The Guardian’s picture editors select photo highlights from around the world
Continue reading...Category Archives: Photography
Someone Close: the intimacy between photographers and subjects
Photography collective Oculi’s first group project gives a glimpse into the lives of 12 members and the people they share their lives with
Conor Ashleigh – photographer
Mazie Turner was more than just my creative mentor; she was a friend, an aunty, a collaborator and above all one of my greatest inspirations. Since passing away in 2014, Mazie has never been far away.
This January I made the most of a summer in Australia and headed north on a road trip. I visited Mazie’s two eldest granddaughters Mali and Lily, both of whom I had often photographed a decade ago as part of my project Baby in a Chapel. I was amazed to see how Mali and Lily had grown and flourished in the seven years since I saw them last. Mali was entering her final year of high school, and she had become a talented and articulate young woman.
Continue reading...Happy ‘farmily’: portraits of people and their animals – in pictures
Photographer Tasha Hall creates what she calls ‘farmily’ portraits – featuring families and their animals. Hall, from British Columbia in Canada, says she got the idea after wanting to include all her furry friends in a family portrait. She now travels the world capturing other families with their livestock and pets
Continue reading...Purim in Covid times – in pictures
Israel has set a curfew to limit festivities for the Jewish holiday when revellers don costumes and party into the night. Similarly muted celebrations have taken place around the world
Continue reading...Kenya’s Serene Haven school opens doors to teenage mothers – in pictures
Private school in central Kenya is welcoming pregnant teenagers, teenage mothers and their babies to ensure they have the chance to finish an education otherwise denied to them by stigma, logistics and lack of money
Continue reading...Art, unlocked: Italy’s museums quietly reopen – in pictures
After Italy’s government loosened Covid-19 restrictions in much of the country – including Lazio, the region that contains Rome and Vatican City – newly reopened museums are offering local visitors the opportunity to enjoy artworks undisturbed by the usual crowds of international tourists
Continue reading...Nude selfies: are they now art?
Lockdown has triggered a boom in the exchange of intimate shots – and now a new book called Sending Nudes is celebrating the pleasures and perils of baring all to the camera
Have you ever sent a nude selfie? The question draws a thick red line between generations, throwing one side into a panic while the other just laughs. And yet, as far back as 2009, that fount of moral wisdom, Kanye West, was advising how to stay safe. “When you take the picture cut off your face / And cover up the tattoo by the waist,” he rapped in Jamie Foxx’s song Digital Girl.
As the pandemic forces relationships to be conducted remotely, more people than ever are resorting to the virtual exchange of intimacies. Last autumn, a poll of 7,000 UK schoolchildren by the youth sexual health charity Brook put the figure at nearly one in five who said they would send a naked selfie to a partner during a lockdown.
Continue reading...Spanish people take to streets over rapper’s jailing – in pictures
Free speech protests have continued since the jailing of musician Pablo Hasél last week for exalting terrorism in his lyrics
Continue reading...Sydney hotel quarantine – a photo diary
The photographer Jillian Edelstein flew to Australia in December to visit her mother, who had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in October. On arrival in Sydney she was bussed to a police hotel. A quarantine exemption was refused so she had to endure a 14-day wait before being able to see her mum. These images form her very personal diary of that experience, some of which she shared on Instagram, edited for publication
Continue reading...John Malkovich as eerie identical twins: Sandro Miller’s best photograph
‘I wanted to pay homage to work that made my knees buckle. John looked nothing like Diane Arbus’s twins. But on set his spirit left and theirs came in’
Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with stage 4 throat cancer. The prognosis wasn’t 100% positive and there were days when I’d lay in bed wondering if I’d ever be able to shoot again. I’m self-taught, and I started thinking about the images that had changed the way I thought about photography – work by Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus, work that made my knees buckle with emotion.
I thought: if I ever get better, I would love to pay homage to these greats, in a way nobody has done before.
