“My work has shifted from thinking about portraiture as a definitive thing, and more rather like portraiture as an ongoing, underlying source for the work”

Exposure presents 40 works mainly from Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio, in which Sepuya uses red lights, props and mirrors to question the dynamics of studio portraiture. Begun in 2017, the series stretches beyond the traditional boundaries of the photoshoot, disrupting the hierarchy which places final image over process, setup, and the relation between artist and sitter. The show represents an evolution from casual domestic portraiture to something more self-referential, but without losing the intimacy of Sepuya’s early shoots. “My work has shifted from thinking about portraiture as a definitive thing, and more rather like portraiture as an ongoing, underlying source for the work,” he tells me. “It’s about the complications that are produced in the making of portraiture.”

Sepuya’s practice began at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he studied for a BFA in photography and imaging until 2004. The early 2000s was a raw time in New York shaken by the September 11 attacks. Artists were at the forefront of the queer and cultural revivals. Sepuya mentions Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern’s 2022 documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom as “very much the place I was in New York” – a daring Williamsburg counterculture where people partied and marched together against the US’s wars in the Middle East.

With ambitions to become a fashion photographer, Sepuya began shooting friends in his apartment, capturing the intimacy of his social circle. Looking back, the pictures appear as domestic portraits, but not necessarily “the way a subject is revealed through not only figure but also an eye into their surroundings,” he explains. After all, the subjects were in his home rather than their own, allowing him to break the association between person and prop and instead strip the setting, gesturing towards studio arrangements. “It took a while for me to realise what I had taken for granted – that I was photographing in my home, a place where I was already very comfortable,” Sepuya says. He would use blank walls and show just the edge of a table or bed, anticipating the manipulation and obscuring of surfaces in later work.

The queer scene gathered momentum and Sepuya’s portraits found a home in BUTT magazine and his own SHOOT zine, in which he published a single male portrait session each session, often featuring nudes. “These portraits that I was just making for myself started to circulate in a way that I hadn’t anticipated through social media – they became quite notorious,” he explains. “I was thinking about the way in which portraiture is wrapped up in this economy of exchange and solicitation – particularly by gay men in homoerotic spaces.” AA Bronson founded NY Art Book Fair in 2006, giving the scene new exposure and expanding Sepuya’s list of friends and subjects. The period triggered a new way of interpreting visual culture. “How do images work in the world?” Sepuya wonders. “How do they circulate and transform relationships? How do they come back?”

If New York inspired the male poses and careful bodily observation in Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio, its treatment of studio spaces has nomadic origins. As more friends began making portraiture around 2010, Sepuya would turn the lens on their shoots and his own, creating a literal introspection. He mentions a Cecil Beaton photograph of Pavel Tchelitchew painting his muse Peter Watson with poet Charles Henri Ford also present – a conscious layering of friendship and artistry within the frame. Sepuya became interested in “recognition and the way that photography is positioned,” he explains. “The camera as a vector pointing outwards and allowing you to understand the position of the artist, the author, the photographer through those things that surround them.”

Residencies at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Studio Museum, Harlem, and on Fire Island allowed Sepuya to gather props and explore rephotographing using images from correspondence with friends. He learned how to shoot on digital during his MFA at UCLA and began incorporating mirrors in his compositions. This enabled him to integrate images made while travelling in Europe and Mexico, fixing prints to mirrors and puncturing the presumed boundaries of the studio.

In Exposures, images feature mirrors littered with research material – “a studio space that could be both the recurring background for an image but also would slightly change over time,” Sepuya explains. Gold fabrics were important for referencing Modernism and Surrealism, while Black velvet maintained the sexual gestures of mid-20th century homoerotic photography while also nodding to 19th-century large-format dark cloths. The combination of black fabric and mirrors “opened up new ways of thinking about the idea of Blackness in terms of material – and the necessity of Blackness for making latency visible,” he says.

Sepuya has exhibited extensively over the past seven years, a form of stress testing for images in constant dialogue with their predecessors. A small show at Team Bungalow, LA, in 2017 was a debut for his darkroom images, which then went to Document in Chicago the following year. Inclusion in MoMA’s Being: New Photography 2018, the 2019 Whitney Biennial and the Barbican Centre’s Masculinities: Liberation through Photography (2020) confirmed his position in the new curatorial focus on queer reflexivity. Recent forerunners for Exposure were shows at Bortolami Gallery, NY; Vielmetter, LA; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; and last year’s twin Peter Kilchmann display in Zurich and Paris. “Where the ideas come in is always responding to observing what happens once the work is made,” Sepuya explains. So viewers in Nottingham will engage in many kinds of spectatorship: with the artist, his subjects, the studios – and previous audience perceptions.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Exposure, is at Nottingham Contemporary until 05 May

“I’m concerned with the final image, thinking about how it’s going to sit in the world”

Lee originally studied marketing at Bowie State University, Maryland, but quit his job a decade ago to pursue a life in art. Beginning with street photography and becoming interested in people’s stories, he then took an MFA at California College of the Arts. Lee’s graduate show was a precursor of sorts to the SF Camerawork exhibition, focusing on the iconography of the Marlboro Man – the tobacco marketing character played by real cowboys, which helped propel Marlboro to industry leader in the 1970s.

