“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

Here and elsewhere, home is physical – land and place – but also communal – shared and divided. We see this in Prut, Matei Bejenaru’s ongoing study of communities along the banks of the Prut river between Romania and Moldova that’s become a de facto border of the European Union. It’s there too in Moira Ricci’s folklore-inflected portrait of the Maremma region, where the artist’s roots run deep. And in self-taught antifascist photographer and factory worker Sisto Sisti’s 1935-50 documentation of daily life in a village housing employees of a chemical plant. 

Several exhibitions consider the construction of housing as an architectural endeavour – where this goes right and where this goes wrong. Alejandro Cartagena’s exhibition in Palazzo Vizzani is an iteration of his Deutsche Börse-nominated book, A Small Guide to Home Ownership, on the effects of urban sprawl in northern Mexico. Images are hung from the ceiling so that visitors almost collide with them as they move through the rooms to represent the ever shifting nature of life in Latin America, Cartenaga says. Rows of identikit candy coloured buildings alongside pictures of residents carpooling – the only way to get around since transport infrastructure has not been fully considered. The work is adapted smartly, TVs showing American real estate ads standing in for the witty book design, which echoes a handbook, both hinting at US influence. 

In images, a documentary and a display of snapshots from personal photo albums, Julia Gaisbacher introduces us to the opposite of this, a remarkable participatory social housing project from 1970s Austria led by architect Eilfreid Huth who worked with young families to co-design homes exactly meeting their unique needs. Many, now in old age, still live there, but funding for this approach ceased since it was so much more expensive than the usual one-size-all fits way so her work is a window onto utopia. Ursula Schultz-Dornburg’s show at the smart National Art Gallery of Bologna drives home the sheer variety of home constructions from Iraq to Russia, Georgia to Indonesia, each shaped by specific cultures and environments. 

There are many neat echoes like this, subtle links between projects that make the whole feel coherent and revelatory, encouraging you to see relationships over time and space. The doll house-like cut outs in Monica Ricci’s work and the popihuis, say. Mikael Olsen and Kelly O’Brien’s shows seem on the surface to converge. Olsen had the chance to photograph two now empty homes of architect Bruno Mathsson. He made himself at home in these now desolate, unkempt buildings and while the former inhabitants’ presence persists, the resulting images of abandon are a far cry from the glossy ‘at home with’ spreads you see in the design press but say something about what’s left, the just-visible residues that linger. 

O’Brien’s No Rest For the Wicked pays tribute to the artist’s mother and grandmother, both of whom worked as cleaners in domestic settings. Their work, unlike those of an architect, is not visible, not lauded. Within a relatively small space, clever curation by Raquel Villar-Perez differentiates distinct strands to the work – earlier imagery that is more conventionally documentary alongside recent, more conceptual, collaboratively staged developments that extend out from the frame through objects and props. A portrait of the artist’s mother, with a mop obscuring her face sits on a table laid candles, a tribute to Bologna’s patron saint of cleaners. 

Perhaps the least obviously related to home is LIVING, WORKING, SURVIVING by Jeff Wall, the main exhibition at Fondazione MAST, which continues until 8 March 2026. These are what Wall calls “near documentary.” He says: “I don’t have any ideas. I don’t start from ideas.” Instead, he notes a phenomenon – rural workers arriving at a city, suburban hunters, a volunteer mopping the floor – and then conjures this as he sees it. Wall invites viewers to dwell in his large-scale images. What he presents are not narratives. There is no beginning, no end, only a perpetual middle so that viewers must fill in the missing information as they see fit.

In outlining his vision, Artistic Director Francesco Zanot refers to two touchstone influences. The first a 1986 exhibition that took place in homes across a city and the second, I Like America and America Likes Me, a durational piece where German artist Joseph Beeuys lived for three days in a gallery with a coyote. Art can be somewhere we, however fleetingly, find a home. And home in turn can be a gallery, a stage, a popihuise, a place of play and possibility, risky, transformative, more layered than the everyday term would have us think. If Home is ever solid, it’s plastic, bending, in a continuous process of reconstruction, in the world and in the mind.

