The British Journal of Photography

10/11/2025

Iraqi Female Photographers (IFP), a grassroots collective of women behind the lens, is rewriting what visual storytelling can look like in Iraq. When they noticed the need for a space such as IFP, “we launched it immediately,” says Forqan Salam, co-founder of the group and a photographer for Reuters since 2019, “bringing together women photographers working in street, journalistic and documentary photography.”

IFP was founded in early 2024 by Salam and Iraqi photographer Ishtar Obaid, and drew on their experiences of being denied access to spaces, facing harassment, and confronting a photography community often steeped in patriarchy. “The challenges start with family and societal restrictions,” Salam explains. “Then, on the streets, we face harassment, unwanted attention, and even exploitation simply because we’re women. For example, with the upcoming month of Muharram, there are many places we won’t be able to photograph freely.”

Read more about IFP at the link below.

Iraqi Female Photographers is a collective addressing systemic sexism, a lack of women’s stories and institutional support in the country

10/11/2025

Launched in 2022, Bound Narratives began as a roving exhibition dedicated to photo books from the SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) region. This year, it marks its first iteration in Tunis as a full-scale festival, expanding its ambition to celebrate photography, publishing and self-representation across the region.⁠

Organised by the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, the initiative seeks to challenge how the SWANA region has historically been portrayed in photo books – often from a Western gaze – by amplifying the voices of artists working within their own contexts.⁠

The 2025 edition brings together over 30 photographers, designers and publishers, exploring themes such as Longing & Belonging, Social Upheaval, and Reimagining Histories. Through exhibitions, talks and workshops, Bound Narratives highlights how the photobook can be both a creative and political act.

The festival also includes a publishing fair, book signings, and talks designed to support emerging photographers developing their first photo books. By focusing on regional collaboration and independent publishing, Bound Narratives is building a new infrastructure for photographic storytelling across the region.

Find out more at the link below.

https://bit.ly/3LxhJPJ

10/11/2025

⚠️ CLOSING TOMORROW ⚠️

This is your final opportunity to share work that reflects what it means to stand on the edge of change. This year’s theme, On the Cusp, is about transitions - both quiet and radical. It’s about the moments before something shifts, the space where transformation takes root.

Whether you’re documenting personal milestones, social unrest, cultural identity, climate breakdown, motherhood, grief or recovery: this is a call for work that sees the world clearly, and doesn’t look away.

Selected images will be exhibited in 2026 at PhotoIreland in Dublin and 10.14 Gallery in London. Work will be reviewed by a jury of industry leaders, including Alessia Glaviano (Vogue Italia), Jessica Baxter (Tate), Kimberley Moulton (Tate Modern), Kennedi Carter, Nancy Janes (Hahnemühle), Carolyn Mendelsohn and more.

Series winners will receive a Nikon Z Series mirrorless camera and two NIKKOR Z lenses, and for the first time, a People’s Choice winner will be selected by public vote and featured in an exclusive interview on 1854.photography.

Become a Member to submit up to 10 single images or one complete series.

Enter now: http://1854.photo/47z7H9n

Deadline: 11 November 2025, 23:59 UK time.

07/11/2025

Our new issue, Body Talk, examines photography’s relationship with the body – as subject, vessel, and site of power, pleasure, and perception. Across essays, interviews, and visual features, artists and curators explore how images of intimacy, desire, and physicality reveal the complexities of looking and being looked at.

In Features, Diego Moreno fuses eroticism with Catholic iconography to examine guilt and devotion, while Hoda Afshar confronts a French colonial fixation in a photo archive from Morocco. Andi Galdí Vinkó exposes the absence of the cl****is in visual science, and Alba Zari and Amandine Kuhlmann explore how digital self-representation can both empower and objectify. Curator Mark Sealy considers a liberatory photographic future in the 2026 Hamburg Triennial, and Andrea Copetti discusses Wysocka and Pogo’s publication, which resists legibility as a quiet act of resistance.
In Projects, Cammie Toloui explores human touch; Luis Cobelo rethinks romance through Latin American fotonovelas; Ximena Borrazás transforms X-rays into images of empathy; and Caroline Mauxion investigates sensuality through a feminist and ‘crip’ lens.

Our Agenda surveys global exhibitions, from Italy’s first major HIV-AIDS retrospective to Alejandro Cartagena at SFMoMA and the V&A Photography Centre rehang. Intelligence highlights Signal Film and Media’s 25th anniversary, six decades at the Cité internationale des arts, and Donata Pizzi’s radical collection of Italian women’s photography.