Marlboro’s cowboy figures were traditionally white, though, and Lee’s work is about confronting such blindspots and prejudices in American mythology, in the hope of giving viewers a more balanced representation of the country’s history. With family roots in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Houston, Texas, Lee is shaping a practice informed by the legacies of the Deep South and Great Migration, concerned with restoring Black histories while tracing current aspirations. The cowboy project is ongoing, with the current aim to widen the scenarios and contexts the subjects are captured in. A recent trip saw Lee venture to rural Louisiana, where he met the only Black competitive rodeo rider in the state’s high schools. “I want to document every aspect of each subject’s life on the ranch,” Lee says. “I want to move away from just person and horse – diving into what this lifestyle is and the layers within it.”

Lee returns to a term used by Ghana’s Akan tribe to summarise his philosophy – ‘Sankofa’, meaning ‘It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind’. “We are here and we have been part of this American Dream too, even though we haven’t had the opportunities to enjoy the American Dream,” he says.

Charles Lee, Sweat & Dirt is at SF Camerawork, San Francisco, until 03 February

For Starskey Butler, there is an unbroken continuum between social work and creative practice. “I’m an artist and I’m a social worker but I’m one person,” they say. “There might be a technical separation but there is not a spiritual separation.” Now based in Birmingham, Butler was brought up in Wolverhampton by Ena, their unofficial foster mother. Ena is ‘Nan’ (though not biologically) and an abiding influence – a documentary where she shares her warmth and wisdom features in Thirty-Six. 

Elsewhere, landscape images from a series called IN/OUT evoke the interplay between external and internal worlds while pictures made at Ena’s home touch on the ways that memory and culture shape our identities. A moving-image piece trains our gaze on the greenhouse in her garden, while a still image shows a spade belonging to Ena’s husband, another formative figure for Starskey Butler. The artist speaks of history and culture – how many Jamaican immigrants brought farming traditions from their country of origin to Britain – but they are as much metaphors for how we are nurtured and how we grow.

There are always multiple versions of any story. There is a version of Starskey Butler’s story that sensationalises pain and trauma; there are versions of their story seen through the perspective of family members, caregivers, council authorities. And there’s the version of the story they tell here, picking their words carefully as we drink tea in a quiet room away from MAC’s public areas.

“I’m an artist and I’m a social worker but I’m one person… There might be a technical separation but there is not a spiritual separation”

The artist did reconnect with their birth mother when they were 7 or 8, but it was only as an adult that they really got to know her. Access Subject (2022), an in-progress book project centred on portraiture and dialogue between the pair, was sparked by the discovery of those children’s services records. “I just went round to her house and was like, ‘I’ve got these records, shall we do a photography project?’” She agreed and they looked through the records together, speaking at length about her childhood and life before Starskey Butler was born. “After that, we finally both saw each other properly, as human beings,” the artist reflects.

Before their career as a social worker, Starskey Butler hadn’t considered delving into their own past. But working in child protection, they started to wonder about their background. “I always knew I had older siblings that had been placed into care,” they say. They also point out that “a person who has had previous concerns raised will have a ‘pre birth assessment,’ so my mother would have had some involvement with social services.” In April 2017, Starskey Butler put in a ‘subject access request’ with Leeds council, expecting to receive a single-page letter and instead finding themselves weighed down with a mountain of paperwork.

Gradually, they were able to piece together more of the jigsaw, but further questions emerged through the information missing in the redacted pages. “Visitors think I redacted them but that’s how I received them,” they say of the documents on display at MAC. “I was interested in them as objects, their textures and how they relate to the photographs.” The council sent the redacted pages, related to events that took place before Starskey Butler’s birth, through with the rest of the documentation, although there was no information contained besides the inclusion of name, place and date of birth and a court date. More intriguing than not seeing anything, these almost entirely blanked out papers remind us of knowledge just outside of our grasp.

This is a theme that recurs throughout Thirty-Six. For example in a series of images shot from trains when Starskey Butler would travel around the UK conducting interviews with individuals to assess their suitability to foster a child to whom they already have a connection, but who cannot reside with their birth parents. The smudged and fleeting landscapes are meditations on the responsibility of making those decisions. “You assess somebody’s entire life from when they were born up until that moment,” Starskey Butler explains. “You think, ‘Who am I to even be doing this?’ And you’d see someone over a long period of time each week for hours.” Moments of optimism and confidence could rapidly give way to doubt with an unforeseen revelation. It is a prolonged process where the assessor must stay open to all possibilities before finally reaching a starkly binary conclusion – a yes or a no.

Thirty-Six takes us on a journey of deep empathy that echoes Starskey Butler’s own experiences, both professional and personal. The intensive discussions that informed Access Subject began in the same way that a foster viability assessment would – although that impartiality was impossible to maintain. In a section of the interview, reproduced verbatim on the exhibition wall, Starskey Butler’s birth mother asks, “Do you think I was a bad mother?” They reply, not as a social worker but as a child: “No… I think people have their circumstances.” In the end, circumstances are all we have, the sum total of our stories, layer upon layer, that make us who we are.

