McCartney’s studio is testament to her varied and visually alert career. Tucked away on a quiet cobbled mews in West London, its three floors combine all of the practical needs of a working environment – office space, shoot backdrops, an extensive range of herbal teas – with the white-washed atmosphere of a gallery.

The space is festooned with McCartney’s images: some in a state of completion, printed at huge scale, others attached to a large silver board with magnets, covered in felt tip notes. A monobrowed Tracey Emin (as Frida Kahlo) stares down from one wall. Mark Rylance dressed as Olivia from Twelfth Night from another. Celebrities face off frogs and white horses, reigning over the neatly arranged piles of contact sheets and books. On the floor, a photo of neon lights has been turned into a rug.

“When I first came here, it was all offices,” McCartney explains. “I just stripped it out… It’s nice to have it quite clean.” We are sitting at a huge round, wooden table that used to belong to McCartney’s mother, Linda. To one side, a bank of windows reveals a bright-ish winter day – all that glass crucial for a photographer who prefers to work with natural light. In the background members of her team drift up and down the stairs.

McCartney has been here for more than two decades, using it as a hub for photographing, post-production, exhibition organisation, ideas generation, and more. For her most recent publication – a plant-based cookbook-cum-portrait project called Feeding Creativity in which she captured figures including the Haim sisters and David Hockney eating her meals – she had two large armchairs installed near the kitchen so that she had somewhere comfortable to sit and write. 

“It became my friend. What I like about film is that when you’re wandering taking pictures, it’s just you and the camera”

The table is not the only thing McCartney has inherited from her mother. Also a photographer, Linda McCartney was responsible for providing Mary with her very first camera, a Leica R7. After grappling with the challenges of shutter speeds and light meters, it quickly offered a new window onto the world, travelling everywhere with her. “It became my friend,” McCartney says. “What I like about film is that when you’re wandering taking pictures, it’s just you and the camera.”

In her 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting’, Virginia Woolf dwelled on the pleasures of walking through London. She describes the process of becoming extra-observant, distilled to “a central pearl of perceptiveness, an enormous eye.” For McCartney, the camera crystallised a similar feeling – preserving and making concrete the fleeting details she had been noticing since childhood. “It can be this big scene, but you see one little flower or something within it and it then seems like a photograph.”

As an ambassador, McCartney works frequently with Leica cameras, whether an SL for “all singing, all dancing” projects that might end up on a billboard, or the Q “if you’re out and about, or at a party.” She also has “a little compact Leica” which fits in her bag – another portable eye.

This range of models speaks to the breadth of her work, spanning portraiture, fashion, landscape, and documentary (both static and film), as well as more commercial endeavours. A particular light comes into her eyes when discussing portraiture: the delicacy of creating a rapport, knowing when to speak and when to be silent, the skills both personal and technical that go into reaching something “deeper than surface level.”

“If I could do a portrait of someone and just be in their home and take a picture of their unmade bed, that would make me happy”

Some of McCartney’s portraits are made here in the studio. “If I’m shooting here… it pares it all back,” she observes. “It’s really about the pose, the connection, how you’re feeling with the person. There’s less space to hide.” Really though, one suspects that she is happiest out and about where her gaze can rove.

“I love going into somebody’s environment,” she confirms, explaining her interest in what people’s possessions and personal clutter betray about them, “like how Pre-Raphaelite painters would have little symbols.” She references a 1996 photo of hers titled ‘Mum’s Side of the Bed’, a patch of sunlight falling across beautifully embroidered duvet and pillows. “If I could do a portrait of someone and just be in their home and take a picture of their unmade bed, that would make me happy.”

This image is currently sitting as a sizable print on the ground floor, resting against the bookshelves. It is magnificent up close, the scale revealing every wrinkle and stitch. It was recently featured in her 2023 Sotheby’s show Can We Have a Moment?, part of a trilogy of solo exhibitions that began at the Château La Coste in France and ended at A Hug From the Art World in New York last November.

Each taking a different theme, this trilogy gave McCartney free reign to revisit her archives from the past three decades, drawing new threads between her intimate, playful images – family portraits, rubbing shoulders with snogging couples, muddy festival-goers, fleshy roses, and performers readying themselves backstage.

The pleasure of a photograph is not just in the taking, but in its continued afterlife. McCartney’s studio points to the ongoing physicality of a photograph, whether it is a question of tweaking colours and rebalancing shadows or drawing out fresh details in the chosen scale and opacity of a print. In an exhibition setting, too, new conversations can be created as disparate images speak to one another across time and genre.

Towards the end of our conversation, McCartney brings up a fortuitous encounter she had with Magnum photographer Eve Arnold in the 1990s while overseeing a show of Linda’s work in a museum in Bradford. Arnold was working on her own in an adjacent gallery. “She was incredible… She looked like the lady in the [Looney Toons] Tweety bird cartoons. But then when you observed her hanging the show, she knew exactly what she wanted. She was very direct, feisty in a really good way.”

“Take a moment, observe, and think – what is it that I see here?”

The two got to know one another and McCartney learned an important lesson from this woman who had coaxed extraordinary candour from the famous: that the subject should always come first. “She had so much trust with her sitters,” McCartney reflects. Sometimes the perfect image might arrange itself in front of the camera as if conjured – but if it ruptures that sense of trust, it is not worth it. This sort of mutuality seems to define McCartney’s work, which often has a grounded, contemplative edge, full of quiet warmth. Really, it is very simple, she says. When you lift a camera, you “take a moment, observe, and think – what is it that I see here?”

Images taken by Alice Zoo with Leica’s SL2-S, with 35mm, 50mm, and 90mm lenses

“I feel that to be able to comment on someone’s work, I have to earn my place, and that has to be through the relationship we build together”

The word ‘diversity’ is circulated a lot, and there is wider representation than before. Things are slowly changing. But even now, you’ll find lists with maybe 10 to 20 per cent of the artists from outside the west. Very rarely do we see majority representation, say to the tune of 80 per cent [as in the Arles Discovery section this year]. I felt we needed to have that precedent. It is very important we have a majority of non-European, non-American representation, allowing for nuances to emerge rather than generalised perspectives.

While working with artists in the Global South, the possibilities are very different. Of course, the whole sociopolitical context completely differs, but I mean more in terms of resource. We don’t have patron institutions in the same way as the west, and we don’t have access to the same technical equipment all the time. For example, when we were working with printers in New Delhi or in Quito [for Discovery] the options for printing depended on availability. When paper is often imported, it is either at limited availability or at unaffordable prices. There are huge disparities in the production process itself.

Can we ever really have an equal world? That feels like utopia. History has shown us that things are always shifting, and the once oppressed can also become oppressors. For example, India was colonised but now it has colonised places like Kashmir. India’s independence was from British rule, but the postcolonial landscape continues to have caste hierarchy that was already in function for thousands of years. For the oppressed, it marked only a shift in the oppressor – from the British coloniser to the dominant castes – not a true moment of liberation. We all continue to have complex identities. In the west I am seen as a person of colour, a minority voice, but back home I am from a dominant caste. For me, these complex positions can inform our movements towards equity.

“Visiting an exhibition can be a collective experience. Everyone’s having this private viewing, but you’re also aware that there are others around you”

There are so many layers in the power relations of making an image. What happens in that encounter? There is this assumption around the power of visibility, the idea that people will get justice because they will be seen. But does becoming visible ensure empowerment? I’m not convinced about that. I’m interested in the simultaneous notion of refusal, that we get to choose not only what (part of us) we show, but also what we refuse to be seen.

