The British Journal of Photography

30/12/2025

LAST CHANCE to get an Early Access discount to enter OpenWalls Spotlight 2026!

Save up to 33% on one-off entries and get the chance to exhibit your work in partnership with WePresent and our historic partner Galerie Huit Arles, alongside Les Rencontres d’Arles, at a time when the city becomes the global centre of photography.

The judging panel, including Lillian Wilkie (Director, Chateau International), Julia De Bierre (Director, Galerie Huit Arles), Holly Fraser (Editor-in-chief, WePresent) among others, will select one series winner and 25 single-image winners to be presented in the Grand Salon, with the series winner also receiving a £1,000 grant.

Early Access discount ends on 4 January, enter now from just £5: https://1854.photo/45hJG54

26/12/2025

Ezekiel’s new photobook, Somewhere between a doll and a dog, is an ambivalent, searching, devotional to trans identity. Shot between 2021 and 2024 across the UK, the Philippines, Europe and the US, the book assembles film stills, iPhone images, letters and diary fragments into what Ezekiel calls a “visual archive of transness”, one that does not offer resolution.

The work is preoccupied with time, inheritance, the body and the limits of self-knowledge. Bodies bind, swell, scar, soften. Water recurs as cleansing and return. Faces blur, refract, reappear. Transness here is not a problem to be solved or an aesthetic to perfect, but a state of productive liminality – somewhere between effeminacy and machismo, East and West, ancestral memory and contemporary life.

Ezekiel’s practice resists the Western obsession with fixity – with naming, categorising, surgically “resolving” gendered bodies. Instead, beauty is located in suspension. In the courage to stay unfinished. Influenced as much by Lana Del Rey and early Madonna as by Wolfgang Tillmans’ sequencing logic, the book loops and doubles back like memory itself.

Returning to the Philippines – where pre-colonial trans and gender-nonconforming figures were once revered as spiritual intermediaries – opened a way of imagining transness beyond binary grammar, beyond shame. Somewhere between a doll and a dog is ultimately about that “somewhere”: a tender, radical refusal to harden into certainty.

Read more at the link below.

23/12/2025

Early Access is now live - enter OpenWalls Spotlight and save up to 33%!

Presented in collaboration with WePresent, the arts platform of WeTransfer, and our historic partner Galerie Huit Arles, the award offers photographers the opportunity to present their work in Arles in July 2026, coinciding with Les Rencontres d’Arles. One series winner and 25 single-image winners will be selected for a group exhibition in the Grand Salon, with the series winner also receiving a £1,000 grant.

This year’s theme, Homecoming, invites work exploring return, reconnection and rediscovery - from personal narratives to collective and environmental journeys.

For a limited time only, Early Access pricing on one-off entries is available. Digital and Full Access Members can enter this award, and all BJP international awards, for free.

Enter now and secure your Early Access discount: https://1854.photo/4j1DN1D

22/12/2025

Ne M’oublie Pas (Don’t Forget Me) is an exhibition that insists on memory as resistance. Opening at Union de la Jeunesse Internationale in Barbès during Paris Photo, this new edition revisits the extraordinary Studio Rex archives: tens of thousands of ID photographs and portraits taken in Marseille’s Belsunce district from the 1960s to the 1990s, at a crossroads of migration between ports, train stations, and uncertain futures.

Originally founded in 1933 by Assadour Keussayan, Studio Rex became a vital stop for North and West African migrants arriving in France – men clutching suitcases, women staring directly into the lens, lovers writing tender messages on the backs of photographs destined for families across seas. In Paris, curator Jean-Marie Donat presents these images against hot-pink walls, assembling passport-sized photos into a vast mural of passage and presence. Elsewhere, enlarged black-and-white portraits glow from lightboxes, while a film slowly morphs faces into one another, revealing how bureaucracy can blur lives and how looking closely restores them.

Rather than flattening stories, Ne M’oublie Pas rehumanises them. At a moment when migrants, particularly those of North African origin, are once again subjected to dehumanising rhetoric, this exhibition quietly but powerfully celebrates migration as lived experience. Shown inside the former TATI building – itself a landmark of working-class and immigrant Paris – the exhibition feels rooted.

