Broomberg has always been political, in life and in art. He was born in 1970, at the height of apartheid in South Africa, and was active in the anti-apartheid movement from the age of 15. He left his home country in 1990 to study in London, and politics have very much informed where he has lived ever since. “After London, I went to Italy for about seven years but then Berlusconi and Lega Nord, the right wing [took over], so I moved back to London,” he says. “I was there for about 15 years, very settled, but then Brexit happened. At the same time, I got a job with Olly [Chanarin] as a professor in Hamburg, and had a show here in Berlin. At a dinner at the end of the show I said, ‘Does anyone know of a school’ – because we had two young kids – ‘and an apartment in Berlin?’ Somebody at the table knew a school, somebody else had an apartment, and a week later we arrived here with two bags – ostensibly for six months, but we’ve just stayed. Berlin felt so different to London then. But now this place…” he trails off.

Much of Broomberg’s current output is centred around Palestine. His most recent photobook, Anchor in the Landscape, made with his former intern Rafael Gonzalez, comprises black- and-white portraits of olive trees in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Many of these are thousands of years old and stand as symbols of Palestinian identity and resilience because they are vulnerable to destruction (800,000 trees gone since 1967). It was created as part of Artists + Allies x Hebron (AAH), the NGO Broomberg co-founded with Palestinian activist Issa Amro in 2022, with the aim of confronting the ongoing oppression of Palestinian residents in Hebron by the Israeli military. A number of the original 8×10 photographs from Anchor in the Landscape featured in South West Bank – Landworks, Collective Action and Sound, the AAH-organised exhibition shown at last year’s Venice Biennale, dedicated to “works produced by artists, collectives and allies in and around the southern West Bank”.

The olive trees are the focus of other ongoing AAH projects too. With Counter-Surveillance: H2, Broomberg and co launched a counter offense to Israel’s “extensive and technologically advanced” surveillance of Palestinians by erecting a number of surveillance cameras in Palestinian olive groves in Hebron H2. Viewers can access live broadcasts of the groves via various digital platforms run by cultural institutions around the world. “It’s about using technology that’s traditionally considered ‘military’ to do something benevolent – to protect rather than destroy,” Broomberg explains. “We’ve also geolocated all the olive trees we photographed and are now working with a nano-satellite company, which has these tiny satellites that ring the Earth and deliver very high-resolution imagery of its surface every 24 hours. You can point the satellites at specific geolocations, so exactly where an olive tree is, and receive an image of it every day. It’s kind of counter archiving. And if anything happens to that tree, an alarm will go off.”

Subverting the power dynamics inherent to certain forms of photography, using the exact same forms, is nothing new for Broomberg. For the 2015 photobook Spirit Is a Bone, he and Chanarin used Russian surveillance technology to make eerie portraits of Moscow residents, in a series that reimagined August Sander’s extensive portrait of German society in the 1920s, People of the 20th Century. The same goes for Broomberg’s 2021 photobook Glitter in My Wounds, a poster for which adorns the wall between the studio’s two windows, spelling out the evocative title in red lettering.

That book was made in collaboration with the transgender activist and actress Gersande Spelsberg – who stars as its subject in multiple portraits, lit only by sunlight and mirrors – and is also a study in power disruption. “She totally directed me,” Broomberg says. “‘This is how I want to look, these are the moments I want you to capture, and if you want to try and get emotion out of me, this is how to do it’. We shot it in a day. It was really interesting; it turned the tables on the dynamic between the person photographing and being photographed.”

Collaboration seems to have remained integral to Broomberg’s practice, even since the dissolution of his most prolific working relationship with Chanarin, which was formally pronounced dead in 2021. “Definitely,” Broomberg says. “I’m hopeless with organisational or executive functional stuff so I always need to work with people to help with that. I also need to be challenged and pushed back against.”

A collaborative effort of a different kind is the room’s most lively wall, adorned with photographs, artworks and trinkets. “I have an 11-year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter, and this wall is all key memories, key things that are not only important to me but also to them,” Broomberg says with a smile. Favourite objects on the wall include the famous picture of Lee Miller bathing in Hitler’s bathtub on the day of his death. Her boots – muddy from her morning visit to the newly liberated Dachau death camp, where she had photographed the dead – are placed deliberately in frame, Broomberg points out, as is a portrait of Hitler and a statue of Venus. “It’s this performative act – it’s very radical.”

Other treasured items include a photograph of Bertolt Brecht’s chess pawn, and a picture of Broomberg’s daughter, Leni, asleep as a child. Now that she is 15, the artist says, she no longer lets him photograph her without her permission. “She’s OK with all of the pictures of her when she was little, but now she’s saying, ‘No, these are my boundaries, this is my body and you as a photographer no longer have access to it unless I give it to you’, which is amazing.”

Broomberg’s children split their time between their father’s apartment and that of their mother, the artist and architect Sarah Entwistle, who lives next door. “Honestly, I don’t think we could have created this kind of life in England,” Broomberg notes, “because I think England is still quite unforgiving in terms of what constitutes a family – this idea that it’s not broken, we’re separated parents but doing it together.”

I ask how working from home, while sharing the space with his children, has impacted his practice. “It’s kind of amazing for them to see the process, and it’s amazing for me to be present. I’m not elsewhere,” he says. “We’re always around; we’re with them but we’re also making at the same time. It’s a bit like this that you’re witnessing,” he continues, pointing to the dog, who is now playing with a plum retrieved from a bedside table. “Work has to fit in between domestic life.”

Broomberg says he misses having “a sanctified studio space, where you can totally focus”, but he adds that having one enables a certain kind of arrogance, and that abandoning that approach – like having children – has been humbling and enriching. “I’ll give you a great example,” he says, reaching for a pile of photographs of the olive trees from under his desk. “When we had these pictures hand-printed, I came back with a pile of them like this and my son came in, sat down and spent half an hour with them, really attentive. Then he said to me, ‘They’re really beautiful, papa,’ and I said, ‘Thank you’. He said, ‘No, I mean the trees’. Isn’t that perfect? I’ve done 15 books of photography, and I’ve always struggled with the notion of photography and what the meaning of it is. This was the first time I thought, ‘That’s the reason why one can do it – it’s a conduit. It’s allowing somebody else to access these things. But it’s not about me!’”

Making things that are not about him is central to Broomberg’s current practice. “Most of my work now is going between Palestine and here, a lot of planning and production, talking to people, collaborating – that’s why this space works as a studio,” he says. “Starting with my work with Gigi [Spelsberg], but mostly these past two years working with Palestinian artists, learning how to be an ally, it’s been the biggest learning curve of my life.”

Allyship has meant wrestling with and trying to counteract what he terms “the extraction value” of photography, whereby the photographer makes all the money, while the subject is left with nothing – the reason Broomberg launched his 2021 initiative, FairFoto, which uses blockchain technology to ensure subjects receive shares of the profits generated by their images. “For the Anchor in the Landscape photographs we’ve ensured that a third of the money accrued goes back into the community,” he explains. “It’s about how to make these pictures work, not for me, not for my career, not for capital, but also for the community and to bring Palestine into the public arena a bit.”

At the moment his main preoccupation is bringing the Biennale show to Berlin – to Spore Initiative, the one institution where he says “completely open dialogue can happen, because it’s privately funded”. This will open later in the year. As our conversation draws to a close, as his dog has his now-ruptured plum confiscated, I ask if Broomberg plans to leave Berlin, given all the difficulties. “A lot of people are saying to me, ‘Why don’t you leave?’ but I think it’s actually a particularly important moment to be here,” he says firmly. “There are small pockets of solidarity here in Berlin, people are getting more organised. So I’m staying here for now.”

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“I’m not interested in making luxury fine art objects – I’m interested in the industrial, and manufacturing, and the actual techniques rather than mimicking them”

Hammond works closely with photography – she was awarded the Single Image Award in British Journal of Photography’s 2016 International Photography Award – but from some of her earliest efforts as an artist, was thinking into three dimensions. “It became as much about architecture, and politics of urban space, and gentrification, and ruin as it was about photography, and the screen, and the lens,” she explains. “What happens when you turn the lens of your camera back on the computer-generated image and make it photographic, and then materialise it? It’s all about these feedback loops and cycles between image and material and sight and screen.”