Visiting an exhibition can be a collective experience. Everyone’s having this private viewing, but you’re also aware that there are others around you. It’s similar to when you go to the cinema and everyone laughs together. There’s power in that collectivity of the public. I’m interested in entering into a dialogue with the audience, I believe they have agency. People are intelligent, if you give them the space they want to respond.

What you do with the image, the activation of the work is crucial. If we think of photography as a portal, perhaps the exhibition can offer one point of encounter for a dialogue.

“Honesty makes a good portrait – that moment where they’re confident in themselves, when there’s trust involved. Creating an environment that is relaxed and that has nuances of love creates a great portrait”

“I used to love to go through the family albums as a kid,” he says. “I’m the youngest in my family, so a lot of my relatives had passed away, but to have a way of knowing who they were, of knowing their style, their smile, their eyes, understanding why they were placed in that part of the book, it was all super important to me. My grandmother used to always sit on the front porch too, and go through the family album and offer oral history, which I thought was amazing.

“But I feel like it’s the same for me, that the way I look at Pharrell is the same way I look at my great-uncle in a photo,” he adds. “Not knowing him, but hearing stories about him and being excited about it, especially because the people that I photograph have all inspired me in one way or another.”

Carter’s father was in the air force and was involved in the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers, “able to express himself in the Black is Beautiful movement”, says Carter. Maybe he passed on a sense that everyone has something special because that is what Carter reaches for in his shoots. As his friend and collaborator Tracee Ellis Ross puts it in the introduction to What’s My Name: “He creates a space that is less of a set and more of an exchange; kind of like hanging with a friend in their backyard on a sunny day in that peace that comes after all the food has been eaten, the catching up is finished, and you are just there together without an agenda. This is what he captures – the safety of connection, the beauty of being.”

“You’re just able to be your full self, and not feel ashamed of being a little weird or a little different,” says Carter. “Embracing that is really beautiful. That’s the best, and the most original. If you’re trying to emulate someone else it can feel a little forced. Honesty makes a good portrait – that moment where they’re confident in themselves, when there’s trust involved. Creating an environment that is relaxed and that has nuances of love creates a great portrait.”

Carter’s father died in 2021 and the photographer responded with his first solo show, American Black Beauty, at SN37 Gallery New York, in which he also mixed his own photographs of relatives, family photographs, and professional work. With his book, Carter is keen to continue this trajectory, working on self-assigned projects alongside commissions. He is drawn towards photographing his nieces, he says, towards the feeling of doing the shoot as much as the images.

“I often don’t share the images, it’s my family and I’m protective over them,” he says. “But to see my nieces laugh and smile – to be a little nervous but then, at the end of the session, feel good about themselves because they’re like ‘Wow, I actually am valued’ – I gravitate towards it. But it’s not just from them. It’s honestly everyone that I love to photograph.”

Micaiah Carter: What’s My Name is out now (Prestel Publishing)

“We’re interested in everything – what motivated the photographer, what were the challenges of their particular time, what else was going on, what were their political interests?”

Ovenden is Bodley’s Librarian, the head of the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, which date back over 400 years. After a 20-year stint with the institution, Ovenden was appointed its lead in 2014, and has spearheaded a new interest in photography. Shortly after he was appointed, the libraries acquired the William Henry Fox Talbot archive, which encouraged others to donate or deposit Talbot-related work. In the last decade, the Bodleian has also acquired archives by photographers including Daniel Meadows and Bern Schwartz. In 2014, Martin Parr was commissioned to make new documentary work in Oxford, while in 2022, Garry Fabian Miller was the first fine art photographer to be awarded an honorary fellowship by the library.

The final instalment of Miller’s lectures at Oxford took place at the end of 2023. He has also published a book, Dark Room, with Bodleian Library Publishing, and showed his work in an exhibition at the institution, Bright Sparks: Photography and the Talbot Archive, which paired contemporary artists with the photography pioneer. The show was curated by Geoffrey Batchen, an Oxford history of art professor and photo specialist. He also drew on the Bodleian’s collections to create another show, A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800–1850, which ran at Oxford’s Weston Library earlier this year.

Even though the Bodleian is now actively pursuing photographic artists and their works, both have been part of the libraries since the medium was invented, Ovenden explains. The Bodleian is a legal deposit library, meaning it is entitled to receive a copy of every book published in the UK and Ireland. This includes photobooks, so the centre holds an edition of Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature – the first commercially published book to include photographs. It also has copies of classic publications and supplements like The Sunday Times Magazine. Older gems in the collection include The Illustrated London News, one of the first periodicals to reproduce photography.

Many of the Bodleian’s regular books include photographs too – what Ovenden calls a huge “latent” collection yet to be mapped out. The archives of UK institutions including the Conservative Party and Oxfam are here, and they include many photographs. There is so much, in fact, that in 2022 Ovenden secured endowed funds to appoint a first curator of photography, Phillip Roberts, who was charged with collating what the libraries hold. Case studies are vast in number and Ovenden estimates there are over a million photographs. “We have an album of 120 Julia Margaret Cameron prints because we have the archive of Henry Taylor, who was one of her close friends, so she gave this album to him,” he recalls. “Another example is the archive of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel – all these Victorian clergymen out in the world had cameras, and when they came home they put lanterns and slideshows together and showed them to raise money.”

The essential challenge of Ovenden’s post is how to organise the photography collections in a meaningful way within the library’s wider project. “My problem was how we could make this more purposeful, to become a more distinct and visible part of our collecting,” he says. “And how we could develop a strategy to identify areas where we could do things that other institutions couldn’t.” The fact that the Bodleian is a library makes a difference. Unlike institutions such as the V&A or Tate, the Bodleian is not just interested in prints; it is concerned with the entirety of an archive; the details which might seem peripheral but which flesh out the circumstances in which photographs are made. This includes notebooks, finished ads and business records for commercial photographers, or casts, seed packets and political records within the Talbot archive.

“We want everything that documents the life of an individual and their work,” Ovenden explains. “This is necessary because we’re a universal library. There are people using our library for purposes we don’t even know – academics from scientists and medics to social scientists and those in the humanities, but also people from outside. One user was the set designer for Doctor Who, who came in with all sorts of weird and wacky requests.”

“Dealing with an archive is expensive for an institution, whether it’s a library, archive, or museum. You have to commit to that cataloguing and conservation work, but also exhibitions, publications and seminars, and all those things require resources”

Being the Bodleian has other advantages too. Renowned the world over, it is able to attract donations such as the “transformational” £2million gift from The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation, which funded Roberts’ position. At a time when other institutions are struggling, the Bodleian is an attractive institution to place work. Daniel Meadows’ archive was originally held by the Library of Birmingham, which put together a world-class photography collection before running short of funds. Meadows’ archive was mothballed, alongside other photographers’ collections, until the Bodleian Libraries stepped in to ensure Meadows’ back catalogue remained open to the public. This cautionary tale is one of the reasons Ovenden was keen to permanently endow the curator’s position. “To take Meadows as an example, I didn’t want to say yes until we’d got the money to catalogue the archive properly, so that it wouldn’t just end up as boxes in a basement,” Ovenden says.