Read the conversation at the link below.

Images of North African and African migrants to France from Ne M'oublie Pas resist forgetting in a new edition of the show – BJP speaks to curator Jean-Marie Donat

20/12/2025

IDEA’s Davide Sorrenti Journals: Volume 1 (1994–1995) returns us to the origin of a vision that would later be misunderstood, sensationalised, and endlessly referenced. Born in Naples and raised in New York within a family of photographers, Sorrenti developed a visual language as intimate as it was disruptive while still a teenager. These journals, compiled years before fashion’s fixation on his imagery, are not polished portfolios, but living documents. They bring together drawings, handwritten thoughts, Polaroids, contact sheets, fragments of a young artist observing his world.

Edited by his mother, Francesca Sorrenti, the publication resists nostalgia. Instead, it insists on clarity. By preserving the pages exactly as Sorrenti made them, it allows readers to encounter him without the noise that followed his death in 1997 at just twenty years old. Born with thalassemia, his awareness of fragility shaped the tenderness and melancholy that runs through his work, often eclipsed by reductive narratives around ‘heroin chic’.

This first volume predates the controversy and recognition that would come through Interview, i-D and Detour. At the link below, Francesca Sorrenti elaborates on the book.

This is where the late photographer collected ideas, drawings, writing, tear and contact sheets, test prints, flyers – here, Sorrenti’s mother elaborates on the new IDEA publication

19/12/2025

Speaking with Simon Bainbridge, discusses Mrs Doubtfire, British eccentrics, and the kit that helps him create his joyful view of British life.

Shooting primarily candid, street photography, the London-based photographer thrives chatting with and photographing strangers across the UK, with the intention of celebrating "the lighter, friendlier side of being British."

Experimentation is key to his playful aesthetic. “I go through phases, wanting to shoot 28mm all the time, then winter comes and I can’t shoot 28mm, so I sell it. I sell to MPB regularly. It’s super straightforward. I’ve used them for years" explains Edgoose.

Read the full interview:

In partnership with MPB, British Journal of Photography delves into the kit that helps craft Suzie Howell's signature serene images

19/12/2025

In the mid-1970s, Daniel Meadows spent two years in the Borough of Pendle, Lancashire, where he photographed Bancroft Shed, the last steam-powered cotton-weaving mill in the district. His portraits captured a community working against the backdrop of industrial decline.

First shown in 1978 through the Half Moon Photography Workshop’s touring programme, Shuttles, Steam and Soot travelled widely before the exhibition was eventually lost.

Fifty years later, Meadows has worked with Four Corner and Bluecoat Press to recreate the project as three accessible 20-page newsprint publications. To ensure high-quality reproduction, Bluecoat Press collaborated with Newspaper Club, specialists in newspaper printing on ethically sourced 80GSM paper.

The full set is available now for £30. Very limited signed editions are also available. Order yours now: https://1854.photo/3MmAjdW

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18/12/2025

OPEN FOR ENTRIES: OpenWalls Spotlight: BJP x WePresent

Created to elevate both emerging and established photographers, OpenWalls has spent the past eight years partnering with one of Arles’ most iconic spaces: Galerie Huit Arles, a 17th-century mansion, coinciding withLes Rencontres d’Arles.

This year marks the second edition of OpenWalls Spotlight in collaboration with WePresent, the arts platform of WeTransfer. One series winner and 25 single-image winners will be selected to exhibit their work in the Grand Salon at Galerie Huit, with the series winner also receiving a £1,000 grant.

The theme for this edition is Homecoming, inviting photographers to explore what it means to return: to a place, a person, a memory, or a version of oneself. It reflects reunion, reconnection and the journeys that shape identity and belonging, while also considering how people, societies and ecosystems find their way back to themselves. Homecoming can be intimate or expansive, offering space for stories of resilience, restoration and rediscovery at the threshold where past and present meet.

To celebrate the launch, we are opening submissions with Early Access pricing, available for a limited time only. Our Digital Access and Full Access Members are able to enter this and all of our international awards for free.

