“Here in Norway, the culture is to be outside and be in nature and it’s something that Somali aunties have adapted to”

She explains that, before WhatsApp, her community relied on cassettes and photographs to keep up with each other’s lives. “People back in Somalia used to film themselves in a cassette and then send them over to Norway, or England or America…and that’s how they would remember each other.” Abdi emphasises the value of putting effort into creating a memory. In Oslo, domestic settings became the backdrop for wearing one’s finest clothes – an inspiration for her early editorial work that blended the home with African studio portraiture. “When I do studio work, I take a lot of inspiration from the effort people used to take in taking photos of each other. How people used to get dressed and the whole ritual behind it,” she says. There was a shared consensus that smelling your best was as important as looking your best. Relatives across the diaspora and the motherland perfumed the envelopes before mailing them, turning each one into a sensorial vessel of memory. “People will smell you through the photo, people will smell the emotions”. 

Abdi approaches documentary with care, softly enough to capture intimacy while remaining cognisant of the sensitivities of her work. Being welcomed into communities is a part of her process, and people willingly permit her to share their narrative. Rarely are her photos taken, they are gifted. Working strictly with film is a patient process just like these interactions whether it’s a tender moment between a mother and child or between friends.

Abdi tells me that one portrait taken in Nairobi was where Family in Focus found its start. Serendipity took the photographer to an orphanage in Kangemi where she met Priscilla holding her neighbour’s daughter – while the neighbour had her hair braided by Priscilla’s daughter. In the portrait lies an enchanting parable of community and entangled lives, a defining metaphor for the Family in Focus canon which continues in her moving image work.

Abdi’s understanding of film as a universal medium for storytelling began in her adolescence watching Bollywood movies void of subtitles. Drawn to dramatic colour palettes and choreography, she realised that feeling was the only metric that mattered to her and why she intently uses minimal dialogue in her films. On Tip Toe is a performance film co-directed by Abdi and Dina Al-Makhrami and follows the ballet dancers of Na Ponta dos Pés, an art school built by their instructor and matriarch Tuany Nascimento. Set in a haven in the favelas hanging over the city where youth feels truly sacred, we see a dream-like sequence of girlhood. A dance between play and performance, before falling into Nascimento’s embrace.

This fascination of matriarchal communities begins at home for Abdi. In My Heroes, Abdi spotlights Somali women in Oslo, including her mother, whose instinct, like Priscilla, is to lean on her community. In this microcosm of Somali womanhood we see their capacity to show up for one another, to play and reclaim the outdoors.

“Here in Norway, the culture is to be outside and be in nature. It’s literally ingrained in Norwegian culture and it’s something that Somali aunties have adapted to.” With a process rooted in rapport and invitation, Abdi plans to keep translating personal stories of the diaspora through pop-up studios and an upcoming Family in Focus book.

@ayyanabdi

“It’s this whole subculture where boys meticulously colour-coordinate a tracksuit with their trainers, then top it off with a fresh trim”

The idea took root during conversations with her brother about the often- overlooked grooming rituals of Moroccan youth. “We’d talk about how crazy the hairstyles were – but no one really documents them,” she says. “It’s this whole subculture where boys meticulously colour-coordinate a tracksuit with their trainers, then top it off with a fresh trim. It’s all curated.”

As Abelque continued her research, the project deepened in complexity. Hairstyles, she realised, reflect political realities. “There’s this stereotype that these boys are just idling all day,” she says. “But they’re creating joy and purpose for themselves. A footballer debuts a new style and suddenly everyone’s talking about it, running to the barber to get the same look.”

In a country where youth employment is scarce and public recreational spaces are limited, the barbershop emerges as a vital hub. “Hair and beauty become a means of self-expression,” Abelque says. “But it’s also a social ritual – a way to find identity and belonging among young men.” Abelque shoots in the barbershops too, and the images festooning their walls provide a joyfully chaotic foil for the quieter portraits taken against a clean space. Abelque sees the barbershop as a boy’s bedroom in public, walls covered in football posters, streetwear brand logos and mirror selfies. “It’s where their interests live.”