Ovenden points out the Bodleian is not the only library to do this kind of thing – University of St Andrews Library holds work by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, while the National Library of Wales acquired the Philip Jones Griffiths archive in 2011. Institutions prioritise archives which make sense for them, so it was logical for the National Library of Wales to collect the work of Jones Griffiths’, who was famous for his projects in Vietnam but was a Welsh native. Meanwhile, the Bodleian holds a smaller archive of work by Dafydd Jones because it was made at Oxford student social events from 1980–1991.

Institutions liaise to make sure they do not collect the same items, Ovenden says, but there could be more collaboration and joint purchases, as happens in other media. (He helped organise a joint acquisition of the Franz Kafka archive in Germany). Photography is also collected in a fairly dispersed manner across the UK’s public institutions, with no overarching strategy to co-ordinate what is essentially a national collection, albeit one spread across various homes. “Some national strategic thinking could play a role in making sure that gaps are not created,” he says. “Dealing with an archive is expensive for an institution, whether it’s a library, archive, or museum. You have to commit to that cataloguing and conservation work, but also exhibitions, publications and seminars, and all those things require resources. While there’s a degree to which institutions can prioritise, I think it’s better to grow the cake rather than to argue about how slices are divided up. As this generation of photographers starts to move their work out of their homes, the public funding bodies need to come together.”

This institutional support for photography is a “no-brainer” for Ovenden because photography is so important – a key medium of communication ever since its invention, in prints and art institutions but also in books, magazines, pamphlets, ads, posters and more. He includes digital communication in this remit, with the Bodleian now collecting digital files and even archiving UK webpages. Ovenden has established a legacy that will continue at the Bodleian – and hopefully beyond – long after his time at the libraries, to ensure that his efforts are not just a personal passion that ends with him.

Even so, it is a personal passion. Ovenden’s sister was a professional black- and-white printer and showed him around the darkroom; as a young man, he tried for a place at the Polytechnic of Central London and was interviewed by the formidable Victor Burgin. “That wasn’t easy, so I ended up going off to university instead,” he laughs. “But I was the photographer on the student newspaper for a while and just always kept up the enthusiasm. I went to the Royal Academy’s Art of Photography exhibition in 1989 and realised the sheer depth of the history, and carved out a role as a curator of photography from there.” It is a profession that has served him well, but more importantly offered a legacy that benefits the entire nation.

All images from Desi Boys © Soham Gupta

Soham Gupta made his name capturing Kolkata’s unseen poor. Now his mood has softened, and the city’s youth movement has picked up pace

In Kolkata, young men crowd on roadsides, around food stalls, in shops, warehouses and arcades. From the tomb of Wajid Ali Shah – the last Nawab of the northern region of Awadh – in Metiabruz, to the bustle of Park Street and Mullick Bazar, men linger on motorbikes, smoke, laugh and flirt nervelessly, the same as youngsters the world over. One of them, Sahid, looks especially gleeful, his shirt removed to reveal a toned torso and a forearm tattoo sleeve (the word ‘Love’ is just visible). A woman places her ringed fingers on his bare chest, their easy smiles matching. Her eyes are relaxed, looking directly into the camera, while Sahid peers over his muscular right shoulder. His body, her face, are almost luminous against the night sky and worn paintwork of the thick railings behind them.

Sahid is an amateur bodybuilder, we learn from Soham Gupta’s Desi Boys journals. He has just started working in his father’s motorcycle garage in Tollygunge in south Kolkata, but often hangs out at the Safari Park in nearby Rabindra Sarobar – one of countless public areas or monuments named after Rabindranath Tagore in the city. “The girls are always dying to pose with me – and it always gives me a high,” Sahid says. After he has posed for Gupta, Sahid takes him to meet some of his friends nearby, boasting to them that he has just had his picture taken. “The others wanted to have their images made and I was suddenly engulfed in requests, from all sides,” Gupta writes. “And happily, I kept making images.”

These are the Desi Boys – Gupta’s friends, inspiration, subjects. They come from across this city of nearly 15 million, a swelling youth movement comprising both Muslims and Hindus belonging to a range of caste positions, including some Dalits. The idea for the project came about after Gupta was shooting a fashion editorial for New Delhi-based magazine Platform, where he was commissioned by Bharat Sikka. He began noticing what had previously blended into the background. Not just young men wearing fake designer clothing and dyeing their hair, but the way these sartorial choices constituted a new form of expression – the audacity with which they showed off, exchanged ideas, circulated pictures of each other, and saw their choices as distinctly subcultural. “There are different hints of masculinity in different places,” Gupta tells me. “They’re playing many different roles.”

Music is a key part of this new collective identity. Pune-born rapper MC Stan is an important touchpoint for these groups, Gupta says, with his lyrics describing life in – and beyond – India’s working and lower-class communities. The song Basti Ka Hasti is especially popular, its lyrics a combination of tribal hip-hop bravado and pride in a disadvantaged upbringing: “I’m a celebrity in the township!” he barks at one point. “MC Stan is very explicitly talking about the economic divide in India; he is the ultimate symbol for the Great Indian Dream,” Gupta explains. Another rapper crops up in Gupta’s journals, an amateur called MC Cidnapper. “He was not older than 20 – with a lock of golden hair up to his shoulder,” Gupta writes. The boy bounds over to him, excited that he might have his photograph taken and reciting a few lines from a new song about a girl who left him for a richer man.

New India

Desi Boys depicts a globalised India, but not in the way one might associate with tech-hubs, Silicon Valley CEOs and the country’s recent lunar landing, which prime minister Narendra Modi described as “mirror[ing] the aspirations and capabilities of 1.4 billion Indians”. Instead, the globalisation the Desi Boys experience relates mostly to liberalisation, social connectivity and employment – all of which have come about via mass mobile phone uptake in the past decade. In supremely competitive higher education and job markets, the arrival of the gig economy has offered new routes out of unemployment. The criss-crossing journeys these jobs involve add to Desi Boys’ sense of motion – of restlessness in a hyperactive city, of youthful excitement matched by its surroundings. “For many bourgeois and upper-class families, these boys are looked upon as a menace,” Gupta says. That, more than anything else, surely boosts their subcultural credentials.

Desi Boys was made in a specific Indian – and Kolkatan – context. Despite the fake Gucci clothes and Levi’s T-shirts, it is a simplification to assume that globalisation means simply emulating the west. There are other motifs alongside the preference for South Asian hip-hop. Several of Gupta’s encounters happen while searching for the next bowl of steaming biryani, while buildings’ pastel walls, DIY advertising boards and the boys’ sandals and coiffed hairstyles are distinctly Indian. The flash illuminates sections of the graffitied walls behind each of Gupta’s subjects. Exposed pipes and security grills speak to the thousands of vendors who line Kolkata’s daily markets. The youngsters smoke and flex their muscles, gestures whose universality as expressions of young masculinity give them an endearing edge. It is clear that there is a deep affection between artist and subject. “We are like brothers,” Gupta reflects.

The role of religion

But more than any visual cues, it is India’s tense political and religious climate that gives Desi Boys its texture. Led by Modi since 2014, the country’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has proposed a series of legislation which disadvantages India’s Muslim population. Passed in 2019, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) excluded Muslims from a fast-track for persecuted minorities to attain citizenship, while an accompanying amendment to the National Register of Citizens (NRC) similarly planned to exclude Muslims from an accelerated naturalisation process. Following widespread protests in early 2020, the NRC has yet to be implemented nationwide, with West Bengal among several states not under BJP control saying it will not enact the rulings. Cities with historically Muslim names have been renamed to reflect the BJP’s Hindutva ideology – Allahabad has become Prayagraj; Osmanabad is now officially Dharashiv, for example – and mob intimidation and violence against Muslims has become increasingly normalised.