Hammond has always worked in and from studio spaces: straight after art school she moved to a live-work warehouse in Tottenham with some of her coursemates, which she describes as “chaotic and fun”. “I was very nomadic,” she adds, detailing moves over the course of a few years from Tottenham to Hoxton to Hackney Wick and through various residencies, often living on top of or alongside her work. Her airy current studio, in Sydenham, south-east London, has had many different lives. “That office used to be my daughter’s bedroom,” she says, gesturing towards a room full of monitors, where her partner now works. Before it was a bedroom, Hammond used it as a recording space during her time playing in bands. She and her partner still often collaborate with artists in the building’s other studios, and the whole community has put on nights in the project space on the ground floor.

On the day I visit the sun is shining, casting light through the leaves of plants on both sides of the space, the sky blue from the top floor. Hammond and her family eventually moved out of the studio in 2022, after the intensity of living and working in the same few rooms during the pandemic, and when she started to receive more commissions. Suddenly, living on top of her work was no longer feasible. Today, the studio is full of works in progress: a huge print, almost the length of the room, laid across a table; the flattened side panel of a car, a high- gloss navy blue, mounted; and the bulk of a new piece, Rigged, from her recent project, bolted to a tall, orange frame.

This latest work, Variations, is the result of the Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship, a £15,000 award that gives mid-career artists the opportunity to develop an original project. Hammond applied after the culmination of her 2021 solo show, Remains in Development, which toured from C/O Berlin to Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp. “I formulated a new research question around data-mining and geological mining,” she says of the application. “To me, it felt like there were these two worlds, and there was potential to interrogate them through collage – collage being this perfect place for investigating potentially disparate things that have a relationship.”

Alongside these collages, she began to generate AI images as tests to understand the technology, and became curious about the way she was presented with four options: versions one, two, three and four of a given prompt. She wondered how that system might be applied to a curatorial framework. “I knew I wanted to somehow materially enact the processes that generative AI uses and draw our attention to it through a different lens,” she explains. “I was interested in the fact that there are global logistics, and global territory, of this particular technology. It’s not isolated to our screens, and in order to create the hardware to use it, we need minerals from one place, they need to be shipped from here to there, we need data centres elsewhere. There is this expansive territory.”

With this premise as a starting point, the first variation, Content Aware, took the form of a shipping container, exhibited in Brighton last October during the Photoworks Weekender; the second, Rigged – the one which currently stands in progress in her studio – will go to QUAD in Derby in spring. For the third variation, Model Collapse, which will show at The Photographers’ Gallery in London not long after that, Hammond will use images and data gathered from security cameras fitted to the first and second variations, the installations imaging the viewers and, thanks to a reflective wall opposite, themselves.

“The idea is that there are some people trying to hack the machine and to infect it with its own images,” Hammond says of the third iteration. “But what happens when AI-generated images that aren’t real, physical things in the material world are fed back into it? How does it interpret that data, and how do they start to shift and almost poison the machine?”

The exact form of Content Aware is yet to be determined, as it will depend on this gathered data; Hammond will have to work fast to interpret it and re-imagine the next variation in real time, as there are only a couple of weeks between the installation in Derby and the next in London. “I’m less interested in actually what it does to the system and more interested in that as a framework, or concept,” she says. “So that’s why I’m re-enacting the images; and I still don’t know what that’s going to look like.”

The final work, Repository, considers the idea of the archive, where all of these generated images are housed, where the data is stored, and what happens when these endless machines are discarded and go back into the ground. Crucially, none of the Variations have been conceived as documentary or realistic, instead they reflect on aspects of the AI machine as a place for speculative engagement. “None of these are descriptive about the process, it’s more a sort of theatre,” Hammond explains, “or a sort of collapsing and bringing together, creating stagings and sets for us to imagine.”

Given the questions, and even critiques, Variations implicitly raises in its exploration of mining (digital, material) and decay (digital, material), I was surprised that Hammond is using generative AI as part of her process. “I’m actually battling with that as we speak,” she tells me. She remembers receiving the first couple of days’ worth of data from the camera attached to Content Aware in Brighton, and preparing to use AI tools to work with it. “As I started doing it I was like, ‘What am I doing? I don’t want to be doing this’.” She began to wonder about the possibility of using it as a training set for herself instead, as though she was the generative AI system that her work is staging. “I don’t need this,” she recalls thinking. “I’m enacting it.”

“I feel like I have to engage with it, but I don’t feel like I want to use it as an integral part of the machine of art production,” she says of her current take on AI-generated imagery. “Maybe it’s similar to travel – I fly, but if I don’t have to fly I’ll get the train. I feel like maybe it’s the same for AI. I need to use it for this part of the process in order to be able to interrogate it further, but I’m not going to sit and make thousands – or tens of thousands – of images, just training training training, data data data. Firstly it’s not useful for me, but I feel uncomfortable doing so.”

Aside from environmental concerns about the technology, Hammond takes a pragmatic view on the impact of AI-generated images. “I don’t really think it’s too different from CGI,” she says. “It’s just an extension of non- lens-based ways of making photographic works – and by photographic, I mean in the broadest sense of their relationship to the real, and all of those dialogues that have taken place throughout photographic history.

“Whenever we’re using a medium, we need to be reflecting on what that medium is, and how it relates to the subject matter that we’re working within,” she continues. With AI, as with any other technology, the medium must be at least part of the message. “I’m really sure that I don’t want to use it on this surface level. The context and medium are so interlinked, so I feel like the idea of making work that uses a camera that doesn’t somehow reflect on or interrogate the photographic… Well, somehow I feel like that has to be a part of the field that is being investigated. The same absolutely goes for AI-generated images. If you’re using it, it has to reflect on the technology. It shouldn’t just be a means to an end.”

And so it follows that her works meticulously make tangible the processes they examine – the process by which, for example, the digital degrades and is eroded just as the physical is, which is hard to feel as truth even as it is understood intellectually. Works such as Variations stage and concretise the ruin of the digital and, as a result, the viewer can experience that truth as embodied, physical. “I’m asking how the ideas of the work interact with the material world,” Hammond explains.

Her working process is an extension of this commitment to the tangible: the objects, installations and sculptures she makes, whether she makes them herself, or works with others to bring them to life, are conceived and designed with these principles in mind. “I work a lot with non-photographic spaces, places that work with industry as opposed to the arts,” she says. “When I get something spray-painted I go to somewhere that spray-paints machines, as opposed to a fine art fabricator. I’m not interested in making luxury fine art objects – I’m interested in the industrial, and manufacturing, and the actual techniques rather than mimicking them.

“That’s perhaps why the work is never slick,” she continues. “It has these elements that might be very slick, but there is still a sort of roughness – you can see the bolts. I want it to somehow be true to the material that I’m responding to and the context I’m responding to, rather than a sort of fetishisation of it.” This materiality and attention to the industrial is personal for Hammond, informed by her early life – she grew up in Birmingham, where her father worked in a factory. But it is also a response to her lived environment.

“I’ve lived in industrial spaces for the last 10 years of my life, so I’m strongly informed by the materials that I’m around a lot,” she says, looking over at Rigged. “So, thinking about things like the bolts, they just feel like part of my material world.” 

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“I’m thinking more about my process – allowing myself to experiment, allowing myself to make mistakes, allowing myself to figure out what my flow is”

“That was such an interesting time, coming out of uni and already getting an idea of what it’s like to do commissioned work based on personal work,” she remembers of 2015, the year of our first encounter. The BJP Breakthrough Award exhibition had led to Jalloh’s first editorial commission after Emma Bowkett, director of photography at FT Weekend Magazine, saw her work and asked for a meeting. From there, Jalloh was soon shooting regularly for magazines such as Clash, until celebrity portraits and working on sets with several assistants became a matter of course.

Accolades aside, the essence of Jalloh’s work remains rooted in the places she knows most intimately – the memories so much part of the fabric of her life that it took her a while to recognise them. “I always wanted to photograph the experiences I had when I was younger – the hall parties that I would go to, or always being with my cousins, or seeing kids playing in the park after school, being silly,” she says. “Growing up, I would look at those things and be so used to them that maybe I didn’t appreciate their beauty. When I really was getting into the flow of shooting every day, my perspective changed. It intensified my empathy.”