Abelque is particularly drawn to aesthetic contradictions. “To see an Arab man walking around with a massive mohawk – that image is so layered,” she reflects. But she adds that their pride is also palpable. She was overwhelmed by how excited the boys were to have their portrait made, the images perhaps validating the care taken over their appearance, and further encouraging them to attract a healthy attention. “When I asked to take their photo, they’d light up,” she says. “They’d pull out pictures of their best fits, their favourite cuts. They’re proud of how they present themselves.”

@zeeeeeea

In Imperial Valley, Rossi expands, “water is like gold”, a fact he emphasises in his work. In an image of a young woman washing her horse with a hose, water droplets spray and catch the light like flecks of gold or flying sparks. Similarly, in a photograph of the All-American Canal, the largest in the Imperial Valley, the setting sun gives the water the glossy, reflective appearance of precious metal. Water is equally notable in its absence too; Rossi’s desaturated and warmly hued palette reveals a landscape which is palpably dry.

The movement of water is crucial to the geography of Rossi’s work and the valley itself. Many of his images are made in the communities that border the Salton Sea – a prehistoric lake to the north of the valley which was inadvertently refilled by runoff when the valley was first irrigated in the early 1900s. Once a popular vacation resort, a series of environmental changes instigated the sea’s decline in the 1970s. By the 2000s, more efficient use of water stopped all runoff to the sea completely and caused the shoreline to shrink, revealing a lakebed containing a toxic dust composed of ozone and particulates which, combined with exhaust fumes, pesticides plumes and factory emissions, creates a haze which hangs over communities in the valley. Rossi describes how “you can actually feel your skin and eyes burning when you’re on the shore of the lake”.

Despite this, there are still communities living around the lake. In fact, Rossi explains, “because you can buy a lot for $2000, people are actively moving to the area”. One such resident is Doris Dinsmoor, who Rossi photographs in her home of 48 years in Desert Shores, located on the western shore of the Salton Sea. Rossi’s portrait reveals the contradiction between the bucolic fantasies of agricultural life and the reality of the valley. His subject sits at rest on her sofa surrounded by ornaments, artworks, windchimes, a sword, and above her head a print depicting a verdant farmhouse scene. The photograph has the same slightly yellow hue as Rossi’s other images, which now seems unnerving in the context of an interior. A vent in the top right corner of the image is framed by an ominous dark yellow stain. 

In another image, Rossi photographs a young boy, Alexis, playing in a barely full paddling pool in the yard of his family’s trailer on the shores of the Salton Sea. The trailer, its awning, gutters, door, the air conditioning unit and an ornamental sun with pouting lips – which resembles the Incan sun god Inti – are painted uniformly beige, giving them the appearance of having been coated by the dust which Rossi depicts in earlier photographs. Above him, a print of Santa Maria, echoing Lange’s Migrant Mother, averts her gaze from the camera.

Fantasies of the West as a place where the American ideals of individual liberty, economic prosperity and ultimately happiness could be pursued seem far from the reality of the Imperial Valley. Rossi remarks on the huge levels of deprivation which exist there: “22% of people live below the poverty line. Lots of people who live in the Imperial Valley aren’t there because they like it. They’re there because of the opportunity and because it’s dirt cheap to live there. Many people I’ve met are from other parts of California where they can no longer afford to live.” In one photograph, Rossi pictures Sydney, a recently unemployed agricultural worker, kissing the leg of his partner Kourtni, which hangs out of the window of the car they both live in. 

In another portrait, Rossi depicts farm worker Raul in Calexico on his way home to Mexicali, one of an estimated 15,000 day labourers who cross the Mexico-US border to work in the valley every day. This kind of insecure and casual labour seems foundational to Imperial Valley, which has a history of conflict between workers’ unions and the agro-industrial corporations that operate there. Since the beginning of Trump’s second term as president, this instability has been compounded by the looming threat of aggressive ICE raids, which are already sweeping nearby agricultural regions like the much larger Central and San Fernando valleys.