The Desi Boys belong to both religions, and Kolkata’s political history plays an important part in the social harmony of the project. West Bengal was led by the communist Left Front from 1977 until 2011. “There’s no room for xenophobia in West Bengal – we grew up among too many hammers and sickles,” Gupta says. He recalls a discussion with a young man after he commented on his celebratory dress: “Eid is for the Muslims, but at the same time Eid is for everyone.” Gupta connects this environment to the willingness of the Desi Boys to express themselves, especially with styles that subvert a traditionally conservative culture. “Here, people feel safe to assert themselves, to go out in clothes that they like, to dye their hair. Desi Boys is a response against the xenophobic phase we’re going through,” he says.

Gupta describes Desi Boys’ subjects as “all subaltern in some way”. He draws a link with his 2017 project Angst, in which he made pictures of those at the foot of Kolkata’s social and caste ladders – the homeless and the hopeless. The word ‘subaltern’ resonates deeply in Kolkata, particularly in its adoption by late-20th-century postcolonial theory. Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee and Gayatri Spivak, founding members of the Subaltern Studies group, all attended Kolkata’s Presidency College (the latter two were also born in the city) before developing their ideas abroad. The group applied Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the subaltern to the marginalised populations whose experiences had been omitted from the history of India, especially narratives of how anti-imperial thought had developed into the independence movement. The subaltern is not simply someone who is poor, neglected or part of a system-based underclass. It means that they are excluded from the economic, social and cultural institutions of power within their colonial society, and – as Spivak queries – may also lack the means to articulate their condition if the language and norms of the coloniser have been impressed upon them.

“Desi Boys is a response against the xenophobic phase we’re going through”

Subaltern experiences

How does the subaltern relate to Gupta’s subjects – and his wider project? On the one hand, his photographs are the voice of subaltern experience. The way Gupta makes pictures is collaborative, but not prescriptive. The boys ask for their portraits for their WhatsApp pictures: “Come, take a group photo – of all of us! And you better send them to us! Not just one or two, but the entire set!” they tell him. His portraits perhaps circulate among his subjects more than they do in a western context, in which exploitative power dynamics risk being repeated. The image is networked, not static.

But still there is wariness around the ethics of display, particularly with Angst – the portraits at times shocking, raw and near-theatrical in their depiction of alterity and deprivation. The series was included in the 2019 Venice Biennale, the epitome of western art-world polish. But, as shown by the displacement of street vendors before the recent G20 Summit in New Delhi, the Indian establishment often chooses to look away from its own working classes. In this context, looking at people is recognising that they exist, even if it risks showing them as object not subject. To share images today is to engage with a specific moment in Indian history, to show integration, joy and modernity when openness seems on the wane. It is history without the responsibility of history; a record without the dryness of documentary.

When Gupta first titled Desi Boys, he was cautioned by critics whose advice he paraphrases in the Desi Boys journals. “How can you name it Desi Boys! You’re further marginalising the subaltern by calling this work that!” But Gupta’s photographs can be seen as a subaltern source – as history from below, with photography a new discourse. “Angst was made at a time when I was really emotionally down. It had all my anger in the work for a world that doesn’t care for people who are marginalised,” Gupta says. Desi Boys reflects a mood shift, but a way to invite his subjects into the image-making contract. “I’m more balanced now and it shows in the pictures,” Gupta continues. “They’re a celebration of life – my version of the truth that I am trying to portray.”

“Mixing capitalism and stock markets with the arms trade is one of the worst things that can happen”

In 2020, the estimated value of the global arms trade was $112billion, but the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza have bolstered sales; German manufacturer Rheinmetall’s share price more than doubled in the two months following the Russian invasion into Ukraine. The UK’s arms exports doubled during 2022 to a record £8.5billion, with Qatar the biggest buyer. Nothing Personal shows the full breadth of the equipment behind these numbers. Tanks, armoured suits, rifles and intelligence devices are shown in prototype or unused form, with an unnerving sterility which matches the attendees’ tailored suits.

Most of all, Teryoshin is attuned to the ways the industry justifies itself – a combination of wilful ignorance, profit-chasing and close ties to the security architecture of superpowers such as the US, China and India. By holding these narratives alongside the realities of today’s wars, dark ironies emerge. Slogans are a straightforward example: Kalashnikov Concern rebranded in 2014 under the slogan ‘Protecting Peace’; ITT Inc uses the line ‘Engineered for Life’. Nothing Personal is about conveying these ironies, exposing not just these closed fairs, but the implications of a world in which militarisation is incentivised. A huge battlefield-inspired cake at the UAE’s Navdex fair in 2019 is the most absurd example of these juxtapositions, while red carpets, copious wine and ornate bouquets feature across the series.

“For people working there, it doesn’t actually matter what they’re selling,” Teryoshin says. “You can sell vacuum cleaners, cars, killing machines, as long as you maintain the idea that what you’re doing is good because it’s for security, fighting against ‘bad guys’.” An earlier project, Hornless Heritage, saw him go behind the scenes in Germany’s dairy industry, where cows are genomically selected and artificially inseminated. Teryoshin sees similarities with the arms fairs in terms of ethical triangulation – millions of people eat meat despite knowing about the extractive and abusive nature of factory farming, and people continue to develop and sell weapons while civilians and soldiers are killed.

“These ironies are coming not just from my point of view, this world is isolated from the public,” Teryoshin says. “People are living in a parallel universe.” Even so, he picks out the fairs’ banality as perhaps their most sinister quality: “For a weapons trader, the best thing is to sell to both sides of the conflict.”

Nikita Teryoshin, Nothing Personal – The Back Office of War is out now (GOST Books)

“Not complying with the rules of a heteronormative world is a deeply emotional, sometimes shattering and isolating experience” – Bérangère Fromont

The politics of visibility have long been the purview of portraiture for members of the LGBTQIA+ community, who have used the medium to provide evidence of their love and lives since its inception. As a visual strategy, photography has been a tool for radical coalition and solidarity, building and nurturing self-regard and togetherness. While portraiture as a mechanism may seem deceptively simple to a cis-heteronormative audience, existing through images is not just a survival strategy for Queer people. It is proof of existence in a world in which law and institutions continue to deny our fundamental human rights.

As Boulos’ work reminds us, portraiture has been central to the ideology of resistance. Yet, the tension between visibility and safety is increasingly complex, especially in the context of social media, where identities and personal information can be easily accessed. “Since the revolution, I’m very conscious that images can put us in danger,” she explains. “It’s not the right time to bring the book to Lebanon. In the last month, politically charged, anti-LGBTQIA+ campaigns have drastically reasserted that homosexuality is against the law and the consequence is the death penalty. We’ve also seen increased attacks by radical groups as intimidation tactics. It’s too risky for me and my collaborators to be seen now.”

The personal is political

Boulos is not alone in her safety concerns. The UK prime minister regularly promotes preaching anti-trans rhetoric and health bans in the United States are fundamentally altering the material reality of transgender people. This summer, Italy removed the parenting rights of non-biological lesbian mothers, and Hungary instigated a law encouraging citizens to report same-sex families for violating the constitution; meanwhile, parts of Poland still uphold LGBT-free zones.

