SPAIN: Photographic landscapes that trace the afterlife of place and the unfolding dialogue between rebirth and what remains.
Category Archive: Europe
RUSSIA: Gently observed portraits of the people of Bryansk that touch on the mystery of everyday life.
NETHERLANDS: Portraits that speak to the entanglement of individual, interpersonal and collective identity, the mutability of the body, and the fluidity of being.
NORWAY: Images that draw on overlapping histories of cultural suppression, religious conversion, and contested identity to weave ancient Arctic culture with contemporary ecology.
BELGIUM: Contemporary images that evoke the past while looking to the future.
UNITED KINGDOM: A collaboration between identical twins drawing on the traditions of European folklore, Gothic Romance and Hollywood cinema, blending British whimsy with a darker psychological ambiguity that lends depth and complexity.
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.
GERMANY: Reworking the traditional contact sheet on a grand scale, Thomas Kellner makes architecture dance.
UNITED KINGDOM: An exploration of Scotland’s cultural and historical figures through an innovative hybrid of photography, painting, sculpture, and installation.
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.
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.
RUSSIA / ESTONIA: An artist who uses ritual and imagination to rediscover her untamed inner self and resist the growing tides of unfreedom.
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.
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Erich Fromm
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.
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.
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.
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…
UNITED KINGDOM: Latter-day descendants meticulously restaged in the pose of a painting or photograph of an historically significant predecessor, with some surprising discoveries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
GERMANY: The Zeitgeist evoked in radiantly melancholic portraits in which the artist paints on the black of night with light itself.
UKRAINE: An elegy on a coming of age overwhelmed by the coming of war, of the landscapes of youth laid waste.
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’.
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.
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.
SWITZERLAND: Phantom iconographies that trace a collective tourist consciousness bestriding the real and the virtual.
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.
UNITED KINGDOM: A creative duo that explore the beautiful heterogeneity of human identity and personal relationships.
UNITED KINGDOM: Portraits exploring the transition from child to adult as it is expressed through modes of dress, social behaviour and body image.
INTERNATIONAL: Eleven artists and one archivist each select a photograph that speaks to them about the significance of family in its many ways of being and being understood.
FINLAND: The ambivalence of sibling relationships hauntingly caught in the autumnal half-light of northern Europe.
BULGARIA: In-depth documentary projects exploring the lives of people who live outside of the modern urban sphere and the connection between fathers and sons.
UKRAINE: The ever-evolving approach of a documentary photographer prepared to engage with uncertainty and place his trust in the intuitions of human subjectivity.
NORWAY: Images that seek to envision personal psychology and shared trauma suggesting an abstract and affective sense of what lies beyond that which can be seen but must be felt.
NETHERLANDS: Knighted by the Dutch Government, Erwin Olaf has earned a world-wide reputation for his immaculately choreographed tableaux that subtly suggest the ultimate uncertainty of being.
IRAN / UK: Interlacing archival imagery to suggest the complex interplay of culture and context across time.
SPAIN: Images that borrow the narrative or visual architecture of other stories, other pictures, animating each with the personal in ways that evoke new meaning.
ITALY/USA: From the imposing to the delicate, images assembled from thousands of nudes weaving across a panoramic field of view.
A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection.
Oscar Wilde
BELGIUM/FRANCE: Visual poetry, nature photography and digital design come together in Catherine Nelson’s transcendent landscapes to evoke the complexity of ecological equilibrium.
FINLAND: One of the country’s most celebrated photographers discusses his deep connection with the northern landscape and the Sámi people who live there.
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre.
Walter Benjamin
SWEDEN: A simple pinhole camera used to create images that evoke the primordial and the post-apocalyptic; a tension between humankind and the rest of nature.
LATVIA: Personal evocations of the impact of social and ideological change while living through the turbulent post-war and post-Soviet eras.
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Dorothea Lange
GERMANY: What are the implications of an AI generated image winning the world’s largest photography competition? For photography, for society, and for the arts?