The uncertain future of farming in the valley has implications for almost all its residents. In Rossi’s own words, “everyone you meet in the valley is connected to agriculture.” It’s the third largest employer in the surrounding county, trailing only the public sector and healthcare. Under Trump’s administration, the pressure to rewrite the 1922 Colorado River Pact – which overestimated the river’s annual flows and ignored the seniority rights of indigenous groups – has diminished. The promised reinvigoration of the local economy by the discovery of lithium deposits in the area now seems unlikely following the President’s rescinding of tax and regulatory benefits for electric vehicles. It’s difficult to imagine any scenario other than the valley’s continued decline.

Rossi’s images of this decline might seem to echo Dorothea Lange’s FSA photographs, documenting how the same kinds of unsustainable agricultural practices which forced Lange’s subjects westward have now led to the Imperial Valley’s own demise. On closer inspection, however, what Lange and Rossi share is more political. In an interview towards the end of her life Lange said of her work, “it’s not pictorial illustration, it’s evidence. It’s a record of human experience.” After nearly a century of exploitation, Imperial Valley’s fate seems sealed. Rossi’s work is making a record of it, of the people who lived and worked there and the impact of the exploitation of workers and the earth on human life.

@scottrossii

“There was no intentional choice of style; what emerged was simply an expression that came on its own,” she says. “Melancholy and instinct worked shoulder to shoulder in creating these images. I let go of my consciousness, often listening to music, and bits from Kabir singers, allowing the flow to lead. Each photograph became a hunt to confront grief and its many daunting, masked forms… While creating, I focus on feeling, form and function. Once you recognise the truth of the feeling you want to convey through a frame or a story and choose the right form to express it, the function becomes inherent. Grief is atmospheric; it arrives with baggage, carrying its own sounds, spaces, light, thuds and stings. This story reflects only the imprint of grief.”

Eventually Khan found acceptance, and a new understanding of mourning as a form of homecoming “because it crosses boundaries, extends geographies, and lingers with you wherever you go”. Her final image is a double exposure, symbolising this sense of duality, and she named the series Daa.era, in honour of her grandmother’s fierce acceptance of life and death. ‘Daa.era’ refers to embracing living while acknowledging circumstance, she explains, relating how her grandmother would bathe, change into a fresh dress, and prepare a sweet dish during Eid. “She would say, ‘Yes, the dead are gone, but I am large enough to hold death and life within me. I am still alive’.”

Daa.era is rooted in Khan’s particularly gruelling experience of grief, after losing both parents in such a short space of time. Even so, she says that her story, though drawn from her personal life, is not unique. Death touches every life, and mourning is a shared human experience, she points out – and as such, Daa.era has connected with others. Khan’s series has been exhibited at events such as Indian Photo Festival and Hyderabad Literary Festival, and published in the huge English-language Indian newspaper The Hindu, and she is working on a film version of it.

“This story transcends individuality,” she says. “The most powerful works of art emerge when the personal is shed, allowing the core to resonate beyond the self… In the image of the deer, the concept was how grief isolates you, making you feel as though you are special – but that’s the ego speaking. You are not special because life happened to you, you are special in how you respond to life. That is the spark in the eye of the deer. Its circle is complete. We are all animals of loss.”

abeerkhan.com

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

– Hannah Darabi 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“This experience of finding my roots has been quite healing. Of course, it’s been painful. But I’m lucky to even have something photographic to hold on to”

Today, Tomorrow – which, as a title, is a poignant reminder of the passage of time: of how the present is always becoming the future, and vice versa – was somewhat accidental. As an undergraduate, Wan spent a year working with the archives department at the Art Institute of Chicago which introduced her to the archive and its preservation, but she never thought to bring archival work into her practice as a photographer. “I started thinking about how there were many missing gaps in what I understood in the family history, things I never asked and the silence that follows when you’re a family with a heavy migration history.” Photographs are complicated objects in these instances, where a single image can only reveal half a truth or a moment in history. By filling in the gaps in chronology and persisting to shoot her family for the album, Wan begins to mend the archive and address the complicated relationship between memory, loss and a photograph. 