Marley Starskey Butler: Thirty Six is at Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, until 28 January

The exhibition title foregrounds the artistic and social relationship Lê has maintained between the Mississippi and the Mekong. Delta (2011) shows Vietnamese women in New Orleans and Ho Chi Minh City, vibrant colour portraits that emphasise similarity as well as difference. New York City is home to around 20,000 Vietnamese Americans, 60 per cent of whom were born abroad. Showing these works at MoMA speaks to Lê’s global consciousness; she mentions the dislocation of diaspora life, as well as the shakiness of the US’ democratic experiment. “Living through the war and being a refugee continues to reverberate today with immigrants from Latin and South America,” she says. Her past becomes a vehicle for empathy, the photographs public tokens of solidarity.

Lê spent the period between 1999 and 2004 tracing the ways in which war is alive in the American psyche, whether real or imagined, imminent or deferred. In Virginia and North Carolina, she photographed men who re-enact the Vietnam conflict for Small Wars, while in the arid Californian desert, she made intense studies of military training exercises on the eve of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars for 29 Palms (2003–04). Films relating to both series appear at MoMA. Events Ashore shows the prowess of the US Navy, the colour shots gesturing towards a sense of misplaced adventure. (Lê was invited onboard by a colonel). People often ask whether she is fetishising the military. “Of course not,” she tells me. “People throwing that word around without understanding what it means” motivated her to explore the history of erotic imagery, the thin line which can separate desire and violence. Gabinetto (2016) – pictures of erotic artefacts from Naples’ Secret Museum – and new porn-inspired embroideries explore this at MoMA.

“I’m thinking about what it means to group together a multitude of pictures inspired by poetics, rhythms, dissonance and breaks – remembering the first image and carrying that impression on to the next photograph”

While visiting her mother in Orange County during the pandemic, Lê began returning to the Twentynine Palms training base, nearly two decades after she first observed exercises there. She had access to a raised viewing point, the swirling dust drifting across the desert as it had done in her black-and-white shots of mortars and gun drills. “I had a quasi out-of-body experience and remembered why I was there,” Lê recalls. “I saw the span of my mother’s life flashing across the landscape, from her birth in Hanoi in the early 1930s and through various occupations.” Lê’s mother had been awarded a scholarship to study in France in the 1950s, returning to a divided Vietnam after the Geneva Accords in 1954. But her health was now deteriorating, accelerated by Covid isolation. “She would shuttle back and forth with this fragmented life defined by American geopolitics – which was also my life,” Lê says. As the vision faded, helicopters circled and another training exercise began.

Lê describes the experience as confusing, but was struck by the power of a 360-degree vista. She began discussing the potential for a new immersive work with Marcoci. The resulting installation, Fourteen Views, consists of vertical panels stitched together from Lê’s “library of clouds”, inspired by the work of JMW Turner and the sublime. The cyclorama is derived from negatives, but Lê used Photoshop and other digital tools to stitch images together, a departure from her typical hands-off approach. The new work helps answer a genre query often put to Lê, whose method is sometimes compared to photojournalism or documentary. “There was always this question of ‘Where’s the art?’ and ‘Where does the art reside?’ in my work,” she says. “It’s an open question… with Thomas Demand, you know where the art is.”

Between Two Rivers showcases Lê’s mixed-media practice in a way that her first US institutional solo show did not. On Contested Terrain featured more than 125 photographs organised in juxtaposing series clusters, opening in 2020 at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art before travelling to Fort Worth and Milwaukee, concluding in March 2022. Speaking now, Lê views the show as something of a research exercise in anticipation of a more experimental outing. “That idea of looking at the work on the wall is always very clarifying,” she explains. “I was able to see clearly the connections between my ideas and my concerns throughout projects – some are different iterations; some are completely new ideas; and some are extensions.”

This makes the MoMA show a pivotal moment, a chance to disrupt a linear way of looking, whether via series mash-ups, embroideries or digital alterations. Silent General (2015–ongoing) epitomises this; a roving, agile series suitable for state-of-the-nation New York Times picture essays and shots of high-school students alike. The work moves in motion with the country, as it did when debates around the southern border shifted either side of Trump’s election in 2016. The task at MoMA is to capture that variety without drifting.

“I’m thinking about what it means to group together a multitude of pictures inspired by poetics, rhythms, dissonance and breaks – remembering the first image and carrying that impression on to the next photograph,” she observes. Lê’s mindset suits river flow or current analogies. “I’ve been around long enough to see that history is cyclical,” she says. “We always talk about how the Vietnam War was a lesson learned, but it wasn’t.”

