“It is not easy to create a sustainable, strong, professionally accepted art and photography culture in Turkey”

Fifteen minutes’ walk from the palazzo is a duo show at 212 Studio, pairing work by ES Kibele Yarman with images by curator and film-maker Çağla Demirbaş. Yarman’s collages have a whimsical feel, layering eyes, diamonds, statues, hands, celestial orbits and staircases. Demirbaş’ analogue photographs are produced using layering techniques and double exposures, and yield a similarly hallucinatory atmosphere.

A group exhibition at İstiklal Art Gallery, titled Close to the Surface, includes a collage series by recent art-school graduate Güliz Kayahan, created using anonymous family photographs sourced from secondhand bookshops. Kayahan visibly stitches the images with red yarn, suturing them with sentences cut out from letters. Her work is shown alongside Hilal Özdemir’s punchy light art and Dilan Pak’s experimental abstractions, among others in the exhibition.

“Our programme curation is based on, and focused on, discovery,” says Tunçağ, who cites previous festival participants as proud success stories. Serhat Kır won the 212 Photography Competition in 2023, for example, and was nominated for this year’s Prix Pictet for his work on urban transformation and ecology; Tunçağ also commends Damla Şahinbaş, included in a group exhibition in 2022, for her compelling studies of human relations, including queer ones.

When asked if Turkey’s conservative political regime limits what can be shown, Tunçağ clarifies, “We are not a very political festival that would be a problem for any artists”. But she adds that, more generally, “It is not easy to create a sustainable, strong, professionally accepted art and photography culture in Turkey”. 212 Studio, an agency which also has production and strategic content arms, and publishes a biannual Turkish/English magazine, is part of a scene that is championing another vision.

212 Photography Istanbul takes place from 27 September to 12 October 2025

“I really want to emphasise that the curation and the editing, I didn’t do it alone. No one does anything alone”

And, like DeFeo and real roses, it also kept adding layers. Kurland, Miller Meigs and Werbel wanted to make a catalogue but, adding more artists – and realising that some of their featured artists were excellent writers – ended up creating a wider photobook, The Rose: A Circular Genealogy of Collage, which is now being published. Along with curator Marina Chao, Kurland has also put together a new version of the exhibition, now on show at CPW (AKA the Center for Photography at Woodstock, which relocated to Kingston, New York, in 2022). Chao, who was at the International Center of Photography before joining CPW, has added new artists and more ideas, says Kurland, not least the concept that, as they are constantly code-switching, women and other minoritised people live their lives as a kind of collage. “I really want to emphasise that the curation and the editing, I didn’t do it alone,” says Kurland. “No one does anything alone.”

The idea of group work runs through The Rose. Joiri Minaya’s #dominicanwomengooglesearch is included in every iteration, for example, made by the artist by quite literally searching ‘dominicanwomen’ on Google. The images that pop up show bikini-clad ladies and veer towards soft porn, a queasy sexualisation that also suggests the thin line between tourism and colonialism. Minaya blows up and cuts out body parts from these images, then invites curators to install them in 2D/3D mash-ups, in which visitors can reassemble figures if they stand in the right spot. “The instructions are just to hang the body parts so they correspond to the viewer’s body parts,” Kurland explains. “You can do whatever you want, but the head is at eye level, the torso is at torso. So not only does it deconstruct the image, it creates an analogue of virtual space, these body parts rushing at you on the interweb highway.”

Kurland was keen to engage with the sense of the body in The Rose, a perception “of how we move as we go in the world, from our internal sense of our embodied feelings to how we participate politically, culturally and societally in the world”. The exhibition also includes work by K8 Hardy that “is about sexuality and pleasure and the way we present ourselves in the world”; Kurland notes she was keen to include images in which women represent their own sexuality – rather than being commodified – because “there’s so much shame associated with it”.

These embodied experiences also pick at the medium of photography, which represents the world via a disembodied single plane, and without engaging with other senses. This factor also flickers through the work of Wendy Red Star. An Apsáalooke multimedia artist, her collages show her community’s visual and material culture as it is formally displayed in ethnographic museums. “Since the time I left the Crow reservation I have encountered my tribe’s material culture in every city I have exhibited or occupied, and often in institutions which frequently display these historical artefacts improperly or impersonally, deprived of their context or function,” says Red Star, quoted in the book The Rose. Her collages include handwritten notes or her own hand holding objects, Kurland points out, reinserting the personal, the tactile, and the wider environment exorcised from the museum vitrines.

