the rights of people with disabilities, it’s about the human condition.” In opening the doors to her world, adorned with lace, sequins, and glistening fairy lights, Katayama urges us to seek out the beauty in our own treasures and bodies.

marikatayama.com