Despite the many hard-fought freedoms won over the last 100 years, the rise of the far right foreshadows a future in which the LGBTQIA+ community is increasingly marginalised in violent and insidious ways, rendering hyper-vigilance the only way of life. Where do we stand now? How are the politics of representation shifting? How does portraiture function as a care modality? And perhaps most pertinently, what does it mean to make work in an era in which visibility is both liberating and dangerous?

While the representation of the LGBTQIA+ community in culture is evolving, Queer image-makers are rarely recognised for their contribution, and most mainstream storytelling is still told from an outside perspective. “We are fetishised, objectified and routinely targeted by hate speech. How can we possibly build a sense of self in such conditions?” says French artist Bérangère Fromont, who uses her work to reclaim space and fill representational gaps. “I’m fond of the idea that Queers anywhere are responsible for Queers everywhere.”

In L’amour seul brisera nos cœurs, Fromont’s recent book, the artist celebrates dyke identities, creating an “archive of our memories, our imaginations and our dreams for the future”. The project, published by À La Maison Printing, presents a monochromatic patchwork of lesbian love through a playful exchange between Fromont’s images and poetic texts by Elodie Petit. Focusing on the representation of lesbians at the intersection of several forms of discrimination, the duo use gesture and proximity in their fight against Queer women’s erasure in wider culture.

“Not complying with the rules of a heteronormative world is a deeply emotional, sometimes shattering and isolating experience,” explains Fromont, who considers photography a space in which marginalised groups can share knowledge and build a survival network. “Staying in the shadows doesn’t have to be an obligation. I wanted lesbian love stories to be shown and enacted by people who experience it, for whom it is a physical reality.”

For the last four years, Jesse Glazzard has been documenting his transition in Testo Diary, a deeply personal exploration of his life after top surgery. Through the images, we witness Glazzard finding himself anew, with the loving support of his then-partner, Nora. The project was initially born out of boredom, during the London-based artist’s six-week recovery post-surgery. But over time it became more mission-led, an opportunity to address the lack of trans portraiture in the UK.

“We are living in a weird time,” says Glazzard. “We can exist freely but equally face so much backlash. On the one hand, the community is bigger now. It’s been powerful to witness the changes in my friends over the years as they are transitioning. But with greater visibility comes risk and hostility.” For many individuals, the journey to gender euphoria is not linear, and is deeply affected by sociopolitical contexts. “Some friends take testosterone, then they will go off it briefly. Even for me, sometimes I think I should go back because it’s so scary right now. This experience is just one of the reasons why we need to tell our own stories.”

Self-portraiture is just one facet of Glazzard’s practice. In Camp Trans, he collaborates with a community festival that exclusively hosts trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people in a safe space, encouraging joy and rest from the binary pressures of everyday life. In his latest work, Soft Lad, he reclaims the northern slur in a series of luscious portraits of transmasc individuals resting and relaxing at home and in nature.

“I’m only documenting the private spaces of people I’m close with, and most of the time, the work doesn’t become public. And if it does, it’s consensual,” says Glazzard of the delicate ethos of his practice. “I’m not sure I will ever be able to show the Camp Trans work, but it felt important to make it.” For Glazzard and others, building the archive and centring care in a practice is more important than showcasing the work, though it is work that also explodes our understanding of the linear, contained and sequential conventions of the cultural production of photography.

“As Queer people, we can’t wait for laws to change; for someone to tell us we can do certain things. We have to take chances, embrace our desires and express ourselves” – Janina Sabaliauskaitė

Create safe spaces

Contemplating modes of display and circulation which best serve the community is also integral to Devyn Galindo’s practice. A non-binary Mexihkah transdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, they opted to launch their first book in a space in which those who had participated would feel most comfortable. “I feel like I’ve been very centred on ‘by us, for us’ from the jump,” says Galindo. “I try to keep it more for the community, even to the detriment of my work being seen more broadly.”

While these values hold true for the artist, the rising violence across the US is also something they have experienced first-hand, and that has motivated a change in approach. “Right now, the work needs to reach beyond our community because we’re living in such an isolated echo chamber; the ramifications of that charted with the rise of hate crimes. I’m optimistic that if the work has a wider reach, it could create more safety and understanding about our community, instead of divisiveness.”

In God in Drag, a project Galindo has been working on since 2017, they explore their gender journey alongside their transmasc siblings in a multifaceted, intimate series made across the US. Like Glazzard, Galindo’s collaborators embody trans joy and speak to a new era of body positivity in which masculine femininity and feminine masculinity are not just seen but celebrated. In particular, God in Drag speaks to the sweet and tender friendships accompanying the tougher masculine aspects of taking testosterone, creating a remarkable contemporary portrait.

Galindo sporadically appeared in their previous bodies of work, but in God in Drag they centred themself as much as their collaborators, reconfiguring the power dynamics of the work. “I’ve hidden behind the camera for so long,” says Galindo. “The only way to push through this heightened fear is to create work where I can [also] see myself through the lens of my community.”

Being vulnerable in front of the camera is just one of the evolving aspects of creative practice for artists such as Galindo. The lateral experience of kin-building is also central, and goes beyond film and photography production to engage with all kinds of community work, from art collaborations to a monthly dance party. “I’ve been trying to think of all of my life as part of my art practice these days,” they explain. “The fear just motivates me to go even harder.”

Building community

For Queer artists, manifesting care goes beyond the politics of representation or their photographs alone. It is an intrinsic part of the work. Janina Sabaliauskaitė is an image-maker but also an educator and archivist, who curates festivals and runs a black-and-white darkroom in Newcastle for the Queer community. In her hands, photography is a tool for organising, as well as an act of resistance, reflecting her desire to build safe environments for creativity and play.

“Amazing things can happen when you empower somebody to use a camera or develop film and print pictures,” the Lithuanian artist says. “The most important thing is that people have the tools to start archiving their own lives.”

In Sending Love, an exhibition of Sabaliauskaitė’s work at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, earlier this year, she presented sensual and erotic collaborative photographs celebrating a sex-positive perspective on masculine femininity – a love letter to her transnational LGBTQIA+ community. The project features Sabaliauskaitė exploring her identity as both an immigrant and gender non-conforming lesbian, and is a provocation to listen to the experiences of Queer folks from a wider geography.

For Sabaliauskaitė, inclusion and collaboration are vital, and she is committed to participating in other photographers’ work as much as her own. She hopes this gesture of “building visibility together” will create a chain reaction, helping others feel safe and empowering them to take risks, to push the boundaries of how Queer bodies can be seen and represented. “I always make work with the intention that it will be visible,” she says. “First and foremost, because in Lithuania, there isn’t much. As Queer people, we can’t wait for laws to change; for someone to tell us we can do certain things. We have to take chances, embrace our desires and express ourselves.”

If the past is any indicator, the significance of today’s visions of Queer life will go unrecognised for years. Yet, these artists instinctively understand how vital it is to create a living archive of, and for, LGBTQIA+ people, and the endless and vital ways in which queerness is experienced and performed. Queer culture, like photography more generally, is entering an era in which the mechanics of cultural production are perhaps more meaningful than the final shot. As we contemplate the role of images in our lives, my focus has shifted from ‘Is this good?’ to ‘What might this do for someone?’

“I would say that the root of my ambivalence about photography, right from the beginning, was the power of the camera over and in the act of representation” – Susan Meiselas

But the authors behind Collaboration include two photographers, both of whom are still active today, and as its subtitle suggests, the project is an attempt to both reshape how we think about images and propose new ways to make and share them. Collaboration is less a condemnation of photography than a thorough reappraisal of how it works and how we have interpreted it, and a bid to find more equitable approaches. As its introduction says: “We hope that this book can inspire you to experiment with and find the joy in being with others with and through photography.”

