“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.

“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)

Programme

The festival has several sections in which to explore different aspects of photography. Exhibitions from Arles brings international work from the 2023 French festival to a Chinese audience, and includes the publications shortlisted for Arles’ Book Award. The committee selected the Wim Wenders exhibition My Polaroid Friends, as well as part of the Søsterskap (Sisterhood) Contemporary Nordic Photography show, Hoja Santa (Holy Leaf) by Maciejka Art, and the moving-image work Cosmovisión by Garush Melkonyan. Jimei × Arles will also feature two shows taken from the Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award, which was curated by Tanvi Mishra: Caribbean Dreams by Samantha Box, and The Ajaib Ghar Archive by Philippe Calia.

“For Chinese audiences to visit Les Rencontres d’Arles in France, the costs of airfares and accommodation are high,” says RongRong. “Having these works brought to our doorstep provides a fantastic opportunity for local audiences. “Les Rencontres d’Arles in France is the pioneer of photography festivals and has been held for over 50 years, showcasing numerous international artists,” he adds. “Three Shadows Photography Art Centre is extremely honoured to have the opportunity to collaborate with such a prestigious national art event.”

Jimei × Arles is a two-way relationship with the French festival, with the winning exhibition from the Jimei × Arles Discovery Award receiving 100,000 yuan plus a showcase in next year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles. This award highlights emerging image- makers from China, with eight artists nominated by four curators – this year, Chen Min, Joanna Fu, He Bo and Yao Siqing. They have chosen, respectively: Li Dan for the series Samples of Air; Liu Guangli, Katabasis; Lahem, Modernity’s Fracture: The Odyssey of Returning Hometown; Wu MeiChi, Baby’s Baby; Wu Yuhang, Fragmentary; Zhang Lanpo, A Multitude of Riddles, in Stasis, in the Open; btr, AIR; and Yu Guo, Layered Views.

The works cover a broad variety of subjects and approaches, from Wu MeiChi’s wild digital interventions and Liu Guangli’s experiments in AI and 3D modelling, to Lahem’s delicate images of his hometown, a small village in the southern mountains of Jiangxi. RongRong says he is always curious to see the series picked out for the Discovery Awards, adding that there has been a notable increase in work using new media or multimedia approaches in recent years – a shift he links to the fast pace of development in imaging technology. He hopes Jimei × Arles represents younger cohorts of Chinese artists, and ensures those voices are heard internationally. “When visiting Les Rencontres d’Arles, we noticed that the voice of Chinese photography is relatively weak,” he notes. “It is highly significant for the works of our photographers to be exhibited at Arles alongside artists from other countries.”

New technology

Jimei × Arles is also highlighting cutting-edge thinking via China Pulse, a section devoted to a different Chinese art institution every year. For 2023 it is welcoming Tsinghua University’s Academy of Arts & Design, with the section titled Forever Young after the university’s motto. The show is divided into two parts, Literature and Performance and Fiction and Experiment, and draws on Tsinghau University’s 30-year history of photographic education – an unusually long history in China, where photography majors have only been established for the last 20 years. Tsinghau started teaching photography in 1991 and set up its first photography major in 2010, emphasising interdisciplinary work and making the integration of art and science a cornerstone.

Curated by Feng Jianguo, China Pulse’s range of artists includes RongRong, as well as Gao Yuan, Lei Lei and Wang Shiran – whose works create uncanny updates of icons of the western photographic canon. “When reflecting on the history of world photography art spanning nearly two centuries, it’s clear that this narrative has evolved atop a foundation of continuous innovation in art, technology and culture,” reads the introduction to China Pulse. “Today, photographic art has expanded to encompass a broader range of technological methods and conceptual interpretations… The central query within photographic art has transitioned from ‘what photography should be’ to ‘what else photography can be’.”

The Jimei × Arles Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image selection illustrates something of this potential, picking out five proposals by emerging curators selected from an open call. The finalists will receive mentorship and training, and one exhibition will go on to be shown at Three Shadows in Beijing plus other Chinese venues. The proposals include Bodies of Information by curators Gwendoline Cho-ning Kam and Li Suchao, a look at media in the algorithmic era and how bodies of information can connect and interact with the human body, and Beyond the View by curator Wang Jiayi, which considers how social media morphs real-life experiences and emotions into materials for editing. Song for the Luddites, curated by Feng Junyuan, considers the oscillation between irrational fear of technology and labour resistance in the contemporary digital landscape.

