REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Exploring the liminal space at the threshold of realty and simulation, original and replica, fact and fake.
Many an original composition is corrected into mediocrity.
Walter Scott
UNITED KINGDOM: Four friends of the late Tim Hetherington discuss the work of this compassionate war photographer who sought to depict Big History through the lens of small history.
JAPAN / USA: A photographer whose identity lies at the threshold of two very different cultures and histories, Osamu James Nakagawa evokes the spirit of place and ghosts of a past that still linger in the present.
GERMANY: Reworking the traditional contact sheet on a grand scale, Thomas Kellner makes architecture dance.
AUSTRALIA: Pat Brassington exploits the legacies of Surrealism while subtly subverting those (primarily masculine) traditions with a clearly feminine and feminist inflection.
UNITED KINGDOM: An exploration of Scotland’s cultural and historical figures through an innovative hybrid of photography, painting, sculpture, and installation.
You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled then something has been lost.
Martha Graham
INTERNATIONAL: We are social creatures, but it is a characteristic with many aspects. Talking Pictures asked twelve photographic artists from around the world to consider the nature of human connection. The images they selected are as nuanced as they are diverse.
AUSTRALIA: An artist painting with light to create richly coloured and emotionally intensified images of the natural and human worlds.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Constructing from the catalogue of British oil painting ironic self-portraits that situate the alienated Asian man in the midst of Britain’s aristocratic past.
UNITED KINGDOM: Throwing the paradoxes of domesticity into sharp relief, Sian Bonnell uses absurdity to critique the socially constructed role of women in the home.
USA: Kirk Crippens explores the tension between the American Dream of home and increasing precarity – gentrification, downsizing and foreclosure – but also the haven of the unorthodox.
RUSSIA / ESTONIA: An artist who uses ritual and imagination to rediscover her untamed inner self and resist the growing tides of unfreedom.
Photography has no rules, it is not a sport.
Bill Brandt
AUSTRALIA: Rather than illustrating an idea, Christophe Canato’s images propose a paradox that animates questions around gender, sexuality and the transition from child to adult.
GHANA: With few resources and no connections into the wider art-world, Nana Frimpong Oduro has developed a distinctive photo-art practice gaining recognition internationally.
UNITED KINGDOM: Here, in Part Two of this extended interview with Karen Knorr, we discuss her twenty-first century imagery exploring myth, power, and postcolonial identity at the intersection of nature and culture.
UNITED KINGDOM: Part One of an extended interview with one of the foremost British photographic artists of her generation whose work has shaped debates on class, gender, and heritage since the 1980s.
USA: With her unconventional mode of creation, Anne Skoogfors’ intimate botanical portraits capture the beauty and the mystery of flowers.
IRAN / AUSTRALIA: Poetically perceptive imagery that engages the layers of displacement, difference and marginality that define what it means to be ‘other’.
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Erich Fromm
MEXICO: conceptual and performative images that capture the physical nature and metaphysical possibility of deserts around the world.
UNITED KINGDOM: A photographer drawn to older members of the community, those with a life lived – eventful, however ordinary. The Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers born to decades of deprivation and opportunity.
BRAZIL: Spectacular images that extend the concepts of time, space and perspective to explore the complex and multifarious nature of our contemporary world.
AUSTRALIA: a remarkable synthesis of timeless Aboriginal wisdom and radically innovative printmaking that creates pictures of intense poetic beauty and philosophical depth.
A closed mind is like a closed book; just a block of wood.
Chinese Proverb
FRANCE: For Denis Darzacq, the body is an instrument of social critique with which to explore the constraints and barriers suffered by people marginalised by materialist society.
ARGENTINA: A hybrid approach to the photographic that digs deep into the complex relationship between culture and nature, decay and renewal.
AUSTRALIA: Alasdair Foster, a curator, researcher, and writer who draws on an array of experiences from around the world, offers his perspective on photography – and where it’s going next. Interview by Alexander Strecker.
USA: Repurposing their household possessions to create a mandala or build a spaceship, Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen use photography, video, performance and installation to explore the paradoxes of the American Dream.
UNITED KINGDOM: Voted one of the top three physique photographers in Europe in the fifties and sixties, Frank Morton published under the professional name of Hoffman of Edinburgh. This article takes a double historical perspective combining his interview made in 1986 and my own present-day reflection on his life and work, three and a half decades after his death.
ARGENTINA: A nocturnal explorer who seeks to communicate the richness of everyday lives and the profound histories of ordinary people.