She has long described her work as a kind of visual diary, “embedded in how I was raised, what I was around, my own life experiences”. This diary, while recorded in photographs, is something that Jalloh experiences as three-dimensional and multi-sensory. “When I look back on my images, I can really hear them,” she says. “And even though a lot of them are in black-and-white, there’s this vibrancy that I can feel.” There is a palpable sense of her desire to communicate this fullness of experience; for the viewer to feel it too.

Until last year, Jalloh worked in a studio space that she took up during lockdown. “When I initially moved in, it was so quiet,” she recalls. “It was just me. It was the perfect time to step into that world, separating my work from where I lived, having the room to think somewhere else.” She made portraits and commissions there and began to paint, and, when the Covid rules were relaxed enough, invited people for meetings and studio visits. “It was a good time to be able to explore my thoughts and feelings, and to really see my work in a physical way, in a physical space,” she says. “I was actively going out of my way to see how my images make stories. It was a good way to see how else I could think about approaching my work moving forward.”

The decision to part ways with the space last year was bittersweet. “The rent was too high, it just didn’t make sense,” she explains. “It almost felt like I’d be paying house rent money. It was a shame, but then again I was at this place where I was actually OK with letting it go.”

At home in Bermondsey, where her life and practice are once again intermingled, her prints are on the wall again; the house is full of her work, framed beautifully and hung throughout her living space. The shift away from the studio and back towards home has occasioned a moment of deep reflection for Jalloh who, a year before moving out, had already begun the lengthy process of archiving a decade’s work. In doing so, she had cause to look closely at her beginnings, for the first time in years, the ways she moved as a photographer, the things she saw, what she prioritised.

“I was very much in a different place in my life,” she recalls. “I was thinking about how I would use my body when I was outside, for example – like the way I would approach street photography. I was chasing the light all the time, and using my eyes, my ears, and other senses to be able to capture things. If I’m hearing kids running from the side of the road, I’m already prepping my camera. If I’m hearing aunties having conversations I’m already chasing light – because I can see the light is going to hit them in a certain way, so I’m running to the other side of the street.

“I definitely used to carry my camera around with me everywhere,” she continues. “I went through a period of shooting every day. I think it was a good practice of allowing myself to just shoot, rather than overthinking the process.” Her years photographing on the street eventually cohered to form a discrete body of work, Love Story, an archive of a particular place, at a particular time; the Black communities of south London, at play and at rest in the light of summer.

One of the biggest changes she has observed in this moment of archiving and reflection is a difference in speed. “I’m a lot slower, which isn’t a bad thing,” she reflects. Working in the studio, where light can be meticulously controlled, required a different muscle to the dynamic nature of the street in British weather, and as a result Jalloh grew accustomed to a more measured pace. “Maybe it’s also an age thing,” she adds. “I’m wanting to take my time. I’m ready to move quite slowly, and really take the time to see where this new way of working might manifest.” She is more seasoned now, a decade’s experience under her belt. “It’s interesting, coming to that conclusion and being OK with that.

“There’s so much to absorb when you’re outside, and there’s so much to play with,” she says of her fleet-footed approach to her early work. In the studio, with an adjusted pace, the rhythm was more subtle, allowing for more patience. This shift led to a deepening of her approach to portraiture, informing the contemplative character for which her work is celebrated. “I feel that now I’m drawn not only to capture a person in their essence, but also to hear what they’re about. There’s a lot more bonding,” she says. The sensitivity she cultivated to light and movement in the street was tuned instead to shifts in mood and narrative in her relationship to her sitters.

“I’m taking the time with where they’re at,” she says of her process today. “I like hearing other people’s stories; I like being able to know how they’re doing, see how they’re feeling in that moment. When I ask, ‘How are you feeling?’, you can tell at a certain point after having the conversation they’re…” she pauses, searching for the right word. “Lighter.”

I observe how closely her commissions have seemed to align with her personal work, that her commissioned portraits seem to live in the same world as those of her projects. “It’s great to have that, where it feels like things can merge together,” she agrees, “but I do also feel like I’m wanting to track back a little, to how I was approaching things when I initially started shooting – when it really felt like I had the time, and there was a bit more purpose around what I approach and why.” As with many working photographers, there is the ongoing question of how to balance these two commitments – the imperative to make a living, and the necessity of creative experimentation and play. “I think I’ll probably always end up bouncing between the two,” she admits.

For now, her focus is turning back towards personal projects. “I’m hungry to start making work again, and figuring out what I want to do, how I want to do it, where I want to go,” she says. This moment of reflection, of taking stock, is part of that. “I’m thinking more about my process – allowing myself to experiment, allowing myself to make mistakes, allowing myself to figure out what my flow is. Allowing myself to have fun with it.”

Jalloh is slowly imagining what this new work might look like, what shape it may eventually take. She is photographing, painting, watching films, making pottery; she is going to the Stuart Hall Library in Pimlico, pulling out references and studying. She is drawn to the idea of photographing somewhere different, perhaps abroad. “I want to see how things go when I’m in a different place, what my photographic language looks like,” she says. “What are the similarities and differences? What are the new things I pick up along the way that I choose to bring with me when I’m photographing things at home?”

But wherever she lands, her values will remain, and will remain central. “I want it to feel timeless, and I want it to feel hopeful, and I want it to feel intimate,” she says. “And also, when you’re looking at it, you can hear it.”

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“If it ever comes to a point where I can’t walk, at least I can still get to the studio in a wheelchair”

Katayama works from a one-story studio located in her home-prefecture Gunma, a mountainous region in northwest Japan. “It would have been near-impossible for me to afford a studio in Tokyo,” says the 37-year-old artist, who lived in the capital for two years after graduating with a masters from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2012. “If I was going to take my craft seriously, I had to go back to Gunma.” Katayama rented out a two-room apartment, where she spent her formative years as a working artist, kneading plaster, stitching cushions, and decorating the ornate frames she uses to exhibit her portraits.

She moved to her current studio in 2019, just before her breakthrough exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale. She shares the space with her husband, a DJ and musician, and adjacent to their home, it is split into three rooms – Katayama’s atelier, her husband’s studio, and a shared office with DJ decks and a collection of thousands of records. The couple have just one rule, never bring the work home. “I’m finding that hard to stick to,” Katayama admits, with a laugh. “I do a lot of my sewing work without my prosthetics, on the floor. Sometimes it’s more comfortable to spread the work across one of the spare rooms in the house.”

For Katayama, accessibility between the house and studio is essential. She was born with congenital tibial hemimelia and, at nine years old, opted to have her legs amputated. “If it ever comes to a point where I can’t walk, at least I can still get to the studio in a wheelchair,” she says. Her plastic toolboxes are all marked with silver heart-shaped labels – cute, but also practical. On days when she is tired or in pain, even her six-year-old daughter can collect the materials she needs.

Katayama is eloquent, charismatic and effortlessly cool. She wears fishnet tights over her tattooed prosthetics, which she has been painting herself since her teens. Growing up with a disability was not easy, and art was her lifeline. “All I wanted was normal legs like everyone else,” she says. “I tried so hard to walk normally so people wouldn’t realise I was wearing prosthetics.” Katayama spent her early teens hiding her legs under baggy trousers, but her high school required girls to wear skirts. “I thought, ‘If I can’t hide anymore, I’ll just avoid people altogether.”

Katayama retreated from the physical world but found a haven online. In the early ’00s Myspace was King, and she made countless friends by sharing her music and art. Teenage memorabilia is scattered across her studio, from paintings and beaded cushions to her first guitar, a 1980s Les Paul Photogenic, bought second-hand when she was 16. “I couldn’t afford to buy everything I wanted. I had to find and create them myself,” she says. Katayama’s mother and grandmother are both talented seamstresses, and her grandfather was an art enthusiast. “It’s thanks to them that I became an artist,” she reflects.

In the beginning, photography was a tool for Katayama to share her creations, and in many ways, it still is. Her process usually begins with constructing installations, which can take up to a week to set up. The photographic process is comparatively short, she says, 30 minutes to an hour at most. None of this is to say that Katayama is a complacent photographer. In fact, there was a time when she was obsessed with camera gear. The photography world, particularly in Japan, can be dominated by older men who tend to fixate on technical details. As a young artist, Katayama was often condescended and questioned by these men.