“Technological advancements, especially the development of smartphones, have significantly transformed the art of photography… and have changed our way of life” – RongRong

Launched in collaboration with Chanel in 2021, the Jimei × Arles Curatorial Award aims to encourage both emerging curators and curatorial practice in general in China. “In the western world, being a curator is a well-known and respected profession, but in China, the curator industry is relatively young, and not everyone is familiar with it,” RongRong explains. “Young people who aspire to enter this industry often lack the necessary paths and platforms. This award provides significant support to curators, including financial rewards, funding for exhibition implementation, international research trips, and masterclasses conducted by renowned international curators for other participants.” 

Chanel is supporting another exhibition at Jimei × Arles: Clumsily Burgeoning by actress Huang Xiangli, which presents Polaroids from an unknownwomanalongsideherown photography. It is part of the Crossover Photography section devoted to multimedia shows, which also includes work by sculptor Jiang Sheng, and film photographer and director Yu Likwai. Sheng’s works reflect on the relationship between humans and nature, while Likwai’s Already it is dusk exhibition, curated by Hai Jei, creates a dream realm for lost souls with photographs and gifs drawn from film productions. The Greetings from Asia section, meanwhile, highlights photography from a wider region, and this year is organised by the Singaporean curator Gwen Lee (who is also on the Jimei × Arles committee). Titled Archipelago: Paradise Revisit, it showcases artists from the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Cambodia, including Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee, Lim Sokchanlina, Wawi Navarroza and Miti Ruangkritya.

Jimei × Arles is supported by Jimei District Committee of the Communist Party China, the French Embassy, and ticket sales, but it also needs to attract sponsorships, such as with Chanel, local banks and Vivo Communication Technology. Headquartered in Dongguan, Guangdong, Vivo was founded in 2009 and is now one of the biggest mobile phone manufacturers in the world; it is sponsoring an exhibition at the festival titled vivo VISION +. Curated by RongRong, it includes image-makers such as Alex Webb and Francesco Gola, and reflects on the shift in aesthetics and perceptions fostered by smartphones, which have simultaneously spread photography and made it easy to take bursts of images.

“Technological advancements, especially the development of smartphones, have significantly transformed the art of photography in just a few short decades and have also changed our way of life,” comments RongRong. “In the past, not everyone had a camera, and people had to visit a photography studio to have their family portraits taken. Later on, almost every household had film or digital cameras.

“Now, with the advent of smartphones, and particularly the advanced development of smartphones in China, they have provided preset photo effects for regular users and professional settings for photographer users. Especially with the widespread popularity of social media, it has become very convenient to take photos and share them on platforms such as WeChat Moments or Instagram. For example, before having a meal, people may take a quick snapshot of their food to share. I believe this has subtly changed our relationship with images. In this era, photography is intimately connected with everyone.”

“The art of photography is constantly changing and requires embracing diverse technologies,” RongRong adds, although clarifying that this does not equate to abandoning analogue methods. “I believe that if young artists only know how to use smart devices and are unfamiliar with the principles of photography, without stepping into a darkroom, we will gradually lose the history of photography and our understanding of it. This year, we have an exhibition featuring the works of Taiwanese artist Chen Tsun-shing (titled Color, it is the third part of his Personal Psycho History Trilogy). His photographs from the 1980s will allow young people to once again see the charm of colour film photography.”

Art of collecting

Jimei × Arles also has another exhibition of vintage prints, in its regular Collector’s Tale exhibition. This show highlights a different collector every year, this time presenting Liu Gang and a photographic album he holds. Made “during the late Qing Dynasty”, in 1908, it documents the American Great White Fleet visiting Xiamen, cementing the city’s position as one of China’s modern treaty ports – a key historical event. “It is a unique collection, and upon seeing it, I decided to invite it for display at Jimei × Arles,” says RongRong.

Establishing photography as a collectible art form is one of the reasons RongRong co-founded Jimei × Arles – and, before that, the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing. Photography is a young art form in China and its community is still growing, he points out; Three Shadows was the first photography institution in China when RongRong set it up in 2007 with his partner, Japanese artist inri. They had been inspired by an earlier artists’ residency in Vienna, on which RongRong first realised how differently photography was regarded in the west. “The impact and contrast I experienced were immense,” he says. “I was shocked by the level of importance photography held in Europe and the general public’s awareness of it. Even small photography museums had photography collections.

“The concept of ‘art districts’ in China gradually took shape after 2000,” he continues. “Despite their development, photography as an art form in China still lacked an independent space. At that time, both the authorities and the public did not pay much attention. There were no photography spaces, libraries, residencies, and there were few critics and collectors. An entire photography ecosystem had not been established.”

