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
URUGUAY: An artist, chemist, craftsman, essayist, poet, and teacher, who imbues photography with a newfound physical and philosophical dimension.
UNITED KINGDOM: A creative duo that explore the beautiful heterogeneity of human identity and personal relationships.
CANADA: A fifteen-year project that may well be the most extensive photographic documentation of Hutterite culture ever produced.
USA: Spanning six decades, Mariette Pathy Allen’s sensitive portraits have chronicled the transgender and non-binary community.
UNITED KINGDOM: Portraits exploring the transition from child to adult as it is expressed through modes of dress, social behaviour and body image.
AUSTRALIA: Integrating science and aesthetics, David Malin’s photographs changed the way we think about the universe.
The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.
William Osler
YEMEN: Caught in the tension between cultural roots and personal identity, these symbolically expressive tableaux map an intimate journey of becoming.
USA: Ellen Jantzen uses digital imaging processes to synthesise a visual language through which to evoke the existential conundrums of our place in Nature and the impermanence of life.
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.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Colourful, painstakingly created installations that envision the artist’s innermost thoughts and feelings through metaphor and fable.
PUERTO RICO: Cinematic images evoking the narrative possibilities that haunt the Caribbean night.
FINLAND: The ambivalence of sibling relationships hauntingly caught in the autumnal half-light of northern Europe.
Teachers open the door.
You enter by yourself.Chinese proverb
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.
AUSTRALIA: Occult rituals that combine mysticism and modern technology, embodying the personal and the cosmic, the esoteric and the erotic.
CANADA: Now in his ninety-sixth year, Gabor Szilasi’s photographs are remarkable not only for their visual eloquence, but for their cumulative social and historical insights.
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.
Reality is always extraordinary
Mary Ellen Mark
IRAN / UK: Interlacing archival imagery to suggest the complex interplay of culture and context across time.
AUSTRALIA: With a subtle insistence, Marian Drew’s still-life and light-painting images question how we might inhabit and share the natural world in a sustainable and equitable way.
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.
BANGLADESH: A photographer with a strong social conscience and a deep concern for the welfare of the marginalised members of her society.
ITALY/USA: From the imposing to the delicate, images assembled from thousands of nudes weaving across a panoramic field of view.
GUATEMALA: Luis González Palma grew up during thirty years of civil war, but while his images evoke sadness, they neither sentimentalise nor do they counsel despair. Rather they affirm the transcendent nature of the human spirit.
CANADA: Experimental photographic techniques that poignantly evoke the subtle grandeur and ultimate fragility of the Arctic region.
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.
AUSTRALIA: Japanese myth and sensual metaphor reflecting upon the ebb and flow of loves now unrequited.
ARGENTINA: Memories of the Dirty War starkly visualised by one of the survivors of the regime’s Clandestine Centres of Detention and Torture.
AUSTRALIA: In a career spanning six decades, this celebrated aerial photographer has captured the magnificence of the Great Southern Continent.
FINLAND: One of the country’s most celebrated photographers discusses his deep connection with the northern landscape and the Sámi people who live there.
POLAND / AUSTRALIA: Blending the chemistries of photography and vegetative decay to create hauntingly beautiful images exploring themes around memory, time, habitat, health, and inner contemplation.
Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre.
Walter Benjamin
CANADA: Casting a critical but amiable eye over the medium in acts of ‘becoming photography’.
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.
CHINA: breaking with Chinese art traditions that eschew the nude, performative images that express the importance of trust, empathy, and personal authenticity.
LATVIA: Personal evocations of the impact of social and ideological change while living through the turbulent post-war and post-Soviet eras.
PERU: Lyrical images that find a melancholy beauty in dilapidation and enfold maternal wisdom in pictorial fables.
USA: Disrupting the sedimentation of artifice through a bold juxtaposition of the vegetative with the simulation, the object with its image.
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?
CONGO: Eccentric, impromptu performances set in the warlord-controlled villages of the Democratic Republic of Congo that challenge the established conventions of humanitarian representation.
AUSTRALIA: subtly disquieting images that evoke the artist’s youthful memories, unravelling the myth of childhood innocence.
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.
VIETNAM: Focusing on people at the margins of society, these relaxed domestic moments explore, without sensationalism, the intimate companionship that is a foundation of our shared human experience.
AUSTRALIA: Images of conflict that avoid the explosive spectacle of war, to explore the lives of individuals caught up in events beyond their control.
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
JAPAN: The photo-booth, the class portrait, the high-street studio, the job-applicant’s mugshot… hundreds of photographs and beneath them a single artist–model.
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.
SOUTH AFRICA: a remarkable synthesis of structure, texture, and authenticity exploring the triangular relationship between history, memory, and community storytelling.
CHINA: Youthful Asian women and men engage in the conscious but unselfconscious presentation of self within a milieu of open intimacy.
INDIA: Exploring radically different ways to think about museums, books, and photography, Dayanita Singh emphasises curiosity over cognition.
REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Land art seeking a fresh perspective on Nature freed from notions of territory and property.
Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Arundhati Roy
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.
AFRICA / AMERICAS: poignant imagery on a grand scale evoking the existential threat of human exploitation to both animals and people.
AUSTRALIA: Distinctive ways of being and knowing, experienced through a queer perspective on expanded photography.
BANGLADESH: A humanitarian photographer who not only documents injustice and inequity in the world, but also explores his own imperfection with poignant honesty.
VIDEO: marking 150 interviews published on Talking Pictures.
KOREA: Park Jongwoo – the first person to photograph the interior of the so-called ‘Demilitarised Zone’ that divides Korea – speaks about what he found in this, the world’s most contested strip of land.
UNITED KINGDOM: an insider’s sensitive depiction of a group of south London fighters who find self-discipline, confidence, and connectedness through martial arts.
MEXICO: Harnessing artificial intelligence to create photo-based images that may well come closer to the true nature human visual perception than will ever be possible with a camera.
PERU: A bird’s-eye view of Lima’s Pacific coast and inland desert revealing the delicately balanced, intimately entangled ecology below.
USA: Exploring the interplay of context and desire, and the evolving ways in which desire might be reconciled with an initially hostile environment.
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.
Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.
Mae West