An-My Lê, Between Two Rivers/Giua hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières, is at MoMA, New York, until 16 March

Elliott Erwitt in reflection, Tropicana Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 1957

The passing of Elliott Erwitt is a major loss for the photo community. We revisit his Paris retrospective from earlier this year

“You first get a sort-of-frame and then you wait for someone to fill it,” Elliott Erwitt once said of his photography. The retrospective of the American artist at Musée Maillol, Paris, presents the various ways in which he fills the frame – sentimentally, amusingly, alertly. Erwitt’s work is characterised by a certain buoyant vision, one that transcends any single location or era; his tone remains lively whether photographing life and livelihoods in Birmingham, England; Valdés, Argentina; or Częstochowa, Poland.

Born in Paris in 1928 to Russian parents, Erwitt spent his childhood in Italy before emigrating to the US in 1939. He then returned to Europe in the 1950s, where he joined Magnum and served as its president in the late-1960s. From there, he began his freelance photography career, which has lasted for well over half a century.

The exhibition highlights Erwitt’s worldliness, but emphasises that it never came at the expense of the sincerity he found in charming, guileless moments. Observational slyness is where the 94-year-old excels. His images are most interesting when he notices different silhouettes reflecting each other, like a photo from the Florida Keys in which a great egret stands beside a slender outdoor faucet (1968); or the mirroring effect of a young girl sprawled across three stools in a painter’s studio, reclining in the same pose as the figure in the canvas in the foreground.

Across the 215 photographs on display, Erwitt also creates visual antagonisms with his subjects’ body language, such as between an Amish couple and a pair of teens – all four standing before the shore in Santa Cruz – in which the pair peer critically at the adolescents grasping nonchalantly at each others’ waists (1975).

Erwitt’s playfulness is further heightened in his images of dogs with their owners. The photographer was known to honk a portable horn to keep the creatures extra pert while in front of the camera, effectively preventing their attention from wandering (he also did this for human subjects). He photographed a large poodle upright on its hind legs, rendered on par with a human’s eye view, standing almost as tall as a petite older woman to its left. And amongst the many reasons he loved dogs as subjects? “They don’t ask for prints,” he remarked wryly.

“Observational slyness is where the 94-year-old excels. His images are most interesting when he notices different silhouettes reflecting each other”

Erwitt’s colour work is displayed separately from his black-and-white images, categorised by region (i.e. Soviet) or type (fashion photography). His ability to spot visual brackets – such as a photo of two off-duty Las Vegas showgirls each standing in doorways, their blonde hair and red lipstick making them quasi-doppelgängers – creates a vision of life full of charming parallels. This eye for doubles reflects a certain awe at the world’s naturally-occurring synchronicity; there is no need to orchestrate these motifs, to rely on artifice, just a tireless curiosity to spot such treasures. By comparison, Erwitt’s celebrity photos and political portraits, also in colour, feel more straightforward and less memorable. 

Two sections bring Erwitt’s works into conversation with those of French sculptor and painter Aristide Maillol, the Paris museum’s namesake. One is Regarding Women, the title of Erwitt’s 2014 book of portraits, tousle-haired Marilyn Monroe on the cover. Images of the famous – Jackie Kennedy crying at her husband’s funeral, Grace Kelly impeccable in white at her wedding – are interspersed with anonymous figures, each surrounding Maillol’s bronze nude statues. The two 20th-century artists shaped different visions of women: one normatively classical and muse-dependent, the other much more versatile.

Some of Erwitt’s images reveal a gendered gaze that hasn’t aged as well as his wider work. In the colour photography section, there’s a lineup of women sunning in bikinis in the south of France from 1959. On the one hand, it’s a formal look at silhouettes lined up on the sand, but also inevitably invites viewers to gawp at women’s bodies. Significantly more alarming is a 1982 photograph of a group of naked men surrounding one naked woman in a tub in Amsterdam. There is no accompanying text for context, but also no description capable of justifying the unease the scenario elicits.

Erwitt’s works intermingle again with those by Maillol in the series Museum Watching. It’s a cheeky exercise for museum-goers to be looking at photographs of museum-goers, and Erwitt clearly delights in examining the phenomenon of the gaze and the posturing around art. In one image, a young girl stands frozen while aligned with a row of statues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nearby, a photo of a Rodin sculpture at Métro Varenne – a station just steps from the Musée Maillol – shows the statue ponderous as ever on the empty platform with scaffolding erected around it. Whether observing animals or art, beach-combers or urban backdrops, children or adults, Erwitt remains enchanted by these relationships – the way they affably reflect our distinct humanity.

Often his first viewing of the exhibition is when he arrives to take images, typically on the day of installation. Earlier recces are unfortunately a rarity, because budgets do not allow for it. “Occasionally there are architectural visualisations and sketch up models that I can see,” he admits.

Time is pressurised, both because there is not much of it and because the gallery is on a deadline to open to the public. Initially, Colson simply notes the practical and technical requirements. “I look for the big obstacles to capturing good photographs, such as glass cases or big paintings that are behind a glaze,” he explains. “Objects like that can take a long time to photograph, because you need to have apparatus set up to counter the reflections.”