“These people were more interested in how you handle the camera, your technique and knowledge, rather than what was in the picture, or what it was trying to express,” she says, and this ignited a fire inside her. She tested digital cameras by all the major brands, studied printing techniques, and experimented with darkroom processes. “If someone questions me now, I’m confident that I know so much more than them,” she grins.

Throughout the day, the artist constantly chews on gummy bears. “It’s not even like I absolutely love them, it’s just become a habit,” she shrugs. This is an understatement, because there are at least 30 identical prints of Haribo packaging dotted around the studio. Katayama’s love of the sweets dates back to when she was 18, and spent a few weeks in a homestay with the professor of aesthetics at Dusseldorf’s fine art university. The professor’s husband was a painter and he was always stress-eating Haribos.

“Before I left, he said he would take me to his favourite place. It turned out to be the Haribo shop. I kept one of the empty packets I bought that day, and took a photo of it,” she says. Almost 20 years later, Katayama still uses the image in her installations. “Haribos were there for me at an important turning point in my life,” she says. “I had no intention of becoming an artist back then, but I loved art. [The professor] said I should carry on in that path… Every time I see Haribos, it reminds me of that.”

Poignant but playful, this anecdote is emblematic of Katayama’s approach. Her work is always personal and is propelled by a genuine love and admiration for artistic expression, be it literature, painting, music, or her grandmother’s handmade garments. “Many people tell me I have so much courage, showing myself ‘as I am’,” says Katayama. “I’m not making art with that intention at all. It’s not about the rights of people with disabilities, it’s about the human condition.” In opening the doors to her world, adorned with lace, sequins, and glistening fairy lights, Katayama urges us to seek out the beauty in our own treasures and bodies.

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Her studio space is multifunctional: as well as a  portrait studio, it’s also an editing suite, and a space to mentor emerging photographers and young people from Shipley and the surrounding area. Carolyn is a Nikon ambassador and has been working with Nikon kit since 2007. Usually shooting with the Nikon Z8 and Z9, with Z50mm 1.2s, Z85mm 1.2s, and Z24-70 2.8s lenses, her work is crisp and clean.  “I have all the equipment I could hope to have,” she says.

A copy of her 2020 book, Being Inbetween, sits on the table between us as we sit drinking herbal tea. She describes it as an autoethnographic piece – even though the work is a series of portraits of tween girls, it’s about her own memories and life. The project was exhibited around the country for years and received national news coverage and an outpouring of warmth from viewers. “Things happened because of that project for me,” she tells me. “I was working in a way that didn’t mean so much to me and this enabled me to create work that had meaning.” Carolyn still feels like she “sideways stepped into being an artist” – it was an accident, not an intention, to take on this career after training as an actor and director. The attention she got for Being Inbetween allowed her to take herself more seriously and pursue the work she really wanted to do. 

At the moment, many of her projects are especially rooted in Bradford and the community she lives in. She seems surprised when I point out how much her work feels connected to Yorkshire, but says that there is a certain “rawness” about it that she’s drawn to. “I love wildness,” she says. Born in London, Carolyn has lived in Yorkshire for decades. She’s working on the second iteration of her series Wild and Free, made for the Brontë Parsonage in Heworth and inspired by Wuthering Heights. “There’s so much joy in these works”, she tells me, showing me a series of photographs of women of all ages rambling through the rugged hills of West Yorkshire. The joy she feels making them is just as important to her, and to the work, as the joy I can see in her subjects. 

She’s also the artist-in-residence for the Born in Bradford project, which is a large-scale research study documenting Bradford’s residents over time. Carolyn works on the Age of Wonder part of the project, taking pictures of a cohort of young people every year starting from age twelve. She’s getting to know them well, which jives with her ethos of co-production. Her connection with young people is clearly profound: during the COVID-19 pandemic, she created the Through Our Lens project, which helped teach young people how to photograph their own spaces and lives. She continues to mentor young people now, and returns to them as subjects over time . 

“I always feel like I’m starting at the very beginning with everything that I do”

Recently, she’s started experimenting with large-format analog work. “It’s a privilege to have time to explore two mediums that inform each other like this,” she says. As a self-taught photographer, Carolyn always feels like she’s learning. That drive to learn and express herself honestly imbues her work with a paradoxical combination of frankness and vulnerability. Up here on the edge of the moorland, the cycle of learning and making continues, Carolyn says. “I always feel like I’m starting at the very beginning with everything that I do.”

Images taken by Thomas Duffield with Nikon’s Z7II, with Z 50mm f/1.2 and Z 24-70mm f/2.8 S lenses

Murakami was born in Tokyo but, from ages five to 10, lived with her family in Belgium. From ages 10 until 26 she was back in her native country, and felt settled there – until she didn’t. “Intellectually, I’m very anchored to the Japanese language,” she says. “But eventually I realised I could go abroad. It was in 2011, two years after I had finished my MA, and I was just struggling, like other young artists. I spoke French but maybe hadn’t been conscious enough of the power of it.” Receiving a one-year scholarship, she returned to Belgium on an exchange programme at L’Ecole nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre.

In contrast with Tokyo, Brussels felt small, and Murakami found herself heading to Paris every weekend. “Since I was interested in the oldest photography practices, I was like, ‘Maybe I should go to the place where it was invented’.” She moved to Paris in 2012, taking further studies at Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains. After several years in France, she pursued archival research in the United States and in 2018, became an artist-in-residence, doing six months at the Getty Research Institute and six months in Rochester, New York, at the George Eastman Museum, before returning to the French capital.

Murakami is fascinated by alternative photography, all the arcane processes before the industrialisation of the medium. Her studio space and darkroom are tucked behind a curtain, their shelves stacked with labelled boxes, stocks of glass plates, Instamatic cameras, and heavy-duty masks for when she is using toxic chemicals (such as mercury). She moved into the ‘atelier-logement’ two years ago, and having her studio in her home has given her a feeling of great liberty. Previously she commuted to work in the basement of an architecture firm, and had to occupy the bathroom to play with chemicals, which sometimes felt awkward. Now she comfortably accommodates studio visits with her gallerist and interested collectors.

Currently her studio is dotted with an array of green leaves and plant cuttings, which she has been searing against copper plates using an IBX Instruments heating plate. The process, which results in lush colours, is a rarely used approach found in a 1850s-era photographic manual – thermography. Murakami will show this work in an exhibition on colour photography in Cherbourg until September, part of the festival Normandie Impressionniste. She will also present another work, Nomenclature of Colour Photography, “about how the notion of colour photography was born… the inventors, while they were inventing, they were also trying to coin the terms. I collected all the different words that meant colour photography before it became industrialised”.

She gathered this list from a deep dive into the correspondence and notebooks of Louis Ducos du Hauron, the French inventor of colour photography, and the phrases are positively poetic – souvenir du spectre, rétine minérale, vision photochromées, aquarelles lumineuses. Murakami showed a previous piece, Nomenclature, in a group exhibition at the Getty Center, which gathered all the phrases before the term ‘photography’ officially designated black-and-white practices. Nineteenth-Century Photography Now was on view from April to July.

“When you’re alone, it’s very difficult to protest. But when you have a union, you have a certain structure [supporting you] while facing a bigger organisation, and they are obliged to respond”

Murakami relishes the beauty of bygone processes that have often been dismissed as laborious or time-consuming, and thus fallen off the radar. She has previously recreated a format favoured by Nicéphore Niépce, namely a long process of polishing limestone to a mirror state to make it photosensitive. “Everything has to be faster, cheaper and easier to manipulate, but behind that are all those different technical possibilities that were abandoned just because they were not efficient enough,” she says. “From an artistic point of view, there’s lots of potential.”

When Murakami was working on her MA in the Department of New Media at Tokyo University of the Arts, she wondered about the sustainability of updating her computer and camera every two years to keep pace with whip-fast digital updates. She felt the pressure to do so was transforming her from an artist into a consumer, and decisively resisted. “The newest thing is renewed every year, but the oldest thing always stays the oldest,” she reasons. “When you stick with the oldest, you can go further to find something new that nobody saw before.”

