“If we can’t see where we’re from, maybe we can invent a homeland”

That informal education helped the brothers forge a style unburdened by documentary conventions. “Because we didn’t go to photo school, we didn’t get too obsessed with reportage or journalistic truth,” says Jibril. “Our lens was always through cinema, where fiction is welcome. We were more interested in creating worlds that invite imagination.”

Their earliest experiments in Los Angeles were inspired by the analog revival of the early 2010s. After discovering medium-format film on Tumblr, they met British photographer Tyrone Lebon at a Q&A, a pivotal encounter that introduced them to darkroom printing and led to their first editorial work for i-D Magazine. “We sent him our images, and he gave us feedback,” Jibril recalls. “Eventually, he introduced us to the team at i-D, and we got our first commissions, profiles on Rejjie Snow and Keith Ape.”

As their editorial work developed, the brothers began reflecting on how their itinerant upbringing shaped their outlook. “Being exposed to so many cultures has been a gift,” says Jibril. “When you’ve actually seen the world, your vocabulary for images widens. What we used to see as displacement, we now see as a tool for maturation.”

In 2017, revisiting their family photos from the Caribbean proved transformative. “We realised that what moved us wasn’t just other people’s aesthetics,” says Jibril, “but the warmth and sunlight we grew up around. We decided to use those techniques to tell stories about the Caribbean, about tropical identity. That’s when we stopped imitating and started defining our own voice.”

Movement has defined the Durimel blueprint and seems to continue to colour their visual worlds. Their subsequent move to Paris expanded their exploration of occidental design and African diasporas. “We were struck by the African presence in Paris,” says Jibril. “At first we thought we’d photograph the diaspora there, but after speaking to people we decided to go directly to Africa.” Travelling to Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal deepened their ongoing book project, Quiet as the Country (a working title), a long-term body of work that weaves portraiture, landscape, and costume into a fictional yet emotionally grounded world.

“We wanted to make a photo book based on a fictitious tropical republic,” Jibril explains. “If we can’t see where we’re from, maybe we can invent a homeland. Through that make-believe, we’ve learned a lot about ourselves.”

The project, which has been in progress for nearly nine years, began partly out of frustration with the commercial fashion system. “Fashion can be too hierarchical and too fast,” says Jibril. “It was limiting. The book became a cry for autonomy – a way to rediscover creativity without deadlines.”

The brothers now work with small crews, relying on natural light and minimal styling. “We love bare makeup and simple materials.  Coconut oil, sunlight, the park at sunrise,” says Jibril. “We like to keep things light: a bag of clothes, a reflector, and our cameras. It’s about letting the image feel like it’s already happening.” That simplicity mirrors their broader creative philosophy: “We try not to over-manipulate,” says Jibril. “We want the photos to feel natural, effortless.”

Their latest project, Lundambuyu’s Mobility Program features Habiba Hopson as ‘Lundambuyu,’ a fictitious mobility trainer, it’s an ode to the able body. Here, the goal is beauty in the pursuit of dignifying our everyday lives, Durimel printed a limited run of 500 posters from the series that was shared for free at Climax Books in New York City, the first public reception of their work, on 27 October. 

Nature itself has become an essential part of their visual and spiritual vocabulary. “We look at nature as the idea of God,” Jibril reflects. “The best art feels like God made it. When you look at a tree or stones in a river, there’s effortlessness. That’s what we try to achieve – something that feels organic, like it already existed.”

Recently, they have been experimenting with still lifes of natural concretions — stones that form without human intervention. They realised they were always drawn to the images that felt untouched. Jibril says, “that’s when it clicked. Even in our portraiture, we’re searching for that same natural expression.”

Despite their shared vision, collaboration remains a careful balance. As one can imagine, working with family can’t be a straightforward feat. “Working together is a social journey,” says Jalan. The brothers have had to learn how to communicate better, but admit “it’s something we’re still figuring out,”, says Jalan. Their process now gives each twin autonomy within their shared practice. “If one of us has an idea, that person leads the shoot,” Jalan explains. “The other assists completely. It’s about surrendering power so ideas can flow.”