After that, he works his way through his mental shot-list, which will include wide photographs of each area of the gallery. He systematically documents every wall then gets closer to capture the details. Colson tries to make the Barbican look as immaculate as possible and, although there are always people around when he is working, he prefers not to include them in the images. However, his other commercial career is events photography, and for that he is invariably trying to capture as many people as possible in the space. It is a perfect foil to the installation work. “Event photography is reactive and fast,” he explains. “You’re working with people who are usually in a crowd, happy and easy to work with. The editing can be a huge job, because you’re taking a lot of images to get one good image of a particular group.”

“I partially do the editing process when I’m shooting. I’ve usually got a plan for what images I need to get. You’re not chasing moments because the installation is static, and the editing process is more about refining”

By contrast, when photographing exhibitions, Colson edits as he goes along. “I partially do the editing process when I’m shooting,” he says. “I’ve usually got a plan for what images I need to get. You’re not chasing moments because the installation is static, and the editing process is more about refining and delivering pristine images – for example, removing dust.”

Colson also photographed the showcase of Central Saint Martins’ graphic communication design degree course, as well as “the exhibition in motion”. He is an associate lecturer at the university, and says being a practising photographer definitely helps his teaching. The university and commercial work allow him to devote time and resources to his art practice, which is also characterised by a fascination with space. “I have been using a LiDAR 3D scanner to scan London’s streets for the last five years,” he says. “I’m interested in laser scanning as an ‘expanded photographic’ technology.”

This interest has led to two projects – Offshore Capital, documenting ‘ghost’ property in London owned by offshore companies based in tax havens, and London Knowledge, a short documentary film using 3D scanning animation, journeying through the London streets black-cab drivers memorise for their ‘Knowledge’ qualification. The latter was screened in Piccadilly Circus last year; an aptly chaotic, iconic and central location.

Colson enjoys the balance, but admits it was hard to achieve. His decision to move into photography was impetuous, he says, and it took years to get a foot on the lowest rung. For those considering installation photography, he advises talking to people in the area or, better still, assisting an architectural photographer. “I never did and I wish I had,” he says. “Architectural photographers often have budgets to pay for assistants. You’ll also learn about client workflow and how to light interior spaces, and it will set your job expectations.”

Architectural photographers might also have tips on kit, as this is a specialist area in which “investing in equipment is important, and expensive”. He shoots with a Nikon D810 and a good range of lenses, including wideangle, mid-range and telephoto zooms, a wideangle architectural tilt-shift, a macro and two primes. He deems a lens belt as essential, and also takes flashguns, spare batteries, memory cards, a tripod and a laptop.

Getting started can be nerve-wracking, he adds, but it only takes a couple of curators to notice your work to give you a chance. “It was a constant scramble when I started out,” he says. “But I was all right once I got one or two people who keep on coming back.”

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Although he didn’t know it at the time, the images that impacted Smiejek so markedly were taken during The Troubles. The violent sectarian conflict between unionists loyal to the UK and nationalists in favour of an independent Republic of Ireland lasted for 30 years, and led to over 3,500 deaths. Though the violence officially ended in 1998 with the signing of The Good Friday Agreement, pockets of resistance remain on both sides. 

Now 45, Smiejek has been living in Northern Ireland since 2011, when his desire to understand The Troubles finally drew him to Belfast. His work began slowly at first. Through NGOs and peace project workers, he deepened his understanding of the conflict, gradually adding context to the carefully constructed imagery of his youth. 

The earliest images from what is now Not Surrendering, a book and exhibition (currently on show at Belfast Exposed), are impactful but perhaps not unfamiliar. At first, Smiejek had captured the parades, bonfires and riots that characterised the tense post-Troubles period, but he was not satisfied with his research ending there. He wanted his work – and understanding – to go deeper.

“The bombs blowing up in Belfast, in the UK, was the first live conflict I’d witnessed through the media, through the TV. And that was strong enough to stay with me. We had a very basic knowledge, but it triggered me to dig deeper later on”

“Me and my ex-partner decided to move to one of the most difficult districts, an area which was under strong IRA [Irish Republican Army] protection,” he tells me. “We wanted to see active IRA members, the neighbourhoods, the people living in these areas.” Smiejek describes living among members of the nationalist organisation  as a difficult experience. NGO members, he says, told him it was a crazy plan.

Throughout the following two years, Smiejek forged deep connections with nationalist communities, his own position as a Polish immigrant and outsider affording him an unusual level of trust. His work began to reflect this, becoming both more thoughtful and intimate. But even as the photojournalist came to understand the intergenerational trauma of those around him, it became clear that the violence responsible for their pain had not truly come to an end.

He recalls a conversation with several people that he describes as being associated with the IRA, who he had known and photographed for several years. They showed him an image taken inside a prison. “They said, ‘This is a member of our family, we knew him from when he was born, we spent time in jail together, and you know what? We had to kill him because he talked’,” Smiejek recalls. “‘You come in here with your camera and you say you’re Polish, but you have to remember: we can’t trust anyone’.” The message from this conversation was clear, Smiejek says. And yet, far from driving him away, this thinly veiled threat made him more determined to understand the people on both sides of the border and political divide – and to forge deeper relationships within the communities. 