Foto/Industria, Bologna is on at Fondazione Mast until 14 December, 2025

@fotoindustria

“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

I don’t identify with the label ‘born free’. Just because you were born after Apartheid doesn’t mean you don’t experience its effects indirectly

Sfiso Jodwana, for example, who fixes Bheka’s lens with a quiet intensity or an unnamed girl whose mirror reflection Mazibuko photographs in an interior room. That sense of tenderness, of care, that imbues these works is born of an insider’s view. Like the youths in their photographs, the photographers belong to the so-called ‘Born Free’ generation of individuals whose lives began after Apartheid’s fall. In 1994, the country’s first democratically elected government took power and the exhibition considers what that means in practice.

“For me, really great strides have been made in terms of democracy,” says Mazibuko, “but I don’t identify with the label ‘born free’. Just because you were born after Apartheid doesn’t mean you don’t experience its effects indirectly. That’s why we create the work we create because we find ourselves in the townships. It’s not necessarily physical bondage but it’s a bondage of the mind. In one street, you might find two taverns and many churches. It’s like you only have two points to run to: religion or alcohol.” .

Bheka sees in his work a “tension between hope and illusion”, a duality that characterises their generation. “What about the emotional, psychological and socio-economical scars of the past that are passed down through generations affecting how we navigate the world today?” He asks. “The trauma of previous generations doesn’t simply disappear. Yes we have freedom and rights, basic education and the right to vote but the journey toward true freedom is far from complete.”

Curator Valérie Fougeirol, previously director of Paris Photo and Magnum Gallery, worked with Mazibuko and Bheka over six months to interweave their work. In the intimate exhibition space, their images mingle, varying in scale, a visual conversation between two artists, between colour and monochrome, inside and outside, differing temporalities – Bheka takes most of his pictures after dark. The result is intended to create a feeling of immersion but also of blockage, like you can’t escape. “It’s one long sentence,” says Fougeirol. “If you know the photographers, you can recognise the work but we agreed that in the show we don’t say who is who.”

Fougeirol invited the pair to delve into their archives, presenting work from the past more than a decade alongside recent images. Mazibuko was struck by “the sameness” of the area. “It’s almost like you could have shot it yesterday, which speaks volumes about the pace of development in townships… But at the same time we can’t not see the beauty in it.It’s this specific eye that Sibusiso has that comes from being genuine. In that space, you forget about the underlying issues in the environment and you capture the humanity of the community.”

This is the third time that Fougeirol has worked with Of Soul and Joy, which trains a cohort of 20 young people in Thokoza annually in photography and other skills. It was how both Mazibuko and Bheka first seriously discovered the medium. “Photography became my refuge,” says Bheka, crediting it with shielding him from the substance misuse that is prevalent in townships. “It also empowered me as a person to tell my own story and about my own community.”

He adds: “The workshops were instrumental in my growth, expanding my network, and introducing me to new spaces that propelled my career forward.” Since their journeys began, both photographers have been making waves internationally, with exhibitions at Bamako Encounters, Les Rencontres des Arles, Ghent Photo Fest. Mazibuko has found in Of Soul and Joy something akin to family, “A platform where I can be myself and, frankly, I can be a free thinker. The project has embraced my ideas and supported me and.for that I am grateful.”

Nonetheless, both confess to a complicated relationship with photography. “Even when I don’t realise I’m photographing that way, my images have an element of sadness,” says Mazibuko. “But at the same time there is a connection. I believe that everyone I photograph I carry with me … Representation is my driving force. I want to create a beautiful archive of Black bodies that celebrates their life.” Bheka is troubled by the way that photography is always open to multiple interpretations. “Sometimes it doesn’t say what you want it to say. There’s always a conflict between what you experience and what you give out to the world,” he says.

The exhibition title, Ubusukunemini, is a compound, Fougeirol explains, made by merging two Zulu words: ubusuku, meaning ‘night’ and nemini, meaning ‘day’. The bringing together of what might seem distinct into a whole is a way of presenting Thokoza, its layers of history, present and future, in one space and holding that in all of its complexity, all of its poetry. 

Ubusukunemini (Day and Night) is at Rubis Mécénat hors-les-murs 10 rue Jacob, 75006, Paris, from October 30 to November 23, 2024

“A photography festival needs to support artists’ careers at the same time as providing a cultural event for the general public”

The economic currents shaping our highly globalised contemporary world animate Ritual Inhabitual’s Oro Verde, which considers the trade in avocados. A Gen Z staple in the Global North, avocados have become big business for the drug cartels of Mexico – the country that supplies 45 per cent of the fruit worldwide. Meanwhile, BJP One to Watch Bandia Ribeira’s Not a Home Without Fire portrays intensive high-tech farming of out-of- season vegetables in Spain, which are sold to the UK and other northern European markets.

