The British Journal of Photography

11/09/2025

Chris Steele-Perkins, one of Magnum Photos’ most incisive chroniclers of postwar Britain, has died aged 78.

Across five decades, Steele-Perkins shaped the language of British documentary photography – capturing youth subcultures, social upheavals, and moments when history turned on the street. From his early work documenting inner-city struggles in the 1970s, to The Teds (1979), now a landmark of British social documentary, his lens never ridiculed but instead rendered dignity and complexity.

He ranged far beyond Britain, reporting on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, socio-political crises in Africa and Lebanon, and rural Japan, where he later settled with his wife, photographer Miyako Yamada. His books – from Fuji to England, My England – asked what identity means, weaving together portraits of aristocrats, migrants, and everyday Londoners.

“Photography can’t change anything,” he once said, “but it can stand as a record.”

Magnum announced his death on 08 September, noting he passed peacefully in Tokyo after living with Lewy body dementia. Fellow photographer Homer Sykes remembers him as a peer, competitor, and friend: “We just enjoyed each other’s work, and the business of making it work.”

Read the obituary at the link below.

11/09/2025

NOW AVAILABLE!

Maps, the latest issue of British Journal of Photography, confronts the tension between image and territory, between what is represented and what is lived. From Lewis Carroll’s impossible 1:1 map to Borges’ allegory of decay and Baudrillard’s hyperreal, this issue explores how photography not only documents, but distorts - revealing a world of fragments that can never be fully understood.

Inside, Zofia Rydet’s monumental portrait of Poland meets Edmund Clark and Crofton Black’s forensic tracing of military spending, while Elsa Leydier dismantles the photographic gaze through an eco-feminist lens. We report on the 2024 Daegu Photo Biennale’s post-anthropocentric vision, revisit Sebastião Salgado through the BJP archive, and look ahead to Paris Photo, alongside coverage of Istanbul and Oxford’s festivals.

Elsewhere, Zaineb Abelque maps the subculture of Marrakech’s barbershops, Diggory Lynch confronts the everyday with his Auto-portraits of restaurant rats, and Ebun Sodipo collages layered histories of Black identity. We also meet the Iraqi women pioneering a new photographic movement and sit down with Vivienne Gamble at Stills in Edinburgh.
With reviews of ten essential new photobooks rounding out the issue, Maps asks a question that grows more urgent as our lives are increasingly mediated by digital cartographies and reconstructions of place: where does the map end and the territory begin?

The Maps print issue will reach our Print Subscribers and Full Access Members soon and it’s now available on our online reader for our Members. Not a Member? Grab your copy: http://1854.photo/4nqzfmB

10/09/2025

Daegu Photo Biennale celebrates its 10th since its foundation in 2006. The main exhibition, The Pulse of Life, considers what life is, whilst a second ‘special’ exhibition is titled The Origin of the World and asks what it is to be human.

A third exhibition will be devoted to Rinko Kawauchi’s latest series, M/E On this Sphere Endlessly Interlinking, in which ‘M/E’ refers to Mother Earth and also the pronoun ‘me’. Around 80 artists are included in The Pulse of Life and 75 more in The Origin of the World, as well as Kawauchi’s major solo show.

The Encounters VIII exhibition, meanwhile, is a place to see work by emerging artists. Occupying some 4000 square metres in the Daegu Culture and Arts Center, south-eastern South Korea, the Biennale also includes related events such as a symposium, a photobook exhibition and a portfolio review.

This edition of the Biennale is spearheaded by Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais, an art historian who was previously curator of Centre Pompidou’s photography department, then head of the photography collection and curator of the photography department of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.

De l’Ecotais speaks to BJP; read the full story at the link below.

09/09/2025

Misan Harriman has his first major exhibition at Hope 93, a gallery centred around inclusivity and black/British identity within the creative field. Featuring 120 original photos, shot between 2019 – 2025, The Purpose of Light, which opened on 10 July, spans continents and movements, depicting the lived experiences of everyday people at the vanguard of change, from the Palestinian struggle to the Black liberation movement.