Photography is associated with ‘taking’ pictures, he says, but he decided he had an opportunity to give back, setting up Three Shadows and helping establish lens-based art in China. Others gradually joined and, over the last five years or so, more initiatives have emerged. RongRong is encouraged by the progress but says there is more to be done. “These organisations are focused on photography of different generations and have been developing their own collections in various cities,” he says. “This is a positive phenomenon, but it is not enough. I hope that in the future, there will be dozens of institutions. 

“Photography has changed our way of life. The art is still young, but it is vibrant and constantly evolving. With the progress of photography in China, I hope there will be national-level museums and well-established collections in the future. Of course, I can also keenly feel the development of the photography industry in China. There is still a long way to go, but I believe that the future of Chinese photography is promising.”

Jimei × Arles International Photo Festival is across various venues in Xiamen until 21 January 2024

Held in Le Molière, 40 rue de Richelieu, an old hôtel particulier (mansion or townhouse), approche is the photography fair where less is more. Just 11 galleries are taking part this year, each showing the work of a single artist. Approche focuses on imagemakers experimenting with the medium, and will feature the UK’s Open Doors, Egypt’s Tintera, and South Africa’s Afronova. Each is showing work by a new generation of artists – Kensuke Koike, Ibrahim Ahmed, and Vuyo Mabheka respectively. Jean-Vincent Simonet’s work, on show at Paris Photo last year, will be presented by Intervalle. Places at approche can be reserved via its website.

PhotoSaintGermain is a huge photography festival running from 02 to 25 November, including free exhibitions across the Left Bank. Institutions and galleries involved include the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Centre tchèque de Paris, and Maison de l’Amérique Latine, as well as Munich’s Daniel Blau and Galerie Roger-Viollet. Bookshops and pop-ups also take part, including Delpire & Co. The standard is high, with Nicole Gravier’s Mythes et Clichés at the Hotel La Louisiane, for example, coming fresh from Les Rencontres d’Arles.

There are also photography exhibitions in Paris’ many institutions and museums, including a show by Viviane Sassen at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, and a large group show, Corps à corps – Histoire(s) de la photographie at Centre Pompidou, looking at photographic representations of the human race in the 20th and 21st centuries. Other institutions worth a visit include Le BAL, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jeu de Paume, and Palais de Tokyo, as well as private foundations such as Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.

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On show from 25 October until 31 December, the exhibitions in LagosPhoto are themed Ground State – Fellowship within the Uncanny, and aim to “explore the present moment in a bid to restore, repair and restitute hidden histories crucial for our survival.” As in previous years, the selected works come from artists and photographers from all over the world. This edition includes established image-makers such as Zanele Muholi, Zora J Murff, Poulomi Basu + CJ Clarke, Arko Datto, and M’hammed Kilito, as well as emerging names such as Chris Iduma, Fikayo Adebajo, Rehab Eldalil, and Amina Kadous.

“One of the big things I’m tapping into this year is the fact that Africa is so divided along languages,” says Nwagbogu, who is also curating Benin’s first ever pavilion for the 2024 Venice Biennale. “We need to be connected to people that have similar narratives. We need to forge new connections. These are constructs in our minds that we need to break down together.”

First held in 2010, LagosPhoto highlights contemporary artists working with photography who reflect experiences and identities from the African continent and beyond. In 2022, the festival was themed Remember Me – Liberated Bodies; Charged Objects and considered the photographer’s role in shaping, archiving and ordering narratives about communities and individuals. In 2021, under the theme Searching for Prince Adewale Oyenuga, it presented a project about a missing suitcase stuffed with a historic archive of paintings and photographs, which was left in Barcelona then repatriated to Nigeria.

“In the past, people always collaborated but there wasn’t always a lot of transparency. We need to allow people to see that it’s non-threatening to collaborate, that actually it elevates because everything is better together”

In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the festival was themed Rapid Response Restitution – The Home Museum, and audiences were invited to present something from their personal and family cultural heritage that could be shown in a digital exhibition. For Nwagbogu, the Covid years were interesting. In part, because the virus showed how interconnected the world now is, and in part because the response showed the power of digital technology – including digital images and their circulation. 

“Youngsters now get so much [information] on-screen that they question what they see much more than we did in my generation,” he points out. “I love that. It’s a matter of how we think about photography – we don’t have to abandon it, but we do have to be more conscious about how it makes us see. We have to be hyper-vigilant.”

