The British Journal of Photography

09/09/2026

“To be given the keys to the archive is a privilege,” says Mark Holborn who, nearly four decades after editing Chris Killip’s seminal In Flagrante, was trusted by Killip’s son Matthew to make a new book of his work, North. Published by Thames & Hudson, North eschews many of the images with which Killip is now most associated, instead following a single extended sequence that freely moves across projects such as Seacoal, Skinningrove, and the Isle of Man to reveal not just what Killip saw, but what he perceived.

For Holborn, editing a photobook is closer to editing film than arranging a portfolio. A sequence should become “cumulatively emotional”, controlling the reader’s experience of time, he says. “You move fast-forward, and you pause, and you slow down, and you accelerate... The looking at the book has its own time.”

Four decades on, what Holborn sees in Killip’s individual pictures is a similar tension between form and content. “The first thing you see in the photographs is that they’re remarkably elegant,” he says. “Their elegance is almost in contrast to their subject matter.”

Read more: https://1854.photo/4halvfj

© Chris Killip

07/09/2026

Rania Matar started her project Where Do I Go? organically, after she visited Lebanon following the 2020 port explosion. Observing women working to reconstruct Beirut, she realised there was a wave of young people who wanted to leave the country, but unsure whether they should. “I saw myself in them,” she says.

Matar left Lebanon in 1984, when she was 20; these women were the same age now. “My friends who didn't leave, their kids are leaving. It feels like there's a sense of history that keeps repeating itself,” she reflects. She started photographing these young women over multiple visits, using the same approach each time – put a call for subjects on Instagram, speak with whoever responds, and build a collaboration from there.

“I don't ask for pictures or anything [before meeting],” she says. “If they're replying, then they're willing to be part of this, and I figure they're interesting enough to be willing to put themselves out there.”

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Rania Matar returned to Lebanon for years to photograph the women navigating a country in perpetual crisis. By the time her book was published, war had returned with a question impossible to ignore

04/09/2026

“Over the nearly 40 years that we have been doing Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan, there has only ever been one rule: exhibiting and screening what we believed to be the best in photojournalism.” Jean-François Leroy

Director of Visa pour l’Image for nearly 40 years, Jean-François Leroy championed documentary photography to the very end, passing away just as the 2026 edition of the photojournalism festival opened. Photographers Kadir van Lohuizen and Jillian Edelstein mourn his loss, and – as editorial commissions disappear, and AI, fake news, and authoritarian regimes escalate – the festival’s team explains why Visa matters, and what they will do next.

Read more: https://1854.photo/3UrdlGF

📷️: Stephan van Fleteren

02/09/2026

It all began with the phrase ‘Toumayacha Alakana’, which Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo encountered during a personal visit to the Yagan Usi Museum in southern Chile. It is attributed to the Fuegians of southern Chile and Argentina, and understood to mean “to look with a veiled head”, the artist explains; while considering this a poetic proposition, he became intrigued by its paradoxical nature. “Why must we cover our face to look at the other?” he asks.

His research led him to the astronomical and scientific expeditions of the 19th century, which brought the camera to Tierra del Fuego for the first time. Valenzuela-Escobedo focused on the French Scientific Mission to Cape Horn in 1882-1883, which sought to photograph the transit of Venus across the Sun. “At first, the box didn’t produce images,” he explains. “Progressively, the camera began to capture images, however, the first people to be photographed [with it] never saw their own image. They simply saw an operator under a cloth looking at them for six to eight minutes.”

Valenzuela-Escobedo’s thinking has evolved into an ongoing project titled Mänk’áčen, in which he researches the genealogies of the camera in relation to pre-photographic modes of visuality. The latest iteration of which is now on show in the Dilip Piramal Art Gallery, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai, he explains to BJP.

