“Unconventional or surprising imagery is what excites me most – work that challenges what we think of as beautiful”

Conroy explains the importance of casting: “We’ve moved away from the impossibly aspirational imagery of the past into a more interesting and inclusive era of fashion. By casting non-professional models or people from their own communities, these images are much more striking, partly because they are out of the ordinary, but also because they challenge normative, outdated ideals of beauty in favour of something more awkward and real.” Kaine Harrys Anamalu mixes sharp Italian tailoring with a critical eye on representations of the Black body. His work feels as much about authorship and history as about fashion itself.

When asked what threads she found among the works, Conroy identifies recurring motifs: “I saw a deep and personal connection with nature (in the work of Camille Lemoine and Maya-Aska Arai), an interest in dismantling the glamour and artificiality of aspirational fashion imagery (Kaine Harrys Anamalu, Coco Wu, Rino Qiu) in favour of something that feels more like documentary photography. I picked the work that spoke to me visually first, and threads began to emerge later, with photographers working within and against the genre of fashion imagery.” Across the exhibition, these photographers dismantle the glossy veneer of traditional fashion imagery. Their work feels intimate, grounded, and deeply human, as if the camera has turned away from aspiration and toward connection. 

That connection to nature feels both visual and philosophical. Many of these photographers use the natural world not just as a location or backdrop but as collaborator, embracing weather and light as important and active elements in their storytelling. Fashion photography has long thrived on creating other-worldly fantasies in studio sets, yet here, images are shaped by the instability of daylight and the slow rhythm of the seasons. The landscape mirrors the self, as imperfect and ever changing.

Conroy is especially excited about the show’s setting. “Displaying these works outdoors on Lower Stable Street means a wider audience can encounter them – people who might never step into a gallery. I want passersby to see this work and expand their idea of what fashion imagery even is.” If the old fashion photograph sold unattainable fantasy, the new one seeks intimacy. In an age where every phone is a camera and every social platform a publishing tool, the question becomes: how can an image still move us? What can it reveal that we don’t already know?

Today’s photographers seem less interested in perfection and more in presence and in what happens between the staged and the spontaneous. Shooting on iPhones, in bedrooms, or on the unstaged street corners, they have rediscovered what it means to make images that feel alive. “I’m excited to see how the next generation redefines the parameters of the fashion image,” Conroy says. “Unconventional or surprising imagery is what excites me most – work that challenges what we think of as beautiful, or what even counts as fashion.” 

Rethinking Fashion Image is on at Lower Stable Street Lightboxes, Kings Cross, until 05 January, 2026

“There’s this huge Black community, and a lot of people follow us due to that fact. Because they’re like, ‘OK! Everything Blackness, we can get from this page”

“Initially I was doing mostly West Africa,” says Patrick via video call. “Then later I was like, ‘Damn! Uganda looks really nice – and Zambia and Namibia also’. So I said, ‘OK, now we include East, West, North Africa, actually everybody in Africa definitely deserves to be spoken about’. And later I’d see some events and I’d think, ‘Yo, what the hell is this? It’s European!’. So I decided, let’s create an international issue, where we can just speak to anybody.”

Each issue also includes stories on fashion brands, often international and interesting in their own right. Issue 4 includes a shoot for J-Sabelo, for example, a Zimbabwean- German label. “The brand was honestly born out of a personal necessity to adorn my culture in spaces, far from home, where I felt a crisis of identity, a pure longing for home,” reads a quote from the founder, Aristide Loua. “To me, clothing does reflect one’s particular background, set of emotions, idea of the world, or even reinvention of such. And ever since coming back home, in late December 2015, after a decade living abroad, I have been on constant research, a discovery of excellence in the craftsmanship our local artisans are able to put forth.”

Random Photo Journal’s team is international in scope too, with Patrick based in Nigeria and creative director Justyna Obasi based in Nigeria and Germany; they also take frequent trips to Cape Town. Patrick grew up in Lagos, before moving to Ghana at 13; he studied business administration in Accra, returning to Lagos when he was 26. By then he was a keen photographer, and after a road trip around Nigeria, taking images on the way, launched Random Photo Journal as a vehicle for his own work. 