With this sense of the personal, and the very personal experience that kick-started The Rose, it is perhaps surprising that Kurland has not included the SCUMB Manifesto in any of its iterations. But that is a deliberate choice. “I’ve been showing my work for a long time and I have a really big platform,” she explains. “I feel very lucky about that, but it’s like in teaching – I am slowly learning to not talk so much, so that other people can feel encouraged to speak. In a collaboration or a shared space, it’s often the person who has most visibility who has to back off the most. I have already had a lot of opportunities; I don’t want to become the man I am criticising.”

The Rose is on at CPW Kingston, New York until 31 August, 2025

When Tariq came across slides of negatives of an Essex family from the 1960s in a charity shop in Cambridge a year ago, he began manipulating the images, effacing them in different ways. The images depicted “their general life, a quintessential English family holiday in Mallorca; it’s all there.” He started to take the slides apart, “and I feel a bit bad, but I scanned the images before, then I started disrupting the images.” For Tariq, there was a sense of complicity within the images: “I think seeing a quintessential English family for me during the 60s, when I have images of my grandparents at the time engaged in hard labour, working factories and understanding the context of what they were going through while this family in England were by the sea… it made me uneasy.”

Onto one of the images, he scratched a St. George’s flag with a pin; “I don’t know who this family is,” he says, almost sheepishly. “So I do apologise to whoever they are! I’m sorry your images ended up in a charity shop and they found their way to me,” he laughs warmly. Though the act of disruption is simple here, Tariq attempts to point to something more complex, to the idea of complicity with a “colonial decadence, that the context of [the family’s] lives was built by years and years of subjugation of racialised bodies around the world.” 

From there, the artist developed a glass slide with a red cross – the flag of St George and England’s national flag – and placed it atop the images, making the colonial context of the scenes apparent. He began employing the glass device over other images from his collection of photo books. 

“I enjoy the fact that the device is glass because it feels as if,” Tariq says, “without any image behind it, it’s depicting the fragility of nationalism, how it can just shatter. The times this symbol has been adopted by the far right and by English nationalists and white supremacists is such a fragile patriotism because they’re kind of calling for things that are their own demise.”

100 Glass Cruciforms also highlights the fragility of a the national identity of England itself when one considers that St George, whose flag England has adopted, never set foot in England himself and was in fact a Cappadocian (modern day Turkey) Greek soldier, who is highly venerated both in the Levant’s (Palestine, Syria and Lebanon) Christian communities and in Islam. 

And Tariq’s glass ‘cruciform’ is also a device which makes manifest the colonial question of photography which, as a practice, was developed in large to document and categorise indigenous populations in European colonies around the Global South. Images which were then, and still are to a large extent, housed behind glass panels, cases and vitrines in the West’s major art galleries, which often have historic imperial or defense-industry ties themselves such as the British Museum or the Victoria and Albert Museum, both in London.

In one black-and-white living room scene, we see children playing with each other using a gun; titled by Tarq as ‘Colonial Play’, the image was shot by Judah Passow and depicts Palestinian children reenacting the Intifadah in Fahme Village, west of Jenin, Palestine in the 80s. Another image by Zineke Diikstra shows a high schooler in Liverpool, England, with the flag set over his eyes. “There’s always a little bit of some tension between the image and the symbol. It’s very often that nationalist movements are heavily youth-led. Especially by young men and boys. So putting this symbol over his eyes speaks to how Europe had the Nazi youth or, in this country, we have a lot of white supremacist groups who are recruiting children,” Tariq explains, interrogating the ways in which children are implicated in global, neo-colonial conflicts in which Britain is implicated.

Elsewhere, the images are more explicitly violent and the link between British imperialism and global conflict, such as the ‘war on terror’, is clearer, an ideology which Tariq tells me catalysed his research. “I remember seeing this as a child. In one form or another, we all experienced [the ‘war on terror’]. I grew up in Saudi,” Tariq says, “and it was very present in the discourse there. People would always be talking about what was happening in Iraq or in Afghanistan. In the UK, when we had the Trojan horse affair, I remember being in school and being terrified that I was going to get falsely accused by the secret services. That fear as a child is the key starting point for my research and the war in Iraq was part of my visual consciousness.” In a tableau, Tariq groups together four infamous photojournalistic images from the 2003 invasion of Iraq, all shot by different photographers, but all serving as disturbing reminders of the role images played to boost military morale and garner public approval for the invasion. 