RUSSIA / SERBIA: Three visions of the future: current harbingers of isolation, relics of a forgotten race into space, and a speculative evocation of post-human bio-augmentation…
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
Maya Angelou
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Bohnchang Koo finds in the simplest of objects and surfaces a nuanced expression of traditional Korean values of humility, practicality, and acceptance of the imperfect nature of being.
UNITED KINGDOM: Latter-day descendants meticulously restaged in the pose of a painting or photograph of an historically significant predecessor, with some surprising discoveries.
AUSTRALIA: Photographic tableaux that bring new life to the artefacts of historical and natural-history museums nationally and internationally.
BOLIVIA: An imaginative exploration of personal and collective identity amid the syncretic interplay of indigenous and colonising cultures of the Andes.
SOUTH AFRICA: With a unique visual signature, Roger Ballen’s existential psychodramas have maintained their uncompromising independence, vividly capturing the imagination of generations over five decades.
INDIA / UK: Challenging the prejudices ingrained in conventional constructions of beauty and the traditional role of women, Sujata Setia emphasises the potential for survival, redefinition, and regeneration.
A real diamond is never perfect.
Anthony Doerr
AUSTRALIA: An unconventional approach to portraiture that subverts clichés and stereotypes to emphasise the value of real human relationships over fantasy or caricature.
IRAN: Deeply poetic imagery that speaks to complexity of grieving through the simple arrangement of objects, of alienation through the filtering of daily denial.
ITALY: Elena Givone uses photography and storytelling to help young refugees imagine a better future – images to inspire hope in the child and compassion in the viewer.
GERMANY: Experiential space and resonant fragments of childhood memory brought to life in precise yet elusive detail.
USA: Meryl Meisler’s photographs capture New York City in the transformative decades of the late twentieth century, offering a rare glimpse into her extended Jewish family, the vibrant Brooklyn disco scene before gentrification, and the evolving LGBTQ+ community in the post-Stonewall era.
AUSTRALIA: Photography, digital montage and embroidery combine in images that draw the viewer into the often-disquieting aesthetic of dreams.
UNITED KINGDOM: Both visceral and vulnerable, Antony Crossfield’s visual language of the body engages with and challenges notions of (im)perfection, masculinity, patriarchy, and sovereignty of the self.
It’s a world, someone’s face. When I capture it, I see the future of the world.
Malick Sidibé
CHINA: A fusion of theatre and photography that, with an eccentric magic, weaves together the light and dark of the human condition.
PERU: An artistic partnership that employs the aesthetics of art to make evident uncomfortable issues of violence, racism, and injustice that many gallery goers in Peru would rather not think about.
ICELAND: Picturing the resilient lives and enduring landscapes of a small farming community in the East of Iceland caught between harsh reality and timeless myth.
AUSTRALIA: From cinematic tableaux that evoke the unsettled memory of social rituals and guilty entanglements, to experimental images of landscape caught in a speculative dialogue between subjective experience and philosophical reflection.
CANADA: Combining humour with cultural critique; history with psychology, Diana Thorneycroft constructs visual stories of the anxiety and contradiction embedded in the dark subsoil of Canadian national psyche.
RUSSIA: Quiet meditations on the confluence of memory and experience that seek the redemptive potential of landscape to translate space into place and loneliness into restorative solitude.
Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.
Dorothy Parker
VENEZUELA: Images evoking the powerful mythologies of the indigenous peoples of the southern Americas that emphasise the interdependence of humankind and Nature.
USA: An artist whose creative practice is as feisty as it is experimental, transforming her external appearance into visual metaphors of inner dissent.
GERMANY: Images that speak with quiet compassion of the impermanence that marks us out as human, and the dignity to be afforded to all, regardless of situation, apparent difference, or stage of life.
PERU: Christian Fuchs recreates his aristocratic forebears in performances for the camera that are as much psychological and metaphysical as visually mimetic.
AUSTRALIA: the stark reality of global warming given particular poignancy by an artist who identifies with the melting icebergs.
INTERNATIONAL: Twelve reflections on the nature of Beauty by acclaimed contemporary photographers from around the world, their images and ideas as richly diverse and insightful as their individual creative practices.
RUSSIA/GERMANY: personal reflections on the competing connection and constraint of family life, and the untenable expectations enshrined in contemporary iconography of perfect motherhood.
I never knew what I was doing until I was done.
Man Ray
MEXICO: Stories of an irrepressible archaeology and exhausted modernism; of rampant urban expansion and sublime natural grandeur.