Then Covid hit, and other people’s photography became a way to see and hear about the world. “I couldn’t travel, I couldn’t photograph any place anymore,” says Patrick. “So I was forced to rely on other people in the places I would love to be at. I just resorted to, ‘OK, so I can’t come to Tanzania right now, but please can I talk to you about Tanzania, and please, can I see some of your images so I can have an idea of what it’s like?”

After lockdown he intended to go back to showing his own work but, having interviewed so many interesting people, and gathered so many stories, found Random Photo Journal had taken on a life of its own. It has been a learning curve, he concedes – he has made issues that lacked barcodes, or information on the spine (making them hard to distribute). But he is also part of a thriving scene and, with fairs such as Lagos Art Book springing up and over 31,000 Instagram followers, the magazine now usually sells out.

“There’s this huge Black community, right?” says Patrick. “And a lot of people follow due to that fact. Because they’re like, ‘OK! Everything Blackness, we can get from this page’.”

@randomphotographyjournal

“There is more to our history and culture than violence”

Through a fluid and intuitive editorial process, a pattern of recurring motifs begins to emerge: police, dogs, murals, bonfires, tracksuits, burnt-out cars. These images form a layered narrative, one that weaves together politics, place, and personal experience. As Jackson explains, the sequencing arose organically, connecting works across decades through shared visual cues and thematic resonance.

Megan Doherty’s photographs are emblematic of this approach. Shot during the making of her first series Stoned in Melanchol, her work documents the people in her life during the late 2010s while striving to uncover beauty in the mundane. “Shooting Stoned in Melanchol was a form of escape,” she says. “I was projecting my own visions onto the landscape of small-town life in an attempt to make my fantasy world a reality. But the more I photographed, the more the work naturally became about the people around me.” Her images capture the highs and lows of youth in post-crisis Ireland – offering intimate insight into a generation negotiating resilience, fragility, and the fallout of economic precarity.

A similar sensitivity is present in Gerry Balfe Smyth’s Last Breath, a series chronicling life in Dublin’s South Inner City, specifically the St. Teresa’s Gardens housing complex in The Liberties. Once a vast public housing estate built in the 1950s, the area had long suffered from neglect. Smyth embedded himself in the community over the course of seven years, building trust and gathering stories through his lens. “When I look at the pictures today, I remember the people fondly,” he reflects. “They allowed me access to their lives. I wanted the images to offer dignity and to spotlight the need for greater investment in working-class communities.” Though much of the complex has since been demolished and many residents relocated, Smyth’s photographs remain a poignant record of a place and its enduring challenges – ones that, sadly, persist today.

Throughout Fantasy Island, Seawright and Jackson were mindful to avoid letting the Troubles dominate the narrative. “There is more to our history and culture than violence,” Seawright notes. “But even when not overtly political, Irish photography is inevitably shaped by its context.” In the 1970s and 1980s, photography was a tool for processing conflict – an act of visual bearing witness. That impulse to understand one’s environment still resonates today, influencing how the current generation approaches image-making. For young photographers trying to reclaim and redefine Irishness, engaging with the past is less about nostalgia and more about rewriting the script. It’s a form of co-authorship – collaboratively narrating history from an inclusive, plural perspective.

Fantasy Island is available at Rotten Books

“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

“I think that’s what you get in this exhibition, the myriad ways that working-class people have persisted despite austerity, despite Thatcherism – they’ve found ways to still be creative”

“It seemed to me that during the 60s, 70s and 80s, you had uprisings, working-class solidarity, strikes, unions, things like the Greater London Council – all these organisations that meant that there was a strong working class, a strong political blackness that was going around. The visibility of all that seemed to end in the 90s. And with that I think that working class culture did change. There seemed to be no alternative to this way of doing things.”