LagosPhoto includes exhibitions, workshops, artist presentations, discussions, a portfolio review, and large-scale outdoor prints, which are displayed with the aim of reclaiming shared spaces and engaging the general public with multifaceted stories of Africa. Against a backdrop which is now post-Covid restrictions, but is plunging into ever-worsening wars and climate breakdown, Nwagbogu argues that people will turn to artists to make sense of the “catastrophic era”.

“We should all be thinking of scenarios that bring us together,” he says. “Storytelling is important because we can point to compassion, and it can create change. We can shift perspectives in these spaces.”

LagosPhoto Festival is at various venues in Nigeria and Benin from 25 October until 31 December

“I don’t think historical material should be celebrated to the detriment of contemporary documentary work, but I do think it’s important to look at history”

What was it like making work in the 1960s and 70s?

I always maintain I was fortunate to be born when I was, because in the 1960s we believed a revolution was possible. I was working with people who thought it was possible to change the situation the country was in. It was invigorating and exciting. I still think that is necessary, it still exists today. It’s particularly interesting now to see issues to do with race, gender and sexual identification coming forward and being expressed strongly. That’s very encouraging. I still believe we can change the world.

How do you feel about your campaigning work now? Can this kind of work sometimes stigmatise the people it tries to help?

That was an issue we discussed, especially at Camerawork and Ten.8. It’s one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed making the books because I’ve been able to correct that to some extent – to include photographs that show a wider view.

Why did you make Home and Street?

I had a major medical incident and stopped teaching in 2003. It gave me time to look at my archive, and I realised I had a significant amount of material that had never been published. Over the last few years I’ve been looking back rather than producing anything new. I don’t think historical material should be celebrated to the detriment of contemporary documentary work, but I do think it’s important to look at history. I want my work to be accessible to the public, not just to academics and researchers, because it’s part of a people’s history, and interpreting our past can help us understand our present and predict our future. We shouldn’t forget that. Since its beginning, photography has been used to document people’s lives. If you go back to the 17th century, images were very exclusive, the preserve of the rich. Photography is much more democratic.

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Daily Weeding sought out beauty and community in the everyday, and Ryniewicz is still inspired by that ethos, even as attitudes harden towards immigrants in the UK, and to the LGBTQ community in Poland. For Ryniewicz, finding joy and camaraderie is itself a political act. 

“I go to protests but it’s also important to do things that make us happy,” he says. “It’s important to build a community and have a little fun. Here in the West, we’re so used to being busy, to thinking of the past and the future, we’re losing the sense of being in the here and now.”

“Kuba Ryniewicz uses photography to grapple with the complexities of life and the limitations imposed upon us,” says writer and editor Gem Fletcher, who nominated him for Ones to Watch. “He has no interest in following trends or falling in line with the prescriptive expectations of the industry. Instead, his work is a proposition – how do practices of care allow us to co-curate new possibilities?”

Ryniewicz is shooting his current project in his studio, a former office whose decor he has left untouched. The challenge is to find the poetry in it, he says, laughing that it is tough but all part of the process for this work. He is photographing people he finds via word of mouth, or the local lesbian bar, or Grindr, inviting them to the studio then seeing what happens.

“Often gay magazines only show muscly bodies, I really wanted to show the dignity of different types”

Sometimes it is a small party, sometimes he does not take any pictures, sometimes they will make work together; it depends on the energy of the day, he says, but whatever happens, that is part of the process too. In reaching out and making new friends, he is building a community in the area. As with Daily Weeding, the work is taking him out of the studio too, capturing wild flowers or the northern landscape. 

The photographer’s recent commission for BUTT magazine had a similar ethos, showing a group of friends based in northern Poland. His first contact was via Grindr, then he visited them in their house, a warm pro-gay home despite Poland’s newly harsh laws. He took images of the men on a beach, which was once a cruising ground, keen to change the narrative about Poland and show that a positive LGBTQ scene does exist, and has done for many years. 

He was also determined to include “bigger boys”, he adds, to upend some of the divisions in gay body culture and reach for something more inclusive. “Their bodies are so beautiful, I wanted to show these very Baroque curves,” he says. “Often gay magazines only show muscly bodies, I really wanted to show the dignity of different types.”