There are two debut UK solo shows; for Hashem Shakeri and Inuuteq Storch, the latter the first artist from Greenland to represent Denmark at the Venice Biennale. Bristol Photo also encompasses a major Rinko Kawauchi retrospective, which runs until February 2025 at Arnolfini. Community projects are once again an important element of the festival, with an exhibition of Nigel Poor’s The San Quentin Project in nearby Weston-super- Mare; IC Visual Lab and Prison Education are also creating ‘Prison Mobile Library’ in which inmates at local institutions can share their stories.

“We wanted the festival to be very internationally focused, but locally grounded,” says Acín. “So artists and projects are talking to themes, ideas, and histories of the city.” Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah’s residency commission The House is a Body unpacks the colonial history of The Georgian House, an 18th-century townhouse in Bristol now open to the public; The Weight of Witness, a collaboration between Billy HC Kwok, Jay Lau and Lau Wai at the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), responds to Hong Kong’s photographic archives held at University of Bristol and the University of Hong Kong.

When Bristol Photo launched in 2021, the UK was slowly feeling its way out of the coronavirus pandemic. The programme ended up being stretched over 12 months, and many events took place outdoors or online due to continued government restrictions. Despite the limitations posed by Covid-19, the first edition welcomed more than 200,000 visitors, a quarter of them from outside the city. “It was challenging, but also rewarding because people were eager to come,” says Acín.

Even so, he remembers feeling “frustrated that the work we put into the festival couldn’t be celebrated in an event because the social elements of the programme were removed,” adding: “They’re what a festival experience is about.” The team hopes to build on past successes, while promising a more sociable offering. The opening week will be packed with parties.

This year is the first one with IC Visual Lab at the helm, taking the reins from Tracy Marshall-Grant. A nonprofit Acín co-founded 10 years ago, ICVL runs socially engaged visual arts projects, and this ethos has imbued the approach to the festival. The exhibitions are taking place across the city, at established institutions such as Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Arnolfini, Watershed, Martin Parr Foundation and the RPS, but also in pop-ups in unusual locations, run via partnerships with local and regional organisations. “We want to nurture relationships between independent groups and institutions, using the festival as this platform to support the photography scene,” Acín explains.

Among the venues this year is ICVL’s own new public space in the Old Market area of Bristol, which will host a series of drawings made by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. The sketches show archival images found at the International Committee of the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva, which were made during the Palestinian Nakba; Azoulay was forbidden from photographically reproducing them, on the grounds of ‘political neutrality’. “It’s never been exhibited in the UK and feels very relevant,” says Acín, pointing to the contrast between these absent images and the reportage that has emerged from Gaza over the past year.

Although the RPS gallery is set to close in 2025, Bristol embodies an ever-evolving photography hub outside the UK capital. And on 19–20 October, the popular BOP (Books on Photography) takes place in the city. Acín and team are keen to nurture this environment and they hope to make a lasting impact with the festival, both by encouraging unusual venues and partners, and by paying exhibitors for their contribution. “We know we are limited but we wanted to treat exhibitions with independence and autonomy so every exhibition feels looked after,” says Acín. “A photography festival needs to support artists’ careers at the same time as providing a cultural event for the general public. That’s something we really want to get right.”

bristolphotofestival.org

“These collaborations work best when the poetry is not a caption and the photography is not an illustration, but rather both raise questions”

Solo, a collector of photo-poetry publications, adds that the earliest example he encountered is a French pamphlet from the 1850s. In these initial forays, he explains, the photography tended to be illustrative and used instead of engravings, so you might have a poem by Robert Burns alongside an image of castle ruins in Scottish landscape. The early 20th century avant-garde Dada and Surrealist movements precipitated a more experimental evolution, of which “the iconic example is Man Ray and Paul Éluard’s Facile [1935],” he says. Latin America has a strong tradition of photo-poetry, from the 1954 Alturas de Macchu Picchu with poems by Pablo Neruda and photographs by Martín Chambi to the current output of contemporary Buenos Aires-based photobook publishers La Luminosa Editorial, which frequently combines text with image.