In tandem with her work on thermography she is currently preparing a new perfume for an exhibition with her Parisian gallerist Jean-Kenta Gauthier. Last year she made a perfume called L’Air de l’Image based on Nicéphore Niépce’s laboratory in Chalon-sur-Saône, in which he invented photography. “When he developed his images, he was using turpentine oil and the essence of lavender,” she explains. “This mixture is very strong. The lavender is reduced over several hours, it smokes your whole house! Photography was born in this olfactory environment.”

That scent was diffused at her gallerist’s booth at Paris Photo in 2023; now she is working on a scent linked to a pre-industrialised camera flash, which once triggered smoke and an acutely metallic smell. She invited a “nose” – a perfume specialist – to her studio to help imagine a fragrance to tell this story.

Contemporary resolve

Beyond her individual practice, Murakami is concerned about the artistic milieu at large. In France there is support for artists but in Japan it is conspicuously lacking, so last year she and three friends set up an artists’ union aimed at Japanese art workers all over the world. The initiative began with online meetings during Covid-19, because Japanese artists were not receiving support from the government; they spearheaded a petition, which successfully resulted in some subsidies.

During this process Murakami and her friends realised that many in the art world did not know their rights, and were underestimating the standards they deserved. Murakami organised webinars to address artist fees, insurance and workplace harassment in Japan. “You never learn that in art school, they just tell you how to make work, and after it’s ‘Ciao, goodbye’,” she says. “When you’re alone, it’s very difficult to protest. But when you have a union, you have a certain structure [supporting you] while facing a bigger organisation, and they are obliged to respond.”

Ultimately, Murakami’s world view fuses old school practices with contemporary advocacy; it makes for a powerful pairing.

“When I made the work on the estuary, I would always arrive in the darkness, onto the river, and I would always leave in darkness”

“And when I did the printing on my computer, and all the relooking at the work, I always came in at three, four, or five in the morning, and would finish by nine. It was always done pre-light, with certain styles of music playing that were quite evocative, and quite dark.” (Nivhek’s After its own death, for example) “I kind of fell in love with that space, and the music, and the early mornings, and very exciting pictures. Because I love the estuary work: I think it’s almost the best work I’ve ever done. It’s the most my work.”

Kander was struck by the bleakness of the estuary when he first went to see it. “I came back a bit dejected, and started making a scrapbook of how other people had seen the estuary, like Whistler, or Constable,” he says. Having primed himself with these other interpretations of the river, he was able to see it differently. “It was like I was looking at water that had almost been exhausted,” he recalls. “It’s slowing down, it’s widening, and it’s ready to meet its greater whole, the ocean. It’s like the end of life, in a way.”

For him the river became a moving testament to the “unbelievable human history” it has witnessed on its endless journey through London. “I decided to keep that idea of Constable writing there, unbelievable voyages, people’s loves lost, ships never returning, wars fought,” Kander says. “And all of this humanness I decided to keep with me in my scrapbook, in my mind, while I photographed.”

Working on the images in-studio required another kind of layering, with the river’s manifold pasts and histories invoked by involved work on the prints, finessing colour and tone. “The estuary was quite particular in its made-ness,” Kander says. “What you’re looking at is so bleak, and I wanted them to have a feeling that you’re standing in front of a Rothko.” To make these very particular prints, reflecting such breadth of feeling and experience, his approach in the studio had to reflect his journeys to the river itself.

“I needed to almost begin again, feeling the same feeling, which is why I would come at night,” he says. “I would try to make these works feel like I feel. And that needed layering of colour, or flattening of parts, taking away information where it’s not needed, and really getting into printmaking.” For Kander, the process was a kind of meditation, “my favourite meditation”.

When the work was exhibited at Flowers Gallery in London, Kander included a moving-image work, scored by Max Richter, which showed him sinking and rising beneath and above the diaphanous surface of the Thames, all slowed to half-speed. The film helped guide the viewer’s experience of the photographs. “I was talking about the river in old age, softening, darkening, and beginning to die, beginning to be absorbed, and if you would like to think Jung, or Buddhism, you might think evaporate and start again,” Kander says. “I wanted the exhibition to become clearer, what it was that I was authoring.”

The exhibition asked for more from the viewer than simply contemplating exquisite prints for their aesthetic appeal. “You were here to invite yourself to feel rhythm, to feel tide, to feel this natural phenomenon that is around us, which for me was – is – what this work is about. Being born and dying, another rhythm. And the beauty in that, and the softness of that.” In the film, Kander’s hands are gently placed above his heart, his eyes closed, face relaxed into a mild and beatific smile. Pulled below the surface, he turns his head, opens his eyes, and looks towards us through the water. Some people left the installation in tears.

This clarity of intent is an absolute priority for Kander. “I’m only really interested in work that shows clear authorship,” he says, work that “really shows the person behind the camera”. “I remember clocking that when I was a kid, looking at Edward Weston’s work,” he recalls. “He could show a nude that looked like his portrait, that looked like his shells, that looked like his toilet bowl, his pepper. I remember thinking, ‘Five different subject matters, and they all are his’. That was authorship.” Kander pauses. “I’m not from the camera club who wants to print exactly what the film has – that’s not what it’s about for me. I’m much more about how you feel about the shape and colour.”

“Making a story is a bit like Ian McEwan writing a story. He’s telling a story but really it’s the reader who becomes energised by that, and makes up their own love affair with that book”

He is frustrated by the narrative around photography, that the medium is truthful, accurate, and somehow objective. “I’m sick of that old school hanging on to reportage, or documentary, and ‘storytelling’,” he says. Kander believes photographs are as subjective as the paintings and poems he frequently references – in the course of our conversation he mentions Francis Bacon, Marcel Duchamp, Michaël Borremans, Léon Spilliaert, John Constable and Dorothea Tanning.

“I don’t photograph to tell stories, I photograph to make stories,” he says, quoting from the introduction to his most recent monograph, 2019’s The Meeting. “Making a story is a bit like Ian McEwan writing a story. He’s telling a story but really it’s the reader who becomes energised by that, and makes up their own love affair with that book, or how they envisage it. And it’s true of poetry too, everybody has a different take on a poem. It’s well-known that if you read one, and I read the same one, you might have a very different feeling than me. But photography somehow isn’t seen like that, and that frustrates me.”

This insistence on clear authorship is intuitive enough for still lifes or landscapes, in Weston’s pepper or a river’s widening mouth. But Kander applies the same framework when making portraits. Ahead of a portrait session he considers ‘How would I show this face if it was a dummy? A Madame Tussauds rendition of the person?’; he also Googles his subject, meticulously plans the lighting, and rehearses so that he and the person can work together to transmit a concentrated, potent and specific feeling. Counter to the way many approach portraiture, for Kander, the subject’s own subjectivity is not quite the point. Instead they become an actor, a conduit for something elemental.

The right atmosphere

“I’ve been jealous of Francis Bacon for a long time, in that he could be in his studio early in the morning, on his own, with his music, cigarette, drugs, whatever, and he would paint from a photograph. He never painted from a person sitting in front of him,” says Kander. “It would be so amazing to not have the person there, who has their own agenda. I’ve got my own baggage, too, I might feel intimidated. I wish I could go and push a mole and they’d just keep quiet for a while!

“People commonly think of a portrait photographer, like myself, making my sitter feel very at ease,” he continues. “Talking about how their day has been, so that they become relaxed in what to many people is quite a terrifying experience. A lot of people feel very looked at, very seen – it’s a sustained stare. I find that curious. The great portraits that everybody knows and looks at, right back to Rembrandt’s self-portraits, where are the great ones where people are super relaxed? Look at Irving Penn’s portraits, they have energy and tightness. If you’re going to believe in the meeting being truthful, being a true, unmanipulated encounter, then why would I try and interfere with how a person really is?”

It is true that the prevailing narrative around portraiture seems to seek to deny the camera’s presence – to coax naturalness, ease and a lack of self-consciousness from a situation that is anything but natural. “Putting people at ease is very overrated,” says Kander. His approach is predicated on the artifice of the scenario, the camera, the photographer, the lights. It is akin to the way the artificial setting of a theatre allows actors to present a concentrated version of human stories and emotions and, thus contained, the audience is able to look past the artifice and lose themselves.

Considered response

Kander has a marked determination to hold a space for tension. In conversation he is conscious and exacting, sorting through words until he lands on exactly the right one. At times he stops before a sentence has had a chance to gather pace and pauses to think, completely motionless, as though time is suspended for a moment. His photographs work similarly. They are poised, often melancholic, and profoundly stilled, as though it were life that had stopped the person’s motion, not the action of the shutter.