Pitts became frustrated with repetitive imagery of the working-class before the 1990s. Images by Tish Murtha, Chris Killip, Martin Parr and Paul Graham have become the most widely disseminated aesthetic of working-class Britain, but Pitts wants to ask what working-class has evolved into since then. “It’s the rise of consumer culture within working-class communities. It’s the rise of club culture. And then the new labour world which seems to signify there was no alternative vision for how working-class people could live. You get a completely different aesthetic to the 80s,” says Pitts, a period which the Tate Britain is currently shining its light on. 

“Having that cut off point for the curatorial parameters of the show meant that I couldn’t myself get comfortable in those obvious lowhanging fruit names. It would be obvious to show Paul Graham’s work in the job centers in the 1980s, everyone who’s into photography has seen that work, and I wanted to force myself to find different voices and also deal with that rise of multiculturalism that was so often missing in those photographs. You’re either getting photographs of the Black community protesting or you were getting photographs of white people in unions and in steel works and miners,” says Pitts, noting the lack of new multiculturalism that began to take shape in Britain in the 90s and 2000s.

But it’s also difficult to present a show on the working class without fetishising its aesthetic. As has been tradition in the British music and fashion industries, for example, which has seen a gross appropriation of working-class visuals such as music videos shot on council estates and the consumption of working-class styles in clothing. Pitts tried to resist the glamorisation of working-class culture, including any kind of work “as long as it wasn’t poverty porn or culture safari through the working class from an external gaze,” he says. The photographers he curated grew up working class, “with very little access to money, with no network. I am myself included with that. So it was important to make sure that the practitioners themselves are working-class rather than just a depiction of what somebody thinks the working class should look through the fashion world.”

The touring show opens alongside a new book by Pitts, Afropean: A Journal, which displays a scrapbook, collage-esque assortment of notes, tickets, ephemera and vernacular imagery. Pitts sees the book and the show in dialogue with one another in the ways they present a “messier” representation of working-class culture. “What happens if you can’t go to school   to learn these things officially, what kind of aesthetics does that produce? And is there virtue in that DIY aesthetic?” wonders Pitts. “There are [working-class photographers] who were going out clubbing and just happened to have a camera with them, and there’s an energy there and a rawness that I think is actually sometimes missing in traditional, classic documentary photography that we saw in the 70s and 80s.” 

Highlighting photographers such as Eddie Otchere and Rene Matic, who focus on nightlife and spontaneous moments of joy and movement. Pitts observes that the work isn’t perfect, “the flash goes off where you wouldn’t expect it to,” for example, and that seems important to the curator within the documentation of the working class; for this reason “as I was putting the book together I didn’t want to make it too neat,” Pitts explains.

“I didn’t want [Afropean: A Journal] to look like a classic, modernist photo book for a coffee table. I wanted to show the kind of messiness of a creative working-class life and having to do two or three jobs to make [ends meet] and how the work sometimes spills into the photography and how the photography sometimes spills into the work.” For example, Chris Shaw, included in After the End of History, shot photographs whilst working as a night porter, showing a unique world at night unseen by man. Anna Magnowska, on the other hand, took photographs while she was working in a bar as a waitress.

“There’s also been a democratisation of camera technology,” continues Pitts. “The smartphone is the obvious thing. Everyone can take a decent photograph with a smartphone, but even compact cameras in the 90s got cheaper. So there was just a completely different aesthetic that began to emerge.”

Pitts grew up in a lower working-class area of Sheffield, “but we didn’t just sit around feeling sorry for ourselves. We’d make stuff happen. We’d go to illegal raves or we’d find ways to still be creative and connect and play, and I think that’s what you get in this exhibition, the myriad ways that working-class people have persisted despite austerity, despite Thatcherism – they’ve found ways to still be creative.”

Sheffield is also where, as Pitts reminds me, The Full Monty was filmed. “And I like that film. It’s funny and it captures a bit of where I’m from. But one thing that I can’t forgive it for is how you can film in my area and not see any Yemeni people or not see any Somali, Jamaican or Pakistani people. It’s unbelievable – they produce this view of Sheffield as this white working-class space. But for me, I know the reality wasn’t that.” After the End of History is an attempt at depicting the reality of today’s Britain organically, including images of Slovakian and Roma people by Artur Conka, the South Asian community by Kavi Pujara, and the diversity of youth on Britain’s dancefloors by Ewen Spencer. Whilst admitting it was amiss to not include a Scottish photographer, “this is very much not a London centric show,” Pitts stresses. 