The artist not only uses images from popular media or photojournalism but also weaves in personal histories into the body of work to demonstrate how the personal is indeed political. Four images show the glass device pressed over seeds – Tariq describes receiving a jar of seeds from his grandfather – seeds from his village in Pakistan – with a story of how, as a child, his grandfather would work the land from sunset to sunrise, following a spiritual rhythm deeply connected to the earth. This agricultural and Islamically rooted life, centred on planting, harvesting, and selling crops, formed the foundation of his family’s lineage and spirit. Placing a flag over the seeds in his work symbolises the displacement his grandfather experienced when he left Pakistan to immigrate and the colonial propaganda that compelled his migration to the UK, where the violence of the National Front disrupted the lives of his grandparents and parents.

100 Glass Cruciforms was recently on display at South Asia Archive’s pop-up at the Serpentine Gallery on 12 July, 2025. The images were shown in Tariq’s family album – he removed his family’s images and placed the ‘cruciform’ images inside in their place. Tariq is still developing the body of work and research whilst also working on an ongoing project about the muslim woman’s veil – it’s an idea Tariq has been thinking about for some time and is exploring through many mediums, experimenting with sculpture, image and textiles to unfurl the marginalised women at the heart of liberation movements and nation building efforts. “There’s no room for ego or for it to be about myself,” says Tariq of the project. “In the discussion of the veil, both extremes – to lose the veil or to enforce it – are about destroying the agency of the women who are wearing it.”

@mohammadthewitness

“At some point, it became necessary to talk about dance, [especially] when the Woman, Life, Freedom movement began, and dance became a tool of resistance“

– Hannah Darabi

BJP: Congratulations on winning the Prix Elysée. But it’s also a difficult moment, because we are speaking not long after the US attacked your home country, and Iran is currently at war with Israel. Has your family been affected?

Hannah Darabi: My family is there, and we are very worried, because they’re in Tehran and today one of the streets near to their house was attacked. We are living in a very uncertain moment. 

BJP: Do you go back to Iran often?

HD: I haven’t been back since 2019. My parents are very old, and I felt it would be a risk if I went back during Covid. Afterwards, there was the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, and everything was unstable again. Also, the government started making threats towards artists and activists in a kind of random manner. It didn’t matter if you were political or not, which I think was a strategy – to alarm people, [to scare them into thinking] that if you do something, you will be caught. 

BJP: What memories do you have of growing up in Iran?

HD: When I was born [in 1981], it was the time of the Iran-Iraq War… Sometimes, life was horrible. We would get a red siren to go to the bunkers, and a white siren to come out. But in between we lived life. There were still parties and get-togethers, and those were the moments that kept us sane and alive. There were shortages of many things, and we had [rationing]. But, at the same time, we had dinners, and there was music, and there were people dancing. And then, after the war, dancing became really important.

BJP: That relates to your project, Soleil of Persian Square, and its connection to popular music within the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles.

HD: Some of the people were like superstars in Iran, where they had all the equipment, studios, poets – everything to make ‘proper’ music. And then when they went to LA, they lost everything. So, the music changed because of that, but also because, when they emigrated to the States in 1979 after the [revolutionary] war, they would do all this sad, nostalgic music, and they realised that people were sick of it, and they wanted to dance.

This specific music emerged; a mixture of ‘good’ pop music, and the popular cabaret-like music that was [previously] considered really bad and not at all interesting. In Los Angeles they mixed it up. They created this fantastic new genre, which developed in relation to their situation, and which took in other influences, such as Latin music and music from Arab countries.

Then they sent that music to us [back in Iran]. When I was growing up, I was a shy kid, so my parents put me in a dance class. We would do Iranian popular dance, but there were also all these new tunes that we received, as well as new choreography. And one of the choreographers from these times in LA was Mohammad Khordadian, who is one of the three figures that I was inspired by [and whose work I investigate] in Why Don’t You Dance?.

BJP: I read that you felt that it took moving away from Iran to reflect critically on your homeland. How did that manifest?

HD: It took nine years to make peace with myself as someone who has this geographical distance from home, but who still has the need to discuss it. I wasn’t really feeling at home in Paris [where she initially went to study]. So I decided to go back and make peace with Tehran [through my work], even though I thought it would be impossible; it’s too chaotic, there are too many people and too many buildings. But then somehow I saw the beauty and how photogenic this ugly city could be.

And then came Enghelab Street, a Revolution through Books: Iran 1979–1983 [shown in Paris in 2019 at Le Bal, who co-published a book with Spector], which I wouldn’t have talked about if I was in Iran, because the Iranian government identifies itself as being in a constant revolutionary mode. You get all these ideas and propaganda around the revolution, especially in the form of everyday images. But I really wanted to keep aside my own feelings. I didn’t want to make a statement with my work.

