“If we have more working women photographers in Iraq, we don’t just achieve greater gender equality within Iraq’s photography industry, we also gain greater equity in storytelling”

Over two intensive workshop days in Baghdad in November 2024, Garthwaite worked closely with IFP members on everything from image sequencing and pitching, to navigating identity through the camera. “We had women joining from around Iraq, supported by family members,” she says. “When women gather, we uplift one another, and we seek solutions. We soothe one another. Creativity is not reserved for the lucky few; it’s within us all. What we often need is the confidence to pursue it, and this is a driving force within IFP.”

For Raghad Kisam, a film-maker and storyteller with over eight years of experience, IFP offered “a real boost of confidence” and a community rooted in a shared mission. “I deeply believe in the power of visual storytelling to create change, challenge stereotypes and celebrate resilience,” she says.

Her work often draws on memory, culture and identity, creating personal narratives that speak to larger truths. One of her most poignant projects, Unseen Bonds, explores the impact of decades of war on family relationships in Iraq. “I have only one digital photograph with my late father,” Kisam says. “Because of the wars, our shared memories were never captured and that absence stayed with me.”

She reimagines a family album that never was, constructing images from light, objects, and the quiet spaces of memory. “Unseen Bonds reflects how conflict doesn’t just destroy infrastructure, it quietly reshapes how we remember, connect and grieve across generations.”

This kind of intimate, emotionally layered storytelling is emblematic of IFP’s ethos. For Salam, her first documentary project Shadow – developed during a visual journalism workshop with VII Academy – marked a milestone in her practice. 

“It explores what is expected from women versus what they truly want to pursue,” she explains. “I love this project deeply, it was my very first documentary work.” While the creative energy is palpable, the challenges remain stark. “One of the main challenges is the lack of genuine support and trust among individuals,” Kisam points out. “We need to build real connections based on encouragement rather than competition or undermining each other’s work.” She also stresses the “major need for financial support, especially for long-term projects”.

Garthwaite explains that greater opportunities for women create a ripple effect for Iraqi storytelling on the international stage. “Male photographers are unable to enter many parts of homes in Iraq, but women photographers are permitted to do so,” she notes. “If we have more working women photographers in Iraq, we don’t just achieve greater gender equality within Iraq’s photography industry, we also gain greater equity in storytelling.”

And storytelling is at the core of everything IFP does. “Our discussions and the advice we exchange have been truly valuable,” Salam says. “Through the IFP workshop and exhibition, I was able to present my very first documentary project.” As the collective moves forward, armed with resources and female solidarity within a blooming industry, the women of IFP are shaping not only how Iraq is seen, but who gets to do the seeing.

@ifp_iq_

“The issue for imagemakers and photographers is that without government support to enforce copyright, there is little that can be done to stop web crawlers from scraping images across the internet”

In December 2024, the UK government set out a new consultation on copyright and AI, which closed on 25 February 2025, coinciding with an AI Opportunities Action Plan proposing to unleash AI adoption across the UK and remove any perceived barriers. The key driver for the consultation was certain AI developers in big tech, mostly US based, striving to gain unfettered access to copyright-protected works, such as digital photographs. With over 11,000 responses to the consultation – the second largest human-authored response to a government consultation, and all being reviewed by hand rather than using AI, which should have been verified to start with – it is going to take several months before the government announces its next steps.

The new consultation comes after the previous UK government reviewed copyright legislation in 2022, looking specifically at broadening a copyright exception on text and data-mining (TDM) for research purposes to all purposes including commercial use. Plans to change UK copyright law were successfully quashed by the combined efforts of creative industry representatives, including the Association of Photographers, and parliamentarians who recognised the possible impact on creators’ livelihoods. 

The issue now faced is that US tech giants have arguably even more political influence and promised economic growth from AI, at the expense of the UK creative and media industries. Hence spreading a false narrative that UK copyright law is ‘uncertain’; however, it is clear that scraping creative works, such as photographs, from the internet without permission or payment is an illegal act under UK law. 

The consultation proposed four options for respondents to select – do nothing; strengthen copyright by requiring licensing; a broad data-mining exception to copyright for all purposes, including commercial use; a broad data-mining exception to copyright for all purposes, including commercial use with transparency and rights reservation (opting out). Strengthened copyright by requiring licensing is the closest to our standard business practice, but this has to come with transparency over how or when creative works are used for Generative AI purposes – the two should go hand-in-hand. Formal rights reservation (opting out) proposals are what significantly concerns the AOP, along with so many other creative organisations, and what we are demanding be clarified. 

