02:49 UK time, Thursday, 24 May 2012
Photographer Simon Roberts needs little introduction. Having made the leap to long-term, large format projects, he has managed to use the beauty of the photographic moment to get under the skin of the societies he is documenting, be they in Russia or England.
His latest work looks at the recession, a subject that is often pictured in a simplistic manner with photographs that do not penetrate to the heart of the issue. Here, Simon talks about the work and offers an insight in to the process and influences that shaped the final piece, explaining how he has managed to steer away from a shallow representation.
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11:27 UK time, Wednesday, 23 May 2012
The year seems to be progressing at a furious pace, and so I thought it was time to catch up with Marwah Al-Mugait and Michael McGuinness, two students on the MA Photojournalism course at the University of Westminster, whose progress I've been following.
Both are now well in to the final stage of the course and have recently completed a fascinating group assignment which required them to team up and produce a magazine during the 12-week module.
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15:49 UK time, Thursday, 3 May 2012
It is more than 20 years since revolution and reform swept through Central and Eastern Europe. First in Poland and Hungary, then the wall that divided Germany for so many years came tumbling down, and on Christmas Day 1989 Nicolae Ceausescu's long running regime fell in Romania.
It was far from a peaceful coup, with many killed in the fight for freedom, and though there are of course conflicting views on the events that led to Ceausescu's execution, what is undeniable is that the changes in Europe that year created the map we know today. In Romania, as with many of the former eastern bloc countries, a new generation have since emerged with no memory of the communist country and oppression of that time.
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01:53 UK time, Thursday, 26 April 2012
Photographer Lee Karen Stow has worked in more than 60 countries as both a journalist and later as a photographer, often dipping in out of people's lives as assignments dictated. Yet five years ago she began work on a two-week project that has now become a permanent fixture in her life.
Stow was born in Hull, the home of William Wilberforce - a leading voice against slavery, and in 2007 the city commemorated the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in a big way. Despite her extensive travels, Stow had never been to Freetown in Sierra Leone, a city twinned with her hometown, and this sparked an idea to instigate a visual conversation through photography around this issue.
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10:52 UK time, Friday, 13 April 2012
Photography can be an ideal tool to give a voice to those who need it most, people on the margins of society, or who have little access to mass modes of communication. Yet often the pictures are taken by outsiders. What if the subjects took their own photographs and used the camera as a means of self-expression. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Today this is nothing new and accepted wisdom. Yet about 10 years ago, when the charity PhotoVoice was formed by Anna Blackman and Tiffany Fairey, this was not the case. Photography was primarily still film-based and thus costly, and their move was seen as a bold one to harness the power of storytellers in this way.
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08:57 UK time, Tuesday, 3 April 2012
A Martian landscape or something more sinister? It is in fact a picture of the Democratic Republic of Congo taken on infrared colour film by photographer Richard Mosse, and currently on show for the first time in the UK at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool.
Richard's photographs depict a nation during a time of conflict, from landscapes to rebel groups, against the backdrop and trauma of war.
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09:42 UK time, Thursday, 29 March 2012
With the Olympics nearly upon us many photographers have turned their attention to the state of the nation's sporting prowess.
One such group is called Image17, a collective of photographers based in Waltham Forest who were commissioned by the borough's Council to create a body of work called Taking Part. The project sees the photographers documenting more than 48 community sports groups in Waltham Forest with the resulting pictures being exhibited at various locations in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics.
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01:28 UK time, Wednesday, 28 March 2012
Twins have always proved an interesting subject for the photographer as they offer a chance to visualise the notion of identity, self and other.
Caroline Briggs, a former colleague, dropped by the other day and told me about her latest project which explores this area through the use of double exposure. It's a novel approach.
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15:51 UK time, Monday, 12 March 2012
Following the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on 11 March 2011, photographer Jake Price travelled to the region to document the effect of the disaster on those whose lives were changed forever.
At that time he wrote a report for me on his time in Japan, and subsequently a follow-up six months later from the town of Yuriage. Now a year on, he has returned once more. Here is his final report from the region.
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09:49 UK time, Wednesday, 29 February 2012
For the past 10 years photographer Peter Dench has been photographing the antics of those of us who live in his homeland, the green and pleasant land that is England.
His work follows in the footsteps of some of the most celebrated photographers of the past, including Bill Brandt, Tony Ray Jones, Tom Wood and of course Martin Parr. Dench can trace his inspiration back to his time spent flicking through books by those and others, such as Greg Leach and Paul Reas while studying at the Bournemouth & Poole College of Art & Design.