Enter now and secure your Early Access discount: https://1854.photo/48HuUH4

17/12/2025

A Christmas gift that lasts all year! Give a British Journal of Photography subscription and offer a year of photography🌲

Subscriptions start from just £39 and give the recipient immediate access via our online reader, including the latest issue, 20+ back issues and a full year of new editorial content. It’s a gift that can be enjoyed straight away, wherever they are!

Or for those who prefer print, you can also gift Digital Access plus four beautifully produced print issues delivered throughout 2026.

Gift British Journal of Photography today: https://1854.photo/3YjMBXn

16/12/2025

In Resident Aliens, Guanyu Xu turns immigrant homes into something where domestic airlocks where memory, legality, intimacy, and displacement are held in suspension.

Xu’s ongoing series, now on view at Yancey Richardson, unfolds inside the rented apartments of immigrants across the US and China. Entering as a guest and collaborator, he asks participants to excavate their photographic archives – family snapshots, lovers, meals, skylines, pets, childhood views – then returns to temporarily install these images across beds, mirrors, wardrobes, windows. The result is re-photographed as a single dense tableau, collapsing past and present into one unsettled interior.

Are these photographs of rooms, or of time spent waiting? Are they archives, portals, or evidence – fragments arranged to satisfy bureaucracies that demand proof of belonging?

Most of Xu’s collaborators live in spaces that are not meant to last: sublets, dorm rooms, studios whose impermanence mirrors the conditions of visas, asylum cases, and temporary permits. The home becomes both shelter and holding zone, bearing the weight of lives mid-transition. If traditional immigration photography promises clarity and containment, Xu refuses resolution. His images are layered, contradictory, excessive. They don’t describe a single identity so much as chart a system of movement – memories folding into space, space folding back into memory.

Resident Aliens is on view at Yancey Richardson, New York, through 20 December 2025. Read more: https://1854.photo/4anc9tT

15/12/2025

“If I'm knocking on the Pearly Gates and they say, ‘Okay, mate, what have you done? Just show us one book. See if you can get in,’ I’ll still go for The Last Resort.” Martin Parr

Martin Parr was sometimes controversial, but always interesting; former BJP editor Simon Bainbridge pays tribute to the man and his work, speaking with friends and publishers he worked with for years. Parr is one of the few photographers to have transcended his medium, Bainbridge argues, becoming not just an internationally-celebrated artist, but an instantly-recognisable figure in wider popular culture. Parr was also unusually generous, promoting others through his interests in collecting and curating, and through the Martin Parr Foundation.

“In a strange way, Martin’s work has been slightly overlooked at the Foundation because he was so eager and excited to discover and promote the work of others,” says Jenni Smith, director of the MPF. “We hope to spend time exploring Martin’s archive and exhibit more of his work in the gallery in the future. At the moment his Common Sense work is on display in the Foundation toilets, which he always found amusing.”

Read more: https://1854.photo/3XXUYrj

11/12/2025

“I want you to be confronted with your own desire and the frustration that comes from not finding what you’re looking for”, says Hoda Afshar of her recent project, The Fold. In the images, she turns not only toward history, but against it, confronting the archival legacy of colonial photography by reworking thousands of images originally made by French psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault in Morocco under the shadow of empire. What was once deployed to codify exoticist fantasies about veiled bodies becomes, in Afshar’s hands, a space of reckoning.

For the first time in her practice Afshar directly engages with an archival body of work, now on display at Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac in Paris, titled Performer l’invisible, alongside earlier work. By printing and digitally manipulating fragments, she fractures the intent of the original images, exposing the power dynamics embedded in the act of looking and demanding that the viewer confront the assumptions carried in every frame. This is a project about the politics of visibility, about who gets to be seen, why, and on whose terms.

The book, published by Loose Joints, brings together more than 960 reappropriations, alongside essays and dialogues that deepen this inquiry into representation, domination, and resistance.

The Fold does not invite complacent viewing, instead Afshar frustrates. It insists on discomfort, on critical awareness of photography’s role in shaping historical and political narratives and in exposing what the colonial gaze has long concealed.

Read more:

Working with an archive of photographs made over a century ago, the artist folds the gaze back onto the Eurocentric lens that shaped the images in The Fold