And it was the same with popular music. I hated it [when I lived in Iran]. For me, it was too nice. At the time, Iranian punk didn’t exist, but [something like it was] necessary to express our anger… Then, when I left, I had other tools, and I understood the value of this music. I had been looking at it from a very snobbish, intellectual viewpoint. 

BJP: How and when did your work evolve to this form of expanded photography, encompassing your research, and including more collage.

HD: The collage form came from the research into archives and from the materials I found, putting them in conversation with my own photographs, or trying to add some other possible readings, activating the materials. So there is a clear photographic approach, and then there are these archival materials that are treated the same way, and then maybe another visual element, all working in dialogue beside each other.

There isn’t a lot of cutting and gluing going on. Everything is very clean. There are forms of books and pictures, but instead of putting them separately on the page, they’re all together. It comes from my practice in exhibition spaces, using one image as a wallpaper and putting the other on top of it to make a more intimate connection.

BJP: What do these materials look like?

HD: One chapter of the project is based on a book by a dancer called Mahvash, who made a fictional autobiography called The Secrets of Sexual Fulfillment. Everything comes together around the ideas in the book. It starts by mostly giving advice on sexual education to boys and girls of the time. We don’t know if she’s an expert, or if she’s had lots of experiences, and you see this change in Iranian society to a heteronormative mode. 

Then at the end, she starts to unfold her experiences. And it’s subversive. That’s also why I love this book, because it contradicts itself at the end. So, everything we see [in this chapter of Why Don’t You Dance?] is in relation to things that are discussed in the book. It can be questions about polygamy, or questions on how women are seen in popular culture. It’s exploring all these popular ideas: the ones that persist, and the ones that change. It also reflects on different moments of the Iranian women’s movement.

BJP: Tell me about how your last work, Soleil of Persian Square, fed into this latest project.

HD: It’s always like that – the next project comes out of an old project, something that I had noticed but which needed more space and concentration. And when I was doing Soleil of Persian Square, I was looking at all these clips, and dance was so present in them. 

At some point, it became necessary to talk about dance, [especially] when the Woman, Life, Freedom movement began, and dance became a tool of resistance. Popular music and popular dance had never been considered political beforehand. My generation would disobey what’s supposed to be conventional behaviour, but we didn’t know that what we were doing wasn’t just a foolish reaction. The generation after us completely changed how we look at resistance.

I thought it was fantastic how they invested [resistance into] this art form, [creating] a solution for a protest that was unthinkable. Protest, getting together, was not possible anymore. There was no possibility of organising, of writing or making posters. So, it was very interesting to me that this specific form of art suddenly became very useful for the purpose [of resistance].

BJP: The prize provides you with the support to focus on completing your latest project, Why Don’t You Dance?, for which you are working on three chapters based around three key figures. You have completed much of the work on the first chapter, based around Mahvash. And you have already mentioned Mohammad Khordadian, the dancer and choreographer based in LA, who is the third chapter. What can you tell me about the second chapter and who it is based upon?

HD: Jamileh was very active as a cabaret dancer in the 1960s and 70s. She represents this moment of shift. Cabaret dancers were seen as deviant… [Yet] she appeared in most of the popular films of her era, always playing this role of the belly dancer. There were all these social conflicts around the figure of the cabaret dancer, but what I really liked is that she represents to me a kind of feminism that is not from the middle class. She [represents] this kind of popular feminism. 

In one film she played the role of a good woman, hiding her real identity to marry a very upper class guy. At some point, she’s sick of it, and she dresses really provocatively. She is in this beautiful house, she is drunk, and she says to the musicians, ‘Hey, play me a tune!’ Then she comes down the staircase doing this provocative dance, and all the bourgeois people are shocked. She was a feminist, but not like an activist. It just comes out in her daily behaviour. 

BJP: You will focus on the jâheli dance, of which she was a pioneer.

HD: The dance reflected and also depicted this group of men in a particular neighbourhood [of Tehran]. They had very specific clothing, and a particular style of talking and walking. They were like protectors of the neighbourhood, and protectors of the weak, but also they would get involved in petty crimes, and were sometimes used by the government to [break up] protests. 

These people were jâhel. It was a subculture, very present in popular films. They wore fedoras, white shirts, black costumes and scarves, but they never put their coats on properly, just on their shoulders. And they did the jâheli dance. But Jamileh made it a dance for women.