Many established poets have explored one- off photographic partnerships – such as Ted Hughes with Fay Godwin or Seamus Heaney with Rachel Giese – but generally these alliances drift in and out of vogue. “These collaborations work best when the poetry is not a caption and the photography is not an illustration, but rather both raise questions. The less literal the relationship, the more successful,” says Solo. He adds that the 1960s and 70s proved another fertile phase, and agrees that we are seeing a resurgence again today. Instagram may be a factor, having brought poetry and photography to wider audiences. And, despite exponential digitalisation, the 21st century has also seen a flourishing of independently published print books and zines. But what, in particular, attracts photographers to poetry?

Perhaps it is down to what they share – finite parameters, a heightened view of the world. “Poetry is good at elevating the everyday or looking at ordinary things in a new light and that is what my pictures do. I’m not a classic documentary photographer,” Johny Pitts explains over a video call from Bern, where he is currently guest professor at the university. Pitts was already friends with the writer Roger Robinson and they were keen to team up; in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, their planned collaboration took on a new urgency. “But let’s not react too much to the current moment,” Pitts decided. “Let’s do something unexpected, something we would probably never have been able to do before.” That was the genesis of Home is Not a Place – a book and exhibition uniting Pitts’ images with Robinson’s poems.

Unlike with Hicks and Berry, here the images do not always spark the poems. While the book includes some archive photographs Pitts had amassed over the past decade and a half, it also features new ones produced during a road trip the duo undertook around the coast of the UK – an approach similar to that which Seamus Murphy and PJ Harvey followed between 2011 and 2014 when they travelled together to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington, DC, and “Harvey collected words and Murphy collected pictures”. Influenced by Paul Gilroy’s notion of “the Black Atlantic”, Pitts and Robinson wanted to look beyond London, remapping Britain through Black histories of arrival, displacement, change. “What you’re trying to do as a photographer and as a poet, is to work with ghosts, trying to capture things that aren’t actually there,” Pitts says.

The process varied. Sometimes they would respond concurrently to the same moment in their own artistic languages. Other times, images and words would find each other retrospectively, through editing and sequencing. Although it was completely different in form, Pitts was conscious of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a 1955 portrait of Harlem with images by Roy DeCarava interspersed with words by Langston Hughes, which stitch the photographs together, breathing life into them via a fictional narrative. The book’s form, design and layout are closely bound up with how the images and photographs are produced and then read in relation to each other.

Photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind, who completed an MA at The Poetry School in October 2023 and published her debut collection, One Language, in 2022, makes a similar point, offering some volumes as examples: Caleb Femi’s Poor is the compact size you would expect of a poetry book, with photographs by the author appearing throughout, while the larger Home is Not a Place looks and feels more like a photobook. Taylor-Lind’s book is led by poetry, though it includes images, and her verses allude to a photographic view of the world – a “soft-box dawn”, for example. “This craft of intricate observation is a skill I have developed as a photographer,” she says, adding that both are practices rooted in extraction, removing anything superfluous until only essence remains, each frame or word weighed out.

For Taylor-Lind, there is an important distinction – her photography is journalistic, reporting on events, but her poems are situated. “[My] push towards poetry is also born of my frustration sometimes with the limitations of photography,” she says, explaining that poetry creates space for reflection on her experiences as a witness. “Journalism can give us a lot of information. But when I read poems, I learn about the world beyond facts and figures. Poetry is more successful in taking the specific details of one person or one place or one moment of time and expanding that out into a universal experience.”

Though she has been writing since childhood, Jocelyn Allen’s poetic practice began when she published her photographs of pregnancy and motherhood on Instagram. Accompanying images of her imitating the postures her young children make, they started as captions, witty yet poignant hashtags that increased in length and complexity. “#IHadToLieDownForThisWeeksPictureAsIWasSoTiredButOneMinuteIHaveABurstOfEnergyAndThenIAmTiredAgain,” reads one example and, as this perhaps shows, they play with the idea of self-presentation and authenticity on social media but also help to create distance. “My work has always been therapeutic,” she says. “The hashtags helped me to feel less awkward.” Like Taylor-Lind, she took a course at The Poetry School, and recently exhibited work from her latest project Oh Me, Oh Mãe II at Bell House in Dulwich, together with poems. “Poetry is an extension of my work,” she says, a literary layer enhancing and expanding on the visual.