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Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo’s latest exhibition, Mänk’áčen (Revision 6), at Mumbai's Dilip Piramal Art Gallery, National Centre for the Performing Arts, expands on long-term research into the genealogies of the camera in relation to pre-photographic modes of visuality

01/09/2026

Takuma Nakahira (1938–2015) was a radical and critical thinker, writer and image-maker, most noted for his 1970 photobook For a Language to Come, and for co-founding the political leftist publication Provoke. Less well-known outside his native Japan, Nakahira’s essays and texts have now been translated into English for the first time, widening his legacy.

We speak to Japanese photography experts Daniel Abbe and Franz Prichard, who edited and translated 10 texts – now published as At the Limits of the Gaze, via Aperture – which show that Nakahira’s radical and cultured outlook still resonates today.

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A new book considers the key 1970s work of Japanese photographer, political writer and co-founder of Provoke magazine Takuma Nakahira

26/08/2026

Female in Focus x Nikon 2025 opens at the International Centre for the Image, Dublin in two weeks!

The theme ‘On the Cusp’ asked photographers to consider moments of revolution, revelation, and transformation, the personal and the political, the local and the global. Series winners Laetitia Vançon and Giya Makondo-Wills respond with urgency. Vançon through the lives of Ukrainian youth caught between the world they imagined and the one the war has made; Makondo-Wills through the data centres spreading across South Africa, extracting value in ways that echo older colonial patterns.

Among the 21 single image winners: Ana Margarita Flores documents bonds of intimacy and collective care within female friendships in Togo; Jip Schalkx captures teenage girls lying side by side in bed, each absorbed in their own world, together and yet apart; Fran Rowse's Cornish Maids places women and girls in ball gowns against the stark landscape of Cornwall, holding the tension between aspiration and reality, and more.

📅 10 Sep - 25 Oct 2026
📍International Centre for the Image, Coopers Cross, Mayor Street Upper, North Wall, Dublin 1, D01 E5Y8, Ireland

Learn more: https://1854.photo/4y8pKxL

24/08/2026

With its cosy reading rooms, studied atmosphere and eclectic selection of around one million books, The London Library proved irresistible to Louis Porter as a place of inspiration.

From his series The Anatomy of Business (2012) to Desenho (2023) to his 2025 publication Search Engine and much more, his work considers the circulation of images, texts and ideas plus the methodology of printed publications, making his membership at the library an ideal fit. We visit him there to discuss his photographic practice and processes and why he considers the library as his studio.

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19/08/2026

“None of these photographers would necessarily deem their work gothic,” curator Isaac Blease explains. “We're using the gothic as a window to look at these works in a different context and see what meanings can be evoked.”

Dark Tales: British Documentary Photography and the Gothic reappraises prints in the Martin Parr Foundation’s collection to find the eerie weirdness in the everyday. Featuring work by Parr, Anna Fox, Chris Shaw, Jo Spence, Sarah Pickering and more, and curated by Isaac Blease, it draws on the gothic literary tradition and a contemporary resurgence of horror. It also re-discovers the shadows in photography, as critical to its existence as ‘writing with light’.

Read more: https://1854.photo/3U36MK7

© Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

18/08/2026

Soul City Arts () and the University of Warwick () present 'Good Muslim, Bad Muslim', a symposium examining how Muslim identity has been shaped by decades of Western media representation.

Curated by Mohamed Somji , the symposium explores the politics of representation of Muslims and what the demand for representation costs. Whether the framing comes from outside or from within, the frameworks through which Muslim experience is
rendered visible tend to flatten more than they reveal. The “acceptable” Muslim is curated for comfort; the box is ticked; the image is sanitised; the complexity is lost.

Bringing together artists, curators, and academics working against these conditions, the symposium treats photography as a site of refusal and reimagination, a medium uniquely placed to disrupt commercial templates, social media flatness, and the prescriptive norms that have come to stand in for Muslim life.

Join us on Monday, September 7 at from 1pm to hear from Asim Rafiqui, , , , , .rajina, , , , , @ and Mahmood Mamdani.

🗓️ Monday 7 September
📍Oxford House, Bethnal Green, London

Learn more via the link in bio and book your tickets.

Learn more: https://1854.photo/4hG7GWM

In Partnership with Soul City Arts & University of Warwick