This was a very masculine world, in which women were considered weak specimens. And she got that and [met it] with humour. That’s what I really like about her behaviour…. She just did it for fun, and she laughed because she just loved that dance. But it became a political statement. She incorporated something that was absolutely masculine and took it to another dimension.

prixelysee.ch/

“I focus on womanhood in the Middle East, exploring the unique challenges, complexities, and strengths that define the experiences of women from my region”

Though Hilal’s work aesthetically varies, displaying a diverse technical skill set, her work features women almost exclusively and explores similar themes throughout. Her pieces also often obfuscate the subject, such as Quartet. “Objects and photographs act as vessels for memories, and through them, I try to capture the subtle shifts in time,” Hilal tells me. “The way a once-clear recollection can become distorted, yet still holds significant weight in our lives.”

There’s something about the fragility of memory that draws Hilal in, and she reflects this “sense of impermanence” in her work. Chronic Tenderness, for example, shows a subject’s pose as a repeated motif, rotating as it appears again and again, with parts of the image missing and reappearing. The work has an unsteadying effect, as if we’re not quite sure what we’re looking at, a reflection of the untrustworthy nature of memory.

“I also focus on womanhood in the Middle East, exploring the unique challenges, complexities, and strengths that define the experiences of women from my region,” Hilal tells me. “My work reflects the interplay between tradition and modernity, societal expectations and personal identity, capturing the resilience and power that shape the lives of women in the Middle East.”

Working with her hands, Hilal finds the tactile, physical process to be a necessary vehicle of connection to themes, ideas and subjects of exploration. “For me, there is something so intimate about using my hands to shape, manipulate, and transform raw materials,” she explains. “It’s in this hands-on approach, as it allows me to be fully immersed in the process, to feel the texture, weight, and rhythm of the work.” And experimenting with physical art materials means Hilal has to be open to embracing the unpredictability that comes with experimenting, as “it’s through this process that my ideas truly take shape and come to life”.

Focusing on creating work has been “incredibly challenging” for Hilal recently. With Israel’s invasion on Beirut and South Lebanon, Hilal says that “being here on the ground, witnessing my country in turmoil, facing the possibility of losing my home or loved ones, and knowing that no one is truly safe is deeply unsettling.” But she says she finds solace in daily visits to her studio: “Creating has become my way of holding onto a sense of normalcy – it’s not just work, but a form of therapy that helps me process and persevere.”

Hilal’s most recent show with the collective Hayaty Diaries in London marks her third time exhibiting with them. The all-female SWANA group, founded in 2022 by Kinzy Diab and Christina Shoucair, showcases contemporary women from the region, and Hilal was the sole lens-based practitioner included in their latest exhibition I forgot what you felt like in November. “It’s a privilege to be part of a collective that not only celebrates creativity but also highlights the strength and voices of women from our region,” says Hilal. She’s currently in the research phase for a project which she hopes to exhibit as a solo show in 2025.

yasminahilal.com

“The safety net has failed, social provisions have been disembowelled, everyone apart from the upper crust of the ruling class has struggled these last 13 years”

Exhibited in the neoclassical palace’s opulent Lancaster Rooms is sculptural installation Reeves Corner (2014) and musical composition A Requiem for the Dispossessed (2024). The former is designed like a film studio stage set: a huge oil painting erected on wooden scaffolding portrays a remaining House of Reeves building, suitcases and sale signs visible through the Victorian shop’s ground-floor windows. In front is a recreation of the site where the former store once stood: an attempted garden on derelict wasteland, bound by a white picket fence. Strewn amongst gravel is discarded rubbish – Lucozade or water bottles, cigarette packets, hairspray cans, plastic bags, cardboard boxes. Large concrete planting tubs cherish a collection of bare branches and dying weeds, some of which have escaped their enclosure. 

Playing through the space is Perretta’s sound piece performed by Manchester Camerata, a cinematic score in the style of a classical requiem, intended to be a sonic representation of the uprising and its aftermath. In a vitrine is a copy of The Mirror newspaper from 09 August 2011, proclaiming ‘YOB RULE’ over an image of Croydon on fire. In the cabinet is also a collage of documentation for the project on negative photographic film, including a screenshot of King George I’s 1714 Riot Act written on an MacBook notes app.

The events of 2011 caused a crisis for liberal and conservative commentators, with politicians and journalists narrating the violence as apolitical and its participants inherently criminal, both supposedly existing outside of any social context. Other explanations were outright racist: historian David Starkey, for example, told BBC Newsnight that “the whites have become Black”. The unrest had actually been sparked by the murder of unarmed Black man Mark Duggan by the Metropolitan Police, which Perretta acknowledges alongside deeper structures of feeling at the time. With “what felt like the fall of capitalism in 2008 and then the consequent government austerity”, he explains, “it was a very febrile atmosphere”. 