Mussai says traces of the colonial archive and troubled image repertoires haunt the work of several of the artists she has gathered for the exhibition, adding that many of them choose to work with portraiture that speaks to their own lived experiences, and of their communities, while pointing to urgent contemporary politics. Black female and non-binary artists from the African Diaspora “have been forging unique visual vernaculars”, she says, reaching beyond existing genres to break new ground in photography. Each artist is given their own dedicated, hexagonal space, allowing their work to speak to their particular practices, but also build together into “a larger, collective-communal beehive, or honeycomb-like structure”.

Some of this work is on show for the first time at PhotoIreland, including a recent series by Frida Orupabo, who was shortlisted for the 2022 Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize. In this work, Orupabo created new digital collages by drawing on The McKinley Collection, a private archive of African photographies assembled over the past 30 years by Catherine McKinley. McKinley has followed Orupabo’s work for many years, and invited her to work with her collection; she’s thrilled Mussai suggested exhibiting the collages, she says, adding that they are “breathtaking”.

“The premise is that the sewing machine and camera – two powerful colonial tools of Empire that arrived on the African continent within a decade of each other – were used by African women to upend power through economic assertion and self-invention and expression,” she says, referencing her own comments in her publication The African Lookbook. “Dress, in many African contexts, and fashion trade history, are as powerfully present as the sitters who wear them. In these collages, Frida worked partly with the idea of dressing and undressing, the body, and issues of power, in her inimitable way.”

“I consider difference and marginality as fertile spaces of potentiality, pleasure, as blessings and as breath.”

McKinley has also curated an exhibition for PhotoIreland this year, and it’s also showcasing new work – Dust by Atong Atem, which considers South Sudanese women’s traditional relationship with the land. Atem was born in Ethiopia to South Sudanese parents who were forced to leave the country after civil war broke out; the family fled to Kenya, where they lived in a refugee camp, then settled in Australia. Atem’s work embraces this heritage, and wider issues of decolonisation and the power of photography. Her book 2022 Surat found her restaging family photographs and portraits, for example, drawing on the diasporic experience of sending images all over the world; it was also inspired by her father, who was photojournalist in the 1970s and 80s then Minister of Information for the South Sudanese government.

“I love the playfulness, deep intelligence, and the complexity of this work in that it tells a story of a young woman’s relationship to her extended family, spanning a wide global expanse almost in puzzle pieces of adornment,” says McKinley. “It is also very much a story of material trade, where clothing or objects stand in as substitutes for place and memory in the same way that Atong, as the sitter, stands in for her uncle and father, her mother in her youth, and so on.

“I felt Atong’s work had the risk of being misunderstood in the prevailing era of up-to-the-minute fashion photography borrowing from African studio traditions, by many exciting young Africa artists and the Western luxury brands employing and also co-opting them,” she adds. “In fact, she was using everyday fashion items from any number of places in the world – track suits from China, Kenyan beads, Arab textiles – and making them resolute expressions of ‘Dinka’ identity. The clothing and materials are actually mapping a South/Deeper South forced migration. It’s not ‘African fashion’ but a story of transaction of goods and of people and social customs who are bereft from war.”

For PhotoIreland McKinley was able to commission Atem to make new work, and initially Surat seemed to be the starting point for it. But Atem was pregnant while working on the commission, and this experience “pushed her into an incredible interiority”, says McKinley. Dust instead sees Atem considering ancient Sudanese traditions of birth and death, which were suppressed by colonisation and Christianity. Shipping similarly coloured red sand to her home from the Australian desert, she photographed herself lying in it to recreating a death ritual. “Contemplating this, enacting this at that moment in pregnancy – let’s say this work is deep feeling,” says McKinley.

These exhibitions are the lead shows at PhotoIreland, but there is also much more to see – a solo show by Ruben H Bermuez around his book, And you, why are you black? and work by artist Ethel-Ruth Tawe made after delving into Ben Krewinkel’s Africa in the Photobook publication, as well as a photobook fair. Expanding beyond the established canon, the festival is showing work that questions how that canon was built in the first place, the power that constructed it, and that still maintains it today. For Mussai, it’s a question of radically rethinking our approach to photography, art practices as visual and cultural activisms, and much more besides.

“I am interested in the curatorial ‘otherwise’ – multiple, parallel, overlapping, cross-fertilising, non-linear ourstories, herstories, theirstories, transstories, and not-yet-stories,” she says. “I consider difference and marginality as fertile spaces of potentiality, pleasure, as blessings and as breath. Echoing something the late Toni Morrison once proclaimed beautifully, the life-affirming notion that we must claim all borders and edges as central, for ourselves and for our futures – and invite others to join us in what we designate as our own r/evolutionary centres.”

PhotoIreland takes place in venues across Dublin until 23 July