David Solo observes that the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of academia may be a factor in this wave of photo-poetic cross-pollination. This is true beyond art school, with far less clear distinctions between creative genres. Just as photography has expanded to encompass elements of sculpture, installation, embroidery and performance, so too have televisual, filmic and musical genres blurred in ways that we might not have anticipated a few decades back. Ours is the age of the cultural mash-up and photography and poetry, both “deceptively simple” as Johny Pitts puts it, are ripe for commingling. “We’re using the tools that people use ordinarily every single day – we’re endlessly taking photos, typing words,” says Liz Berry. “But through this accessible medium, we do something different, intense, mysterious.”

blackcountrytype.com, johnypitts.com, anastasiataylorlind.com,  jocelynallen.co.uk

For Starskey Butler, there is an unbroken continuum between social work and creative practice. “I’m an artist and I’m a social worker but I’m one person,” they say. “There might be a technical separation but there is not a spiritual separation.” Now based in Birmingham, Butler was brought up in Wolverhampton by Ena, their unofficial foster mother. Ena is ‘Nan’ (though not biologically) and an abiding influence – a documentary where she shares her warmth and wisdom features in Thirty-Six. 

Elsewhere, landscape images from a series called IN/OUT evoke the interplay between external and internal worlds while pictures made at Ena’s home touch on the ways that memory and culture shape our identities. A moving-image piece trains our gaze on the greenhouse in her garden, while a still image shows a spade belonging to Ena’s husband, another formative figure for Starskey Butler. The artist speaks of history and culture – how many Jamaican immigrants brought farming traditions from their country of origin to Britain – but they are as much metaphors for how we are nurtured and how we grow.

There are always multiple versions of any story. There is a version of Starskey Butler’s story that sensationalises pain and trauma; there are versions of their story seen through the perspective of family members, caregivers, council authorities. And there’s the version of the story they tell here, picking their words carefully as we drink tea in a quiet room away from MAC’s public areas.

“I’m an artist and I’m a social worker but I’m one person… There might be a technical separation but there is not a spiritual separation”

The artist did reconnect with their birth mother when they were 7 or 8, but it was only as an adult that they really got to know her. Access Subject (2022), an in-progress book project centred on portraiture and dialogue between the pair, was sparked by the discovery of those children’s services records. “I just went round to her house and was like, ‘I’ve got these records, shall we do a photography project?’” She agreed and they looked through the records together, speaking at length about her childhood and life before Starskey Butler was born. “After that, we finally both saw each other properly, as human beings,” the artist reflects.

Before their career as a social worker, Starskey Butler hadn’t considered delving into their own past. But working in child protection, they started to wonder about their background. “I always knew I had older siblings that had been placed into care,” they say. They also point out that “a person who has had previous concerns raised will have a ‘pre birth assessment,’ so my mother would have had some involvement with social services.” In April 2017, Starskey Butler put in a ‘subject access request’ with Leeds council, expecting to receive a single-page letter and instead finding themselves weighed down with a mountain of paperwork.

Gradually, they were able to piece together more of the jigsaw, but further questions emerged through the information missing in the redacted pages. “Visitors think I redacted them but that’s how I received them,” they say of the documents on display at MAC. “I was interested in them as objects, their textures and how they relate to the photographs.” The council sent the redacted pages, related to events that took place before Starskey Butler’s birth, through with the rest of the documentation, although there was no information contained besides the inclusion of name, place and date of birth and a court date. More intriguing than not seeing anything, these almost entirely blanked out papers remind us of knowledge just outside of our grasp.

This is a theme that recurs throughout Thirty-Six. For example in a series of images shot from trains when Starskey Butler would travel around the UK conducting interviews with individuals to assess their suitability to foster a child to whom they already have a connection, but who cannot reside with their birth parents. The smudged and fleeting landscapes are meditations on the responsibility of making those decisions. “You assess somebody’s entire life from when they were born up until that moment,” Starskey Butler explains. “You think, ‘Who am I to even be doing this?’ And you’d see someone over a long period of time each week for hours.” Moments of optimism and confidence could rapidly give way to doubt with an unforeseen revelation. It is a prolonged process where the assessor must stay open to all possibilities before finally reaching a starkly binary conclusion – a yes or a no.