Wan began shooting documentary images of her grandparents at home and engaging in daily activities, as well as the environment around them. When she printed these images, she would leave them on her grandparents’ table, intending to trim the white space around the images and place them into the family album alongside “a little caption about that day.” When Wan came back to retrieve the images, she found them coloured in with felt-tip pen, child-like drawings filling the white space around the images, and the captions on coloured Post-It notes in Cantonese. Something as complicated as migration suddenly becomes something light, and Wan’s grandparents become children again. “I didn’t ask my grandparents to draw. They did it all on their own, but I really loved it. Maybe it was a hidden therapy session for them in which they were reflecting on the day.”

The captions, too, were “quite poetic,” Wan tells me. “They’re not straightforward sentences. And they’re things that my grandparents would never say to me. I felt really touched and a bit saddened by these things, and that’s when I started pushing a bit more in a way to connect with them.

“It also doesn’t help when you have a language barrier,” Wan continues. “I’m a first generation Asian-American and thankfully I was able to retain some version of Cantonese but I still struggle to speak to them.”

In every family, there is a memory keeper, and Wan thinks she falls into that role just as so many first or second generation immigrants feel they do. “There’s a hesitancy and there are such painful memories that my family carries, which is why the photo album is precious. Because it’s a tangible object that you can hold and pass on to someone.” Today, Tomorrow features not only newly shot images for the contemporary photo album, but archival images from Wan’s family’s time in China, too. Many of these images have been damaged or torn; people have been cut out of history, other’s faces have been scratched. Wan asks us to consider the ways in which photographs can fail us in holding memory. 

“I began using these poems my grandparents wrote for me as memory keepers for our family. So now, the family album is really just a box of random things, too. It’s a bit like a time capsule. Sometimes things are removed without my knowledge, sometimes things are being put inside. So. it is a photographic project but now it’s become more sculptural, in a sense.”

For the photographer, the project is as much about documenting her family’s history as it is about exploring and building her own identity. “This experience of finding my roots has been quite healing. Of course, it’s been painful and there’s still so much more that I’m finding out about my own family. But I’d say I’m lucky to even have something photographic to hold on to.”

 vivianwan.studio

At Chiostri di San Pietro – an ancient monastery and marvel of Italian Renaissance architecture, restored to its original beauty in 2019 – 10 exhibitions are on view. Several are politically charged, such as British photographer Andy Sewell’s project examining forms of power and protest in close-ups; Thaddé Comar’s study of how Hong Kong demonstrators cleverly circumvented punishing surveillance systems with masks; and Iranian journalist Ghazal Golshiri and photo editor for French newspaper Le Monde Marie Sumalla scrutinising the Iranian uprising which broke out in 2022 after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died following her arrest by the morality police. 

In the same venue, various series examine youth culture, including Claudio Majorana’s spotlighting of adolescents at summer camps and in forests on the outskirts of Vilnius, Lithuania; further northeast, Toma Gerzha focuses on the life and environment of Generation Z in Eastern Europe before the project was interrupted by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Jessica Ingram documents the cadets at an American high school in Georgia; while Kido Mafon captures the underground nightlife of Tokyo on film using a Contax G1 in IFUCKTOKYO – DUAL MAIN CHARACTER. British photographer Vinca Petersen’s Raves and Riots also explores the highs and fears of release and adrenaline.

Migrating elsewhere across the globe, in an exhibition designed for the Italian Cultural Institute in Beirut, Rä di Martino has been chronicling, since 2023, the gathering places that a younger generation has been drawn to in Lebanon during this barbarous period of ever-escalating regional conflict.