A month later, ‘Occupy’ protests would spread across the world, followed by more than a decade of surging left-wing and right-wing movements. Perretta distinguishes the 2011 and 2024 riots in their politics and targets, but explains “the safety net has failed, social provisions have been disembowelled, everyone apart from the upper crust of the ruling class has struggled these last 13 years. As much as the people involved in those extremist riots would quite literally want to kill someone like me”, he reflects on this summer, “I understand entirely that the material condition that they find themselves in is untenable, because it is the very same condition that many diverse communities in the UK are mired in.”

Riots or rebellions have been a frequent occurrence in Britain for centuries – mere metres from Somerset House is a site that formerly housed Savoy Palace, destroyed during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Whether motivated by white supremacy as in 1919, or against police racism as in 1981, collective violence often erupts when resource distribution mediated through social hierarchies is contested. Of the 2024 summer’s episode, Perretta tells me that he would “rather they punch up at the ruling class than violently scape-goat communities of colour, but, after 13 years of austerity, the fact of their punching is inevitable.” 

Given the exhibition’s analysis of power, its location only adds to the impact: a neoclassical complex in central London, rebuilt in 1776-1801 to house the Royal Navy and the Admiralty, as well as the Stamp Office and Tax Office. A nineteenth-century extension, the New Wing with its grandiose Lancaster Rooms was occupied by the Inland Revenue, later HMRC, until 2011 – coincidentally the year of the unrest. Somerset House was an institution from which the British Empire was ruled, and where the UK state managed the process of extracting wealth from its subjects. Perretta acknowledges it is a complex venue from which to critique the ruling class, but sees an important project in using art to reckon with Somerset House’s past and “remaking in real time of what this building means and who it’s for.” Re-creating a South London wasteland at such a site can feel somewhat surrealist. 

Encasing the BlackBerry in a vitrine is kind of wryly absurd, while also reflecting on the ways in which museums impose frameworks on their artefacts, drawing on an intellectual apparatus historically shaped by imperial attempts to collect and categorise the world. The project prompted the artist to consider the politics of property: how it is distributed, governed, and accessed. Austerity was first invented at the end of World War I to protect capitalism from crisis, with the public calling for alternative systems, restricting the imaginative and material space for dissent by shifting wealth to an elite minority. After its reintroduction in 2010 by the Liberal-Conservative Coalition, Tory government ministers spent subsequent years curtailing the public’s right to peacefully protest, while hardening borders under the pretence of resource scarcity. 

Perretta understands the irony of symbolically relocating a privately-owned and publicly-inaccessible area of unused scrubland to a privately-owned but publicly-accessible palace, both deeply contested grounds. For him, exhibiting the work at Somerset House offered an opportunity to stage a version of Reeves Corner where the public can congregate to memorialise the events of 2011, meditate on their legacy, and build forms of solidarity in ways impossible amongst the fenced-off ruins in Croydon. With Labour effectively promising more austerity and anti-migrant rhetoric in 2024, A Riot in Three Acts insists that the insurgent energy of 2011 will only erupt again.

somersethouse.org.uk

“These collaborations work best when the poetry is not a caption and the photography is not an illustration, but rather both raise questions”

Solo, a collector of photo-poetry publications, adds that the earliest example he encountered is a French pamphlet from the 1850s. In these initial forays, he explains, the photography tended to be illustrative and used instead of engravings, so you might have a poem by Robert Burns alongside an image of castle ruins in Scottish landscape. The early 20th century avant-garde Dada and Surrealist movements precipitated a more experimental evolution, of which “the iconic example is Man Ray and Paul Éluard’s Facile [1935],” he says. Latin America has a strong tradition of photo-poetry, from the 1954 Alturas de Macchu Picchu with poems by Pablo Neruda and photographs by Martín Chambi to the current output of contemporary Buenos Aires-based photobook publishers La Luminosa Editorial, which frequently combines text with image.

Many established poets have explored one- off photographic partnerships – such as Ted Hughes with Fay Godwin or Seamus Heaney with Rachel Giese – but generally these alliances drift in and out of vogue. “These collaborations work best when the poetry is not a caption and the photography is not an illustration, but rather both raise questions. The less literal the relationship, the more successful,” says Solo. He adds that the 1960s and 70s proved another fertile phase, and agrees that we are seeing a resurgence again today. Instagram may be a factor, having brought poetry and photography to wider audiences. And, despite exponential digitalisation, the 21st century has also seen a flourishing of independently published print books and zines. But what, in particular, attracts photographers to poetry?