Thirty-Six takes us on a journey of deep empathy that echoes Starskey Butler’s own experiences, both professional and personal. The intensive discussions that informed Access Subject began in the same way that a foster viability assessment would – although that impartiality was impossible to maintain. In a section of the interview, reproduced verbatim on the exhibition wall, Starskey Butler’s birth mother asks, “Do you think I was a bad mother?” They reply, not as a social worker but as a child: “No… I think people have their circumstances.” In the end, circumstances are all we have, the sum total of our stories, layer upon layer, that make us who we are.

Marley Starskey Butler: Thirty Six is at Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, until 28 January

Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool’s Socially Engaged Photography Network defines it as “activities or projects where photographers and communities/individuals come together to co-author or co-produce visual representations of the world around us”. There is an implied parity. And yet, hierarchies persist, not least financially. While the professional artist usually receives a fee, the participant does not. But – if they are true co-creators, co-authors, co-producers – is it time they should?

“I’ve been grappling with these questions for a long time,” says Anthony Luvera, who has worked as a socially engaged photographer since 2002. “Would it further underscore the power imbalance between myself and the participant if I were in the position of employer? Would they feel they had to do a ‘good job’ to be rewarded? Would payment incentivise participation? Would they feel as free to express their own agency, interests and  perspective?”

For many of Luvera’s projects – with people experiencing homelessness, for example – the photographer has been embedded within a partner organisation, which comes with its own parameters and protocols. “The participant might be visiting a support centre for specialist services, to see a housing adviser or a nurse, and taking part in my work is one of a number of activities they may be offered,” he says.

“Being paid for the project meant a lot. It made me feel as though I was truly a respected part of the project, as though my ideas and contributions were important, valid and appreciated”

Open Eye Gallery has a similar approach. “We see the projects as a creative offer,” says Liz. Wewiora, the gallery’s head of social practice and leader of the MA course in socially engaged photography at Salford University. “It might be something they’re doing for their health and wellbeing through social prescribing.” 

Transparency is important in outlining this offer and how creative work might be used afterwards. Discussions take place around “what the group or individual want to get out of the process” and which expenses need to be covered, “so that it’s a positive opportunity that doesn’t put a strain on anyone”.

Noni Stacey, author of Photography of Protest and Community: The Radical Collectives of the 1970s, thinks differently. “Artists are getting funding and building their careers off the back of these projects. It has a much longer impact for them than the participants and that should be recognised,” says the photo historian. “I don’t think it’s right. If people are taking part in a project, they should be paid a living wage.” Contemporary practices have roots in the politically motivated community photography of the 1970s that Stacey studied, but the landscape now is different: “The budgets they were getting then were tiny and there wasn’t the gallery system there is today.” The participants may be credited as co-creators now, but they rarely benefit from the same opportunities the artist might receive. These projects, while not commercially driven, have a legacy. They can increase the artist’s cultural capital in the form of status, as well as bringing in commissions, exhibitions, sales and funding for future projects.”

But there can be opportunities for participants too, such as paid talks, workshops, or funding to run their own projects independently. “She / Her / Hers / Herself is not just a project, it’s my life,” says Sarah Wilson, with whom Luvera collaborated for five years chronicling her journey as a trans woman, after the pair met when she participated on a previous socially engaged project, Let Us Eat Cake. “It’s helped me grow and expand my business. It’s given me advertising. It’s given me work. It’s helped me make connections with many people. It’s opened up doors I never thought could be opened for me.”

With Luvera’s help, Wilson shot video tutorials to promote her work as a beautician and ran a nail bar during this year’s exhibition of She / Her / Hers / Herself at Belfast Exposed, receiving a fee.

Alternative rewards

Paying a participant is not always as simple as processing an invoice. The practicalities can be admin-heavy and logistically problematic. A participant can risk losing state benefits or asylum status by being paid. In the UK, anyone earning more than £1,000 a year as self-employed needs to file a self-assessment tax return. One way to circumvent this is by giving vouchers in lieu of payment.

Becky Warnock has worked on both paid and unpaid socially engaged projects, and presented this as an option to participants in the 2022 Chisenhale Gallery project How’s the Weather in Your Head?. Self-referred via a callout, participants “all identified as having struggled with their mental health, although they were at no point asked to publicly disclose their experiences,” Warnock explains. 