On a different continent still, Women See Many Things brought together 30 young women from Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique for photography workshops, overseen by women from these countries and organised by the Italian non-profit organisation WeWorld. The 2024 workshops are recounted at Palazzo da Mosto with its terracotta tondi and medieval floors, while the photographic output resulting from the workshops is exhibited separately, outdoors at the University of Reggio Emilia.

A series of partner exhibitions have been organised by cultural institutions throughout the area. Further away, the Palazzo dei Musei, a mid-18th century former military arsenal, hosts two exhibitions delving into image history as shaped by the approach of Luigi Ghirri, who taught in the region at the Università del Progetto between 1989 and 1990. (As David Campany once put it, Ghirri “could not, and would not, separate his love of making photographs from his love of looking at the photographs of others that he admired.”) Closer to the centre, an exhibition at Collezione Maramotti – which boasts a permanent exhibition of Italian and international art from the 20th and 21st century – has a solo show dedicated to Viviane Sassen’s work, curated by the artist herself and dialoguing with sculptures in the museum. It consists of more than 50 images produced between 2005 and 2025, with several new works made specifically for this show.

Not only will the Biblioteca Panizzi host an exhibition about the first 20 years of photography from its own collections, notably examples of early photography and pioneering scientific experimentation via daguerreotypes and ambrotypes, it also houses 1,500 works Fotografia Europea has been progressively collecting. The acquisition policy mainly encompasses absorbing projects commissioned by the festival, plus agreements with artists and donations.

Ultimately, the focus of this festival’s edition serves as “a cry for commonality in a time of polarisation,” notes Clark, “without flattening out people’s experiences”.

Fotografia Europea is on across Reggio Emilia until 8 June

“We invite everyone to reflect on the challenges we face, from global crises like climate change and migration to personal struggles related to identity, freedom, and social issues”

Jodi Kwok, curator of FORMAT and QUAD arts centre, and Jenna Eady, FORMAT co-ordinator

Over in Chapel Street, Christopher Gregory-Rivera presents a jaw-dropping work titled El Gobierno Te Odia [The Government Hates You], using images made by the US government of its own citizens. From the 1940s to 1987 the Puerto Rican Police, in collaboration with the FBI and CIA, watched, intimidated, and attacked political activists in the archipelago, which remains a US territory. The secret operation tracked over 150,000 people and compiled dossiers on over 15,000; it only came to light in 1987, after a long investigation into the execution of two university students by the Puerto Rico Police Intelligence Division. The dossiers were returned to those tracked and, as with the Stasi in East Germany, showed that friends, relatives, and neighbours had all been involved in the surveillance, creating lasting divisions for a population in which victims and spies still live side-by-side. 

Gregory-Rivera’s work demonstrates that individuals were sometimes aware they were being watched, creating a panopticon effect in which everyone had to constantly modify their behaviour; the secret police has since been disbanded but this means of control continues, Gregory-Rivera including a video from 2017 in his installation. Made by the police, it documents lawful protestors, some of whom went on to be wrongfully arrested; in the ensuing court case, it transpired that there were many other videos, and that Facebook had shared personal data and conversations from individuals who had interacted with online footage of protests. These examples have ramifications for citizens everywhere, and Gregory-Rivera has also made a book of this work which deserves to be widely seen. 

The showstopper of FORMAT is Felicity Hammond’s installation at QUAD, V2: Rigged, the second iteration of her ongoing project, Variations. Supported by Photoworks and Ampersand Foundation, Variations is an ambitious project around data mining and AI; the first variation, V1: Content Aware, popped up in a public square in Brighton in October 2024 at the Photoworks Weekender. Ostensibly a shipping container, V1: Content Aware included a camera recording those passing by, and V2: Rigged includes images generated from that footage. Many of those who had interacted with V1 had taken photographs of it, notes Hammond, and when she fed images of them into an AI generator, it churned out depictions of men wielding hybrid camera-weapons. 