“There’s some otherness in me that craves a certain uncomfortable look at things,” Kander reflects. “Slightly uncomfortable but beautiful. A bit like putting mustard on chocolate cake.” A Jungian might call this otherness the shadow, the yearning towards the unconscious darkness in all of us, the undiscovered, the unresolved. “We all crave it in a way,” he continues. “That’s why none of us go to movies that show people relaxed, having a nice time, smiling and holding hands.”

I ask him about this inclination. Does it arise from the heart, or from the intellect? “When one is attracted to a great photograph, or great painting, or a great poem, it comes from feeling,” he says. “When I’m making a portrait, it’s the absolute highest percentage of feeling compared to brain. It’s almost entirely feel.” I begin to wonder about the studio as a kind of therapeutic space, in which feeling is brought up from the depths of the unconscious to be condensed and, ultimately, fixed in a photograph; the lights and gels bringing up the shadow, whether it be Kander’s, his subject’s, or that of the viewer. “Most of the pictures I’ve taken,” Kander says, “have been without much consciousness of my process at all.”

Jung dreamed of consciousness as a house, the conscious mind as the higher floors and the unconscious down lower, on the ground floor, and then deeper still into the basement. Perhaps Kander’s studio is like a therapy room, but perhaps too it is like walking into his mind – a first impression of space, the profusion of tiny personal effects like the personality dotted across its edges. The decades-long archive filed into drawers like memories, the heavy machinery hidden behind a curtain, and downstairs newly inaccessible, consigned to the past.

“Probably the main way that [the studio] has informed me is that the mood of how and where I work changed in 2019,” Kander says. “When I came upstairs it was just pre-Covid, then right as it all happened, I was moving up. So I hadn’t been here that long, and I’m still getting used to the space.” His new desk faces the same direction as before, although it is a floor higher – he has ascended, and is newly distant from the depths of his first workspace. “I’ve never delved as deep as I did when I first did the estuary,” he says. “I’ve still got that goosebumpy time of four in the morning downstairs in my head. I haven’t experienced that upstairs yet.”

“Before this, I had never seen a Black man in these Scandinavian settings,” Pitts tells me. He became obsessed with the imagery – the juxtaposition of person and place, and the shoot’s distinct luminosity. The cover is now enlarged and framed on Pitts’ studio wall, next to a handwritten note by Amy Winehouse and a James Barnor photograph of Mike Eghan at Piccadilly Circus. The room is small, but suits the array of kit, pictures and books that cover every surface. Spirit Tales is an important artefact for Pitts, not because it sparked an interest in culture clashes, music, or even photography, but because it synthesised the unusual circumstances of his upbringing (in which these themes were already bubbling) and pushed him beyond them. When Pitts moved to London, he reached out to Anna Bergfors, who shot the Spirit Tales record cover. She quickly became a friend and mentor. In the acknowledgements to his first book, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, he writes that Bergfors “has inspired my photography more than anyone else”.

Born in working-class Sheffield to an African American father and English mother, Pitts had already spent two years living in Japan by the age of 10, transported from the world of Northern Soul to Tokyo’s late-1980s bubble economy. His childhood home contained Buddha statues and the latest Japanese tech alongside Spike Lee movies – a unique cultural mix for the time. Pitts gestures to the stacked shelves behind him, filled with VHS tapes and drawers of negatives. Ambient music plays from his dad’s old analogue hi-fi. “This space is literally my family’s archive,” he says. “There’s nothing whimsical in here.” He returns the Simmonds CD to its sleeve.

Pitts is a photographer, writer and broadcaster. There is room for one more descriptor, but it is more difficult to settle on. He wrote in Afropean’s introduction that the book was an attempt to “use on- the-ground travel reportage as a way to wriggle free from the pressures of theory”, so ‘theorist’ is not quite right. ‘Researcher’ sounds a little dry; ‘thinker’ a touch lofty. Nor does he want to be known as a mouthpiece for the Black community, a concept he is at pains to expand. The window sill in front of Pitts’ desk acts as a bookshelf: I can spot photographic theory alongside Mark Fisher, a cluster of titles about the future, and books on J Dilla and Kraftwerk. He reaches for a quote by writer DBC Pierre: “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” Perhaps ‘artist’ will do.

“The idea was to find a home for the diaspora – a space of consolation for the Black community, rather than for the art or literary establishments”

An Afropean flâneur

With his Afropean blog and book, Pitts sought to “honestly reveal the secret pleasures and prejudices of others as well as myself… learning to be comfortable with being Black and imperfect”. Inspired by the flâneur figure, he self-funded a hostel trip around Europe in search of disparate and unstoried Black communities. The chapter names reveal the journey’s scope: Germaica; Strangers in Moscow; Frantz Fanon’s Toulon. Chance encounters are his main fact-finding exercise. “I love having a chat in a cafe and thinking, ‘Why are we both here?’” he says. “To get this balance between everydayness and speaking to deep histories.”

In Berlin’s French Cathedral, Pitts spots and befriends a family from an Afro-gospel choir; in Moscow he gets chatting to a Nigerian man dressed as a tsar, who tries to sell him a Barack Obama matryoshka doll. Taking nearly seven years to complete, the book is not so much about the author reconciling his own Black identity; it’s more about a young person going into the world, looking for evidence for an enchanting idea – that exposure to composite cultures is a vehicle for self-knowledge, a worthwhile tool in the puzzle to understand contemporary life.

“There’s this whole subaltern visual world that the notion of Blackness can hold,” Pitts says. “It so often gets reduced to black-and-white images of people in trilbies in the 1970s. There’s an opportunity to make it weirder and surreal.” Events like the Windrush scandal may draw attention to the mistreatment of Black Britons by the state, but if they are the only lens through which Black culture is commemorated, little room is left for subcultural texture. Afropean relishes the characters behind the buzzwords. Years after the interviews were conducted, they remain refreshingly blunt. Saleh, a Tunisian bouncer Pitts meets in Stockholm, offers a scathing assessment of his adopted country. “Swedish people will always live good… but they have slaves, they need people like me to make sure only the right people get into their clubs,” he says. “People in Europe think they give immigrants a favour. But they don’t realise that we are only here because they destroy our countries.”

Pitts does not shy away from the anxieties that surfaced during his travels. Meeting an African American couple on a Black history tour in Paris, he writes that “I felt culturally flimsy, as though my identity was vague and half formed compared to my American friends’, my English accent lacking substance when talking about Black identity”. He attends to his prejudices too, recounting that when he had his phone stolen in Paris, he assumed that the pair of thieves were Roma – as the police had assured him. “I could only assume,” he concedes, an honest commentary on how stereotypes are absorbed.

In an age of diversity and inclusion, identity politics and decolonisation, Pitts’ approach is slightly out of fashion. He is interested in the strangeness produced by communities mixing, the messy edges rather than neatly packaged groups ready to be ‘championed’ by outside interests. “I want to take Blackness slightly outside of its comfort zone,” he explains. As a northerner, he opposes what he terms the “Brixtonisation of Black Britain” – “the reduction of the Black British experience into a single, neat, London-oriented narrative”. He was involved in The Guardian’s Cotton Capital series on Manchester’s historic slave links, but his own work is less anthropological and data-driven, leaning more on anecdote and affect. “[Cotton Capital] is important work, but sometimes it can be used to virtue signal,” Pitts reflects. “And I do wonder who it serves ultimately.”

Pitts’ studio is just a five-minute walk from South London Gallery, where the 2023 exhibition Lagos, Peckham, Repeat: Pilgrimage to the Lakes traced the connections between Nigeria and south-east London. From Autograph to shows like Museum of London’s Grime Stories, the cultural platforming of Black Britain is often centred on the capital. “When you grow up outside of London and Birmingham, your experience is different,” Pitts says. “I still don’t feel that connected to London.” Maybe his studio is a research base rather than a preferred environment; a space to reconnect with his archive before going into the field, where the real work takes place.

