Curated by Magnum photographer Martin Parr and the Barbican’s Alona Pardo, Strange and Familiar is an impressive exhibition comprising 23 acclaimed international photographers, each documenting our nation’s changing social and psychic landscape. The iconography of our isles is omnipresent and familiar: bowler hats and London slums, aristocrats and bleary eyed hippies, rolling green hills and more »

There is perhaps something ingenuous in Martin Parr’s words that “all I do is photograph ordinary things”.  While his work is based in ‘the everyday’, he is drawn to the singular and the bizarre, the colourful and the kitsch. Unseen City is no exception. Housed at Guildhall Art Gallery, two large rooms display his output more »

Masahisa Fukase: The Solitude of Ravens Nestled in the warm, study-like space upstairs at the Michael Hoppen gallery, Masahisa Fukase’s forlorn, melancholic images of ravens encircle the room. Like Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock before him, the photographer did little to improve the reputation of these tar-black birds. In folklore and popular culture they more »

January Photography Roundup It’s nearing the end of January when 2016 really begins.  All those half-hearted resolutions left on simmer through the gloomiest month of the year (apparently it still counts as chocolate if it’s been melted!) start to come to a bubbling crescendo.  The seasonal sugar coma has passed and I emerge from my more »

Looking back on this year’s Urban Photo Festival (UPF), it appears that the genre known as Street Photography has been given something of a shakeup.  The festival’s packed out and wide-ranging events came to a close at the end of October (including but not limited to numerous London based exhibitions, a two day Tate Britain conference, more »

Death and decay, the precarious fate of humanity, our disregard for the environment; it would be easy (though complacent) to see The Abyss Gazes Into You as an exhibition seeped in cynicism.  It doesn’t help to dissuade this impression that Nietzsche, a philosopher with a notorious reputation as a nihilist, is quoted for the exhibition’s more »

Shirley Baker was one of the most compelling yet unsung heroes of British Documentary photography. Born in Kersal, Greater Manchester in 1932, she showed an interest in photography from an early age, attending Manchester College of Technology to study the subject. It was in the 1960s, while teaching at Salford College of Art, that she more »

Beyond Memory is a photography exhibition by Japanese born, London based artist Tomoko Yoneda. Co-curated by Paul Wombell, the works on display embody the core concern of her artistic output; the intrusion of past historical traumas and political turmoil into the present day. On first encountering her work it appears that there is nothing more more »