Hammond’s response is a large installation with a similarly sinister edge; part-camera, part-drill, part-processing plant, it is extracting further data from visitors, while a huge mirrored wall alludes to both their surveillance and an endless duplication of images. A large pixellated backdrop includes some of the AI images of men generated after V1: Content Aware, “documentary expressions of society’s views of itself” as Hito Steyerl has put it (quoted in the festival catalogue). The next iteration of Variations, V3: Model Collapse, goes on show at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in summer and will lean further into escalations of our collective imagination; the final variation at Stills Gallery, Edinburgh will investigate how data is corralled and catalogued.

Next to Hammond’s work, Sujata Setia’s A Thousand Cuts also suggests (male) surveillance and control. Working in the UK with domestic violence survivors from the South Asian diaspora, Setia made portraits then sliced intricate patterns into the prints. Inspired by the tradition of Sanjhi art, these cuts afford the women depicted anonymity, suggesting a means of escape but also the lasting impact of their experiences. Setia collaborated with the women to make their portraits and the carved motifs, allowing them to govern their own depiction, just as they have retaken control of their lives; she also recorded interviews which are included in the installation, testifying to how they fell into abuse, and how they managed to escape. The colour red dominates, signifying the optimism of marriage – red is the traditional colour for South Asian wedding dresses – and the violence all too often perpetrated at home. 

An unholy mix of the everyday and the ultraviolent runs through the exhibition OUR RIUKZAK at University of Derby too, a group show of work by Ukrainian photographers curated by Lesia Maruschak. Combining images of the Ukrainian Holodomor famine-genocide of 1933-34 with photographs of the contemporary conflict, it is designed as a portable exhibition-in-a-box which can pop up in various venues. The title references the rucksacks into which families stuff scant essentials before fleeing home, and the present-day images focus on children; there are powerful shots of terrified parents running into hospital with bleeding infants, and buggies being pushed through chaos. Another nearby group show of work from Ukraine strikes on a more complicated note, however; On the Thorns of Evil Ages includes portraits of armed forces volunteers made by Anton Shevelov, an Officer of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Special Correspondent of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.

Elsewhere are other series around physical conflict. Jenna Garrett’s Teeth of the Wolf is an eerie exploration of armed vigilantes in the US, for example, inspired when she saw online images of Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, standing in front of the State Capitol shortly before his fellow protestors stormed the building. Garrett was reminded of images of the Bald Knobbers, a group that sprung up in the Ozark Mountains after the American Civil War, which was responsible for lynchings, beatings, and arson. America’s volatile political situation also surfaces in Alicia Bruce’s The Greatest 36 Holes? Coming Soon, which shows a golf course Donald Trump built in Scotland. Constructed on an area designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, this course attracted considerable local opposition and though Trump announced it in 2006, long before becoming US president, is a cautionary tale foreshadowing his pronouncements on Gaza and Greenland. 

Intriguing images made during World War One by the still-running WW Winter portrait studio show German officers in internment camps; the officers look curiously pampered, suggesting either propaganda at work, or special treatment for the upper class. Elsewhere are interesting installations around the environment, including Lo Lai Lai Natalie’s The Days Before the Silent Spring, and Xueyi Huang’s AI project, No.27 Tong Poo Road. Other exhibitions feel perhaps more tangential, including an exhibition of Michael Omerod’s American roadtrips at the University, and John Blakemore’s Earthly Delights at the Museum of Making. Maybe they testify to the needs of external venues included in the festival (Museum of Making just acceded some of Blakemore’s prints), or the wide appeal required of a public event.

Dancing Through Time also speaks to wide appeal but in a more lively way; an archive of images, ephemera, and oral history, on show in a former clothes shop, it traces the progress of music and clubs in Derby, of shared experiences that build cohesion rather than conflict. It also celebrates the DIY ethos of punk, particularly necessary in a small city, and offering potential solutions amid contemporary funding cuts for musicians and artists. Upstairs, Francis Augusto’s Ghost Notes does something similar, showing one-time stalwarts of Derby’s punk scene today; these elders have much to teach younger generations about self-organisation and making things happen. 