Collaboration was dreamed up more than a decade ago by Meiselas and Ewald, who have both worked with photography for over 50 years and have long had concerns about the medium’s power dynamics. Meiselas’ first major project, Carnival Strippers, included extensive interviews with the women she was photographing, for example, while in Portraits and Dreams, started in 1976, Ewald handed cameras to children and asked them to shoot their own lives.

“I would say that the root of my ambivalence about photography, right from the beginning, was the power of the camera over and in the act of representation,” says Meiselas, who joined Magnum Photos in 1976 and became a full member in 1980. “It was right away problematic for me, and I know it was for Wendy too. We’ve known each other for a long time and, one time when Wendy was staying at mine, we started to reflect on our practice. We found we had similar reference points, and that was very interesting to us. That was an important premise, so we stayed in touch on it, and really reflected on it over the years.”

“Then we started to think, ‘Well, who’s going to write about this?’” laughs Ewald. “Because we knew it wouldn’t be us. We met Ariella at around the same time, and both instinctively said, ‘OK, we have to talk to her’, because she seemed to match and complement the ways we were thinking. We had been focused on our own timeframe, on becoming makers and the work we had seen around us, but she forced us to think about deeper history. We started to see real potential for the project to grow, so we invited Laura and Leigh to join.”

The finished book includes images dating back to the start of photography, from 19th century images of female ‘hysterics’ taken in Salpêtrière Hospital in France through to Dorothea Lange’s iconic images of the ‘migrant mother in California’ and beyond. As the accompanying texts point out, these images are iconic yet somehow unseen, the people they depict made visible yet also overlooked. The ‘hysterics’ are seen in terms of symptoms rather than as women or even individuals, while Florence Owens Thompson in Lange’s famed image is described by her social position, and usually deprived of her name.

Collaboration includes a quote from Owens Thompson, in which she eloquently explains why she disliked her portrait. “I’m tired of being a symbol of human misery; moreover, my living conditions have improved,” she states. “I didn’t get anything out of it. I wish she hadn’t taken my picture… She didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.”

The book also includes a spread on the portraits of ‘Papa’ Renty Taylor and his daughter Delia, which were at the centre of a milestone lawsuit against Harvard University in 2019. The case was brought by Tamara Lanier, who demanded restitution of the daguerreotypes of her ancestors on the grounds that the images were seized from them while they were enslaved; these images were made through a collaboration between Louis Agassiz, the head of Harvard Scientific School, who attempted to use photography to support his racist beliefs, and the photographer JT Zealy. A quote from Lanier in the book states: “For years, Papa Renty’s slave owners profited from his suffering, it’s time for Harvard to stop doing the same thing to our family.”

The changing dynamic 

Each chapter in Collaboration is arranged chronologically, but the book also features plenty of contemporary work, more positive examples of which include series by Meiselas and Ewald plus self-portraits by Nona Faustine, collaborative portraits by Endia Beal, shots gathered from Iraqis by Geert van Kesteren after the Iraq War, and Carolyn Drake’s participatory work with the Uyghur community in China, in which they drew on her images. Each project is given a spread and, where possible, the accompanying texts include comments from the people in the images and their names, as well as comments from the photographers. There are also texts by writers such as Abigail Solomon-Godeau, David Levi Strauss and Mark Sealy, plus voices from a new generation of thinkers.

“We have not stopped with the photographers’ ‘intentions’ or ‘statements’, but rather we look at those photographic events as they unfold over time,” explains the book’s introduction. “Attending to the mode of participation of the photographed persons, in particular, enabled us to reconfigure also the participation of the photographers, not as solo masters but rather as parties to the event of photography. We have refused to diminish or deny the collective effort.”

This approach de-centres the photographer, and the eight chapters emphasise this with titles such as The Photographed Person Was Always There, or Reshaping the Authorial Position. Other ‘clusters’ draw attention to more negative uses of the camera, with tags such as Sovereign and Civil Power of the Apparatus. This de-centring and re-reading of photographers’ work was not always easy for the featured image-makers to accept. “When the writing was edited, we always went back to the photographer,” says Meiselas. “And there were some who felt that the writers had not understood their work. It was challenging for them to feel not seen in the way that they see themselves, especially if they’re more used to being celebrated.”

“But that was very deliberate from the beginning, the idea of it being first person from the photographed person, and the photographer, and of having an additional commentary or interpretation or consideration,” adds Ewald. “We were trying very hard to keep those balanced, to have the voices come from all sides.”

Collaboration picks out some cautionary examples such as surveillance shots by Prague’s secret police, as well as more positive approaches, such as LaToya Ruby Frazier’s community-based work. But the book is not intended to pass judgement, or even assume an authoritative take. Instead it argues that photographs’ meanings are never fixed, and aims to open them up further. It intends to sensitise people to what might be inappropriate, explains Meiselas, but also inspire further questions and a new evolution of work. “It’s not a fixed set to be mimicked, it’s much more to inspire the next stage of exploration,” she says.

“Our dialogues, practices and conversations with other thinkers and practitioners across geographic locations have generated many meanings of collaboration in all its various iterations – utopic, dystopic, messy, complex”

Origins of a project 

In fact, the project avoided hierarchy more widely, and was put together collaboratively in practice as well as in name. Collaboration did not start life as a book, though this form helps spread it; originally it was a collection of interesting photographic projects, which cohered into groups or ‘clusters’. These sets were assembled into grids, which the group used with students and workshop participants. Finding that these grids prompted open-ended, thought-provoking discussions, Meiselas, Ewald et al decided to make them more public.

Collaboration popped up as a lab at Aperture Gallery, New York, in 2013, for example, then as a more formal presentation at the Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto. Visitors, students and collaborators were all actively encouraged to contribute, their insights helping build the project and book. One visitor in Canada suggested considering images of nature, and what they say about cameras and their use in surveying and commandeering places, as well as people. Collaboration includes a handful of these projects, including Public Studio’s Palestinian Landscapes.

Meiselas, Ewald, Azoulay, Raiford and Wexler also robustly discussed among themselves, and Meiselas and Ewald point out that they reached a consensus rather than achieving group think; Ewald urges me to watch an online discussion made with Milwaukee Art Museum in 2021, to see that Raiford and Wexler “have their own minds” (Azoulay was unable to attend). It is on YouTube and is fascinating, particularly as it ends and the women swing into a clearly familiar debate. As in my interview with Ewald and Meiselas, they riff off each other and jointly narrate stories, like any group used to speaking together. “I’m laughing because I feel like in our last couple of meetings we just had these ongoing arguments, not arguments but debates, about contact sheets,” chuckles Raiford.

“We do have differences of opinion,” Meiselas tells me. “That’s exactly the challenge. For example, Wendy and I are trying to find ways to wrestle through it [photography and its power dynamics], whereas Arielle is sometimes condemning it fundamentally. We’ve tussled that together in a number of ways.”

Of course, achieving consensus is not easy, and that is one reason Collaboration took more than 10 years to complete; in a deeper sense, perhaps, that is why it can never be finished. The introduction to the book ruefully reflects, “we feel we could continue this work for another decade”, but the group decided to hand it over so others could continue the discussions “in classrooms, workshops, community centres, in union meetings and at home”. Similarly, the issues and themes are ongoing for the five authors as the introduction also makes clear.

