The British Journal of Photography

06/01/2026

For more than fifteen years, Diego Moreno has been building Onán: rooted in his upbringing in Mexico, where Catholic imagery shaped his earliest understanding of the body, the project weaves together devotion and desire, pleasure and guilt. The polychrome skin of Christ, the ecstasy carved into religious icons, and the crimson symbolism of sacrifice become visual echoes within Moreno’s photographs of his lovers.

Beginning in the conservative context of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Onán emerged from secrecy – motel rooms on the outskirts of town, fleeting encounters, and a camera used as a bridge to intimacy. A cycle of desire shadowed by shame emerged. Over time, and across cities – Mexico City, Montreux – the work expanded, reflecting shifting social realities, sexual freedoms, and the stark contrast between repression and privilege.

Named after the biblical figure condemned for refusing reproductive duty, Onán reclaims disobedience as survival. It is a testimony to healing out loud: an archive of intimacy that transforms personal trauma into collective possibility, and guilt into a new, unruly paradise.

Read more:

Mexican artist the artist has been working on Onán for the last 15 years, making photographs of his lovers, sometimes combining them with Catholic imagery

06/01/2026

Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey, is the first major survey show from one of the UK’s most innovative artists working with photography today, Whitechapel Gallery.

Since the early 1980s, Gregory has been a pioneering force in contemporary photography, playing a critical role in its development nationally and internationally.

Her work explores identity, history, race, gender and societal ideals of beauty, while expanding photography’s aesthetic and material possibilities. Gregory employs a diverse range of media and methods, encompassing Victorian photographic techniques such as cyanotypes and kallitypes, as well as digital media and performance.

Conceptually rigorous and visually seductive, Gregory’s work invites important reflection on power structures, representation and cultural memory.

Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey is showing at Whitechapel Gallery until 1 Mar 2026.

Learn more: https://1854.photo/49jktsk

© Joy Gregory

In Partnership with Whitechapel Gallery.

02/01/2026

Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, now on view at MoMA, traces how photographic portraits have shaped – and been shaped by – visions of pan-African solidarity across decades, geographies, and diasporas.

Rather than following a linear timeline, the exhibition moves sideways through history, placing images from the 1950s and 60s alongside contemporary works. Icons by Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Sanlé Sory, and Jean Depara sit in conversation with artists such as Samuel Fosso, Silvia Rosi, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby. This curatorial strategy, led by Oluremi C Onabanjo, resists neat categorisation in favour of circulation: ideas moving across borders, images echoing across time.

The show draws conceptual grounding from VY Mudimbe’s The Idea of Africa, a text that dismantles how Africa has been framed through Western systems of knowledge. Here, portrait photography becomes a political tool — not merely recording individuals, but articulating collective aspirations. In the decades surrounding independence movements across Africa and the Civil Rights Movement in the US, photographers used the studio, the street, and the nightclub as spaces to imagine freedom differently.

Keïta’s Bamako portraits capture citizens in the act of becoming. Depara and Sory document nightlife as a site of invention and release. Kwame Brathwaite’s images of natural hairstyles in the US speak to parallel struggles and shared aesthetics across the Black Atlantic. Contemporary artists like Fosso both inherit and fracture these histories, re-performing them to reveal their construction.

Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 14 December 2025 to 25 July 2026.

Read more:

How did portraiture shape a vision of pan-African possibility? A new show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art explores the ways images of everyday citizens informed political ideology

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