The reclaimed store feels appropriate but actually we are far from the freedom of 1960s and 70s squats; in 2012 UK laws around property tightened up, and using this venue took months of careful negotiation. FORMAT continues to be a critical plank in the UK’s photography ecology, but how it will evolve in the current political and economic climate remains to be seen. The same can be said of photography, and it is a strength of Kwok’s curation that perhaps the biggest conflict on show here is around images, how they are used and by whom.

The FORMAT International Photography Festival exhibitions are open until various dates; for details check www.formatfestival.com. BJP is a FORMAT Festival sponsor

Poyzer’s series Other Joys taps into her lived experience of autism, a condition often under-diagnosed in women. Tapping into her intensely-felt special interests via self-portraits, documentary shots, and constructed images, the project helps both Poyzer and her audience better understand autism and traits such as the “heavy sensation of warmth, euphoria and excitement” when following special interests, the need for routine, and the ability to ‘mask’ or disguise these inclinations. Poyzer is currently studying for an MA in Photography at the University of the West of England, and is due to graduate in 2025; last year, she was selected as one of four Paris Photo Carte Blanche Awardees. 

“Alice photographs a very personal experience with ASD [Autistic Spectrum Disorder] in a way that is really relatable, imaginative and humorous,” says Jansen. “It’s an invisible thing and hard to capture in words or images, but I think her images help people understand how ASD can be better. They’re also brilliantly theatrical and I love her choreography and staging.” 

“Alice photographs a very personal experience with ASD [Autistic Spectrum Disorder] in a way that is really relatable, imaginative and humorous”

– Charlotte Jansen, Female in Focus Judge

Galandina’s project is titled Ovoo after the sacred totem poles used by the Buryat to mark spiritually significant land; the Buryat are an indigenous group native to southeastern Siberia, and, as well as being born in Buryat, Galandina has maternal Buryat heritage. Using self-portraits, archival material, and family photographs, she seeks to challenge conventional narratives of the Buryat, recontextualising their complex and often hidden history. Galandina is now based in the UK, and holds an MA in Photography from the London College of Communication. 

“Galandina’s series was a fascinating encounter and more widely a really interesting way of exploring the relationship between photography and indigenous cultures, photography and legacy and memory, spirituality and ritual, connected to her own maternal ancestral heritage,” says Charlotte Jansen, journalist, curator, photo critic at The Guardian, and another one of the judges.

Galandina and Poyzer have each won a spot in a group show at London’s 10.14 Gallery and in Glasgow’s Gallery of Photography, along with 20 photographers from the single image category. Galandina and Poyzer also each receive a Z Series mirrorless camera, and two NIKKOR Z lenses of their choice, courtesy of Nikon.

The selected single images include a self-portrait by Asma Elbadawi, who successfully campaigned for the international basketball federation to lift their hijab ban, and a collaborative project by Matilde Piazzi and Nadia Del Frate with the female workers of La Perla, who campaigned to keep their jobs when the luxury lingerie brand went into administration. Other selected single images include Camilla Greenwell’s portrait of the artist Gertraud Platschek, and Victoria Ruiz Prado’s tribute to the Venezuelan people. 

“A single image has to say a lot with a little, and the narrative needs to be approached differently. It needs to be more immediate, striking and get you in the gut!” explains Jansen of judging the two categories. “With the series, I was looking for different visual approaches and strategies when confronting the topic, the pacing, rhythm and variety and how much the artist/photographer was thinking about that interplay between images.”

This is the fifth edition of Female in Focus, an initiative BJP founded in order to support women artists and photographers. In 2024 BJP set up a pilot study into career trajectories in photography, to which some 1,077 people responded – 569 men, 471 women, and 37 gender non-conforming. Though based on limited numbers, this research revealed stark contrasts such as a 30% pay gap between men and women working in photography, which rises to a 40% pay gap between those who have children.