Creative artistic works are seen by big tech as merely data freely available online to take (scrape) and commercially exploit, for AI training and refining purposes, in order to develop programs that compete with creators’ livelihoods. The issue for imagemakers and photographers is that without government support to enforce copyright, there is little that can be done to stop web crawlers from scraping images across the internet, whether that is websites, social media platforms or other networks, in order to collate massive datasets which are then used for training Generative AI programs. 

The vastness of these datasets is invisible to most creators. For example, Hugging Face, which hosts the LAION-5B dataset (consisting of five billion images scraped from the internet used to train Stable Diffusion and Midjourney), has over 300,000 datasets of images, text, audio and video, which are subsequently used to train over 1.5 million AI models it also hosts. We have no oversight over whose creative works feature in these datasets, how creators can prevent the appearance of or remove copyright-protected works from these datasets subsequently used without permission, and how creators can be compensated for the exploitation of their works to date. 

GAI is statistical pattern-predicting technology that outputs machine derivatives of the works a program is trained on. It is different to other AI applications that can improve efficiency, or assist with automating complex tasks which may have been around for years. For example, various software editing tools, camera operations and image processing software have AI features, which enhance image-makers’ creative practice. But GAI is machine technology that replicates or mimics human originality at a fraction of the time and cost, and gives the illusion of control while being little more than a production line manufacturing cheap synthetic imitations. This undermines the originality and value of human creative endeavour, undoubtedly taking away the heart and soul of what it means to be a photographer. 

The proposed formal ‘rights reservation’ or ‘opt-out’ is unworkable, firstly because all creators’ rights in their works are reserved the moment they are created – copyright is an automatic right in the UK and Europe. Secondly it places a significant burden on creators to reinforce their rights – a process creators should not have to undertake. The process of scraping (web crawlers or bots using robot.txt access) can be compared to leaving the front door to your house open so that an estate agent can come in and record it – but at the same time allowing burglars in to steal your furniture to sell on. If you do not want that to happen you have to leave a note on your front door, or on your furniture, to prevent it from happening. If you close your ‘front door’, it effectively means your discoverability online vanishes, which for professional photographers means becoming invisible to commissioners searching online. 

Creators should not have the additional burden of having to source and utilise technical protection measures to prevent the use of their work for AI development. They also cannot always do so effectively as they do not have control over downstream uses of their works on other websites, networks or social media platforms, nor deal with the vast number of digital photographs they have in their archives. 

The AOP hopes that the government revises its preferred option of applying a broad exception and imposing a formal rights reservation process. Ministers, from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and the Intellectual Property Office, have reassured that they will not place the creative industries in jeopardy. However, with many parliamentarians unaware of the significance of copyright to image-makers and other creators as a means to determine the use of their creative work and derive an income from licensing, it remains uncertain what the decision will be – whether the government will look to introduce legislation for a broader data-mining exception for commercial use. If any new legislation is introduced, it may be in the next parliamentary session, in autumn 2025. 

The AOP has been heavily involved in trying to ensure the government, policy officials and members of parliament are aware of the impact of changing our ‘gold standard’ UK copyright law on photographers and image-makers, from both an economic and resource perspective. It has attended numerous meetings with ministers, government officials, MPs and House of Lords representatives, as well as industry roundtable sessions with Oxford University, responsible AI and technology advocates. The AOP took the early initiative to join the Creative Rights in AI Coalition (CRAIC) which now includes over 69 creative and media organisations. The AOP set about hosting a town hall session for members in January, drafting template constituency letters to MPs for them, providing guidance on responding to the consultation, and submitting its own 29-page consultation response. 

However, the policy work continues. With so many new MPs in parliament, the AOP needs to keep stressing how important copyright is as a foundation for economic growth for photographers and image-makers. It also needs to explain how the creative industries ecosystem functions – this sector has a significantly larger proportion of freelancers than other UK industry sectors. A professional photographer will typically work with a range of industry people to deliver commissioned work, therefore if a photographer is impacted by losing work to GAI, so too are their industry colleagues. 

Furthermore, the AOP needs to show the economic harm and value transfer if copyright law is changed for the benefit of big tech and unfettered AI development. With almost £125billion GVA (Gross Value Added) to the UK economy and the employment of 2.4 million people in the creative sector, we cannot afford to hand over our cultural creativity to big tech overseas. As we have done with 300 years of copyright protection after the printing press was invented, we need to nurture and support our human creative talent. 