After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Pitts felt “uncomfortable about this economy opening up around the death of this Black man”, whereby Black artists were suddenly asked to respond to the incident. But when poet Roger Robinson came to him with an idea for a project exploring Black Britain in the wake of the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol, Pitts agreed to collaborate. The pair decided to focus on the coasts, weaving centuries of imperial history, deportations and immigration into Home is Not a Place, a project of photographs and poems. Pitts mentions Paul Graham’s A1: The Great North Road as an inspiration, “a singular route that speaks of something bigger”.

“It’s difficult to make work that is meaningful in an art world where in order to survive, everything has to get commodified”

Commissioned by the Ampersand/ Photoworks Fellowship, the work was first shown as an exhibition at Graves Gallery, Sheffield, before travelling to Edinburgh’s Stills Gallery, and then to The Photographers’ Gallery in London last year. It was also published as a book in 2022. Pitts’ photographs are presented without captions, a nameless tapestry. A child poses in front of a windy Stonehenge; a Tesco cashier stares into the distance. “It wasn’t ethnographic details of populations,” Pitts says. “It’s more a poetic rendition of these places, creating a metaphysical map inspired by conversations and local knowledge.”

Assorted portraits show police officers, festival-goers, mourners, and kissing couples – the breadth of human experience in disarming mundanity. Robinson narrates Black life from within while conveying the novelty of seaside encounters. “A Saint Lucian and a Nigerian are talking / about the quality of light, in art and writing,” one begins. “This sacred conversation between / sky and sea is a stillness and solitude,” goes a couplet written from Holkham Beach, north Norfolk.

Pitts fills in more of the book’s gaps. “There’s a mixed Ghanaian and Irish IRA member living in Belfast; Jamaicans from Brixton; men from Saint Kitts in Southend- on-Sea,” he says. Scottish model Eunice Olumide features, as does novelist Caryl Phillips, another important mentor. A living room installation in the exhibition echoes the rich cultural mix which defined Pitts’ youth; books by Gordon Parks, Roy DeCarava and Liz Johnson Artur stacked next to Tron and RoboCop VHS tapes.

“The idea was to find a home for the diaspora – a space of consolation for the Black community, rather than for the art or literary establishments,” Pitts says. He laughs when recalling a white man who stormed out of Graves Gallery, furious at the pirate radio hip-hop blaring into the space. “The people that you have to speak to if you want to make your way through the photo world generally don’t give a shit about the type of places and people that I represent,” Pitts says. “On the one hand I’m trying to transgress photo-world norms, but on the other, to conform to the types of places I grew up in.” He pauses, rising from his chair to make a herbal tea.

Tokyo drift

When Pitts’ father’s Motown-inspired band The Fantastic Temptations broke up, he retrained as an actor. A few years later, he was hired on the Japan leg of the Starlight Express tour. Aged five, “we got lifted from these terraces that were being decimated by Thatcher into five-star hotels in bubble-era Japan,” Pitts says. The experience changed his life, giving him a wider perspective denied to his Sheffield peers. Several friends from his childhood ended up in prison or dead. “Going to Japan gave me the confidence to pursue a career in creativity,” Pitts says. “I knew there was another world out there beyond my confines.”

Japan remains at the centre of Pitts’ enquiries into what he calls “glitching nostalgia and failed futures”. He thought that late-1980s Tokyo was the blueprint for developed societies; surely Sheffield would look like the Japanese capital in 20 years’ time. “I remember thinking, ‘The future’s going to be great!’” But on returning to Sheffield, he noticed a dichotomy which soured Japan’s apparent glamour. “The very thing that was destroying Sheffield – neoliberal capitalism – was helping Tokyo thrive,” he says. When Japan’s asset bubble burst in 1992, the illusion was shattered. Pitts’ home and adopted dreamland were now both stagnating.

Pitts became obsessed with “this future nostalgia that didn’t work out”; the UK never became like the boom-years Tokyo, instead entering periods of centralised financialisation and deep regional inequality. His childhood memories now exist in a strange state of both past and imagined future. “There were a lot of problems with Japan: it was all about greed and consumption, but it was fucking beautiful as well,” he says, visibly excited. “When something’s beautiful – even when it’s problematic – you’re always going to have to deal with that and be really honest about how humans deal with beauty.”

Politics is the realm of the head, beauty of the heart. Pitts’ work is about being honest with the forces that act upon us, aesthetics alongside material realities. There is no hypocrisy in pointing out how devastated the north of England feels while also being a staunch defender of Sheffield’s culture. There is a moment towards the end of Afropean when Pitts arrives in Gibraltar. “No matter how hard I tried to shake it: all this British bollocks still felt something like home,” he writes.

Pitts recently returned to Japan after 23 years, shooting Tokyo using his parents’ old cameras. He used the Konica film that now litters his studio, while his family’s cameras sit atop a Konica lightbox above the sink. During lockdown, Pitts stayed at his childhood home with his partner and two daughters, spending weeks sorting through old negatives. The Sequel to a Dream: Ghosts of 1980s Japan combines his new images with the family archive. The cameras have reverted to their original timestamps, Pitts says, “their era encoded in the present”. The creative process is bound up with mourning his father.

“There were a lot of problems with Japan: it was all about greed and consumption, but it was fucking beautiful as well”

He passes me a book maquette of the Japan project. The pictures are smoky, the neon street signage breaking gently through the haze. Pitts is taking his time, waiting for the right publisher to bring the project to life. More than any of his work about Black Britain, it relies on intuition and half-memories. He fills in the gaps with his own pictures, but the story’s lingering uncertainty is deliberate.

An electric diffuser continues to puff steam into the studio; the plastic flute of water Pitts gave me is now empty. Our conversation turns once more to the future. Pitts likes having his studio opposite Camberwell College of Arts, where he can see what the students are making (and wearing). Each generation risks misremembering the past, he says, heightening the need for diligent archiving. The economic and social upheavals of the past 50 years make the period particularly vulnerable to pernicious retellings – glorifying the booms without learning from the busts. “I feel that it’s my generation’s responsibility to re-examine and remember the 20th century,” he says. “To think about some of the good things, but also to challenge some of the nostalgia.”

Perhaps time, rather than place, is Pitts’ main subject. He recently released a BBC Radio 4 series called The Failure of the Future. He does not want to be pigeonholed as an artist solely of Black life, an expectation that Black photographers have had to contend with for generations. He recalls a conversation with Ming Smith about the difficulty of garnering interest in her late-1980s Japanese work, and also mentions Mohamed Bourouissa, who told Pitts he wants to make work about artificial intelligence rather than be known solely as a social documentarian of the French banlieues.

“Why shouldn’t we be allowed to also do other things?” Pitts asks. “It’s difficult to make work that is meaningful in an art world where in order to survive, everything has to get commodified.” His tone is one of lament, but it is short-lived whenever it surfaces. A few days after we speak, I see pictures on Instagram of Pitts giving a walk-through tour to the patrons of The Photographers’ Gallery – I wonder what’s running through his mind as he opens his life to the art establishment. A wooden table in the gallery has the rainbow Konica logo coloured into its surface, the same design that, after a few hours in his studio, seems to blend into its background. There is a sign resting on the deskside cabinet that says ‘Slow Down’. All Pitts seems to be asking is for people to pause and think differently, or more simply, perhaps, to think.

After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024, curated by Johny Pitts, is at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry, 29 March-16 June; Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, 3 July-14 September; and Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, 27 September-15 December

McCartney’s studio is testament to her varied and visually alert career. Tucked away on a quiet cobbled mews in West London, its three floors combine all of the practical needs of a working environment – office space, shoot backdrops, an extensive range of herbal teas – with the white-washed atmosphere of a gallery.

The space is festooned with McCartney’s images: some in a state of completion, printed at huge scale, others attached to a large silver board with magnets, covered in felt tip notes. A monobrowed Tracey Emin (as Frida Kahlo) stares down from one wall. Mark Rylance dressed as Olivia from Twelfth Night from another. Celebrities face off frogs and white horses, reigning over the neatly arranged piles of contact sheets and books. On the floor, a photo of neon lights has been turned into a rug.

“When I first came here, it was all offices,” McCartney explains. “I just stripped it out… It’s nice to have it quite clean.” We are sitting at a huge round, wooden table that used to belong to McCartney’s mother, Linda. To one side, a bank of windows reveals a bright-ish winter day – all that glass crucial for a photographer who prefers to work with natural light. In the background members of her team drift up and down the stairs.