Body Talk will be available in our online library from 03 December to all Members, and will reach our Print Subscribers and Full Access Members soon. Join by 19 November to receive this print issue as part of your subscription package! Discover our options: https://1854.photo/3WxU3x4

© Amadine Kuhlmann | © Claudio Pogo and Magdalena Wysock | © Hoda Afshar, published by Loose Joints

05/11/2025

In 2022, the luxury hotel group Belmond started its Belmond Legends project, when it invited photographers Francois Halard, Chris Rhodes, Letizia Le Fur and Coco Capitán to six of its best-known venues (and trains), and gave them carte blanche to shoot what they wanted. Unveiled in April 2023, the series revealed subjective, auteur-like approaches to some beautiful places.

Arnaud Champenois, global head of brand, marketing and communications for Belmond says, “we are famous for our legendary hotels and trains, so we want to perpetuate the legendary art of travel, and even shape the future of travel. And so contemporary photography is a fantastic medium for us.”

Champenois and team later partnered with French publisher RVB Books to launch an ongoing series, titled As Seen By. It includes Le Fur’s take on Caruso, a former palace on the Amalfi coast, and Capitán’s perspective on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, and its route from Paris to Venice.

Other published photographers include Stefanie Moshammer, Rosie Marks and Thomas Rousset, and the most recent publication was shot by Colin Dodgson on and around the Andean Explorer train in Peru.

Last year, the company launched the open-call Belmond Photographic Residency at Photo London in 2024, an annual competition aimed at emerging image-makers.

Find out more about the residency and the books at the link below.

The luxury brand is working with image-makers to create a new approach to travel photography that conveys subjective experiences over commercial work

04/11/2025

This year’s Portrait of Britain reflects a country caught between change and continuity. We’re thrilled to announce the shortlist for Portrait of Britain Vol. 8, British Journal of Photography’s annual photography award that celebrates the depth and diversity of the UK’s people and culture.

Community Everywhere: across 200 portraits, familiar rituals meet shifting identities, revealing a Britain that can feel both uncertain and unmistakably alive. From this shortlist, 100 winning images - to be announced in January 2026 - will be displayed on digital JCDecaux UK screens in high streets, shopping malls and transport hubs across the country.

All shortlisted portraits will be published in the forthcoming Portrait of Britain Vol. 8 photobook, sponsored by WePresent, the arts platform of WeTransfer, and available to pre-order soon.

Read more and view the full shortlist: https://1854.photo/4ol54Ov

03/11/2025

Zaineb Abelque was born in south London to a Moroccan family – in her work, she explores faith, tradition and visual heritage in the diaspora. She also works extensively in her homeland, often capturing daily rituals on her 35mm camera. Abelque’s latest project began by spending time in Marrakech’s barbershops, immersed in the culture.

In a country where youth employment is scarce and public recreational spaces are limited, the barbershop emerges as a vital hub. On the streets of Marrakech, Abelque set up a makeshift studio and conversed with the ‘masharmen’ – slang for the boys and men in this stylish subculture – about how they express their individual style.

As Abelque continued her research, the project deepened in complexity. Hairstyles, she realised, reflect political realities. “There’s this stereotype that these boys are just idling all day,” she says. “But they’re creating joy and purpose for themselves. A footballer debuts a new style and suddenly everyone’s talking about it, running to the barber to get the same look.”

Read the full story, from our latest Maps issue, at the link below.

The South London-based Moroccan photographer spent time in Marrakech's barbershops, photographing its young men

03/11/2025

🚨Final week to enter Female in Focus x Nikon 2025 🚨

Created to challenge the gender imbalance in the photography industry, Female in Focus provides a global platform for women and non-binary photographers to gain visibility, recognition and support.

This year’s theme, On the Cusp, asks: what does transformation look like? Whether personal or political, quiet or revolutionary, we’re seeking work that captures the tension and possibility of change.

Selected photographers will:

▪️ Be exhibited at PhotoIreland in Dublin and 10.14 Gallery in London
▪️ Be reviewed by a world-class jury of editors, curators and artists
▪️ Receive international press exposure
▪️ Series winners will receive a Nikon Z Series mirrorless camera and two NIKKOR Z lenses

Become a Full Access Member today to enter up to 10 single images or one complete series. Membership also includes complimentary entry to all BJP awards and a subscription to our quarterly print magazine, delivered straight to your door.