As members of CRAIC, the AOP is using the campaign as a focal point, directing photographers to email their MPs asking them to safeguard creators’ rights and support the campaign. The CRAIC website has an interactive webpage which simplifies the process of contacting MPs – just type in your postcode, customise a template email and press send. It could not be easier to safeguard creativity’s future, and we urge photographers to do so. 

the-aop.org

“Many Black and African women photographers are unfortunately typecast into covering topics solely related to Black culture, social justice, or race”

The database now serves as a resource for industry gatekeepers, including photo editors, directors, curators and art buyers. But it also provides members with community, funding, mentorship and professional development, including free webinars, workshops and portfolio reviews. That sense of community matters, says Irungu, who admits that, “At times, there’s a feeling that I have to ‘prove myself’ more than others, or that my work is underestimated based on my race.” BWP also launched the free annual Black Women Photographers Summit and the Black Women Photographers Podcast Network, and has partnered with brands including Adobe, Flickr, Live Nation and World Athletics. 

One of the big prevailing problems in the industry is pigeonholing, which limits both what Black and African women photographers are asked to shoot, and when. “Many Black and African women photographers are unfortunately typecast into covering topics solely related to Black culture, social justice, or race,” says Irungu. “Often, they’re only recognised during Black History Month and overlooked during Women’s History Month. This limited perspective hinders broader recognition of their skills and versatility as photographers. Black and African women photographers excel in a wide range of assignments, including outdoors, sports, music, fashion, editorial and commercial work.” 

The historic lack of representation also means stories relevant to Black communities or Black women have often been told by white or male (or both) photographers, usually with an outsider’s perspective. “The value of having Black women photographers document stories within the Black community, or African women photographers cover issues on the continent, can’t be overstated,” Irungu argues. “Their deep cultural understanding and lived experiences bring an authenticity and nuance that often fosters a more respectful and intimate approach to storytelling. This perspective results in narratives that are not only more accurate, but also resonate with a depth that might be overlooked by someone without the same background or cultural connection.” To date, BWP has also provided over $185,000 in financial grants, as well as $60,000 in new camera gear. Grace Ekpu, a Nigerian photojournalist and documentary film-maker, based in Lagos, was the recipient of a $10,000 BWP and Nikon grant for her Bridging Pain project, which focused on people with sickle cell anaemia and the disparities in healthcare access in different regions. “Being part of BWP has helped me feel part of a community of like-minded creatives,” Ekpu tells me. 

“It’s strengthened my views on how important it is to tell our stories and my resolve to continue to be a voice of change through my art.” Ekpu is particularly interested in socially-driven stories, including the impact of climate change on vulnerable people, especially women and children. “It’s important that as a Black woman, I’m able to freely tell the stories that affect me,” she says. “Stories about women’s issues, for instance, can only be told from the lens of a woman who can relate and can give it the best attention, and can also make the subject comfortable sharing their experiences. In my work around women who were former brides of Boko Haram terrorists, the women were able to share their stories to us fellow women and were comfortable in front of my camera. We need to eliminate the male gaze and do more stories that speak to the soul of our characters. We, as women, can also document historical events and shouldn’t be boxed into one corner. There’s a lot we can offer as Black women.” 

Tobi Sobowale, a British-Nigerian photographer based in London, found that joining BWP opened her eyes to the wide range of career opportunities. “Seeing people who looked like me in these roles inspired me to expand my perspective, helping me refine my focus and clarify how I wanted to evolve both my creative vision and my work,” she says. Community membership has brought many practical benefits, including Capture One sponsorship. “The software’s become an essential part of my creative process, especially in experimenting with and enhancing the use of colour in my work,” she says. “For the past three years, I’ve also had biweekly accountability sessions with Whitley Isa, a photographer from Belgium, who I met through the community. We set goals, support each other in achieving them, and reflect on our progress at the end of each year.” 

Sobowale strives to redefine Black beauty in commercial and fashion spaces. “Mainstream media often limits the portrayal of Black women, but through my photography I aim to highlight their vulnerability, strength, power and youthfulness,” she explains. “One example is my series Efflorescence, which explores the softness and delicacy of Black women, symbolising the transformation from a seed to a flower in bloom. As a Black woman myself, I approach photographing other Black women with intention and care.” 

Irungu has also had a busy period. Alongside running BWP, she worked at the White House for three years as the official photo editor for Vice President Kamala Harris, and as a photographer in the Biden-Harris administration. “Photographing in such a prestigious and high-profile environment has been the honour of a lifetime,” she says. “It’s been an opportunity to break barriers and be part of history, but it also comes with the weight of representation. Every time I walked through the doors of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building or the West Wing, it was a reminder of how far we’ve come. Before myself and Cameron Smith, there had only been one Black woman photographer at the White House Photo Office: Sharon Farmer [hired in the early 1990s to photograph President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton].” 