“Our dialogues, practices and conversations with other thinkers and practitioners across geographic locations have generated many meanings of collaboration in all its various iterations – utopic, dystopic, messy, complex,” it reads. “We are striving for nuance and inviting questions rather than offering final answers. We continue to learn from the work of others and are engaged in ongoing conversations with those who are included here as photographers, photographed persons, writers and other contributors to the event of photography.”

As Ewald and Meiselas tell me, the discussion is also evolving because the media landscape is changing. With digital imaging, the internet and social media, it is no longer only ‘hysterics’, ‘migrant mothers’, or young women under forcible arrest who find their images taken and circulated beyond their control. It is all of us – and most of us are also complicit. “It’s important, because people with camera phones have absolutely no sense that there is any responsibility,” says Meiselas. “There is no social contract at all.”

Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford and Laura Wexler, is out now (Thames & Hudson)

“In all the places I’ve lived, I’ve been involved and embedded in the community. But when I speak, I’ve never made an effort to have a softer accent; I’m a foreigner, and that’s what differentiates me”

AS: Which photographers were you specifically drawing inspiration from?

SB: Martin Parr, Paul Reas, Anna Fox, Paul Graham, and so on. I was using the same set-up as them, shooting in colour using a wide-angle lens and flash. It was kind of a visual experiment to understand how I saw things and respond to places, in an attempt to find a way of working that suited me, and how I might own that aesthetic. The flash gives you the opportunity to see the world differently, and to transform the most ordinary things into something exceptional. I was also discovering the work of Weegee and Diane Arbus, and then realised that I wanted to make photographs in black-and-white.

AS: Was your cinematic background also informing your work?

SB: I think that was more in terms of creating a sense of narrative, and learning how to direct the people that I was photographing – asking them to pose in a certain way, or to be as expressionless as possible, which I think I got from the films of Aki Kaurismäki or Robert Bresson. I wanted the kinds of expressions that make everything neutral and ambiguous, from which a certain tension can arise. There’s a lot of humour in that as well, but a humour that’s found in the ordinary. I didn’t want to give the viewer any certainties, but instead to see what the photographs did to them.

AS: Your new book, Ta-ra, draws from a decade’s worth of work made in Wales, from 2013 to 2023, so some of the photographs included were made during this very early period.

SB: Yes, the earliest pictures in Ta-ra are from that time, when I was still at uni trying to discover myself and my approach to photography. There’s a portrait in the book of a man with a dishevelled pompadour – that’s at the Porthcawl Elvis Festival. I took that picture in black-and-white, and was like, “Wow, this is where I want to take my work”.

AS: Earlier you mentioned Weegee and Diane Arbus. Nancy Newhall once referred to Weegee’s photographs as “extraordinary psychological documents”, and John Szarkowski described Arbus’ pictures as being “concerned with private rather than social realities, with psychological rather than visual coherence”. In Ta-ra, were you also more interested in exploring and emphasising the ‘psychological’ possibilities of photography, rather than the ‘social realities’?

SB: Well, that partially comes from the use of flash, but it also comes from always seeing a place with a degree of detachment, as a foreigner or otherwise. In all the places I’ve lived, I’ve been involved and embedded in the community. But when I speak, I’ve never made an effort to have a softer accent; I’m a foreigner, and that’s what differentiates me. I can have a familiarity with a place and its people, and at the same time always have a degree of detachment, because I don’t feel the need to hide my cultural background or references. It’s not about adapting to a place, it’s about using my own perspective to incorporate the elements of the place where I’ve chosen to live – what I like and dislike – into my own vision of it, and being able to be both affectionate and critical at the same time. Again, there’s an ambiguity there, in that you have both sides.

AS: What do you find particularly unique about Wales, and what are you specifically trying to express about the people and the place in Ta-ra?

SB: If you look at Chris Killip’s In Flagrante, at the people in those pictures, everything has been taken away from them, in front of their eyes, and you see their sense of desperation. They’re not letting things slip away from them – someone is coming and taking everything away, and they can’t do anything about it. Alternatively, in my images, I think a sense of numbness prevails. It’s like there’s nothing left to be taken away. With everything that’s happened in Wales and the UK – even since 2013, with the implementation of the austerity policies, and then Brexit and its consequences, and then the pandemic, and then the current economic crisis – what remains is this profound sense of numbness.

AS: Do you feel that this ‘numbness’ is a kind of psychological response or emotional defence mechanism, which is particularly prevalent here as the result of these repeated traumas?

SB: Yes. Also, when I was making the work, I myself was also going in and out of that same sensation of numbness. Even though these pictures were made specifically in Wales, I think this is something that is happening throughout the whole country, in working-class communities and elsewhere.

You’ve also moved to the UK from another country, in your case from the United States, so you must also see the social divisions that are here, and recognise how the class structure is always present, and so systematically embedded within this society. To me, this is unbearable; I can’t stand it. I try to treat everyone on the same level and with the same respect. I don’t make any differentiations if I speak with a lord or a person on the street, I treat them the same, and that’s how I expect to be treated. It’s just common sense. So I find the levels of injustice and inequality that exist here unbearable.

Of course, I don’t come from a perfect land. I come from a place where there is extreme polarisation – 40 per cent of the population of Argentina is now living in poverty. But when you think about the UK, and all of the policies that were implemented in the 1980s by Thatcher and the neo-liberal movement, you realise that they may have actually won by successfully destroying the sense of community in a lot of places. And that’s why there’s not just a numbness, but also a sense of profound solitude within this work.

AS: So Ta-ra is definitely more of a ‘psychological’ rather than a ’social’ document?

SB: I’m not trying to redefine the place itself, or impose my ideas onto these people – it is what it is – but these were the things that were driving me when I was making this work. As photographers we have to accept that our medium is subjective, that within our work there’s always the influence of who we are, how we feel, our cultural background, and everything else we bring to a place. I don’t actually know how much of my own psyche or psychological state is in there, but that happens all the time with photography – there’s always a degree to which we impose ourselves onto the people, places and things we photograph. We are working with the real, but in a way we are also borrowing these things for our own agenda. That’s why it took me so long to come to terms with this work, and to realise that the ideas behind it were actually very simple – that it’s about how I was discovering and responding to a place at the same time.

“This project has probably been the most difficult for me to edit – it took me a long time to realise that I was responding to the place emotionally, and that there was no need to over-conceptualise it beyond that”

AS: In ethical terms, how do you deal with this issue? How do you explain to the people you’re photographing that your own perspective or agenda will inevitably play a role in how they will be portrayed?

SB: Of course, it’s very difficult to explain all the intricacies of this to someone in a few minutes – and in this work in particular, many of my interactions with people were ephemeral encounters. I may have met them once and never encountered them again. But I always give people my contact details. For example, there’s one picture that I really love, of two girls – one of them is about 10 years old, and the other maybe 14. It’s one of my favourite pictures, but before doing anything with it, I got the contact details of their father, and I wrote him an email, and then another, and then another. I sent him the picture and said, “This is one the best pictures that I’ve ever made, and it would be great if you could give me a call or send me your number. I would love to talk with you, and give you a print.” And nothing – he never got in touch. If someone does get in touch I get back to them; if they want a print, I give it to them.

AS: During the making of this work, how did you decide where to photograph? What specifically were you looking for?