Smiejek switched his focus to Belfast’s loyalist communities, moving to an area associated with the remaining paramilitary groups where strong emotions and unrest continue. “What’s really important for me is not collecting histories or digging into who was responsible for what,” he says. “What’s important is to capture the traumas people are carrying with them after so many generations.”

The photographs brought together in Not Surrendering reflect this goal. Unflinching in their portrayals but never entirely lacking in sympathy, the time and research invested in their creation is clear. Firmly in the documentary tradition, the pictures show communities no longer officially engaged in conflict, but certainly still battling with the horrors of their pasts. One image captures Graffiti reading “TAIGS [a derogatory term for a Catholic or Irish nationalist] WILL BE CRUCIFIED”, while another shows a life-size cutout of Queen Elizabeth II amidst a beaming family. An image of a wedding cake features a cake topper depicting a smiling bride and groom, each clutching handguns. Groups of young people are shown frozen in face-offs with riot police.

A particularly striking portrait shows a unionist couple at home in their bedroom. On the wall behind them hangs an image of the Union Jack, accompanied by the text “It’s Our Flag Fight for it Work for it”. The man was an active member of the Ulster Volunteer Force, Smiejek says, and had previously spent 22 years in prison for paramilitary activities. “He has since passed away, which is why this is one of few photographs where I can really describe someone as an active member of a paramilitary group,” the photographer explains. 

Legal, ethical and safety concerns pertain to both Smiejek and his subjects. He describes conversations with the man in which he was open about his past – and about how important fighting for his country and identity was, even after serving time in prison. The photographer attended the man’s funeral, where saw many more men dressed in loyalist paramilitary fatigues.

What struck Smiejek most about some of these men – more than their uniforms or weapons – was their age. In the 12 years he has spent working across the island of Ireland, it is those growing up in the shadow of The Troubles whose experiences have stayed with him the most. Young people who, by continuing to be drawn into the conflict’s rhetoric by their elders, and by still joining paramilitary organisations on both sides, were ensuring that division and prejudice were passed down the generations. 

By bringing the images of Not Surrendering together, Smiejek hopes that he will educate more people about the ongoing involvement of young people in The Troubles’ legacy – and that he will finally contextualise the conflict he witnessed as a child. “When I talk about these things in London people look at me like I’m from another planet,” he says. “But this knowledge is important to understand who we are and where we come from. We should understand how easily people are affected by wars, by colonisation and by conflicts, and we should understand their impact.”

Not Surrendering is at Belfast Exposed until 28 October. A book of the same name is out now

DS: How did you get the Free Photographic Omnibus up and running? 

DM: These days you might call it crowdfunding. I went to Manchester’s Central Library, found directories of directors, and wrote to anyone who’d expressed an interest in art. I wrote 10 letters per day and when I’d raised £700, wrote to the Arts Council. They gave me another £750. I also worked at Butlin’s and, after a year, I had raised enough to start. 

Why did you feel the project was needed? In those days people might shoot one film per year on holiday. I was a guy with professional kit saying, “Tell me what you want me to photograph, and I’ll do my best and give you the picture tomorrow”. I was idealistic, driven by the belief we’re all special and deserve to be treated as individuals. I still hold onto that view but these days, if you did what I did, people would think you entitled. Now everyone has a camera, and there’s been a democratisation of the media we could never have imagined. That’s wonderful.

DS: How did people react? 

DM: Sometimes people were hostile. There were those – often older men – who were angry I was Arts Council funded, that I was wasting their tax money. But others would ask if I’d had breakfast and invite me into their homes for bacon and eggs, even when they had very little themselves. Their generosity blew me away.

DS: Was there a power dynamic involved? 

DM: Most of the people I photographed would have thought I was posh. My dad ran a country estate. I was brought up with a whole load of prejudices and have spent most of my life trying to get rid of them. I was taught that gentlemen don’t reveal their feelings, then when I was eight, I was sent to boarding school. I hated it. 

DS: What was it like studying at Manchester Polytechnic? 

DM: Going from boarding school to art school was terrific, and I was really lucky to have good people around me – Charlie Meacham, Peter Fraser, Brian Griffin, Martin Parr. We were this slightly misfit group, but like-minded. We filled in gaps in what we were being taught, we’d run seminar groups, get copies of Creative Camera, set each other tasks.

DS: Why have you revisited the bus project? 

DM: A decade ago I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, that’s one of the reasons I was keen to get my archive sorted [it’s now held by the Bodleian Libraries]. My hand-eye coordination is all crap, I just take bad pictures now, so I don’t. Last year I realised I haven’t shown my story from the bus. I kept journals and talked into my tape recorder, making spontaneous recordings. At times I’m excited and upbeat, at others it’s raining and I’m stuck in a car park, despairing. I wanted to talk about that: the personal angst that went with the pictures. 

DS: What inspires you now? 

DM: I wish everyone learned media literacy in schools because this is how we communicate. We still haven’t sorted what a democratic media would look like. I used to say to students, the media is in flux because of the digital age, so we constantly have to ask what media we would like to be a part of. When I was young, I started to address engagement – I was a privileged white man, but I was trying to do something radical. So my invitation was, what will you pioneer?