BWP started out with a focus on photographers, but its membership has evolved, and it is now organising “two new verticals” – Black Women Videographers and Black Women Cinematographers. And Irungu has other big plans. “I’m excited about the future of Black Women Photographers and its continued growth as a global resource,” she says. “By our fifth anniversary in July, we anticipate BWP will have distributed $240,000 in grants and $80,000 in equipment. My aspiration is to reach the one million dollar mark in the near future. I’m committed to scaling our initiatives and fostering a thriving community for Black and African women creatives in every way possible.” 

blackwomenphotographers.com

“By opening this space of friction and dialogue, Rencontres d’Arles 2025 pursues a vital ambition: to make photography a place of resonance, where voices coexist without hierarchy”

“It’s a rare example of true co-curation,” says Wiesner. “Where the narrative isn’t just about indigenous perspectives, but shaped by them from within. The result is both politically and visually powerful, anchored in land, memory and resistance.”

In an indictment of its historic use in ethnographic documentation, the artists in On Country reaffirm the camera as a truth-telling device – a means with which to reconcile the myth of objectivity. In the series Warakurna Superheroes, Tony Albert and David Charles Collins record children from a remote First Peoples community in the Northern Territory, for example, posing as superheroes amid dramatic outback landscapes. From the outpost of water tanks, at the dais of mechanical scrap heaps, they radiate strength and imagination. “The works on display this year offer alternative ways of telling and self-representing, rooted in cultural traditions that elude the visual standards of Western art history,” Wiesner says. “They raise crucial questions about authenticity, identity, and the legitimacy of the gaze. Who produces the images? Who displays them? And from what point of view are they seen – and understood?”

This line of enquiry is carried further by other photographers challenging power, particularly the emerging image-makers in the Discovery section. It includes Musuk Nolte’s documentary project in the Peruvian Amazon, Daniel Mebarek’s mobile studio in Bolivia (BJP #7920), and Heba Khalifa’s gendered perspectives, which resist ingrained prejudices. All invite reflection on whose viewpoints shape the narrative.

A reinterpretation of visual archives by Brazilian artists, Ancestral Futures makes for equally illuminating viewing. Sliding between quiet contemplation and fierce irony are images that pick holes in a narrow audit of Brazil’s history as told by the unreliable narrators of hegemonic culture. Gê Viana’s collaged portraits and photomontages appropriating colonial imagery are perhaps the most direct, but a similar tone echoes through Ventura Profana’s visionary photospreads, or Mayara Ferrão’s AI portraits, which playfully reinterpret visual traditions through an intersectional lens.

This year’s programme also includes the exhibition Retratistas do Morro, created by local photographers in Brazil’s favelas, and challenging monolithic Western narratives by presenting the everyday beauty and dignity they see first-hand. “What I find particularly striking,” reflects Wiesner, “is the project’s embedded nature – these are not outside observations, but relationships and histories built over time.” Conceived in 2015 by artist Guilherme Cunha, and drawn from an extensive archive of 250,000 photographs, the exhibition reflects a commitment to community collaboration and storytelling.

Arles also makes room for historical depth, reappraising Brazilian modernist photography and celebrating the socially engaged work of Letizia Battaglia and Claudia Andujar. “These historical perspectives don’t just complement the contemporary ones, they ground them,” says Wiesner. “Reminding us that today’s photographic struggles and innovations often echo older ones.”

With over 40 exhibitions, the French photofestival is a platform for diverse voices, and Wiesner has deliberately avoided corralling them too tightly. “By opening this space of friction and dialogue, Rencontres d’Arles 2025 pursues a vital ambition: to make photography a place of resonance, where voices coexist without hierarchy,” Wiesner says. “It feels less like a fixed narrative than a collective constellation of voices, each adding to a larger, unfinished image of the world.”

Together these works signal a meaningful shift toward shared authorship and renewed agency, reminding us that there is no neutral way of seeing, only personal and cultural ways of making meaning through images.

rencontres-arles.com

“You must always have an eye on finding those partners and opportunities… I’ve never worked in a silo”

But this exhibition also testified to the future of Photofusion, because it was held in the organisation’s handsome new gallery. Originally housed in a first-floor space on Electric Lane – off the famous Electric Avenue – Photofusion moved to International House in 2015; this was supposed to be a temporary stopgap but ended up being home for seven years. Then in April 2024, Photofusion finally moved into a more permanent space, which gave it a street- level gallery for the first time. Just round the corner from Brixton Tube, the new venue on Beehive Place is part of Brixton Recreation Centre and owned by Lambeth Council, who have leased it out for at least the next 10 years. The council also gave Photofusion a capital grant to develop the space, allowing it to create purpose-built facilities including two galleries, two studios, darkrooms, a film- processing department, digital production and education rooms. “We’re bigger and better than before, we have this amazing space,” says director Jenni Grainger.