Stills.org

Marc Vallée’s self-published zine takes us into an East End student house, featuring queer fashion, pop culture, and newfound freedoms

Marc Vallée’s 90s Archive: Volume One is a homage to the 10×8 print and a showcase of work shot in London in 1996 and 1998. Indeed, Vallée’s discovery of a box of 10×8 prints in his studio, which he printed in the 90s, sparked the idea for the new photobook series, the first instalment of which collates studied colour and black-and-white portraits of friends from the Cass School of Art and the indie and alternative queer club scene. 

The majority of subjects are pictured in their homes, including Vallée’s east London student house from his art-school days, vibrant and dilapidated at once. However, one series captures Vallée’s friend Cal against the distinctive backdrop of London’s Soho; the iconic Raymond Revuebar in the distance.

The pictures are autobiographical; a window into Vallée’s life in 90s London. However, they have a wider historical and political significance, capturing queer youth as the gay community slowly emerged from the horror of the 80s and early-90s global AIDS epidemic, Margaret Thatcher and Clause 28, which was in effect until 2003.

The simple photobook allows the photographs to breathe; their rich formal qualities and multilayered meanings given space to unfold. And despite being an ‘archive’, as far-right governments come to power across Europe and the world, Vallée’s celebration of queer culture feels as poignant as ever.

90s Archive: Volume One by Marc Vallée is out now

While photography is prohibited in Berlin’s brick and mortar clubs in an effort to maintain immersion and protect clubbers’ freedom and privacy, many in the rave scene were open to Dodd-Noble’s lens. Always asking consent, she began to capture the distinctive personalities of these underground revellers, and her photo series 72 Hours was born. A tribute to the length of these parties, which would move in a blur from carefully sound-proofed apartments to WWII bunkers on the outskirts of the city, her 35 mm portraits crystallise moments of vibrancy and expression in an otherwise bleak period. 

Of course, many in Berlin’s party scene abided by lockdown measures and remained indoors, and Dodd-Noble is candid about the ethical dilemmas of documenting and partaking in the hedonism. “There was definitely a moral compass that was figuring out which way it was pointing,” she admits. “I knew I was doing something wrong in terms of breaking the rules, but I had also spent months and months doing things right. I guess it was also about this need to be around people.”

Dodd-Noble took solace in the moments of intimacy she shared with her subjects before the shutter closed. “My camera became a beautiful connecting point between myself and these charismatic strangers,” she says. “They allowed me to capture the energy and sense of self that they felt at that very moment in time, and we bonded in those brief periods of calm.” She describes her photographs as “precious items” that depict the minutes in which she met some of her closest friends. 

As winter crept into spring, the crimson glow of DIY dancefloor lights was replaced by the golden rays of dawn in parks and lakesides, and Dodd-Noble’s techniques changed with the seasons. “I started off shooting in these dark basements, directing people towards the light,” she says, reflecting fondly on her early images, full of high-contrast artificial lighting. “Then I had to find the darkness and shadow in the daylight. It was fun having these spaces evolve because it meant that my skills and my eye evolved with them.”

When clubs reopened in June 2021, Dodd-Noble’s project came to a close. While it remains her baby, she’s glad to be moving on. “It came from a dark time. The rhythms of life were unhealthy, mentally and physically. It was an incredible thing to create, but I’m glad it’s not the project I’m living in any more,” she reflects.

She’s taking her learnings from lensing the pace and passion  of underground parties and applying them to Berlin’s Ballroom scene and events run by queer collectives. “I’m attracted to queer spaces because people have worked hard to find the confidence to be their authentic selves, to go against social norms and binary constructs and find their own power. I want to photograph these individuals in order to accentuate their power. That’s what my photography is about.”

72 Hours by Emily Dodd-Noble is showing at Leer Studio, Uhlandstraße 125, 10717 Berlin, Saturday 10 – Sunday 11 September 2022.