Category Archives: Photography

Getty opens access to 30,000 images of black diaspora in UK and US

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Photos dating back to 1800s made free to allow telling of black history stories beyond enslavement and colonisation

A collection of almost 30,000 rarely seen images of the black diaspora in the UK and the US, dating from the 19th century to the present, has been launched as part of an educational initiative to raise awareness of the history of black people in the UK.

The Black History & Culture Collection includes more than 20 categories of images including politics, hair, education, female empowerment and LGBTQ+.

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India bars Pulitzer-winning Kashmiri photojournalist from flying to France

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Sanna Irshad Mattoo says she was stopped by immigration officials at Delhi airport despite holding valid visa

Indian authorities have blocked a Pulitzer prize-winning Kashmiri photojournalist from taking a flight to Paris where she was to take part in a book launch and photography exhibition displaying her photos from Kashmir.

Sanna Irshad Mattoo, who works with Reuters as a multimedia journalist from Indian-administered Kashmir, was stopped at the Delhi airport by immigration officials on Saturday, despite holding a valid French visa.

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Médecins Sans Frontières apologises for using images of child rape survivor

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Medical charity’s president calls publication of controversial photographs ‘a mistake’ and says guidelines will be tightened

The international president of Médecins Sans Frontières has apologised for publishing photographs of a teenage rape survivor from the Democratic Republic of the Congo on its website, following criticism that the images were unethical and racist.

Dr Christos Christou also announced that the medical charity had tightened its guidelines on photographing vulnerable minors, such as survivors of sexual abuse, requiring that they should not be identified visually or by name.

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Médecins Sans Frontières condemned for ‘profiting from exploitative images’

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Medical charity criticised for using images that ‘endanger and exploit children’ amid row over photos from DRC identifying child rape survivor

Doctors, photographers, human rights activists and academics have written to Médecins Sans Frontières to raise concerns that the medical charity is exploiting the trauma of vulnerable patients to promote its work.

In an open letter to the international president and MSF board, almost 50 signatories, who include current and former staff, allege that the aid organisation has commissioned, published and allowed the sale of photographs that endanger and exploit vulnerable black people, including children.

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Artist who ‘reclaims black experience’ wins Deutsche Börse photography prize

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Judges praise Deana Lawson’s portraits, which depict familiar domestic scenes containing an unsettling element

An artist whose staged portraits reflect the language of the family photo album has won one of the most prestigious prizes in photography, with judges saying her work “reframes and reclaims the black experience”.

Deana Lawson from Rochester, New York, was awarded the £30,000 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize 2022 at the Photographers’ Gallery in London for her solo exhibition Centropy, held at Kunsthalle Basel two years ago.

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Edinburgh show will display street photographer’s never-before-seen work

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University will host major survey of Robert Blomfield’s shots of student life in 1950s and 60s

Previously unseen work by a photographer who captured life in Edinburgh and has been compared to the great Henri Cartier-Bresson is to go on display at an exhibition in the city where he lived and worked.

Robert Blomfield moved to Edinburgh from Yorkshire and studied medicine in the city while living a second life as a pioneering street photographer who shifted between shooting university students, locals and the landscape of the Scottish capital.

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Sumaya Sadurni: photojournalist and ‘rock’n’roll Mother Teresa’ dies at 32

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Described as ‘outstanding and fearless’ by Bobi Wine, tributes have been paid to Sadurni, whose work featured in the Guardian and New York Times

Sumaya Sadurni Carrasco has died while travelling to take photographs for the Guardian’s Saturday magazine in northern Uganda. Thomas Mugisha, an NGO worker, also died in the accident on 7 March.

Sumy, as she was known, was a talented, driven and courageous photojournalist with a rare gift for friendship. At just 32 years old, she had built a powerful body of work, which had been published in some of the world’s best-known publications; in 2020 she was shortlisted for the Guardian’s agency photographer of the year. She also leaves a legacy of knowledge and inspiration that she passed on to young photographers as a Uganda Press Photo award mentor, a teacher at Makerere University and a Canon trainer.

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Doomed ship of gold’s ghostly picture gallery is plucked from the seabed

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Eerie photographs recovered from the 1857 wreck of the SS Central America are now being published for the first time

It is one of the most famous treasure wrecks ever discovered, a steamer named the “ship of gold” after it sank in 1857 off the coast of South Carolina with one of the largest cargoes of gold ever lost at sea. Miners who had struck it rich in the California gold rush were among those bringing home to New York their hard-earned wealth, only to lose their lives when the SS Central America was struck by a hurricane, sinking nearly a mile and a half beneath the waves.

When nuggets, ingots and coins were recovered from the seabed in various expeditions between 1988 and 2014, the world was dazzled. But, with reported values of tens of millions of pounds, it sparked a complex legal case that landed its original treasure-hunter in jail.

