The British Journal of Photography

01/12/2025

When photographer Leia Morrison first visited Oxford as part of her Catalyst commission, she carried a story from her sister: the moment a woman’s portrait went up in Christ Church, and the shift it created in the room. A reminder of who gets to be seen and who gets to feel seen.

Commissioned by British Journal of Photography and the Bodleian Libraries, Morrison captured Oxford researchers whose work shapes global health, regenerative medicine and water security, as well as GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) practitioners building inclusive cultural spaces for adults with learning disabilities.

Her approach was simple: collaborate, listen, photograph people where they feel most themselves. From botanical gardens to college staircases, every location holds meaning; every portrait shows the person beyond their title.

The resulting portraits now enter the Bodleian’s permanent collection - a testament to representation, care, and the communities that make Oxford what it is. The series is part of Catalyst, a partnership commission between British Journal of Photography and the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

View Leia Morrison’s work and read more: https://1854.photo/3KwkkJG

📷: Leia Morrison

25/11/2025

Golden evenings on Lake Kariba shaped so many of Jono Terry’s childhood memories – the heat breaking, colours melting into one another, a sense of calm settling over the water. But as he grew older, Terry realised that the beauty he remembered was inseparable from the violence and loss that created it. His new self-published book, They Still Owe Him a Boat, is his attempt to reckon with that past.

Over six years, the Zimbabwean-born, London-based photographer returned to Kariba questioning what it means to belong to a land built on displacement. The lake that once felt like a playground for white Rhodesians is also a site of deep trauma for the 57,000 Tonga people forced from their fertile homelands when the Zambezi was dammed in 1960 – a “colonial legacy of broken promises” that still shapes life today.

Through sun-soaked portraits, soft pastels, red earth and purple skies, Terry captures both the lake’s staggering beauty and the weight of what lies beneath it. He listens to elders who remember life before the floodwaters arrived, to myths of river gods and sacrificed goats, to stories of abundance replaced by arid land and unkept promises. Many communities still live without electricity, just kilometres from the hydroelectric dam that transformed their world.

Read more about They Still Owe Him a Boat at the link below.

The Zimbabwean-born, London-based artist problematises his memories of childhood, speaking through his self-published book, They Still Owe Him a Boat

21/11/2025

What does a family truly look like when it stretches across continents, languages, and generations? Somali-Norwegian photographer Ayan Abdi is answering that question through Family in Focus, an ever-evolving study of kinship that spans Hargeisa, Oslo, Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro and New York.

Rooted in Somaliland and raised in Oslo, Abdi has been tracing the emotional cartography of the African diaspora since she first picked up her mother’s camera at 11. Her practice carries the echoes of cassettes mailed across oceans, envelopes perfumed for relatives far from home, and the ritual of dressing in one’s finest simply to be photographed in a living room.

Abdi’s forthcoming Family in Focus book and series of pop-up studios aim to further document these shifting definitions of belonging. As she continues to travel, observe and listen, her work stands as both archive and testimony, insisting that the everyday lives of diaspora communities are worthy of sustained, serious attention.

Read more about Abdi’s project at the link below.

The Somali-Norwegian photographer’s project Family in Focus was developed across several countries and continents, asking what a family constitutes

18/11/2025

At King’s Cross, Violet Conroy’s exhibition Rethinking Fashion Image argues that the genre’s future isn’t about perfection or aspiration, but about authorship, community, and the refusal to perform for a system that no longer feels relevant.

The photographers she brings together – past and present CSM voices – aren’t interested in recreating the visual codes of luxury. Nature overtakes the frame and casting becomes political. The line between documentary and fashion collapses. These images operate less as advertisements and more as proposals for new aesthetics, new bodies and new power structures.

“Editorial, non-commercial fashion work is a space of great visual innovation and freedom,” Conroy explains. “It’s produced some of fashion’s most iconic imagery, by people like Juergen Teller, Corinne Day and Tim Walker.”

Presenting the work outdoors on Lower Stable Street removes fashion from the closed circuits of galleries and brands, placing it directly in public space. If fashion imagery once insisted on control, this exhibition insists on friction.

Rethinking Fashion Image runs at the Lower Stable Street Lightboxes, King’s Cross, until 5 January 2026. Read more about the show at the link below.

In the Lightboxes at King’s Cross, Violet Conroy curates imagery which presents fashion as less a materialistic choice and more about “an attitude, a mood”

18/11/2025

Each year, Portrait of Britain invites us to look closer, not just at the faces of a country but at the stories that define it. Volume 8 continues that tradition, capturing a Britain shaped by resilience and quiet acts of joy.

Across the 200 shortlisted portraits, we see a country that is both fractured and united, changing yet familiar, constantly redrawing the lines of identity.
From care workers and campaigners to drag performers and farmers, these portraits document the everyday power of presence, the courage simply to be seen. Together, these works form a record of life in the UK in 2025: complex, intimate and profoundly human.

Published by British Journal of Photography and sponsored by WePresent, the arts platform of WeTransfer, Portrait of Britain Vol. 8 brings together all 200 shortlisted portraits from this year’s award edition.

Pre-order your copy and own a lasting record of this collective portrait of Britain: https://1854.photo/4hFO0jN

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