Perhaps it is down to what they share – finite parameters, a heightened view of the world. “Poetry is good at elevating the everyday or looking at ordinary things in a new light and that is what my pictures do. I’m not a classic documentary photographer,” Johny Pitts explains over a video call from Bern, where he is currently guest professor at the university. Pitts was already friends with the writer Roger Robinson and they were keen to team up; in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, their planned collaboration took on a new urgency. “But let’s not react too much to the current moment,” Pitts decided. “Let’s do something unexpected, something we would probably never have been able to do before.” That was the genesis of Home is Not a Place – a book and exhibition uniting Pitts’ images with Robinson’s poems.

Unlike with Hicks and Berry, here the images do not always spark the poems. While the book includes some archive photographs Pitts had amassed over the past decade and a half, it also features new ones produced during a road trip the duo undertook around the coast of the UK – an approach similar to that which Seamus Murphy and PJ Harvey followed between 2011 and 2014 when they travelled together to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington, DC, and “Harvey collected words and Murphy collected pictures”. Influenced by Paul Gilroy’s notion of “the Black Atlantic”, Pitts and Robinson wanted to look beyond London, remapping Britain through Black histories of arrival, displacement, change. “What you’re trying to do as a photographer and as a poet, is to work with ghosts, trying to capture things that aren’t actually there,” Pitts says.

The process varied. Sometimes they would respond concurrently to the same moment in their own artistic languages. Other times, images and words would find each other retrospectively, through editing and sequencing. Although it was completely different in form, Pitts was conscious of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a 1955 portrait of Harlem with images by Roy DeCarava interspersed with words by Langston Hughes, which stitch the photographs together, breathing life into them via a fictional narrative. The book’s form, design and layout are closely bound up with how the images and photographs are produced and then read in relation to each other.

Photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind, who completed an MA at The Poetry School in October 2023 and published her debut collection, One Language, in 2022, makes a similar point, offering some volumes as examples: Caleb Femi’s Poor is the compact size you would expect of a poetry book, with photographs by the author appearing throughout, while the larger Home is Not a Place looks and feels more like a photobook. Taylor-Lind’s book is led by poetry, though it includes images, and her verses allude to a photographic view of the world – a “soft-box dawn”, for example. “This craft of intricate observation is a skill I have developed as a photographer,” she says, adding that both are practices rooted in extraction, removing anything superfluous until only essence remains, each frame or word weighed out.

For Taylor-Lind, there is an important distinction – her photography is journalistic, reporting on events, but her poems are situated. “[My] push towards poetry is also born of my frustration sometimes with the limitations of photography,” she says, explaining that poetry creates space for reflection on her experiences as a witness. “Journalism can give us a lot of information. But when I read poems, I learn about the world beyond facts and figures. Poetry is more successful in taking the specific details of one person or one place or one moment of time and expanding that out into a universal experience.”

Though she has been writing since childhood, Jocelyn Allen’s poetic practice began when she published her photographs of pregnancy and motherhood on Instagram. Accompanying images of her imitating the postures her young children make, they started as captions, witty yet poignant hashtags that increased in length and complexity. “#IHadToLieDownForThisWeeksPictureAsIWasSoTiredButOneMinuteIHaveABurstOfEnergyAndThenIAmTiredAgain,” reads one example and, as this perhaps shows, they play with the idea of self-presentation and authenticity on social media but also help to create distance. “My work has always been therapeutic,” she says. “The hashtags helped me to feel less awkward.” Like Taylor-Lind, she took a course at The Poetry School, and recently exhibited work from her latest project Oh Me, Oh Mãe II at Bell House in Dulwich, together with poems. “Poetry is an extension of my work,” she says, a literary layer enhancing and expanding on the visual.

David Solo observes that the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of academia may be a factor in this wave of photo-poetic cross-pollination. This is true beyond art school, with far less clear distinctions between creative genres. Just as photography has expanded to encompass elements of sculpture, installation, embroidery and performance, so too have televisual, filmic and musical genres blurred in ways that we might not have anticipated a few decades back. Ours is the age of the cultural mash-up and photography and poetry, both “deceptively simple” as Johny Pitts puts it, are ripe for commingling. “We’re using the tools that people use ordinarily every single day – we’re endlessly taking photos, typing words,” says Liz Berry. “But through this accessible medium, we do something different, intense, mysterious.”

blackcountrytype.com, johnypitts.com, anastasiataylorlind.com,  jocelynallen.co.uk

Through technological interventions such as databending, photogrammetry and virtual reality, Ascencio alters the meaning of an image. The familiar becomes new again, tangled in a web of fresh associations. In a letter composed before he died, Ascencio’s father wrote: “Forgive me and communicate with me.” The photographer wanted to fulfil his father’s wish, and began creating work that was in direct conversation with him. “Whenever I want to feel close to my dad, I go to the countryside or the forest,” says Ascencio, explaining that his father was a gardener. 

