The British Journal of Photography

08/08/2025

For its 11th issue, Balam turns toward the archive as a living, breathing act of resistance. From war zones to bedrooms, this issue centres q***r and trans lives not through spectacle, but through self-determination. Stories are told in the first person. Margins become frontiers.

The archive is no longer something to be preserved by institutions, it’s something we make ourselves. In the absence of official q***r histories, photography becomes both evidence and defiance, explains Luis Juárez, editor of Balam

Issue 11 also marks a rare collaboration with Nan Goldin, whose The Other Side is brought into dialogue with Argentina’s Archivo de la Memoria Trans. These images collapse borders between artist and subject. Together, they ask: who gets to record history? And who gets remembered?

With rising political pressure and vanishing cultural support in Argentina, Balam persists. Each issue is made without certainty of the next.

Find out more and pre-order Balam N11: Radical at the link below.

A conversation with Luis Juárez, editor of LATAM’s first q***r photography magazine, on its latest issue and collaboration with Nan Goldin

07/08/2025

Get ready to dive into the next issue of BJP: Maps. In this issue, we take a look at how cartographies, digital reconstructions of place, and physical maps have been used as images and subverted our understanding of photography. Elsewhere in this issue, we visit Mohamed Bourouissa’s show at Fondazione MAST and gearing up for Paris Photo in November. As well as festivals in Istanbul and Oxford, we also have a look through BJP’s archives to remember Sebastião Salgado in his own words.

In projects, we explore the subculture at the heart of Marrakech’s barbershops with Zaineb Abelque, we meet restaurant rats in Diggory Lynch’s Auto-portraits, and we find collaged layers of black history with Ebun Sodipo. And as per usual, we review 10 of the best photo books on our desks at the moment.

Find all this and much more in the latest issue of BJP. Subscribe by 20 August to secure this issue as part of your package: http://1854.photo/3HhAiFN

07/08/2025

📣 OPENING SOON: Female in Focus x Nikon 2025 📣

Women photographers continue to be underrepresented, under-commissioned and under-recognised across galleries, awards and publications. Female in Focus was launched to address and challenge this imbalance.

Soon returning for its 2025 edition, Female in Focus opens for entries on 02 September in partnership with Nikon. This marks the second year of collaboration, and our continued offer for photographers to enter one single image completely free of charge.

Get your submissions ready and become a Full Access Member to maximise your chances and enter up to 10 single images or one series for free. With a Full Access Membership, you'll enjoy complimentary entry to all our internationally acclaimed awards and receive our quarterly print magazine delivered straight to your door - including our upcoming Maps issue, if you subscribe by 20 August.

Discover our Membership options: http://1854.photo/40PDkI3

05/08/2025

HIP HOP - Living a Dream, recently opened at Saatchi Gallery, traces the roots and rise of American Hip Hop from the 1980s to today.

This immersive exhibit brings together three legendary photographers: Jamel Shabazz, Joseph Rodriguez, and Gregory Bojorquez – each capturing a distinct layer of Hip Hop’s evolution.

From the streets of NYC, Shabazz’s portraits like The Downtown Brooklyn Crew (1985) are time capsules of the movement’s earliest days. His lens first caught legends like LL Cool J and Public Enemy.

Rodriguez offers a more raw, documentary edge. His East Side Stories peel back the layers of East L.A. in the ‘90s, spotlighting Hip Hop’s political voice and the rise of Southern icons like Master P and the No Limit Crew. “Their music was like the newspapers of the streets,” he says.

L.A.-based Bojorquez captures Hip Hop’s crossover into celebrity, from Birdman in Eastover (2005) to Andre 3000 & Big Boi (2002), revealing the genre’s climb from underground to global.

Find more images and information at the link below.

Galerie Bene Taschen exhibit the works of Jamel Shabazz, Joseph Rodriguez and Gregory Bojorquez throughout the 1980s and 90s, documenting the genre’s rise to popularity

01/08/2025

When Mohammad Tariq found a family’s old negatives in a Cambridge charity shop, he began experimenting with the images – slicing, scratching, overlaying. What emerged was 100 Glass Cruciforms, a body of work probing British colonial nostalgia and national identity.

Using a handmade glass device embedded with the red cross of St George, the London-based Pakistani-Bengali artist places this symbol over archival photographs – making visible the imperial violence often hidden in scenes from reportage and media.

Tariq’s work draws from legal research, personal history, and diasporic memory. His grandmother runs Alina Fabrics in East London; he grew up between Jeddah and the UK, surrounded by textiles and stories of migration. His practice – spanning sculpture, jewellery, and image – asks: how do we inherit, preserve, or resist empire?

In one image, Palestinian children reenact the Intifada; in another, a Liverpool schoolboy has the cross placed over his eyes. Both suggest how nationalism and conflict shape youth. In another, seeds from his grandfather’s Pakistani village are seen under the flag – a metaphor for migration, labour, and spiritual dislocation.

Originally shown at South Asia Archive’s Serpentine pop-up, the work replaces his own family album’s contents so that the personal becomes political.

Read the full story at the link below.

With a simple glass device, the London-based Pakistani-Bengali artist turns archival photo books into sinister revelations on British colonial histories

30/07/2025

Opening 16 July, Celebrating 30 Years brings together artists and estates represented by Yancey Richardson to mark three decades of the gallery’s work. Co-curated by the artists themselves, the exhibition pairs practices that share formal or conceptual affinities, creating a cross-generational dialogue that reflects the gallery’s long-standing engagement with photography and lens-based media.