Book of the Road by Daniel Meadows by Daniel Meadows is available for pre-order now (Bluecoat Press)

DS: How did the exhibition come about?

TN: Coming from Brazil, we wanted to look at a photographer that came from a very different background to most of the American or European artists we are used to looking at in photography. We also wanted to look at other paradigms of photography, to try to understand a context where there were no strong institutions or photography collections, where there wasn’t that kind of established infrastructure for photography, but nevertheless – or maybe because of that – very interesting new ideas were being proposed.

I suggested doing a show on Moriyama, and received a grant to go Japan to study his work and archive. That was really mind blowing because, while I knew some of his books, I hadn’t realised how much the books were just a second iteration for his work. Many of these images were originally created for magazines, the Japanese magazines were the exciting places where all the photographers wanted to be, where all the hard conversations around photography were taking place, and where the most original ideas were being posed. I quickly realised that there was a challenge and an interesting question for this show, around how to make an exhibition in a museum focused not on framed artworks for the walls but in a diversity of images that included publications and the printed page.

DS: So how do you go about showing this work in a gallery?

TN: What Moriyama is really saying is that it’s in the nature of photography to be reproducible and replicable. He’s against and not interested in the veneration of artworks, he wants photography to be disseminated. It’s one of his most radical ideas. So we’re presenting plenty of pages from the magazines and books, printed, on the gallery walls and for visitors to browse, and have made videos flipping through each of his really rare books. There’s also a whole section dedicated to seeing the original books. It is going to be a very dense show. But we also wanted to break the hierarchy between a framed picture, a printed image, a wallpaper, and a vinyl. So there are all these different and very interesting kinds of images.

DS: Moriyama is known for his work in the 1960s and 70s, but you have included much more recent images. Can you explain the reasoning behind that?

TN: Even people who know Daido’s production will see how much he has changed throughout his lifetime, while posing the same question – ‘What is photography? What is the nature of photography?’ He has come up with completely different answers to that question, so another challenge was to present those transformations.

In the 1960s and 70s, he was making extraordinary, beautiful images, capturing Japanese society and this ambiguous feeling towards Westernisation and the erosion of traditional Japanese culture. He was also a very interested in the nature of the language of photography, and all the possibilities that that language could offer. He started to struggle with the idea of photography being a window to the world, and started testing the materiality and the flatness of the image. He worked as a conceptual artist. He was saying, ‘There’s nothing beyond an image, this is just an image’, and to accept that was radically original and beautiful.

But he has continued to move and has become, if anything, more in tune with the times. Since the 1990s he has used a digital camera to make colour photographs, looking at advertisements in shopping malls and beyond. He is interested in the idea that the image is becoming more present in reality, in certain cases even substituting our reality. His work from the 2000s envelops the architecture of the gallery with vinyls, he makes huge patterns of images that go from floor to ceiling. Of course he’s anticipating our lives completely connected to screens, to these multiple virtual realities of the image which are making and in a way eliminating the real world.

Since 2006 he has also published a magazine called Record, where he is photographing every day non-stop, looking at his own neighbourhood and daily life. He’s addressing issues of ego, saying ‘I don’t think artists are more special than anyone else’ and trying to produce something more automatic, and thus democratic. I think he clearly understands that this banality, this horizontality is an essential aspect of photography.

DS: Do certain images have to be included in a Moriyama show? The photograph of the stray dog, for example, is an iconic Moriyama image.

TN: It’s good for the visitor to see some images they recognise because they probably relate to them emotionally, to certain moments in their lives when they first saw them. That creates a lot of connection and affection. Also some images have reappeared in his work over and over and over, they keep being reinserted and renewed with new croppings, new printings, new contrast, new tones. They’re there since the start, and keep following him. But he’s also one of the most prolific photographers ever. So there are plenty of images in the show, and plenty for the visitor to discover.

“What Moriyama is really saying is that it’s in the nature of photography to be reproducible and replicable. He’s against and not interested in the veneration of artworks”

Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective is at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, until 11 February 2024 

Queens, Kings and Gods

The work of George Osodi is probably the most emblematic in this section. It’s a series that looks at individual, traditional rulers across Nigeria, all of whom now have a ceremonial position as custodians of cultural heritage, but no longer hold the same kind of political agency that they would have had in the pre-colonial times. It’s an attempt to look at the ethnic diversity of Nigeria, which of course, as a result of being colonised by Britain, was amalgamated into a country.

You can see the pomp and ceremony, but also the grandeur of these as royal portraits existing in the present, but speaking about a tradition that was perhaps lost within a colonial encounter. This was an attempt to think about starting Africa’s narrative differently. Instead of starting with this narrative of colonialism and slavery, which is ever present, we think about some of the customs and traditions that predated that encounter.

Spiritual Worlds

This particular room is very demonstrative of the artists all engaging with questions of spirituality in such different ways, whether it’s spirituality through the lens of the body and devotion, or this existential possibility of engaging with one’s ancestral heritage. Or thinking about the problems of isolation and togetherness in relation to spirituality, spirituality in relation to ideas of the landscape and what it means to memorialise one’s ancestors.