Both brothers are also cultivating individual practices: Jibril has returned to drawing and draftsmanship, while Jalan is teaching himself music and songwriting. “Having our own outlets has been liberating,” says Jibril. “It makes the collaboration healthier.”

Now based in New York, they are continuing work on Quiet as the Country while seeking the right publishing and gallery partners, aiming tentatively for a 2026 release. “We don’t know exactly when,” Jibril admits. “But what the project has done for us – for our relationship, and for how we understand image-making – has already been enough.”

At the centre of their work is a commitment to transformation – a belief that art is not only about making something beautiful but also about becoming through the process. “Art is metamorphosis,” says Jibril. “Each project teaches us who we are. We just want to make something beautiful that makes people feel something.”

durimel.co

“His introspective approach reflected a movement in British photography that sought to use the medium in a more meditative way”

– Paul Hill

This persona came with an ever-increasing interest in Eastern philosophy and tantric practice (his brother taught yoga in the West Country). But John was not an aloof mystic or guru. He had a sharp, acerbic wit, but was also very shy. I remember him telling me that when he started teaching in Derby, he wandered the corridors at the Kedleston Road campus summoning up courage to face his first class of students.

This will surprise those photography students and workshop attendees at my Photographers’ Place in the Peak District, who clung to his every word as he talked eloquently about his work and sensitively critiqued their photographs for hours. His introspective approach reflected a movement in British photography that sought to use the medium in a more meditative way. Nature and the landscape were the leitmotifs. Spirit of Place was replacing a moment frozen in time. However, from time to time the black dog descended and you would not hear from John for a while. 

I knew he would emerge when asked to give a talk about his work or run a workshop – which we did, often. John was not a self-promoter. But when someone opened the door and offered a platform, he came alive and entranced his audience with deep philosophical insights and immensely useful tips on how to improve photographically. He also possessed great curiosity and an impressive intellect. An example of this came when Derby offered him a sabbatical in the late 1980s and, instead of using the period to work on a new project, he enrolled on the MA Film Studies course at the University of East Anglia.

His renowned large format work surfaced following time spent in Wales in 1968, unsuccessfully running a cafe with Penny (his second wife) after the breakdown of his first marriage. Influenced by the Transcendental Movement and the work of American photographer Minor White, John returned to Wales and the Mawddach Estuary, where he used the natural world to make emotionally deep black-and-white images that were wonderfully gestural and metaphoric, about ideas not things. 

During mentally challenging periods later, he often took nature indoors and made large format photographs that beautifully chronicled the life cycle of cut tulips in and out of vases, and arranged thistles and pampas grass still lifes that reminded me of Roger Fenton’s fruit and flowers prints made 140 years earlier. 

Like many photographers of that postwar era, John stumbled on photography before pursuing it professionally, seeing the seminal Family of Man exhibition in the pages of Picture Post while he was doing his National Service as an RAF nurse in Libya in 1956. He recalled in John Blakemore: Photographs 1955–2010 (Dewi Lewis, 2011): “I saw photographs not as speaking of sameness but of difference. Of disparities of wealth and poverty, of war and peace.” He immediately ordered a camera and revelled in the excitement of looking through its lens.

Many see John as an artist who uses a camera, but I always think of him as a photographer who made art. This is not a semantic conceit; it defines a particular empirical practice that is camera-based, where the maker thinks and sees photographically and focuses on making the final print the event, rather than a record of what is in front of the camera. John made his landscape or still life prints with great, almost fetishistic concentration on craft and immaculateness. He was a consummate fine printer, rewarded by transmitting the sensitivities of his seeing into a tangible form. 

It was an intensely personal journey as the photographs are emotional and evocative – and an escape from domestic problems and relationship difficulties. From time to time, he came to stay in my caravan in the Peak District and went out alone every day with his trusty MPP 5×4 and tripod. “To be alone in the landscape was a release, a return to the pleasures and pursuits of my childhood which had been lost to me,” he said. 

John had left school at 16, going against his parents’ wishes to work on farms in Shropshire, my native county. He would talk about working with horses under the shadow of the iconic Wrekin, a hill near what is now Telford. Up until that time he had been a city boy. He was born in 1936 into a house without books, but became an avid reader obsessed with birdwatching, drawing and painting. He was influenced by his grandfather who had been a carter (someone who transported goods by cart). Perhaps that is why he always headed for the stables when he came to visit me. 