The participants were given the option to either receive an hourly rate of the London Living Wage for their time attending meetings and developing artwork, the equivalent value in vouchers, or an in-kind opportunity like a course. Each one chose payment. 

“Being paid for the project meant a lot,” says Emma, one of the participants in the project. “It made me feel as though I was truly a respected part of the project, as though my ideas and contributions were important, valid and appreciated.” Another member, Maiya, adds: “Within this project, I saw myself as a collaborating artist. My experiences and opinions were valued.”

“Collaborative research is based on the idea that everyone can be a creator of knowledge”

Beyond the photography world, there are compelling examples of remunerated participatory projects. Dr Stefano Piemontese is a research fellow in the University of Birmingham’s Department of Social Policy, Sociology and Criminology, focusing on migration, with an interest in collaborative and audiovisual research methods. In some cases, where resources allow, individuals are paid as ‘co-researchers’, employed as casual workers for a fixed term, active in the project’s design and execution.

On the one hand, he says, this is about appreciating what they bring. “Collaborative research is based on the idea that everyone can be a creator of knowledge,” he says. But it also addresses the fact that people from economically deprived communities do not necessarily have time to volunteer – they might be working multiple jobs to make ends meet, trying to survive.

The question then comes down to whether participation constitutes work. Or, as Open Eye’s Liz Wewiora puts it, “Are they delivering a service?”. Luvera frames his practice as primarily pedagogical. “Working in this way, I bring a skill set and the participant is invited to develop skills or have a particular experience,” he says.

Luvera is in the process of completing a new project about economic segregation in recent housing developments, commissioned by Four Corners. The participants in this project are paid for their time as standard. “I’m thinking through the mechanics and ethical implications,” he says, echoing Wewiora’s definition. Whereas, in the case of Warnock’s project, participants formed a collective and were identified as artists and change-makers from the off.

Perhaps co-creation is a sliding scale and social engagement not a universally agreed category. Each concept is a guideline, not a rule, continually interpreted and enacted in a plurality of ways. Noni Stacey is not sure this argument cuts it: “First it was participatory, then community, now it’s socially engaged. There are all these terms swimming around. I don’t see much difference between them but I do have problems with the model.”

The current flourishing in participatory arts could be read in multiple ways: as artists doing the job of a state stripped bare by more than a decade of austerity; as a long-overdue acknowledgement of the holistic richness of art; as a celebration of the need for creative expression inherent in all of us. Art practice is exactly that – a practice, something artists do, an approach that changes, shifts, adapts. At the core of every socially engaged project is “an exchange”, says Warnock. 

What changes hands can be artistic, social, educational, material or monetary, but it must be fair. For collaborators with a stable income, remuneration might not be a concern. But for others, it is a barrier to their participation. And that is something photographers choosing to work in social engagement must continually negotiate.

Noticing the lack of work by local photographers, Rollo initiated her own project, re-working found images and documenting festivals across Southern Italy

Photography has long been associated with magic; the way it can stop time, and the alchemy in how images appear in the darkroom. In the 19th century, it was used for optical trickery in stage illusions and at fairgrounds. Concurrently, the camera was being employed as a tool for scientific study. These two applications of the medium are at odds with one another, and today, photography’s claim to pure objectivity has been replaced with an understanding that the camera can sometimes lie.

Alessia Rollo was struck by this realisation in 2019. Having grown up in the southernmost point of Italy – “the heel of the boot” – she moved north to Milan for a master’s in photography. During her studies, she encountered the work of Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino. In the mid-20th century, he studied and wrote about religion, shamanism and tarantism in southern Italy. But Rollo did not recognise the way her home region had been represented. The photographers and film-makers who accompanied De Martino on his trips contributed to a perception of the south as ‘other’, a backward place still steeped in superstition compared to the ‘rational’ north.

“In the history books I studied there were images of south Italy but none by southern Italian photographers,” Rollo notes. She decided to start her own project, Parallel Eyes – a riposte to those who recorded funerals, religious ceremonies and other rites with little appreciation for their nuances. In their gaze, the richness, beauty and complexity of her culture were lost.

