The British Journal of Photography

17/11/2025

Don’t miss out on Body Talk! It’s the final days to become a Member and get the issue as part of your package.

In this issue, we delve into representing the body and its intimacies, examining how photographers have approached these topics over time. Hoda Afshar’s show at Quai Branly in Paris uncovers a troubling colonial obsession with the bodies and coverings of Muslim women in Morocco, for example, whereas artist and editor Tianyu Wang considers the cultural contexts of four artists – Shen Wei, Yushi Li, Zhang Zhou and Luo Yang – in a deep dive essay asking how Chinese artists work with the body and desire, and their work is interpreted beyond their country.

This issue also features a look into a major show at the MoMA which asks how portraiture helped shape a vision of pan-African possibility, featuring well-loved images from Seydou Keita and Samuel Fosso. Elsewhere in the issue, Caroline Mauxion’s work plays with disruption to explore embodiment, care, orthopedics, and desire through a feminist lens.

In Intelligence, we speak to the Met about its significant new gift of over 6,500 images from Africa and Asia, from the Arthur Walther collection, which will be housed at the museum and toured around the world in coming years. We also speak to Souraya Kessaria, programmes and partnerships manager at Paris’ Cité internationale des arts, whose work includes offering residencies to artists seeking asylum from their countries of origin.

Read these stories and dozens more by subscribing to BJP by 19 November to secure this issue as part of your package: https://1854.photo/491xVmc

13/11/2025

This year’s Portrait of Britain photobook cover features Bimini, photographed by Jennifer Forward-Hayter. The portrait shows the drag artist moments before taking the stage at Mighty Hoopla - Europe’s largest LGBTQIA+ music festival, held each summer in Brockwell Park, South London.

In 2025, Mighty Hoopla was almost cancelled following a protracted dispute with local residents over the use of the park. The battle - fought in the press, in local courts, and on the very fences that cordon off the space - became emblematic of a broader struggle over London’s identity: gentrification, access to culture, and the ongoing fight for q***r joy and visibility. Forward-Hayter’s image captures the spirit of resistance that runs through this year’s Portrait of Britain: the quiet determination to exist, celebrate, and claim space.

Forward-Hayter’s image is among the 200 shortlisted portraits of the Vol. 8 edition of Portrait of Britain; in a year marked by turbulence, these portraits reveal how individuality and collective identity coexist, continually reshaping what it means to belong.

Portrait of Britain Vol. 8, sponsored by WePresent, will soon be available to pre-order. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive all the updates: https://1854.photo/3X9SlCd

© Jennifer Forward-Hayter

12/11/2025

It would be wrong to call a popihuise a doll’s house. In South African townships, children fashion these makeshift homes from scraps and imagination – play as an act of creation. It’s this spirit that animates Vuyo Mabheka’s “Popihuis”, one of 11 exhibitions at Foto/Industria 2025 in Bologna, a biennial dedicated to the photography of industry and work, on view until 14 December.

This year’s theme, Home, ripples through the city. Mabheka’s hand-drawn memories blur the line between fact and feeling, reconstructing a childhood without photographs. In contrast, Forensic Architecture’s Looking for Palestine rebuilds erased histories – villages removed from maps, resurrected through testimony and digital cartography.

Elsewhere, homes multiply and mutate: from the migration odysseys of Alejandro Cartagena’s Mexican suburbs to Julia Gaisbacher’s portraits of participatory Austrian housing that once reimagined how we might live together. Kelly O’Brien honours the invisible labour of cleaners; Jeff Wall finds quiet drama in the work of living itself.

Find out more about this year’s edition of Foto/Industria at the link in below.

12/11/2025

“I’ve always said that in Britain, it’s the politics of between the sheets that scares the living daylights out of everyone,” Mark Sealy tells BJP editor Diane Smyth in our upcoming issue, Body Talk. Smyth and Sealy discuss the 2026 Triennial of Photography Hamburg, which he has themed Alliance, Infinity, Love – In the Face of the Other, and which includes q***r Nigerian artist Rotimi Fani-Kayode, whose image is featured on this issue’s cover.

Fani-Kayode, born in 1955 in Lagos, Nigeria, came to the UK as a child and later studied in the US, before returning to England to pursue photography. He also helped to found Autograph.

Sealy’s curation is inspired by bell hooks’ 1999 publication all about love; the curator is “not thinking about Valentine’s Day-type love, bringing people chocolates and flowers”, he says, but more fundamentally about how we relate to each other and the world – and photography’s role in doing so.

Become a Member by 19 November and receive our quarterly print issues, delivered straight to your door - including our upcoming Body Talk issue.

Discover our options: https://1854.photo/3X6eIbI

📸: Front cover © Rotimi Fani-Kayode, courtesy of Autograph Gallery

11/11/2025

🚨 LAST CHANCE TO ENTER: Female in Focus x Nikon 2025 🚨

This award was created to address a reality that continues to shape the photography industry: women photographers remain consistently underrepresented in exhibitions, commissions, leadership roles and awards.

Last year, a survey of over 1,000 members of the BJP audience found that women in photography earn, on average, 30% less than their male counterparts and more than half said they had faced gender-based discrimination in the workplace.

Female in Focus exists to challenge this imbalance - not by asking women to do more, or prove themselves further - but by building space where their work is seen, recognised, and valued.

Now in its sixth edition, the award invites photographers to respond to the theme On the Cusp: a reflection on turning points and transitions, both personal and global. Work will be exhibited at PhotoIreland in Dublin and 10.14 Gallery in London, and reviewed by a jury of leading editors, curators and artists from across the industry.

Series winners will receive a Nikon Z Series mirrorless camera and two NIKKOR Z lenses, and the public will also have a voice in the new People’s Choice Award, with the winner 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/4o0SvHP

The deadline is today 11 November 2025, 23:59 UK time.

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