On one of those visits he came with a handsome young man in his twenties, one of his two sons from his marriage to first wife Sheila. He had not seen him since the youngster had been a child and part of the reconciliation was visiting his photographic world. John was not a mystic in my experience, though he was mysterious. But if you want to discover this complex, gifted and generous person, you need only look at his photographs.

John was married to Sheila and Penelope and had two long-term partners, Catherine and Rosalind. He leaves behind three sons, Jay, Paul and Matthew, and two daughters, Gita and Orla. An open celebration of his life will take place later this year.

Phumzile Khanyile

“This work has taught me that no one is going to treat you well based on money – they either love you or they don’t. This journey has also taught me my worth. I come from Africa, where although we play with plastic crowns, we forget that the real jewels are literally beneath our feet. Plastic Crowns is based on symbolism. I use metaphors based on the power of being able to redirect one’s narrative, the power of our natural resources and jewels from this continent. The work is also a reminder to every single person that you can take part in your own storytelling. We are all worthy of a red carpet, plastic or not.”

Atikah Zata

“Saf is a farm labourer. He works on his brother’s rice field, carrying sacks of rice weighing up to 40kg. This story is a journey through Indonesia, a place that often sells itself as an agricultural country, but the reality doesn’t match expectations. There are many problems in the Indonesian agricultural system, including its treatment of farmers. As the climate crisis continues to worsen, urban farming communities play an increasingly important role in supporting food security for themselves and nearby communities. In this project, I am trying to document the farmers’ lives, their future and relationship with Indonesia.”

Chase Barnes

“The forces that direct and exert influence in our world are multiform and invisible. My series Wilderness of Mirrors endeavours to visualise contemporary mechanisms of control, which employ technology, anxiety and images as a means to destabilise and restructure belief. These discrete social and technological systems are embedded into the fabric of everyday life, and serve to reinforce and advance dominant structures of capital and power. This photograph was made in 2018 at the Renaissance Center, a complex of seven skyscrapers in Detroit, Michigan, containing a convention centre and the General Motors world headquarters. In the series, this image functions at face value – on a large LED display, a white hand operates a machine in the central tower of massive, labyrinthine architecture.”

Heja Rahiminia

“Since 1983, four years after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, hijab became mandatory for all women. Compulsory hijab for girls starts from a young age and they are forced to observe it in public places, work and study. Hijab has now become a political symbol in Iran. A few months ago in Tehran, a Kurdish young woman named Jina (Mahsa) Amini was arrested for allegedly not wearing the hijab in accordance with government standards. She died as a result of police brutality, and the incident became the basis of a widespread protest for women’s freedom of choice and against compulsory hijab as well as social injustices. This photograph is from a series about mandatory rules and especially the compulsory hijab as a tool of the regime to control women in Iran.”

Leia Ankers

“It has only been in the last couple of years that I’ve come to identify myself as a disabled woman. Embracing my disability has not been an easy journey, but in 2019 I was done pretending – I had let the fear of others’ prejudices control my life for too long. I started giving a lot of thought to the representation of disabilities in the media – always shown from a medical point of view and through dependency on others, rather than focusing on the entire person and what they have done for themselves. I want people to see that individuals with disabilities, whether they be visible or invisible, don’t have to live with this narrative of fear and pity, or have to be inspiring to be seen as deserving. I want to exhibit the strength and empowerment of people with disabilities and show how they have surpassed the limits enforced by society.”

David Severn

“This is Geoff Poulter, a former Nottinghamshire coal miner, who came out on strike with the National Union of Mineworkers during the infamous 1984–85 miners’ strike. The image is from my series Thanks Maggie, which explores life and culture within the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire coalfield. He is wearing his prized mining helmet, which he wore from the age of 15, when he began work in the pits. Poulter was in the minority as a striking miner in Nottinghamshire, as the non-striking Union of Democratic Mineworkers had become the dominant union in that area. The sociopolitical reasons behind this are highly complex and much debated but, in part, the authorities had helped to orchestrate a divided workforce, pitting workers against each other and ultimately handing control to the government. The divide-and-conquer strategy succeeded and the strike was lost, greatly diminishing the prominence and strength of trade unions in Britain.”