CHINA: Without recourse to AI, Zhang Wei pieces together photographic fragments to create images that suggest the way in which ideological revisionism and Newspeak are deployed to encourage collective amnesia while making conformity seem inevitable.
COLOMBIA: In addressing the trauma resulting from the ongoing multilateral armed conflict in her country, Erika Diettes focuses not on violence but on bearing witness to the grief of survivors.
GERMANY: The Zeitgeist evoked in radiantly melancholic portraits in which the artist paints on the black of night with light itself.
AUSTRALIA: David Stephenson’s photographs are about very big ideas: the endless Antarctic icecap; the vastness of the heavens; the great domes of European architecture, and the luminous excesses of the modern metropolis.
UKRAINE: An elegy on a coming of age overwhelmed by the coming of war, of the landscapes of youth laid waste.
Nudity is a state of fact – lewdity a state of mind.
Paul Outerbridge
USA: Employing the symbolic and physical qualities of water, Wendy Sacks makes photographs that speak of the complex nature of human relationships, both light and dark.
CUBA/USA: Landscapes aesthetically reconceived as near and far, vista and texture marry in the moment.
INDIA: Described as “the most entertaining artist-iconoclast of contemporary Indian art”, Pushpamala N’s pioneering and influential feminist–conceptual photographic performance works seek to subvert the dominant cultural and intellectual discourse in India.
AUSTRALIA: An anthropomorphic metamorphosis in which bees not only evolve to humanoid form but behave with all the perverse complexity of humankind.
UNITED KINGDOM: Quintessentially British in their rigorous formality, these allegorical tableaux grow from the personal experience of an intergenerational life partnership condemned to the margins of ‘otherness’.
AUSTRALIA: A look back at the career of one of Australia’s best known photographic artists whose prolific practice has spanned five decades.
Art is not a privilege, it’s a right. It’s a fundamental part of being human.
Carmen Lomas Garza
GEORGIA: Staged annually in the capital of Tbilisi, this festival of photography is known for its openness and inclusivity.
SWITZERLAND: Playing with the nature of visual perception, Dominique Teufen discovers the creative possibilities of the photocopier, photoflash, glossy photographic paper and grey paint.
UNITED KINGDOM: An artist, activist, and co-creator of a potent form of psychological therapy centred on photography.
ARGENTINA: An artist and inventor who builds cameras to capture both space and time: from brooding art deco architecture to mind-bending aerial imagery and the world’s longest continuous photographic negative.
NORWAY / FINLAND: Poetic pictures of older people that seek to dissolve the border between human and nature.
ITALY: Spending extended periods with poor and itinerant families, Ciro Battiloro discovers, beneath the domestic discomfort and social neglect, a tenacious humanity and a love that turns “despair into delicate sweetness”.
UNITED KINGDOM: a documentarist whose photographs do not so much capture a moment as grab it by the throat.
Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.
Oscar Wilde
AUSTRALIA: The only Australian in the celebrated Magnum collective, Trent Parke’s work is acclaimed around the world for its innovation and originality.
SWITZERLAND: Phantom iconographies that trace a collective tourist consciousness bestriding the real and the virtual.
MEXICO: Dulce Pinzón creates latter-day visual fables that address real social issues: racial prejudice, low-paid workers, environmental damage.
COLOMBIA: Vernacular imagery reconfigured to speak of the universal at the heart of the deeply personal.
AUSTRALIA: Documenting the dysfunctional, the dispossessed, and the dogged hope that lingers amid the ashes of failure.
USA: Meticulously crafted miniature worlds that speculate on a future without human beings.
TALKING PICTURES features in-depth interviews with photographers around the world. Conceived as a continually expanding educational resource, it is available to everyone free of charge and free of advertising.
GERMANY: A father’s captivating images of his two sons as they grow from infancy to teenage.
UNITED KINGDOM: A forensic examination of plants, zoological specimens, snail trails, and nylon stockings that finds poetry in precision and unexpected grandeur in the mundane.
FRANCE: Famed for his unique visual sensibility, William Ropp’s photographs channel a desire to know and feel how another might know and feel.
AUSTRALIA: A satirical exploration the artist’s complicit, often uncertain, relationship with the social conventions of being a man.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Visually seductive allegories depicting a personal sensibility through the recombination of photographic fragments garnered from everyday life.
The aim of art is to present not the outward appearance of a thing, but its inward significance.
Aristotle