McCartney has been here for more than two decades, using it as a hub for photographing, post-production, exhibition organisation, ideas generation, and more. For her most recent publication – a plant-based cookbook-cum-portrait project called Feeding Creativity in which she captured figures including the Haim sisters and David Hockney eating her meals – she had two large armchairs installed near the kitchen so that she had somewhere comfortable to sit and write. 

“It became my friend. What I like about film is that when you’re wandering taking pictures, it’s just you and the camera”

The table is not the only thing McCartney has inherited from her mother. Also a photographer, Linda McCartney was responsible for providing Mary with her very first camera, a Leica R7. After grappling with the challenges of shutter speeds and light meters, it quickly offered a new window onto the world, travelling everywhere with her. “It became my friend,” McCartney says. “What I like about film is that when you’re wandering taking pictures, it’s just you and the camera.”

In her 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting’, Virginia Woolf dwelled on the pleasures of walking through London. She describes the process of becoming extra-observant, distilled to “a central pearl of perceptiveness, an enormous eye.” For McCartney, the camera crystallised a similar feeling – preserving and making concrete the fleeting details she had been noticing since childhood. “It can be this big scene, but you see one little flower or something within it and it then seems like a photograph.”

As an ambassador, McCartney works frequently with Leica cameras, whether an SL for “all singing, all dancing” projects that might end up on a billboard, or the Q “if you’re out and about, or at a party.” She also has “a little compact Leica” which fits in her bag – another portable eye.

This range of models speaks to the breadth of her work, spanning portraiture, fashion, landscape, and documentary (both static and film), as well as more commercial endeavours. A particular light comes into her eyes when discussing portraiture: the delicacy of creating a rapport, knowing when to speak and when to be silent, the skills both personal and technical that go into reaching something “deeper than surface level.”

“If I could do a portrait of someone and just be in their home and take a picture of their unmade bed, that would make me happy”

Some of McCartney’s portraits are made here in the studio. “If I’m shooting here… it pares it all back,” she observes. “It’s really about the pose, the connection, how you’re feeling with the person. There’s less space to hide.” Really though, one suspects that she is happiest out and about where her gaze can rove.

“I love going into somebody’s environment,” she confirms, explaining her interest in what people’s possessions and personal clutter betray about them, “like how Pre-Raphaelite painters would have little symbols.” She references a 1996 photo of hers titled ‘Mum’s Side of the Bed’, a patch of sunlight falling across beautifully embroidered duvet and pillows. “If I could do a portrait of someone and just be in their home and take a picture of their unmade bed, that would make me happy.”

This image is currently sitting as a sizable print on the ground floor, resting against the bookshelves. It is magnificent up close, the scale revealing every wrinkle and stitch. It was recently featured in her 2023 Sotheby’s show Can We Have a Moment?, part of a trilogy of solo exhibitions that began at the Château La Coste in France and ended at A Hug From the Art World in New York last November.

Each taking a different theme, this trilogy gave McCartney free reign to revisit her archives from the past three decades, drawing new threads between her intimate, playful images – family portraits, rubbing shoulders with snogging couples, muddy festival-goers, fleshy roses, and performers readying themselves backstage.

The pleasure of a photograph is not just in the taking, but in its continued afterlife. McCartney’s studio points to the ongoing physicality of a photograph, whether it is a question of tweaking colours and rebalancing shadows or drawing out fresh details in the chosen scale and opacity of a print. In an exhibition setting, too, new conversations can be created as disparate images speak to one another across time and genre.

Towards the end of our conversation, McCartney brings up a fortuitous encounter she had with Magnum photographer Eve Arnold in the 1990s while overseeing a show of Linda’s work in a museum in Bradford. Arnold was working on her own in an adjacent gallery. “She was incredible… She looked like the lady in the [Looney Toons] Tweety bird cartoons. But then when you observed her hanging the show, she knew exactly what she wanted. She was very direct, feisty in a really good way.”

“Take a moment, observe, and think – what is it that I see here?”

The two got to know one another and McCartney learned an important lesson from this woman who had coaxed extraordinary candour from the famous: that the subject should always come first. “She had so much trust with her sitters,” McCartney reflects. Sometimes the perfect image might arrange itself in front of the camera as if conjured – but if it ruptures that sense of trust, it is not worth it. This sort of mutuality seems to define McCartney’s work, which often has a grounded, contemplative edge, full of quiet warmth. Really, it is very simple, she says. When you lift a camera, you “take a moment, observe, and think – what is it that I see here?”

Images taken by Alice Zoo with Leica’s SL2-S, with 35mm, 50mm, and 90mm lenses

These conceptual musings have led to some of his best-known works. Theaters, for example, emerged out of a “near-hallucinatory vision” – an “internal question-and-answer” beginning with “What if I photographed an entire movie?” The result is a series of more than 100 large format photographs of empty theatres, their architectural details illuminated by gleaming white screens. These images, along with key works from all of the 75-year-old’s major photographic series, will be displayed in his largest retrospective to date, opening this week at London’s Hayward Gallery.

Sugimoto thinks of himself as a conceptual artist, stating that “I use photography as a tool”. His work, which spans 50 years, meditates on existential themes such as mortality, truth and the passage of time. In Diorama, he photographs displays of stuffed animals in natural history museums, eerily blurring the border between reality and fiction. Seascapes raises metaphysical questions, presenting horizons from around the world. Another major series, Portraits, includes images of wax figures at Madame Tussauds, which invite us to consider our perception of truth, while Lighting Fields is a study of static electricity rooted in his fascination with the history of photography.

Sugimoto’s references are vast, spanning art history, psychology, philosophy, anthropology and physics. “The collection of historical objects is a very important source for me to study the passage of time, the history of human consciousness and how the human mind was born,” he says. Photography is Sugimoto’s “visual statement” – a means to express his ideas. But his preoccupation with ancient objects has also fed into his architectural work, a more recent arm of his practice. In 2008 he co-founded a firm, New Material Research Laboratory, with architect Tomoyuki Sakakida. The name is intentionally ironic; their ethos is reinterpreting forgotten materials and techniques from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period.

This strand of Sugimoto’s work is interesting because in relation to time, photography and architecture feel inherently different. Photography relies on impermanence, capturing a fragment of time that will never be again. Architecture, on the other hand, does not stop or capture time – rather, time moves around it. How do these two practices align for Sugimoto? “The consciousness of space,” he says. “Designing a space is the same as composition in photography. You need to have a sophisticated sense of space.”

In fact, the passage of time is a key factor in Sugimoto’s conceptualisation of physical spaces too, especially the Odawara Art Foundation, which he describes as “the last piece of my art”. Established in 2009, Sugimoto’s foundation is located around an hour outside Tokyo, nestled in the mountains of Hakone and overlooking Sagami Bay. Parts of the grounds are still under construction (it is due to be finished in around three years) but at its core is the Enoura Observatory, completed in 2017. The complex includes a 100-metre-long gallery, an observation deck, a tea house, and a restored stone gate from the Muromachi period (1338–1573).

“Designing a space is the same as composition in photography. You need to have a sophisticated sense of space”

Sugimoto the photographer is a master of light, and as an architect, he is no different. The gallery is oriented to frame the sun on the summer solstice, while the deck is angled to capture the winter solstice. Sugimoto likes to imagine future alien civilisations stumbling upon these human ruins, and this played an integral role in his design. In the gallery, the optical glass windows will eventually smash, and its roof will crumble. If it all goes to plan, in around 5000 years the complex will be complete – “a beautiful ruin” like a pyramid or the Parthenon.

Sugimoto’s second studio space, a penthouse apartment, is where he keeps sculptures, makes architectural sketches, and develops images. As you would expect, it is spacious, minimalist and pristine. Sugimoto picks up a music box, handmade out of a rusting rice- cracker tin. Winding through an aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, he sings jovially, pacing the wooden floors and gazing toward the glittering Tokyo skyline. The scene is surreal, but it is in no way surprising. Sugimoto has spent most of his life cultivating atmospheres with unexpected but insightful references. If it all goes to plan, his insights will endure, passed on to future civilisations who will discover enigmas in the ruins of his art.

Hiroshi Sugimoto is at the Hayward Gallery, London, from 11 October until 7 January 2024