There are two strands to the project. First, Rollo reinterprets found images from the 1950s and 1960s, making new photographs that depict rituals practised in south Italy today. “There are many festivals celebrating the winter solstice, the spring equinox, and often these are connected to nature and fertility,” she says. Rollo then manipulates the pictures manually, by hand-painting black-and-white negatives in vivid colours, or using pins to pierce their surfaces – an effect that looks akin to glitter cascading like fairy dust across the saturated hues. Through this heightened aesthetic, Rollo valorises the magical and establishes an alternative visual language to the clinical documents of the archives.

“I want to embrace the magical, participatory aspects, the idea of fate, the invisible,” she explains. Past portrayals have overlooked the emotional side of ceremonies and their importance in binding communities together. Since 2019, Rollo has documented festivals in Apulia, Sicily, Basilicata, Campania and Calabria, and has plans to cover Sardinia. It has been a slow process as the rituals often occur on the same day in each region, meaning she has to revisit every year.

The series is not intended to be exhaustive but to show “a wider perspective”. In addition to stills, Rollo has been shooting video and envisages the work in book format as well as a multimedia piece to be viewed online, and in-person as an immersive installation. “The still pictures alone are not enough. I want to engage the other senses so viewers can perceive something magical,” she says. Layering new meanings over the past, Rollo creates a visual palimpsest, reimagining her heritage in an act of radical self-authorship; an ode to south Italian culture by someone who has lived it.

alessiarollo.it

How did you meet the women in the book? Was it difficult given this is a taboo topic? 

Different ways – from a friend’s suggestion to research across anonymous forums on the internet. You wouldn’t believe how many mothers feel like this! Apart from regret, I was looking for specific profiles of stories and had a list of countries. I was keen to highlight that these women do not regret their children as such, they regret that they had signed up for a job which has robbed them of their own existence. Ironically, they are excellent mothers and adore their children, but if they could, they wouldn’t choose to be mothers again in the same conditions.

You use an array of visual strategies alongside text. What did you seek to portray?

I use my images – discussed with the mothers – and their direct testimonies as two different languages. I combined them to create a narrative divided into seven chapters, each built around one main feeling that prevails in this mother’s life – fear, isolation, exhaustion, resignation, anger, guilt and acceptance. I included blank space and silence in between these for readers to reflect and draw their own conclusions. I used documentary-style photography, the only appropriate way to talk about this subject in my opinion. I wanted to be invisible and serve as a vehicle for my protagonists to express themselves and their realities.

“There would be fewer exhausted and unhappy mothers if fathers did their half of the job properly”

Many of the women survived domestic violence or pressure from pro-life authority figures. Are patriarchal expectations of motherhood the root problem? 

Of course, there are women who even in the best conditions and with a fully involved second parent would still regret their decision. But in my research they are a minority. Most feel regret because they were either pressured into motherhood or abandoned in this role. It was the US writer and feminist Adrienne Rich in the 1970s who first made the distinction between motherhood as a human relationship and motherhood as an institution in her groundbreaking book Of Woman Born. Her idea was that as much as motherhood means a love-based bond with your child, it is also a conservative oppressive ideology with moral rules that prescribe how you must feel, think and behave. Nonconformity is punished by society. 

Fathers do not feature much. What did you conclude from that? 

Women are still expected to be caregivers and men breadwinners, but most women today also want to work. So, either they end up with second shifts at home or give up their jobs and lives altogether. The problem is women have had their revolution, but men have not. They continue to protect their privileged position without realising that they too are socialised according to rigid gender roles which don’t allow them to fulfil their human potential and explore their nurturing side. I want people to ask: where is the father? There would be fewer exhausted and unhappy mothers if fathers did their half of the job properly.

There is such limited cultural exploration of motherhood, which is shocking given that women are half the population. How did you relate to prior visual representations of mothers? 

Undo Motherhood is meant to undermine the highly idealised imagery of normative motherhood. The special edition of the book contains a handmade pop-up created out of stock images of pregnancy and motherhood widely used in ads and media. This is my only – sarcastic – statement as an author in this project. If people see only this representation, they get a false idea of what it means to raise a child. I see these images as a contemporary version of age-old male fantasies about motherhood, starting with depictions of the Virgin Mary, an image I hate. It’s great to see more and more female photographers showing motherhood as it is – a complex, multilayered human experience.

Undo Motherhood by Diana Karklin is published by Schilt.