Eli Durst

“In this image, a man in a New Age class spins around in circles – much like a whirling dervish – in the hope of accessing a meditative state. He spins 33 times, in reference to the age of Christ when he was crucified. This photograph was made in a relatively straightforward documentary style. I observed the class and made photographs throughout, sometimes asking people to stop or repeat a certain action or exercise. In this way, the photograph is an honest document of reality, a description of the surface of the world at that moment, something we might call truth. In another way, however, the photograph is a cipher, a physical description of a metaphysical dimension, invisible to the camera. It is a photograph of this man’s faith, a spiritual experience from which the viewer is excluded, something very far from fact or objective truth.”

Jamie Lee Taete

“I took this at a Trump rally in Wyoming in 2021. I noticed the car because it had personalised number plates that read QP8RIOT, a reference to the QAnon conspiracy theory movement. The car’s side and back windows, and about two-thirds of the windscreen, were covered in stickers relating to the driver’s various conspiratorial beliefs: that Covid-19 vaccines are poisonous, that JFK Jr faked his own death, that a group of global elites are involved in a massive child-trafficking ring, and – I think – that Donald Trump is the reincarnation of General Patton. There are many ways that these types of conspiracies can be harmful to the believer. But it’s rare to see someone whose beliefs put them in such immediate danger – to such a degree that they are unable to safely operate their car.”

Rik Moran

“Truth is inherent in my book, Chance Encounters in the Valley of Lights. As a story about a story – of Alan Godfrey, a Todmorden policeman who claimed to be abducted by a UFO – it plays to the way we tell them. We emphasise, exaggerate and embellish in the name of a good tale. What truths lie in Godfrey’s story when there’s no evidence beyond his recollection? Growing up nearby, this story has lived with me for over 30 years. I wanted to tell my truths, presenting the facts for the viewer to draw their own conclusions. This image shows the Todmorden, West Yorkshire, landscape where Godfrey had his encounter. Shot on Aerochrome film, which records infrared light invisible to the naked eye, it reveals hidden truths within the landscape: a fitting metaphor for the untold stories present all around us.”

James Bannister

“Las Vegas projects a facade of success and glamour. It’s something that we all buy into. We train our vision to see what the casino-hotel owners want us to see, and are blind to what they don’t. We see the easy lie, not the difficult truth because the world is complicated, and this helps us digest it. Despite the dire water situation – a symptom of being only two hours from the hottest place on Earth – lawns, pools and golf courses have become a status symbol in Las Vegas. A signifier of our relationship with scarcity and value. An investigation into presentation, photography can sometimes have a great knack of getting under the cracks of the image we project. I find the distance between the fantasy and the reality of ourselves very revealing. Arbus called this ‘the gap between intention and effect’.”

Alison Jackson

“I started my MA at the RCA hating photography because of its manipulative qualities. I ended up making this whole body of work about exactly that – about how you can’t tell what’s real or fake through photography; you can’t rely on your own perception. My work bursts the bubble that we can believe in anything we see in an image, exploring how seductive imagery is, even when you know that you can’t believe it’s true. Photography is not truth – it’s only resemblance. In my work, resemblance becomes real and fantasy touches on the plausible. I create scenes that the public have all imagined, but have never seen before. It’s an exploration of our insatiable desire to get personal with public personalities, raising questions about the power of imagery, which incites voyeurism and our need to believe.”

Ayesha Jones

“As I sat to think about these words, a man asked me, ‘Where do you come from?’. He wanted to inform me, unprovoked, that ‘I have mixed race kids too, you know’, like me. This image is from a project titled Where do you come from?. It is a response to being constantly asked this question, as a Black/mixed heritage person living in the UK. It is about the social construct of race. I have made photographs during time spent in the Caribbean, Wales and West Africa. Places that my recent and distant ancestors would have called home. This image was taken in my late grandmother’s car, at the top of a hill in Machynlleth, Wales. In the mirror is the place where I feel most at home, a bench overlooking the view below, a view enjoyed by my late grandparents, late father and now my son and I.”