An artist that’s become very emblematic of these discussions in the UK, as a result of her tragic death in the Grenfell tower, is Khadija Saye. In one image she has lemons covering her face, and there are connections between lemons and the idea of domesticity, female labour in the Gambia, but it’s also because she loved Beyoncé’s Lemonade. So it’s an attempt to think about Gambian ritual, but in a deeply personal way. 

When we thought about Spiritual Worlds, there was this idea that spiritual worlds are often constructed in spaces of private contemplation. It can be about a collective spiritual practice or belonging to a particular religion, but I think more importantly for many of these artists, it’s a personal journey, and that’s what we didn’t want to lose sight of.

Worrying the Mask

Many people assume that masks are a way of hiding, but what many of these artists demonstrate is that masks can also be used to reveal. So in many instances in traditional African cultures, when one is wearing a mask they’re no longer regarded as a human subject, but as a spiritual entity. 

There’s also something ironic about the way that masks have now become somewhat detached from those legacies. Here Emmanuel C. Bofala is thinking about the mask as a ubiquitous signifier of global African identity, and how particularly in Rwanda where he’s based, people will often wear their Sunday best to have their passport photos taken.

When we think of questions around the migration crisis and how that impacts our society, it has a very detrimental impact on individuals who are unable to travel freely. And in this work, it’s obviously a very ironic take on the idea, but very powerful when you think about the layers that uphold this idea of the passport photo, particularly within the history of photography.

The Living Archive

I think what was important in this section was not to merely reflect on the colonial legacies of photography, but think about the ways in which artists had reimagined those legacies. Often contemporary artists are asking us to rethink the present in different ways, and Sammy Baloji is an artist who’s so emblematic of that.

This particular series, Mémoire, was built upon an archive that he discovered that was pulled together during the period of Belgian colonial occupation. What you’re seeing is many indentured labourers, effectively, completely without agency and without the ability to determine their own representation. But photography becomes this tool for registering these acts of colonial violence. 

Quite often, when we think about the colonial histories in the context of the UK, we think primarily about a kind of a symbolic violence, but we don’t always think about the ways that it affects wider issues of climate change, infrastructure, questions around sovereignty. So all of those issues that are at play in this work are important for us to look at as a result of where we are now – they’re not divorced from our present.

Family Portraits

This section was an attempt to mine a different narrative of the family portrait. I was very conscious of the fact that, particularly during the 1840s when photography studios were being set up, most of the people that had access to traditional photography studios would have been middle class or upper middle class families, who had the privilege to fashion their own identities. Often this made them slightly divorced from many of the social and political realities that the majority of people were experiencing at the time, and that’s certainly referenced in this work by Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album.

Typically, when you look at the work of Mofokeng, you’re looking at Black South African subjects wearing Victorian dress, many of whom were associated with the Christian missions. And as a result, were able to transform the way that they were perceived by others. But what of course happens as the 20th century unfolds and many of these people’s lives are socially, politically, economically transformed. So it’s fascinating to think about the politics of studio portraiture, because it’s about looking at all of the different uses of the family portrait and the family photo album.

There was a really interesting challenge with this particular section of the exhibition, to look on one side at the history of studio portraiture, and on the other side at the history of the colonial archive. To my mind, it was about really delving into those juxtapositions, even at the risk of not providing a coherent narrative, because there isn’t one. This is a history that’s constantly becoming unfixed, often by the artists themselves. This kind of unravelling of time and memory is so important within this exhibition.

Shared Dreams

Kiluanji Kia Henda’s A City Called Mirage is a very good example of work that was initially considered as a kind of conceptual installation that was documented through the medium of photography, but it’s absolutely as much a sculptural project as it is a photographic one. It’s derived from the artist’s recognition that after the civil war in Angola, there was a shortage of affordable urban housing. This led to a situation in which the city that was rising, that almost looked like it was fashioned after Dubai, had nothing to do with the social reality of its citizens. 

And that’s where we wanted to take people with this next section, which is not about Afrofuturism as projecting a fantastical reality in which Africa is viewed only through a fantasy lens, but about how artists are projecting their own futures. What they think African might be – rooted in the present and rooted very much in the contingent social, political realities that they face.

If the early section is the answer to colonial photography, ethnographic photography that fixed African subjects within a lens of exoticisation or difference, this section responds more directly to contemporary representations of Africa. This is through aid organisations, through documentary photography and other kinds of media that sometimes serve to create complex narratives, but often serve to reassert what we think we already know about the continent.

Epilogue

What I wanted to do with this exhibition, essentially, was to not have Africa necessarily be the only anchor. I was thinking about the ways in which artists were addressing these very global issues, whether it’s spirituality, urbanisation, the climate emergency, but from an African perspective. What I wanted to suggest is that by doing that, we gain a more expensive understanding of our humanity. But in order to do so, we have to also undo or unlearn some of the assumptions that we have around what Africa represents.

A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography is at Tate Modern, London, until 14 January 2024