RUSSIA: An artistic partnership with experimentation at the heart of a creative process that blends the sensual and the conceptual.
SPAIN: an artist who is also a scientist, harnessing scientific technologies to visualise the invisible.
The only true voyage of discovery… would be not to visit strange lands but to behold the universe through the eyes of another…
Marcel Proust
UNITED KINGDOM: Whimsical, poignant, fantastical, dark… these family photos restage the complex nature of parenting and the domestic dynamic, from ageing and the shift in mutual dependence, to ultimate departure.
INTERNATIONAL: Eleven artists reflect on what they learned during the pandemic, picking just one thing they would reimagine for the better in the future.
POLAND: Atmospheric images of a social, political, and economic landscape that has changed radically over the past sixty years.
UKRAINE: Visualising the journey towards self-realisation that dances between empathic attunement and the artist’s own interior sensibility.
ESTONIA / AFRICA: Images of love and loss delicately exploring the essential mystery of human interconnection.
VIDEO: marking 150 interviews published on Talking Pictures.
UNITED KINGDOM: an insider’s sensitive depiction of a group of south London fighters who find self-discipline, confidence, and connectedness through martial arts.
RUSSIA / SPAIN: Alisa Sibirskaya creates photographic tableaux echoing themes from the Dutch Baroque and Siberian folktales that capture the luminous glow of a bygone age.
FINLAND / USA: After five decades re-imagining his body as something malleable and re-interpretable, Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s images remain as vital as those of his youth, and as refreshingly original.
AUSTRALIA / ICELAND: Haunting images of natural, urban, and industrial landscapes that rekindle a mythical past or spark ethical speculation about the future.
RUSSIA / USA: One man’s quest for a more nuanced way of being, teasing apart notions of morality from those of dogma, of identity from those of normality.
UNITED KINGDOM: Going beyond the clichés and prejudices about homelessness by facilitating each participant to create their own self-portrait.
The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.
Albert Einstein
UNITED KINGDOM: Conjuring the familial past and a satirical future through the evocative power of photographic masks.
GERMANY: The uncanny and the documentary synergise as temporal and dimensional shifts reveal a prescient vision in the context of current events.
FINLAND: Landscapes, ice, and flea-market clothing and fabrics come together in an unusual aesthetic and conceptual marriage – part myth, part speculation.
BOSNIA / AUSTRALIA: Darkly beautiful images that use alternative photographic processes to convey the ultimate ambiguity of life as experience.
INTERNATIONAL: Nine photographic artists from across five continents reflect on what motivates them to create photographs.
UKRAINE: The artistic trope of the male nude re-imagined as emblem of a new generation of young Eastern European men.
UNITED KINGDOM: A photographer who looks beyond the momentary click of the shutter to understand the wider social, historical, economic, and environmental context of our globalised world.
I don't want art for a few,
any more than education for a few,
or freedom for a few.William Morris
BELGIUM: The Belgian spirit of whimsical individuality found hiding in plain sight at the edge of suburbia.
ROMANIA: a community of homeless people come together to find companionship, shelter and a degree of mutual sustainability in a network of tunnels under the city of Bucharest.
PAISES BAJOS: Retratos que hablan de la complejidad de la identidad individual, interpersonal y colectiva, de la mutabilidad del ser humano y de la fluidez interior.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
Pablo Picasso
UKRAINE: Psychological dramas that play out the emotional interior of their protagonists: the aching desire to connect that can never be fully realised.
Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.
Alasdair Gray
UNITED KINGDOM: Environmental portraiture exploring family ties across three generations in an area of high socio-economic deprivation.
FRANCE: As the old civilisation collapses generating crisis, illusion and corruption, the paradox of the real echoes through the imaginative lens of memory.
INTERNATIONAL: Impressions of Christmas and the New Year through the kaleidoscopic lens of artists from Asia, the Americas, Europe and Oceania.
Story telling reveals meaning without the error of defining it.
Hannah Arendt
A photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
John Berger