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08:34 UK time, Friday, 24 February 2012
On New Year's Day in 2004 a group of artists from Central Saint Martins College in London divided up the hours of the day and took one picture each - the resulting images being their collective experience of that time.
Yet the project did not end there. The aim is for these 24 postgraduate students to repeat the process each year for 24 years, steadily moving through the hours of the day, so that by the end each will have shot a photograph from each hour in the day.
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01:51 UK time, Wednesday, 22 February 2012
This photograph by Spanish photographer Samuel Aranda was recently awarded first place in the World Press Photo Award and has gone on to generate many column inches of analysis and debate.
It is a powerful picture, both in terms of the content and aesthetics. The pose has been likened to Michelangelo's Pieta and the Renaissance style of lighting elevates it from an illustrative news picture to something that has a heritage.
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16:17 UK time, Friday, 3 February 2012
Artist Natasha Caruana is not afraid to use photography to confront difficult subjects and a new exhibition at Photofusion in London brings together a number of her works that do just that.
Combining found images, snapshots and staged pictures, the exhibition comprises four bodies of work: The Other Woman, The Clandestine Purse, Married Man, and the more recent Fairytale for Sale.
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00:32 UK time, Saturday, 28 January 2012
The blurring of reality and the virtual world has come full circle. Just over twenty years ago I can remember watching the first stirrings of the Gulf War, arguably the first television war, and one where the images of missile strikes were commonplace.
The world watched pictures beamed from the missiles as they made their way to their intended target, or in some cases to a different spot entirely. War seemed remote, and the visuals did nothing to convey the reality for those on the wrong end of events.
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00:59 UK time, Wednesday, 18 January 2012
Alejandro Chaskielberg's pictures taken in the moonlight are distinctive and have bought him widespread acclaim. The Argentinian's series of photographs taken over a two-year period of the islanders in the Parana river delta blew fresh air through the photographic world, claiming the L'Iris D'Or at the Sony World Photography Awards in 2011.
He has recently travelled to North Kenya with Oxfam where he used his trademark style to depict some of those affected by the drought in the region. There is a danger that the ethereal beauty of his pictures could of course eclipse the subject, yet for me he manages to ensure that at heart his pictures are about those within the frame.
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11:05 UK time, Thursday, 12 January 2012
Phil added analysis to:
Ultimately it is the photograph that matters. Is it simply a recorded shot of an event or does the photographer have something to say?
Where once a photo was something to be valued, something you could hold, today thousands bombard our senses. Anyone under the age of 10 will inherit thousands of pictures documenting their developmental years - how, in these vast archives, will they locate those special moments? The notion of a few dozen Kodachromes documenting a life is long since gone.
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08:29 UK time, Thursday, 12 January 2012
Painting or drawing on a photograph might seem like an act of vandalism, and yet a new show at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool celebrates a collection of pictures that are all marked or defaced in some way.
Painted Photographs is drawn from the collection of photographer Martin Parr who is well known for his avid collecting of all things photographic. The pictures on show are press prints and publicity shots which have been prepared for use in a publication or possibly for broadcast.
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01:02 UK time, Friday, 23 December 2011
In the fifth of a week-long series by guest bloggers, New York-based photographer Melanie Burford looks back on a year in which she helped form a new photographic collective, saw a year long project published, and sadly lost friends to the war in Libya.
Visual storytelling is complex and difficult to navigate on your own. After 20 years of working for newspapers, I finally had the courage to resign in 2009. Since that time, I have been evolving as a journalist in the constantly changing landscape of visual storytelling. It was a tough decision to leave the Dallas Morning News, and the friendships and extraordinary talent that had inspired me over seven years.
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01:10 UK time, Thursday, 22 December 2011
Photographers are facing enormous ethical questions posed by the allegations aired during the ongoing Leveson inquiry. Here, Max Houghton, course leader in MA Photojournalism at the University of Westminster and a writer on photography offers her personal views on the challenges ahead.
"For a number of years I was relentlessly pursued by 10 to 15 men, almost daily... Spat at, verbally abused... I would often find myself, at the age of 21, at midnight, running down a dark street on my own with 10 men chasing me. And the fact they had cameras in their hands made that legal."
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01:06 UK time, Wednesday, 21 December 2011
In the third of a week-long series by guest bloggers, photographer Matt Dunham looks back at his year covering the biggest news stories for the Associated Press news agency(AP).
Matt Dunham is a 33-year-old British photographer who studied Documentary Photography at the University of Wales in Newport and has worked on the staff at AP since 2005. He is best known for his picture of Prince Charles and his wife Camilla when their car was attacked during the student protests in London in December 2010.
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