SB: This project came about because I was just shooting all the time, for the pleasure and sake of making pictures. I think it’s important to understand the place where you are. Like any photographer, I could be parachuted into a faraway place and find things that interest me, but I’m not driven by exoticism. I much prefer to be in the most ‘boring’ or familiar places, creatively that’s where I find a challenge. Trying to elevate something that is seemingly insignificant, and trying to identify remarkable things within the ordinary is a great challenge.

So really, it just depended on where I was, and what I was doing. Ta-ra is almost entirely made in the south of Wales, predominantly in towns and cities, rather than in rural places or the bucolic countryside. I really wasn’t trying to target a particular demographic, or certain class or anything. I was just looking for people who I was drawn to. But what I was always trying to do was to decontextualise everything, so that the context for each picture would be informed by the other photographs, the edit, and the sequence, in order to create an almost imaginary sort of space. This project has probably been the most difficult for me to edit – it took me a long time to realise that I was responding to the place emotionally, and that there was no need to over-conceptualise it beyond that. I started with 250 prints, and then slowly tried to make sense of it, refine it, and find the common factors that brought everything together. That way, the work itself collectively builds a place of its own.

AS: What do you think your Argentinian perspective brings to this place that might differ from that of British photographers?

SB: I always feel like I’m some kind of hybrid, because the education I received and so much of the information that I consumed came from the UK. But then I have this set of cultural references that comes from Latin America and Europe. So there is something different there, but I don’t know exactly what it is. Sometimes I feel – maybe you notice it too – that in the UK there is a certain lack of spontaneity within life in general. You have to constantly generate new adventures for yourself if you want to be challenged by what’s happening around you. When I was beginning to make this work, I felt this need to ‘feel alive’, so I went to what was supposed to be the most ‘notorious’ neighbourhood in Newport. And indeed there were people on the streets all the time, and things were spontaneously happening everywhere, and it was great – and, as in Argentina, there was a strong sense of community. When I was walking around, some kids came up to me, wanting me to take their picture, so I took it, and then immediately said, “Let’s go talk to your parents now.” So I went to talk to the parents, and they ended up inviting me into their houses. I made lots of pictures with these two families – in fact, that’s where I made the portrait of the baby who’s all wrapped up.

AS: You spent 10 years making this work. How did you know when the project was complete?

SB: Because I didn’t want to make any more pictures. Maybe I didn’t exhaust all the possibilities, but I felt like it was time to move on. As I said before, the reasons I ended up in Wales, and staying for so long, were chance and entirely circumstantial. It wasn’t something I’d planned, it was just the way my life organically happened. And I’ve reached a point now where I don’t want to make any more work here, but in a nice way; maybe that’s why the book is called Ta-ra, which is a local expression that is commonly used to say a friendly goodbye.

When you become part of a place, you learn to both love it and hate it, but over time more and more things have made it harder for me to live in the UK, and I don’t want to become any more cynical and angry – then it’s really not fair on the people I’m photographing. So I guess that I don’t want to make any more work here because I don’t feel the same way that I once did, and the project might become too dark, or turn into something that it wasn’t intended to be.

AS: Despite this, do you still feel an affection for or connection to Wales, having spent so long living and working there?

SB: Of course, all of my adult life happened here. It’s home – it’s so familiar to me now, it’s what I know, and it’s easy for me to make work here. The people have given me so much. To be honest, I’ve always been fighting with myself here, because I never wanted to make work specifically about Wales, and still I ended up doing it – twice in fact, considering that I also just published another book, The Dynamic, which is about a local Welsh newspaper.

I really do love the history here as well, especially considering that many of the biggest achievements of the UK’s working class started in Wales. The National Health Service was modelled on the Tredegar Workmen’s Medical Aid Society, which was set up by Welsh miners in the 19th century. Before that, you had the Chartist movement in the 1830s, and then you also have a lot of people who went to fight against Franco and fascism during the Spanish Civil War, then you have the Miners’ Strike [1984–85]. In certain communities there is still this strong sense of socialism, which people are born with. It’s by no means a socialist utopia, but those kinds of values are embedded within the culture and remain in the people. Even if they may have lost the battle, there is a sense of solidarity, openness and welcoming energy; it’s still here. So I will always love it, but I have to say ta-ra.

 “I went into this expecting to come out with a project about what recovery looks like… What I found was not a recovered woman, but someone who was still in the midst of dealing with these disorders”

Last month, one of Russell-Jeffrey’s photographs – from her 2021 photobook You Will Always Be Loved Even When You Feel Alone – was selected for this year’s Portrait of Britain award. The image is of Xanthe, the protagonist of the series and one of Russell-Jeffrey’s closest friends. Growing up, Xanthe struggled with disordered eating. “[Back then,] I didn’t quite understand it with great depth, or interrogate it in any capacity,” the photographer says. 

In 2021, while studying photography at Oxford Brookes University, Russell-Jeffrey decided to move in with Xanthe for two months. She wanted to capture how her friend was healing from adolescent trauma. “Naively, I went into this expecting to come out with a project about what recovery looks like… What I found was not a recovered woman, but someone who was still in the midst of dealing with these disorders,” Russell-Jeffrey says.

The pair spent two months together – day-in, day-out – and Russell-Jeffrey became aware of an “immense loneliness” that consumed Xanthe. This was surprising. “Xanthe is very outspoken, driven, and successful,” Russell-Jeffrey explains. They had grown up together as girls, but this was the first time they had spent a prolonged period of time together as adults. While they were living together, Xanthe experienced a bulimia relapse. “She’s not someone who welcomes pity, but I’d never seen her so defeated,” says Russell-Jeffrey. “I noticed that the problems she grappled with when she was 14 are just as prevalent today.”

The sequencing of You Will Always Be Loved Even When You Feel Alone echoes the reality of living with an eating disorder – moving through periods of binge eating, relapse, and healing. “Then the cycle begins again, of trying to stay in recovery, and this immense fatigue around that, because you’re never entirely free of it,” Russell-Jeffrey reflects. Alongside the images are Xanthe’s handwritten notes as well as letters from her family. Imbued with a striking vulnerability, these notes provide further insight into the complex process of dealing with trauma. 

What emerged was a series not just about recovery, but also friendship, and most crucially, care. Even though Russell-Jeffrey doesn’t appear in the images, her presence is palpable. The series feels like a dialogue of understanding and acceptance between two women that have grappled with many of the same issues. “It was almost a documentation of the small-scale things that you can do, the act of noticing, and not always over-analysing someone’s life but being attentive to it,” she says.

Due to the nature of the work, Russell-Jeffrey had to make certain ethical considerations. Xanthe was involved in every step of the process – while making the images, but also in the editing phases. When the project was finished, the photographer made sure that her friend was aware of all the implications of sharing it on the internet. Most importantly, the door was always left open to take it all down if she wanted to. 

Fortunately, “she loved it,” Russell-Jeffrey says. “It made her very emotional. She’s really proud of it as well, which she never thought she’d be able to feel.” The women have also grown closer through collaboration. “We went from having a friendship that we knew so well, to realising there’s so much we don’t know,” Russell-Jeffrey explains. “This was the first time I got to know her in loneliness, which is a rare thing.”

As an adult, it can be difficult to find the right words, or even the time, to properly care for friends as they experience hardship. Russell-Jeffrey’s project is a reminder that sometimes the best act of care is purely our presence. As she pledges in her introduction: “I shall be here not as a spectator to your pain or recovery like before, but as a hand to hold in the sunshine or on the cold bathroom floor, for you will always be loved even when you feel alone.”

sophie-jeffrey.com