Continue reading...‘A great cover for their first album’: Harry and Meghan’s romantic rebellion against royal portraiture
The Sussexes’ baby announcement shared on Valentine’s Day is a confident image of defiance that seems to take us inside their love – granny must find it utterly baffling
The Duke of Sussex’s left foot steals the show. His knobbly toes shove themselves into the foreground, bulging out to rhyme with his wife’s baby bump. Misan Harriman, the Nigerian-born photographer and friend of Meghan who took the picture remotely from his home in Woking, has created an unbuttoned romantic pastoral that doesn’t so much rebel against royal portraiture as bring it to an end.
Producing babies has been the primary business of royalty since time immemorial. Harry and Meghan’s new child will be eighth in line to the British throne, but the picture tells us quite flamboyantly the Sussexes are not in Britain and have no desire to be. It is a confident image of defiance. A cup of California dreamin’. The garden looks semi-tropical. Harriman’s preference for black and white gives the sun-kissed lawn a lovely silvery glow that sets the couple almost in a vision of paradise. But at the same time, their intimate casualness – those toes again – is intended to show us they are anchored to the reality that matters.
Continue reading...The edible art of sourdough faces – in pictures
Five years ago, Swedish designer and stylist Linda Ring experienced total burnout. After a few months doing nothing, she tried to adopt a slower lifestyle. “I started baking sourdough, but as it’s my nature to try to make everything beautiful, I began experimenting.”
Ring’s loaves became canvases for portraits and landscapes, scored into the raw dough. “You never know how the bread or the pattern will turn out, it’s enormously satisfying when I take it out of the oven and see.”
Continue reading...Some people are on the pitch! Sports photos with a twist – in pictures
Combining thousands of images, Pelle Cass’s photographs of tennis, basketball and more perfectly evoke the chaos and physicality of sport
Continue reading...Relics of the Cold war – at auction
Hundreds of historical artefacts from the Cold war era are offered for sale at Julien’s Auctions. The lots will include a rare Soviet version of the Enigma encryption machine known as the Fialka, clandestine operative cameras, and radio transmitters and receivers
Continue reading...Myanmar coup protests grow – in pictures
Huge crowds of protesters have marched in towns and cities across Myanmar in the largest show of popular defiance so far following the military coup a week ago
Continue reading...New Orleans houses become Mardi Gras floats in Covid era – in pictures
Houses are being decorated as floats because the pandemic has resulted in the cancellation of the customary parades during the carnival season
Continue reading...Sahara sand covers European ski resorts and cities – in pictures
This exceptional meteorological phenomenon is linked to a powerful southerly airflow that brings spring temperatures – and a large concentration of Saharan dust suspended in the atmosphere
Continue reading...Myanmar coup protesters – in pictures
At least 30 people have been detained over pot-banging protests against a military coup as demonstrations gather pace
Continue reading...Confinement: photographic responses to the pandemic
Prix Pictet, the world’s leading prize for photography and sustainability, gathered responses to Covid-19 by 43 artists from 20 nations. A featured collaboration of four photographers with the Guardian, in the summer of 2020, draws on themes of isolation, confinement and political instability, and includes laureates and shortlisted photographers from the prize’s eight editions
Continue reading...‘I document America’s strange beauty’: the photography of My Name Is Earl’s Jason Lee
He played a redemption-seeking redneck on TV, but lately the actor has found solace off-screen, travelling with his camera. He talks about slackers, the Mallrats sequel and breezing into one-horse towns
Jason Lee knew he was in trouble when he stepped on the set. The year was 1992, Sonic Youth were at their peak and he was starring as a doomed skateboarder in their latest video. As a music obsessed, pro skateboarder with acting aspirations, he felt he had a point to prove. To add more pressure, it was for the song 100% – the band’s classic ode to a murdered Black Flag roadie – and the video was being co-directed by one of his skateboarding friends (some guy called Spike Jonze).
“I was really trying my hardest to focus,” says Lee. “I was like pretending to be Robert De Niro on the set, really trying to get into it and make it count and make it real and believable.”
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