The images – hazy and distorted – reveal who his father was. For example, Ascencio includes a picture of his father’s membership card to an organisation that fought for agricultural rights in Mexico’s countryside. “I think that his spirit… and the values that he passed along to me and my family are in this picture,” he reflects.

Ascencio was nominated for Ones to Watch by Bolivian artist and Ones to Watch 2020 nominee, River Claure. “Traditionally, the practice of using software in art leaves the viewer with an artificial taste,” Claure says. “This does not happen for me with Cristobal’s images. By rearranging the pixels of his family archive and then generating a digital garden, he brings us closer to a touching story and invites us to think about the continuity or discontinuity of memory in different times.” 

Even without his father’s physical presence, Ascencio’s memory has been rearranged, and his approach to image-making materialises the inherent fluidity of memory. Through digital intervention, he shows us the potential that these emerging technologies have in creating new poetics in an old medium. 

cristobalascencio.com

Petrocchi often re-photographs objects and museum displays and then populates these places with surreal artefacts of her own making. The roots of Sculptural Entities began in early 2020, and it became clear to Petrocchi early on that the book format was the perfect presentation for it, because she wanted to create a fictional catalogue. The artist wanted to create a publication of images that appear to be repetitive at first sight, but which inspire viewers to notice the nuances in shape and form between objects and symbols.

Meanwhile, she adds, “a small orange symbol at the bottom right of each composition identify the page’s numbers of this fictional catalogue and are, in fact, petroglyphs cut-outs from the imagery of prehistoric rocks collected from the internet”. 

Petrocchi has always been interested in the realm of museology, mainly fascinated by the contradictions and controversies that lie within the concept of it. “The purpose of museums nowadays is to educate and ‘civilise’ the general public, but they still are one of the main symbols of colonial power,” she says. “And it is amazing being able to look at statues, objects, tools from different cultures all in the same room in your own city, but is it still fair? And what can be done now to give voices back to the people (and objects!) that have been silenced thus far?” Ultimately, she hopes that her work will inspire viewers to question the role of museums in societies today, especially on where their artefacts come from and how their histories are contextualised.

Sculptural Entities by Giovanna Petrocchi is published by A Corner With Editions.

The project addresses themes running through Shwe’s practice more broadly: identity, relationships, feminism and mental health. Born and raised in Yangon – the former capital of Myanmar – Shwe began pursuing photography as a career four years ago. For the decade prior, she worked as a researcher for UN agencies and NGOs. “I grew up under a repressive military regime, in a society that is historically closed and conservative,” she says. “Life inside Myanmar is much worse than the outside world can imagine, with unbearable human rights violations and atrocities.”

Emmeline Yong, co-founder and director of Objectifs, a visual arts space in Singapore, nominated Shwe. “[Her] work is deeply personal. She is uncomfortable with the uneven power dynamics of a photographer-subject relationship, and this has led to a collaborative and emphatic approach,” says Yong. “Despite the political climate and lockdowns in Myanmar, Shwe has continued to use photography to tackle physical, emotional and mental issues.”

Photography and politics were ever-present in Shwe’s childhood; both her parents worked as civil servants, and her father was the head of photography at the Ministry of Agriculture. “I never directly learned photography from him, but when I reflect on my childhood, I have vivid memories of my father’s lab,” says Shwe. During her childhood, the photographer spent a lot of time with her grandfather, a junior officer to General Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi. “I learned many stories about the Burmese independence movement from him, and I guess that’s one of the reasons I became a development worker,” she reflects.

In 2017, Shwe began to feel frustrated with her profession. She enrolled in the Angkor Photo Festival workshop, where she was mentored by Antoine d’Agata and Sohrab Hura. “I never went back to my full-time job,” she says. “It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.” That same year, she joined the Thuma Collective, an all-female group of photographers who organise workshops and artist talks. Thuma means ‘she’ in Burmese, and the group aims to nurture a safe and supportive space for female photographers in Myanmar.

Four years on, Shwe’s work is recognised by initiatives such as Photo Kathmandu’s South Asia Incubator and World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass. She continues to collaborate with NGOs as a photographer and educator. But, having worked in the sector for so long, her personal practice naturally leans towards exploring social and political stories too.

shwewutthmon.com