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The brave woman who symbolises Ukraine: Mark Neville’s best photograph

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‘This image is from a collection I made called Stop Tanks With Books. I have sent out 750 free copies to try to stop the war’

This was taken in May last year in Myrnohrad, an industrial town 50 miles from Donetsk, a stronghold of the illegal Russian occupation in eastern Ukraine. Then, as now, fears of a Russian invasion were high. While much of the west thinks the threat of conflict started only a few weeks ago, it’s been the reality for Ukrainians for almost a decade.

I was walking around Myrnohrad taking photos with a big portable flash and a plate camera when I saw this woman sit down and light a cigarette. She looked so confident and self-absorbed. I speak a little Russian, so I told her I was taking pictures of ordinary life across Ukraine and asked if she would pose. She agreed without hesitation.

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Benedict Cumberbatch swans about on the baffling cover of Vanity Fair’s Hollywood issue

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Scowling, sodden and surrounded by waterfowl, the actor adorns the new Hollywood issue as an icon of … what exactly?

The customary brouhaha erupted yesterday after the release of Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood Issue cover photos, the most striking of which depicts an angry Benedict Cumberbatch emerging fully clothed from a hot bubblebath sesh with a bevy of swans.

The Hollywood Issue increasingly feels like it belongs to a different era, when fashion magazines and actors’ star power were at their respective heights. These days, the printed press is clinging on for dear life (Entertainment Weekly announced just last week that it will be ceasing its print edition), and in Hollywood no one performer is bigger than a franchise. So the Hollywood Issue, which trades in the nose-to-the-window glamour of movie stars, has a more forlorn quality than it used to.

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Lovers overlooking Sarajevo 20 years after the war: Chris Leslie’s best photograph

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‘The couple were just strangers blocking my view. But as they reached out and embraced each other, it seemed an optimistic image representing the young people of a city that had suffered’

I first visited and photographed Sarajevo in 1996. I had been volunteering in neighbouring Croatia and managed to hitch a ride in to Bosnia in a UN vehicle. The war and siege had ended a few months before and the city was enjoying its long-awaited peace. Sarajevans took to its scarred streets in huge numbers, meeting with friends and drinking coffee safe in the knowledge that they wouldn’t be struck down by a sniper or shell.

The destruction of the city at that time was jaw-dropping, surreal and seemingly total: rows upon rows of broken, bombed-out high-rise flats; shell craters and explosion indents everywhere; hospitals, offices and factories all in ruins. This was urbicide, a late-20th-century Dresden or Stalingrad. Everyone who lived through the nearly four-year siege had a nightmare to share.

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Women behind the lens: raising awareness of albinism in west Africa

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People with albinism across Africa face the harsh sun as well as social exclusion and suspicion. Photographer Maroussia Mbaye hopes to bring greater understanding through her work

An estimated 10,000 people are living with albinism in Senegal. Albinism is genetically inherited and, while prevalence varies from region to region, some of the highest rates are found in sub-Saharan Africa. The deficit in melanin is characterised by the absence of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes. Albinism can lead to skin cancer, visual impairment and sun sensitivity. About 90% of people with the condition across Africa die of skin cancer before they are 40.

Myths surrounding people affected by albinism have led to extreme practices involving the use of body parts. Hundreds of attacks including horrific mutilations, ritual killings, sexual violence, kidnappings and trafficking of people and body parts have happened in many countries across the continent. Many people with the condition are at risk every day because of superstition and witchcraft practices.

Franco-Senegalese photographer Maroussia Mbaye is a graduate from the London School of Economics and the London College of Communication. She was raised in a politically active family and her experiences fuelled an interest in social division and justice, leading her to pursue documentary photography, through which she aims to capture human life in new, perspective-shifting ways

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In limbo: the refugees left on the Belarusian-Polish border – a photo essay

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Offered a route into Europe by the Lukashenko regime in Belarus, thousands of asylum seekers are now stranded on the EU’s frontier

By Lorenzo Tondo. Photographs by Alessio Mamo

On 13 August last year, a villager in Ostrówka, in the east of central Poland, posted two pictures on Facebook featuring groups of men, women and children walking through the cornfields with bags on their backs.

They were families from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraqi Kurdistan, and they were among the first asylum seekers to enter the country from Belarus. The post was accompanied by the following short text: “In the heat of day through wheat, at night through corn, they sneak through, they wander, just to get to the west. Great politics and slight refugees leave their print on the fields near Ostrówka.”

The makeshift shelter of a Syrian family with small children in the forest near Narewka, Poland

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‘Adults are banning books, but they’re not asking our opinions’: meet the teens of the Banned Book Club

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Conservatives are pushing to ban books from school libraries. At a time of crisis, a group of Pennsylvania teenagers are fighting back

“Napoleon’s use of the sheep was notable,” says Jordan Daughtry, 14. She’s clutching a copy of Animal Farm, and referring to the authoritarian Berkshire boar who seizes control of an English acreage, before bending his fellow animals to his will.

The sheep, who represent the unwitting masses in George Orwell’s critique of Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian rule, are “ignorant buffoons”, Daughtry says.

Kiara Daughtry, left, and Lena Cackley.

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