Spanning a range of styles and techniques – from darkroom processes to interdisciplinary approaches – the show highlights the continuity and evolution of the medium across the gallery’s history. Many artists chose to exhibit alongside peers whose work resonates with their own, resulting in a selection that is both personal and reflective of the gallery’s broader curatorial ethos.

Discover the show at the link below.

The New York gallery welcomes its artists to co-curate an exhibition marking three decades of work

29/07/2025

What do we really see when we look at a map? In Maps, the upcoming issue of British Journal of Photography, we explore how photography both documents and distorts the world, revealing the slippery boundary between representation and reality. Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s imaginary 1:1 map, Borges’ allegory of decay, and Baudrillard’s prophetic vision of the hyperreal, this issue asks: where does the map end and the territory begin?

Featuring Zofia Rydet’s exhaustive portrait of Poland, Edmund Clark and Crofton Black’s forensic mapping of military spending and Elsa Leydier’s eco-feminist deconstruction of the photographic gaze, Maps confronts the impossibility of total understanding in a world of fragments. As Black puts it: “How do you know the parts if you can't know the whole?”

We also look forward to, for example, coverage of the 2024 Daegu Photo Biennale’s post-anthropocentric vision. In a world where Google’s cameras map every street and satellite images stand in for truth, Maps invites you to question not only what you see, but who decides what’s visible.

Subscribe by 20 August to secure this issue as part of your package: http://1854.photo/4lNOANs

28/07/2025

Nearly a century after Dorothea Lange captured the Dust Bowl’s exodus, Rossi returns to Imperial Valley, a place built on the same promises of prosperity and now fraying at the edges. In Dreams on the Dying Stone, photographer Scott Rossi follows the water to where it once gave life and now signals collapse.

This is America’s “winter salad bowl,” a region that feeds the nation but starves its own. Agricultural abundance here comes at the cost of water depletion, environmental decay, and the invisible labour of migrants crossing borders daily. “Water is like gold,” Rossi says.

From desaturated desert towns to the shrinking, toxic Salton Sea, Rossi’s lens reveals a place where the myth of the West clashes with a harsher truth. Portraits of resilience, like Doris in her dust-caked home or Alexis in a sun-bleached paddling pool, offer witness to the dreams built and broken on this land.

Dreams on the Dying Stone is about systems – political, environmental, economic – that exploit and is a reminder, as Lange once said, that photography isn’t illustration, it’s evidence.

Find out more at the link below.

Dreams on the Dying Stone charts migration, labour and agriculture in a country which is grappling with a politically polarised mood

24/07/2025

In his graduate showcase at Central Saint Martins, photographer Nimie Li turns the camera toward his mother to explore movement, memory and the complicated terrain between them. Shot over two months across trains, ferries, cars, the series documents a woman in motion. These scenes convey a story of migration, q***rness, and longing.

Li, who moved from rural Fujian to East London as a child, weaves his Chinese-British adolescence into the project. He recalls the London transport system as both a symbol of new beginnings and a site of emotional dislocation. Now, it becomes the backdrop for a visual dialogue with his mother whose presence is loaded with both tenderness and tension.

At times, she looks away. At others, she meets the camera’s gaze. Her clothes, partly her own and partly chosen by Li to echo an archetype of British motherhood, serve as subtle metaphors. Together, they paint a portrait of two people tied together by history and distance. “ ,” he tells BJP.

Read the full story at the link below.

Nimie Li’s graduate project about his mother explores his Chinese-British adolescence and poses questions around how movement effects intimacy

23/07/2025

The world’s biggest photography festival Arles returns for another year with the theme Disobedient Images. Whilst it largely avoids urgent politics, it includes many interesting exhibitions around images and how we use them, especially across Global Majority communities. At the link in our bio, the BJP team highlights its top ten exhibitions from anonymous photographers, Brazil’s favelas and the French Foreign Legion to one daughter reuniting with her father in Armenia.

Read our reviews at the link below.

The world’s biggest photography festival, Arles largely avoids urgent politics, but includes many interesting exhibitions around images and how we use them

21/07/2025

Brought up in apartheid-era South Africa, Adam Broomberg’s art has always been political and remains so in the Berlin home studio in which he lives and works. His work explores conflict, power and the ways in which photography intersects with the two, whether photojournalism, portraiture or footage from government surveillance cameras.

Broomberg has been working from home for the past year, abandoning his studio in favour of his living room, a quintessential Berlin wohnzimmer with wooden floorboards, white walls topped with intricate cornicing, and lots of light courtesy of a tall window and even taller balcony door. The room is comforting and characterful, strewn with an assortment of stuff – stationery, cameras, dog toys, artworks, and multiple books, including Broomberg’s own scrapbooks. “It feels good to be here,” he says. “Berlin doesn’t feel very safe to me at the moment because I’ve made myself very visible, so home feels like a hub.”

Broomberg says he misses having “a sanctified studio space, where you can totally focus”, but he adds that having one enables a certain kind of arrogance, and that abandoning that approach – like having children – has been humbling and enriching.

Discover more of Broomberg’s studio at the link below.

Brought up in apartheid-era South Africa, Adam Broomberg’s art has always been political and remains so in the Berlin home studio in which he lives and works