Grainger is part of the changes. Joining Photofusion in January 2024, she is not from a photography background, having come from the theatre sector, but has lived in south London for 22 years, and always worked in subsidised arts. Joining as Photofusion moved building was a baptism of fire, she laughs, but she is quickly settling in and bringing her past experience to bear. Photofusion is part-funded by Arts Council England, she points out, but it also has to look for commercial possibilities and collaborations to supplement its income. “You must always have an eye on finding those partners and opportunities,” she says. “I’ve never worked in a silo. That was my pitch in my interview, and I think that’s why I was given the chance to run Photofusion.”

She credits her predecessor, Kim Shaw, with having done much of the groundwork, steering Photofusion through a period of change in which it achieved ACE National Portfolio Organisation status, and won the grant and lease for Beehive Place as part of Lambeth Council’s plans to revitalise the ‘Brixton Rec Quarter’. Photofusion is a charity and part of that status comes from its work with the local community; moving into the new space has brought a renewed commitment to removing barriers for people who may find it harder to access the visual arts or creative activities. Photofusion has also long been involved with photographic education, and is now doing more with its Photofusion Educational Trust, including hiring an education manager. Photofusion runs classes in darkroom and camera skills, for example, but more recently the artist Tom Lovelace held a workshop on ‘Photography and the Senses’.

“What we find is that photography courses are really packed at universities, but as soon as students leave that environment, where they’ve got darkrooms, enlargers, all that equipment at their fingertips, where do they go?” says Grainger. “That’s where we serve a function, because our USP is to keep ourselves affordable and be a home for all photography, including digital, analogue and alternative processes. People come in and try all kinds of weird and wonderful new things. We also run a free young mentors scheme in our studio on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays, in which 16 to 25-year-olds can come and do shoots and develop their portfolios.”

Of course the darkrooms and studios can be hired by anyone, but Photofusion has about 400 people in its membership scheme, who access reduced rates, a members’ room, a library, a monthly group crit and the chance to participate in two members’ exhibitions per year. The organisation runs commercial interests, such as film processing and digital production, and printing and framing work destined for venues such as the V&A, and its gallery spaces can be hired out. Photofusion also rents space to a co-operative that has survived as a co-operative, Parallax, a film and photographic supplier, which offers reduced rates to Photofusion members. “We’re keen to do more partnership work going forwards,” says Grainger. “The Photography versus Thatcher exhibition was also a partnership, for example, with the Martin Parr Foundation [which now holds the original Photo Co-Op Archive].”

As she points out, times are hard in arts funding, so Photofusion has to create collaborations and commercial opportunities; but it is still committed to its local community, and sometimes these strands cross over. “On a micro level, we’ve just put in a bid to have some of our young photographers take the images for the Big Caribbean Lunch – a Windrush celebration that happens in Brixton every year, outside in Windrush Square,” says Grainger. “We’d love to partner up and have our younger photographers create an exhibition and show it at our gallery, and help get local people into our space who might not usually think to come. And ideally, we’d get some funding to support it all.”

Threads Of Identity is open now at Gallery 2, Photofusion, a series of portraits by Lambeth-based photographer, Henos Adhanom. photofusion.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

fotoarsenalwien.at

“Every person has a duty to leave a trace of themselves, both through ideals and tangible outcomes”

Observing the world has been Keita’s starting point and he applied the same logic to Studio KENE, which he set up in 2017 in Kanadjiguila, a neighbourhood in the province of Bamako, Mali. Kanadjiguila is a vast cluster of concrete and brick buildings which rapidly grew over the last decade as migrant communities arrived from the Ivory Coast, Guinea and other sub-Saharan regions. Travelling to Mali to visit his brother, Keita was struck by the boredom annihilating the youngsters there, and recognised his past self in them.

Supported by Rome-based organisation Fondazione Pianoterra, he decided to pay back what he had learnt to locals aged 12 to 22 years old. Keita wanted to give these students the chance to be passionate about photography, and set up a workshop. Initially it was not easy to get them interested and later, when Studio KENE opened, it was difficult to get the community on board with having the youngsters – and educators – in the street with their cameras.

KENE had to get closer to those living nearby, to connect so that they could express both their own stories and others’ point of view, a process which took nearly a year. KENE is now a permanent space for photography, education, communal living, and care, centred on teamwork and non-hierarchical teaching.

It is a collaborative approach literally constructed from the ground up, when Keita and others physically built the studio. “The group formed organically and gradually,” he explains. “In the morning, I used to fetch water and transport bricks with a group of older youngsters, to help out with the construction works. In the afternoon I then gathered those curious to know more about photography and the camera, and taught them in a different space. From two assistants to five students, the group grew in a few days. Another five students joined as the community started to notice what we were doing and be genuinely intrigued.”