Discover the images: http://1854.photo/3VBiEjY

📷️: Misan Harriman

09/09/2025

Since 1954, La Perla has been synonymous with lace and luxury, but behind the glamour lies another story: one of resilience, solidarity and struggle.

Italian photographers Matilde Piazzi and Nadia Del Frate - winners of the Single Image category and recipients of the People’s Choice Award for Female in Focus x Nikon 2024 award - turned their lens on the women who have fought to protect that legacy. Their series Sorelle d’Italia: The Luxury of Resistance documents the peaceful yet resolute fight of La Perla’s workforce, who resisted financial speculation and stood together for their craft, their livelihoods and each other. Submitted to last year’s theme, Renewal, it resonated as a manifesto of collective resistance.

At its heart is the portrait of Pierangela Cernera, known as Piera - a worker of 24 years in La Perla’s cutting department. Draped in scraps of lace, tailoring scissors in hand, she becomes in Piazzi’s words “our Madonna of the factory floor”, a symbol of both fragility and defiance.

Read more about Piazzi and Del Frate’s practice: http://1854.photo/482CWu3

This year’s edition of Female in Focus x Nikon is now open for submissions. Once the winners are selected, The People’s Choice category will allow the public to vote for their favourite photograph from the Female in Focus x Nikon exhibition. The winning photographer will be featured in an interview on 1854.photography, discussing their work and creative practice.

05/09/2025

Opening 19 September, 2025, Askam-in-Furness is curated by Phil Northcott and supported by the Chris Killip Photography Trust and the Martin Parr Foundation. Askam-in-Furness also features 59 digital scans from negatives and an archive installation of previously unseen images by Chris Killip, taken during his time in Askam-in-Furness. These images were recently uncovered by Signal Film and Media during a research project with the local Askam community to reconnect with some of the subjects shown in the series.

Askam-in-Furness launches the re-opening of the newly redeveloped Signal Film and Media gallery within their newly redeveloped arts centre, Cooke’s Studios, which is located in Barrow-in-Furness in the North West of England.

Find out more at the link below. http://1854.photo/42fduOi

© Chris Killip Photography Trust/Magnum Photos

03/09/2025

Some 20 years after Périphérique, a new exhibition collates Mohamed Bourouissa’s celebrated series with three others to deepen his focus on the subject of cultural representation.

Communautés. Projets 2005–2025 at Fondazione MAST, Bologna, is a “skeleton of a retrospective”, presenting two sets of curatorially paired series. Horse Day and Périphérique alternate the exhibition’s first section, while Shoplifters nestles between a new series, Hands. In Périphérique, the artist employs friends and neighbours to stage mise-en-scènes, blurring codes between history painting and racially biased documentary.

In Horse Day he slow-documents an African American community in Philadelphia, and their fanciful equestrian companions. In Shoplifters, the artist reproduces bodega Polaroids of would-be thieves in Brooklyn, each forced to pose alongside their stolen goods (milk, eggs, cheese, detergents and so on).

Mohamed Bourouissa: Communautés. Projets 2005–2025 is at Fondazione MAST, Bologna, until 28 September.

Read the full story at the link below.

Some 20 years after Périphérique, a new exhibition collates the artist’s celebrated series with three others to deepen his focus on the subject of cultural representation

02/09/2025

“The two things I heard the most were: ‘We don’t know where to find Black women photographers’ and ‘We want to work with people we already know’,” says Polly Irungu , founder of Black Women Photographers. She wanted to address the “misguided assumptions” that Black photographers were not versatile enough. “These excuses reflected a systemic issue, rather than an actual lack of talent or opportunities.”

Irungu formed Black Women Photographers to address this gap and provide a platform that fosters visibility and opportunities for talented photographers. The database now serves as a resource for industry gatekeepers, including photo editors, directors, curators and art buyers. But it also provides members with community, funding, mentorship and professional development, including free webinars, workshops and portfolio reviews.

Tobi Sobowale, a British-Nigerian photographer based in London, for example, found that joining BWP opened her eyes to the wide range of career opportunities. Community membership has brought many practical benefits, including Capture One sponsorship.