Enter now: http://1854.photo/3J2aoHg

31/10/2025

Twin brothers Jalan and Jibril Durimel have spent their lives in motion – Paris, Miami, Saint Martin, Los Angeles, now New York. They started online, making YouTube videos, teaching themselves editing, storytelling and the language of images through imitation before finding their own voice.

Today, the Durimels’ work merges fashion, portraiture, and cinematic composition, shaped as much by diasporic experience as by intuition. Their long-term project, Quiet as the Country, reimagines a homeland grounded in Black beauty and belonging – a fictitious tropical republic where portraiture, landscape, and costume intersect to tell stories of warmth, light, and identity.

Movement, in every sense, defines their practice. Lundambuyu’s Mobility Program, their most recent series, celebrates the able body and the dignity of everyday life. Printed in a limited run of 500 posters and shared at Climax Books in New York, it marks the first public reception of work that is at once playful, intimate, and disciplined.

The brothers work with minimal styling, natural light, small crews, and a search for images that feel effortless. Collaboration is measured, careful, a balance between autonomy and shared vision. They seek what feels organic, whether photographing the Caribbean sun, the African diaspora in Paris, or stones formed without human intervention.

Read their conversation with BJP here: http://1854.photo/4ojUnM8

© Jalan and Jibril Durimel

30/10/2025

In Body Talk, the latest issue of British Journal of Photography, we explore how images of the body – particularly those that depict love, desire, and obsession – challenge what Martin Jay called the “disinterested gaze”.

The answers, like love itself, are never simple. Diego Moreno’s deeply personal portraits merge sacred imagery with erotic encounters, seeking reconciliation between body and soul while archivist Stefan Dickers reconsiders po*******hy and kink as social history. Hoda Afshar traces fixation through a colonial archive; Andi Galdí Vinkó exposes what science omits from its depiction of the body; and Mark Sealy envisions a liberatory photographic future that resists the violence of observation. But artists Alba Zari and Amandine Kuhlmann reflect on the objectification embedded even in self-representation.

Body Talk also features our regular Agenda, Projects, and Intelligence sections. Highlights include the first Italian exhibition dedicated to the HIV-AIDS crisis (1982–96), Alejandro Cartagena’s major retrospective at SFMoMA, and the V&A Photography Centre’s first complete rehang. Plus, insights from Joumana El Zein Khoury, Executive Director of World Press Photo, and a spotlight on Takuma Nakahira’s radical photo theory.

Subscribe by 19 November to receive Body Talk and all upcoming issues of British Journal of Photography delivered directly to your door: http://1854.photo/4qxnLzW

📷️: Rotimi Fani-Kayode

29/10/2025

I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies brings together twelve artists whose practices expand the photographic image into a space of memory, imagination, and resistance. Curated by Bindi Vora, the exhibition unfolds at Autograph, London, through 21 March 2026.⁠

The project began with a question: what happens when the archives fail us? For British Mauritian artist Sabrina Tirvengadum, whose family history as indentured labourers in 19th-century Mauritius exists largely without photographs, the answer lies in reimagining the past. Using AI models, she creates dreamlike portraits that blur memory and invention. “Something’s always not quite right,” she says, “and histories are distorted that way as well.”⁠

Across the exhibition, this impulse to repair and reinterpret runs deep. Wendimagegn Belete’s Unveil (2016) layers hundreds of faces from Ethiopia’s anti-colonial resistance into a single, composite portrait. Thato Toeba’s Man on Fire (2017) revisits a moment of xenophobic violence in South Africa through collage and repetition. Arpita Akhanda’s woven works, made from maps and family portraits, meditate on displacement and belonging after Partition.⁠

For Vora, collage is an act of abundance. “We mistake photographs for truth,” she notes. “These artists challenge that authority.”⁠

Read the full story at the link below:

I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies invites new perspectives on social histories through mixed-media image making

28/10/2025

‼️ DEADLINE EXTENDED | Enter Female in Focus x Nikon 2025 ‼️

We’ve extended the deadline to give more photographers the opportunity to take part - due to the major Amazon Web Services outage that occurred last week, which disrupted access to submissions in the final days.

This is your chance to gain international recognition and exhibit your work on a global stage.

▪️ Theme: On the Cusp, imagery exploring moments of change, transition and possibility

▪️ Exhibition: PhotoIreland (Dublin) and 10.14 Gallery (London)

▪️ Prizes: Nikon Z Series mirrorless camera + 2 NIKKOR Z lenses for each series winner

To submit a broader selection of work, become a Digital or Full Access Member and enter up to 10 single images or one complete series.

📅 New deadline: 11 November 2025

Enter now: http://1854.photo/42OUxT6