“It basically started this whole journey, where I now go on palaeontology digs every winter and join these palaeontologists who are looking for some of the same bones my grandfather was,” Wilson explains. But these digs, and the work Wilson creates while on them, are not merely scientific, and their meaning is not tied only to her own family.

Wilson’s images of seemingly endless Texan deserts and long extinct creatures, alongside conceptual self-portraits in the style of geology and anatomy charts, speak to an origin story that reaches beyond traceable generations. Each bone collected is evidence of the slow, significant work of evolution, serving as a reminder that we, as humans, sit at the very end of that timeline.

All of this, Wilson explains, makes this work as much about our connection to the Earth, as about her own link to her grandfather. “It’s a sad reflection that we don’t take all of that time and perfect evolution into consideration with how we treat each other and our planet,” she says. “Millions of years from now, when some form of a palaeontologist can see the stratum of our dirt and our planet, what will our layer look like? To me, that’s hard to reckon with.”

The creation of DIG was also, in moments, hard to reckon with. It took Wilson some time to accept the work as a combination of the personal and the scientific; to allow herself to acknowledge that her story – and that of her grandfather – were worth telling. “It’s not only thinking about my connection with him over these years, but the connection that we all have altogether,” she explains. “As mammals, as humans, as a species, connecting to our ancestors – I didn’t really know what that magical feeling was, but it has really carried through this whole project.”

Sarah Wilson, DIG: Notes on Field and Family, is available to pre-order now (Yoffy).

Exposure on the glass plates had to occur in makeshift darkrooms on site, often in wretched conditions. The glass could crack on the route home, especially when travelling down mountains. The resultant artworks are documents of sheer physical exertion as much as anything else, and of whatever emotional and mental animus compelled each mission. The story of their creation is written into their surfaces, in the slippage and run of chemicals, the scratches and frayed edges.

Thematically speaking, these are images of geology; of millennia-old Celtic cultures, and of centuries-long struggles between local communities and the interests of landholders, state, and big business. Boyd alludes in his afterword to a family heritage rooted in Western Ireland, and early sites of human civilisation are in evidence, from the standing stones of Machrie Moor to the forbidding ring forts of the Aran Islands. 

More modern abandoned structures are cast in the same spectral light, like the wreck of the Speedwell on North Uist, and the MV Plassey, a WW2 warship beached on the Aran Islands. There are clearance sites – from which tenant farmers were forcibly removed to make way for livestock during the 18th and 19th centuries – at Hallaig and Assynt in Scotland.

Of particular interest are shots of the so-called Shell to Sea cottages, sites of a community struggle against the installation of Shell’s Corrib gas processing pipeline in the 2000s-2010s. The tale is a recent one, but the method of documentation, with its connotations of great age, grants it the same patina of myth as photographs reflecting more timeworn stories of struggle. At various points in the book, we seem to be cast forward to some point in the future, by which modernity will have become a distant source of morality tales, archetypes.

Boyd has worked with poets throughout his career, and regularly cites them in his work. In this case he has been inspired by Sorley MacLean and Seamus Heaney amongst others. Poems by Moya Cannon are even included in the book, dotted between the photographs. But perhaps the most notable point of reference for this work is the gothic prose stylings of Edgar Allan Poe, a world away from the earthy lyricism of Heaney and MacLean. There is certainly an illustrative quality of ghostliness, of melancholy, even of a lurking evil to some of these pictures: the trace of something ancient, disruptive of our normal sense of the world. This also seems to reflect the personal impulse behind this book, some of which was created during a period of depression: perhaps some psychological sense of alienation, of a spectrality to life, was being recorded and worked through. Indeed, what the text arguably leaves us with above all is a sense of the weight, and the catharsis, of the individual journey that it evokes.

The Point of the Deliverance by Alex Boyd is available to pre-order via Kozu Books.