“My aspiration is to reach the one million dollar mark in the near future,” says Irungu on her ambitions for the collective.

Read the story at the link below.

Kenyan-born, Washington DC-based photographer Polly Irungu, founder of the collective, is also one of the few Black women photographers to work at the White House

02/09/2025

NOW OPEN: Female in Focus x Nikon 2025

We’re pleased to announce the sixth edition of Female in Focus, presented in partnership with Nikon, a global leader in imaging technology - now supporting the award for the second year running.
Created to address ongoing gender imbalance in the photography industry, Female in Focus aims to create meaningful opportunities for women and non-binary photographers to gain visibility, recognition and support on an international stage.

This year, we invite photographers to respond to the theme ‘On the Cusp’ - exploring personal and global turning points. From moments of revolution or transformation to the quieter transitions of ageing, climate change, or technological shifts, the theme reflects the uncertainty - and potential - of what lies ahead.

An international jury of industry leaders will select 20 single images and two bodies of work, which will be exhibited in a group show at Photo Ireland in Dublin and 1014 Gallery in London.

Thanks to our partnership with Nikon, the photographers behind the two winning series will also receive a Z Series mirrorless camera and two NIKKOR Z lenses of their choice. Photographers may submit one single image free of charge. To maximise your chances, become a Digital Access or Full Access Member to submit up to 10 single images or one complete series.

Entries are now open. Start your submission today: http://1854.photo/3VeW2pv

Deadline: 6 November 2025, 23:59 UK time.

01/09/2025

At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no one left to keep you informed. In nearly 23 months, at least 210 journalists have been killed by the Israeli army in this territory, according to Reporters Without Borders. We join with more than 250 other media outlets across the world, to condemn these crimes. And we call on the Israeli authorities to allow independent access for the international press in the Gaza Strip.

29/08/2025

The UK government is consulting on changes to copyright legislation that will help AI companies at the expense of photographers and other creatives.

For over a decade, big tech has been lobbying the UK government to change its copyright law to make it easier to exploit artistic works currently protected by copyright, for a myriad of commercial products, argues Isabelle Doran, CEO of the Association of Photographers (AOP), vice chair of the Creators’ Rights Alliance, and board member of the British Copyright Council.

“UK copyright law does not obstruct innovation, it incentivises creators to produce work, get paid, and reinvest in their work – it is the foundation of the creative ecosystem,” she writes in this opinion piece.

Technology has previously been used to support photographers and image-makers. “The collaboration between creator and technology led to the transition from analogue to digital, improving the delivery of human-authored creative works. Now they find they are competing with machines that can output synthetic works with little or no effort, all without permission or payment for a photographer’s own intellectual creation.”

Read the story at the link below.

The UK government is consulting on changes to copyright legislation that will help AI companies at the expense of photographers and other creatives

28/08/2025

A new show at CPW, Kingston, New York features over fifty women photographers using collage as a feminist form. Curated by artist Justine Kurland and Marina Chao, the idea was born from Kurland’s SCUMB Manifesto (an acronym for Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books), where she would cut up images from the canon of photography; ‘white male photographers.’

Kurland tells BJP “it was so huge, life-changing, cathartic, I can’t tell you how freeing it was, opening up a sense of possibility that we can build a new language and imagine new things.” The process of creating collages felt so revolutionary that Kurland became interested in other artists using the technique, particularly other women.

SCUMB went on to become a success, exhibited at Higher Pictures, New York, in 2021 and published by Mack in 2022. She started to research collage and “collage-adjacent” work from the 1960s onwards, first on her own and later with Sarah Miller Meigs and Libby Werbel from lumber room, a space for contemporary art in Portland, Oregon, which showed a group exhibition of this work in 2023.

A wider photobook, The Rose: A Circular Genealogy of Collage, which is now being published along with this new version of the exhibition, which closes on 31 August.

Read the full story at the link below.

Cutting up the canon of photographic images gave Justine Kurland an interest in collage that has blossomed into The Rose, a celebrated exhibition on show and in print this summer