Keita’s first thought was to use street photography so these individuals could better understand their neighbourhood, but he has found that studio photography helps them too. Encouraging the students to build a firm technical knowledge, it also allows them to portray themselves and others, building trust and self-determination. In addition KENE aims to equip its students for work, often offering its alumni teaching work, and training them in both photography and film so that they can become photographers in their diverse communities, shooting weddings and other special events.

KENE also offers courses in theory, and group reviews, as well as a processing lab; in short, its students are given the instruments to narrate their reality, and understand themselves in relation to it. Making images and stories nurtures critical thinking, and fosters interplay between individual expression and collective action. And together, the students’ work creates a combined portrait of Kanadjiguila, an area often overlooked even by other Bamako inhabitants. In documenting it, Studio KENE is helping form some kind of collective memory, and a better sense of cultural identity. “Every person has a duty to leave a trace of themselves,” says Keita, “both through ideals and tangible outcomes.”

In 2022, Studio KENE opened another outpost in Rome’s multicultural Esquilino district. This time pitched at adults, its main objective is to create a place for learning around photography via teamwork, reciprocal listening and support. Theoretical classes and practice sessions alternate, and students are encouraged to depict and engage with the surrounding area. The Rome location also allows other collaborators to get involved, some of whom are professional teachers in wider disciplines such as publishing, studio and street photography, and editing tools.

Keita now divides his time between Bamako and Rome, and continues his own photographic practice while promoting learning about photography as a root to self-determination, confidence, cultural understanding and basic visual literacy. KENE students are winning recognition for their work, their images circulating through exhibitions in Rome, Naples, and Prato, Tuscany, where Centro Pecci hosted an exhibition narrating the first years of the Bamako space, right before the new iteration in Rome opened.

For Keita, photography can generate transformative practices of mutual care, and help redistribute knowledge and opportunities for change – whether in Mali or Italy. “When we are living in difficult conditions, we are brought to think that our thoughts don’t matter to others and we feel stuck in isolation, incapable of communicating,” he says. “Photography taught me that we can always be useful and our voice does matter, always.”

 studiokene.org

“In community work, you never want to be the saviour… You need to listen to what they need and see if you can provide resources”

– Jil Weinstock 

In the airy and bright backroom office, Weinstock relates her journey to Baxter St, which she joined almost four years ago. As a practising lens-based, mixed-media artist, she previously spent time at the Whitney Museum and the Children’s Museum of the Arts, where she curated 35 shows in under nine years, alongside other institutions. Throughout she maintained a focus on socially engaged arts and community work. “I pushed the boundaries, I brought in contemporary work,” Weinstock says of her time at the Children’s Museum. “I brought artists that were really saying something about what was happening globally, politically, [on] gender. It was very important to have those conversations.”

She brings her expertise to Baxter St to curate shows which demand attention to and reflect vital global conversations on our rapidly changing epoch. Weinstock joins Michi Jigarjian, president of Baxter St, who started as an intern 14 years ago. Since moving the gallery downtown, Jigarjian has also helped update the nonprofit organisation’s mission; to focus on breaking barriers to art and photography, removing membership fees, and encouraging access for local communities. Jigarjian says that the move to Chinatown aimed to help make the organisation sustainable, but also provide more of what artists need; the previous second-floor, midtown location was inaccessible to many, she notes. The space is now not only a gallery, but also a communal workspace, a studio for resident artists, and a venue for events such as this year’s spring block party, a gathering which hosted over 70 vendors ranging from food to crafts and presses from the city.

“When [the board] moved [the organisation] here and started being intentional with the gallery and the residency programme… they realised a lot of artists really just need space and support showing their work,” says Weinstock. Baxter St’s competitive residency programme – initiated by photographer Allen Frame, previously the board director – has only three annual spots and receives over 400 applications each year. The successful ones are selected by a different jury each time. “We’ve had artists who tried three, four, even seven times, seven years in a row before they received the residency,” says Weinstock.

The programme is open to lens-based artists who have never had a solo show, and they receive an artist fee, materials fee, production funds and a three-month work space. Artists also get a mentor, paired to them from Baxter St’s art advisory board, which is made up of 25 professionals, curators, academics, other artists and collectors. The focus is on professional development, which is particularly crucial for artists from less-privileged backgrounds or at the beginning of their career. 