Some 55% of women who responded said they had experienced gender-based discrimination, while 31% felt that their gender had impacted their career progression (compared to 7% of male respondents). “I feel that in the industry, men are seen as the more professional candidate for a job or role in a working photographic setting,” reported one individual. “Women are often overlooked and seen as support or assistants.” BJP plans to expand on this pilot and continue to support women artists with the FIF initiative. 

“Female practitioners need not only more opportunities but also greater representation across the industry,” says O’Keeffe. “They need editors, curators, and competitions like this to champion their work, break down barriers, and level the playing field. To ensure female photographers gain the visibility they deserve, it is imperative to support projects that specifically call out the shortcomings of the photography industry.”

“At Nikon, we believe in the transformative power of photography as both a storytelling medium and a tool for cultural reflection,” says Ruby Nicholson, Communications Manager for Nikon Northern Europe. “We are proud to have partnered with the British Journal of Photography for Female in Focus 2024, celebrating the extraordinary talent and diverse perspectives of female and non-binary photographers from around the world. Their work not only exemplifies creativity, vision, and technical excellence but also underscores the vital role women play in shaping impactful visual narratives that inspire change and challenge societal norms.”

For the first time, Female in Focus introduces a People’s Choice category. Vote for your favourite photograph from the Female in Focus x Nikon exhibition, and the winner will be featured in an interview on 1854.photography. Voting closes 3rd April.

Female in Focus x Nikon opens at 10.14 Gallery 11th April until 22nd May, and at Glasgow Gallery of Photography this summer

“There was darkness, and that’s why the clubs were so important”

– Marc Vallée, photographer

It was a time when “freedom of being, movement, and connection” were in the air in general; as the lyrics of Pulp’s 1995 song Common People suggest, pop stars then could be working class and proud, glamorous but down-to-earth; working class students could also rub shoulders with the super rich at art college. These sentiments carry through in Milne’s portraits of the group, one of which shows them elegant and poised in a greasy spoon cafe. Another shows the group’s singer, Jarvis Cocker, on a grotty though also lush red carpet. Vallée shows two handsome young souls, meanwhile, in their raggedy rented home – retro wallpaper, kitsch posters and all. “I met one of the boys in a club, and told him I wanted to photograph him,” says Vallée. “But I was very clear that I didn’t want to photograph inside a club. My images very much show a queer domestic space.”

Vallée published these images in 2020 in a zine called When I was at Art School in the 90s covered by BJP; as the name suggests, he took them while he was studying (he graduated the Sir John Cass School of Art with a BA in 1997, and an MA 1999). The house was where the guys really lived, and both it and Vallée’s student years speak of an East London now receding from view. The YBAs were still drinking in the Golden Heart, and Whitechapel, around the CASS, was still “gritty”. Other aspects of the time were similarly dystopian. The homosexual age of consent was still 21 until 1994, and 18 until the year 2000. “We still had a homophobic government, and AIDS was still there,” comments Vallée. “There was darkness, and that’s why the clubs were so important.”

It’s an important context for an era now sometimes reduced to good times because, while the 1990s continue to fascinate, it’s mostly 90s club culture, fashion, and music. A good time was certainly had – and the 1990s had an optimism now sorely missed – but there was also another side. As Open Eyes Gallery’s Andrews points out, Queer club spaces are places of refuge, interesting in their own right but providing respite from something. Founded in 2010, DuoVision specialise in curating exhibitions by undervalued artists and, as For Your Pleasure shows, under-acknowledged perspectives and narratives. Upstairs at Open Eye Gallery there’s a video on the duo and their practice, newly commissioned by the gallery. 

For Your Pleasure: 15 Years of DuoVision is on show at Open Eye Gallery until 09 March; on 20 February, Marc Vallée is taking part in a panel discussion titled Power, Gaze and Desire at The Photographers’ Gallery, alongside Finley Gilzene, Sunil Gupta, and Åsa Johannesson, chaired by BJP contributor and V&A Assistant Curator in Photography Isaac Huxtable.