“The objective of these landscapes was not only to show what Britain looked like at this particular time, but also to convey how it felt to drive through it, and to stand by while it moved around you”

Danny Fox

The journey – much like the nature of their collaboration – was intuitive. “When we started this project we didn’t have a clear plan of where we would actually visit,” Fox explains, “we only had a crude red line drawn across the map, vaguely marking the route”. With only eight hours of daylight a day, they drove up the east side of England, then diagonally through Scotland up to the Isle of Skye. They descended down the west coast through Liverpool, Manchester, and then into Wales, where they finished in Cardiff. “Eight days doesn’t sound like a lot of time,” says Ifill, “but when it’s winter, and it’s just the two of you, it becomes a very intimate and emotional experience. You see each other going high and low.” 

Working with different media also meant the journey was distinct for each artist. Ifill was jumping in and out of the van to take photos, but Fox couldn’t paint on the road. “I kind of sat there and thought about things and looked out the window,” says Fox. Note-taking has always been part of Fox’s creative process, and in this instance it became an important part of the final outcome. “The objective of these landscapes was not only to show what Britain looked like at this particular time, but also to convey how it felt to drive through it, and to stand by while it moved around you.” 

December 2021 was a precarious time. After almost two years of Covid-19 lockdowns, the UK was bracing itself for the winter months with the possibility of yet another forced quarantine. Ifill recalls the “sense of paranoia and hostility in the air”, but he also insists that the book does not take a political stance. “It’s more of an honest recording from a neutral standpoint,” he says. “I’m sure a lot of people are guilty of romanticising a place, or gently twisting your aesthetic, finely tuning it into how you want it to be interpreted.” This is also a benefit of a collaboration: “You’re forced into an angle on honesty.” 

When Ifill got back to his studio in Kent, he began processing over 30 rolls of film. He mailed the prints to Cornwall, where Fox painted directly onto the images at his studio using nail polish – a reflection on what was available to him on the road. “There wasn’t an art shop in every town, but there is always a corner shop or a pharmacy where you can buy a couple of colours of nail polish,” Fox says. 

The finished book is meditative and tactile. Much like the journey itself, the sequence rambles through photos, paintings, and handwritten notes with an impulsive, diaristic energy – perhaps an unintentional reflection of their symbiotic collaboration. Ifill and Fox explain that while travelling, place names became a form of wayfinding. “Detours were prompted by encountering signs containing names of places that appealed aesthetically or simply rolled off the tongue nicely,” says Ifill. Holy Island – a tidal island off the north-east coast of England – was one of those places. “We got out of the van and stood there for a while. It felt as though you’d reached the end of the world,” Ifill remembers. There was no real reason why they decided to name the project after this place; “It just seemed to be one of those rare moments in a creative collaboration where both artists are thinking the same thing at the same time,” says Fox. 

Ifill recalls an encounter with London gallerist Hannah Barry, who visited his studio prior to an exhibition of the work back in February. “She asked how we go about discussing the work in order to make certain decisions. I can remember Danny looking at her and pausing for a moment, then replying, ‘We don’t really talk. You have to be on a telepathic level when collaborating with someone else. That’s the only way it can work’.”

Holy Island by Kingsley Ifill & Danny Fox is published by Loose Joints.

Gough’s broader practice considers “how the natural world can be represented at this ecologically critical point”. The questioning of our capacity to infer qualities of scale, distance, and density seems an important aspect of this investigation: it subtly confounds the centring of human perspective which has been a hallmark of landscape art since the Romantic era (embodied in the all-seeing gaze of Caspar David Freidrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog). 

Crawling over the luminous, moss-blanketed surface of lava fields, plunged into caverns, sucked towards the black depths of geysers, Gough’s camera foregoes such a panoramic vantage point. And, as the nature of what we are seeing becomes harder to fathom at close range, our sense of ourselves as the seeing entities becomes oddly fuzzy at the edges.

The trick of taking the viewer right up to a visual surface to disorient them is not new. We find it in everything – from novelty online quizzes (of the ‘can you guess what this is?’ type) to the abstract expressionist photography of artists like Aaron Siskind. But in this context the techniques are put to a different, ecologically-minded use, suggesting a rejection of the anthropocentric gaze. We are nudged instead towards an imagined non-human gaze that is ground-dwelling and primordial. In this sense, Topographies II renders a kind of speculative intimacy with non-human life, and indeed with non-living geological forms, which is both vital and arresting. 

Topographies II by Jess Gough is self-published. 

12 Hz by Ron Jude is published by Mack.