During their time at Baxter St, residents also meet with the gallery’s communications consultant to discuss marketing strategies, and with an art handler who helps them to understand how to put a show together. For each of its resident artists, Baxter St produces a video interview on the occasion of their show, and the conversation is made available online permanently. Additionally, Weinstock often helps with pricing advice. “Once they go through all that,” she says, “then they have anywhere from six to nine months to [make] a body of work for their first show. During their show – it’s up for six weeks – they do two public programmes as part of Baxter St’s Conversation Series.”

Baxter St’s programmes range from panel talks to workshops and more. One resident artist, Simon Benjamin, born in Jamaica, remembers ‘Saturday soup’ as a special moment that he shared with his family, says Weinstock. “So he and his sister made a big pot of soup. We put it outside in the backyard, and we had him talk to a curator and myself about the work and the show while people had soup,” she recalls. Artists-in-residence are also given an online viewing room, which they can populate with installation shots and ephemera such as music they listened to while creating, books that inspired them, poetry they wrote, work-in-progress images, and any press they received. Throughout, the aim is to equip artists with knowledge, connections and experience which will help them continue the work after their time at Baxter St.

Baxter St also offers mid-career and guest- curated programmes, and in each case the end goal is the same – to incubate a space in which artists can create work and express themselves, without commercial constraints. The organisation is intentionally democratic in structure, with artists and the community ecosystem leading decision- making. Jigarjian admits that – although she respects them greatly – Baxter St is not the next International Center of Photography or Aperture. Instead she and her team aim to fill a gap in the existing structure, sometimes by partnering with those institutions. “We understand our place,” she says.

The focus is on building an equitable, circular and sustainable model that can lead by example in the art and photographic industries. Baxter St makes sure to pay artists for any labour, for example, giving them 50 per cent of the proceeds from their fundraisers, and 70 per cent of artwork sales. “Photography is one of the most equitable mediums. We all have phones now, we can all take photos. So how do we translate that into a practice?” posits Weinstock.

A generous $1million grant from the Mellon Foundation in February 2024 has allowed Baxter St to address its needs by increasing capacity and gearing up for new ideas. “We were a small organisation, so in order to support our community, we needed to double staff, double exhibitions and double programmes,” says Weinstock. The Mellon support also helped to fund a new role: a community outreach coordinator. “We are so much part of the fabric of not only the photography community, but all the community where we sit,” echoes Jigarjian. “We’re good neighbours. And we have always dreamed about being able to have a position dedicated to that role.” 

Jigarjian and Weinstock are looking forward to deepening ties within their neighbourhood with potential community programmes and exhibitions lined up; they are also hoping to work with smaller, independent presses on pop-ups, and on events such as zine and collage workshops, and even film screenings. “In community work, you never want to be the saviour,” says Weinstock. “You’re not saying, ‘This is what I think you need’. You need to listen to what they need and see if you can provide resources for that. You may not be able to, but if you can’t, you might know someone who can.”

Baxter St’s garden has even been used as a training ground for Saturday-meetings of the Sisters in Self-Defense, a local group teaching women preservation skills. “[When] we moved into Chinatown [we] really wanted to know our neighbours, it’s important,” says Weinstock. “Which is why we did the block party. Because we wanted them to know that we’re here for them in any way they need it.”

baxterst.org

“His images are testament to the centrality of the photograph in memory and in history”

In now iconic images, such as a child playing with a ball next to an anti-tank device on Sarajevo’s frontline, or the string quartet performing in the ruins of the city’s library, or the wounded woman being supported by Egyptian UN soldiers after mortar attacks on the city centre, Paul captured a fraction of a second of human experience that obtained deeper significance over time. His images are testament to the centrality of the photograph in memory and in history; his understanding of its ability to connect past with present is what honed his eye.

Realising frontline photography was unsustainable for the family life to which he was devoted, Paul’s thoughts turned towards teaching prospective photojournalists, and, over time, to what it means to bear witness to atrocity. At Foto8 in London, where I worked as a writer, and where in 2005 we had exhibited his work Bosnians in our gallery, Host, Paul (while dancing) told me about an online course he was setting up at London College of Communication, one of the first of its kind in the UK. He soon persuaded me to jump ship from the institution where I was teaching to join him at LCC.

When I arrived, Paul was running both the groundbreaking online course and the already renowned onsite course in photojournalism and documentary photography, which he had recently been able to accredit as a master’s degree. He referred to intricate matters of timetabling as ‘4D chess’, which was equally a fair description of how his brain functioned, as he established and grew the two courses, which have become world-leading in their field. Paul stretched time far beyond its linear limits; he was regularly, provably, in two places at once, making sense of students’ ideas and working with them long after their period of study, helping hundreds upon hundreds of people realise their potential, photographic and otherwise. This extraordinary ability was born of the fact that he saw the very best in everybody; his exceptional generosity was as unsentimental as it was limitless. The most frequent phrase used about him at work was ‘force of nature’.

Paul’s academic contribution to the discourse of photojournalism and documentary photography centred around the ethics of witnessing. In this, he was in dialogue with contemporary thinkers such as Susan Sontag, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Susie Linfield, Judith Butler, Barbie Zelizer and many others. His rare combination of theoretical rigour and frontline experience brought visionary clarity to his scholarly works such as Photography, Bearing Witness and the Yugoslav Wars, 1988-2021: Testimonies of Light, Understanding Photojournalism and Reporting the Siege of Sarajevo.

Like other photographers in Bosnia at the time, who witnessed crimes against humanity and genocide taking place contemporaneously, he understood that to do so ‘demands a position of moral courage from the practitioner, moving them from detached journalist to active advocate, providing testimonies that celebrate and commemorate the human spirit’. The war in the Balkans engendered a fundamental shift in photojournalism, towards an understanding of images both as evidence and as a call to action, which would contribute to the eventual Nato intervention, and to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Paul was beginning an LCC collaborative project with Amnesty to continue this urgent, essential work on visualising war crimes.

The annual academic conference he co-organised in Sarajevo, Why Remember?, tackled the role of the photographic image and of culture more widely in public memory. This year’s edition focused on reframing trauma, with powerful contributions from War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, and the Imperial War Museum, as well as colleagues from Ukrainian universities, University of the Arts London, King’s College London War Studies, and many other global scholars. Paul’s personal commitment to the city he made his home, and to justice, insisted that all who knew him would care deeply about Sarajevo too; about the dereliction of duty on behalf of the international community during the war, but also about matters of restorative justice and paths towards peace, which became a focus, notably with his work with the Peace and Conflict Cultural Network at UAL. 

Conference delegates dined together each evening in the atmospheric restaurants of the city’s Baščaršija, and, memorably, at the restaurant in the mountains overlooking the city which is the setting for the charged, joyful image of the couple kissing – they were just married – that forms the cover of Bosnians. The luminous city descends below, looking eternal. Sarajevans loved the four mountains which encircled them, yet this geography facilitated sniper positions and turned the city below into a sitting target. Eleven thousand people died in the siege. 

This summer, Paul’s photographs of the siege were exhibited, for the second time, in the grand octagonal hall of the Vijećnica, Sarajevo’s City Hall, destroyed by Serbian incendiary shelling during the war, in an attempt to wipe out Bosnia’s cultural heritage. Though hundreds of irreplaceable documents were burned, including some from Ottoman times, the library itself was completely rebuilt, reopening in 2014. Paul’s film of the siege – still images set to music – was also on show, in Gallery 11/07/95 Memorial Museum in the city. Watching it with colleagues and strangers, tears fell from every eye.

Everyone who ever worked with Paul will understand that to do so was to become his friend. Paul took us all with him, creating constellations of people all over the world, who now share community and creativity, not least among the photographers of VII, of his prior agency Panos Pictures, and even at Magnum, where he was nominated as an associate member in the early 2000s.  

This expansive capacity extended into other areas of his life. He was a dedicated and accomplished runner; an activity he also wanted to share. In the first week of term, the 2015 cohort and I accompanied him as he led a chi-running event around Elephant and Castle, London with his customary enthusiasm. He completed marathons and ultra-marathons with similarly motivated alumni and colleagues, and ran daily, whether along the Miljacka River, up snowy Mount Igman, or in Clissold Park. He even won first place in a recent race in Sarajevo for runners and their dogs. His passion for dancing ran the gamut from Northern Soul to ABBA to a fine salsa step. He would appreciate being remembered for posterity as a sharp dresser too. 

Paul’s death is a gaping wound for those of us who knew and loved him, but a generation of students, photographers, writers, academics, NGO and cultural workers, journalists and artists has been forever changed by encounters with the award-winning photographer, who became a visionary educator, and, fittingly, Professor of Conflict, Peace and the Image. His photographic and academic legacy is assured, yet it is his matchless energy and indestructible spirit that will survive in all of us, in the images we make, the stories we tell, and the friendships we nurture.

Paul Lowe, Professor of Conflict, Peace and the Image, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, 06 November 1963–12 October 2024. He is survived by his wife and sons.

Photography, Bearing Witness and the Yugoslav Wars, 1988-2021: Testimonies of Light by Paul Lowe, Routledge, 2024

Reporting the Siege of Sarajevo by Kenneth Morrison and Paul Lowe, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021

Understanding Photojournalism by Jennifer Good and Paul Lowe, Routledge, 2019

Bosnians by Paul Lowe, Saqi Books, 2005

“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