Alienated civilians, ruined homes and Ukrainian soldiers on the frontline
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Benedict Cumberbatch swans about on the baffling cover of Vanity Fair’s Hollywood issue
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.
Continue reading...Ansel Adams: rare photographs in stunning hi-definition
Rare photos taken by Ansel Adams from the collection of David H Arrington, a passionate collector of Adams’ photographs from the beginning, will be offered for sale from 17 February at midday in Sotheby’s New York
Continue reading...Lovers overlooking Sarajevo 20 years after the war: Chris Leslie’s best photograph
‘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.
Continue reading...Women behind the lens: raising awareness of albinism in west Africa
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
Continue reading...In limbo: the refugees left on the Belarusian-Polish border – a photo essay
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
Continue reading...‘Adults are banning books, but they’re not asking our opinions’: meet the teens of the Banned Book Club
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.
Continue reading...How Ernest Shackleton’s icy adventure was frozen in time
An exhibition of vivid photographs and a restored documentary give fresh insight into the Antarctic explorer, who died a century ago
One hundred years ago, the leader of the last great expedition of the heroic age of polar exploration died from a heart attack as his ship, Quest, headed for Antarctica. The announcement of the death of Ernest Shackleton on 30 January 1922 was greeted with an outpouring of national grief.
This was the man, after all, who had saved the entire crew of his ship Endurance – which had been crushed and sunk by ice in 1915 – by making a daring trip in a tiny open boat over 750 miles of polar sea to raise the alarm at a whaling station in South Georgia.
Continue reading...Flying high: how a photo of a Syrian father and son led to a new life in Italy
A tender moment captured by Mehmet Aslan of Munzir al-Nazzal and his son, both survivors of the Syrian war, prompted Italian organisations to act. A year on, they are settling into life in Tuscany
In January last year, while working on the Turkish-Syrian border, photojournalist Mehmet Aslan photographed a Syrian man, Munzir al-Nazzal, who had lost a leg in a bomb attack. Munzir was playing with Mustafa, his 5-year-old son, who was born without limbs, and the shot portrayed the father, propped up on a crutch, raising his smiling child into the air.
Aslan entitled his photograph Hardship of Life.
Continue reading...Incredible images from the Budapest Foto Awards 2021 – in pictures
A look at a selection of the winning images from the Budapest International Foto Awards – a platform for photographers from all levels and genres to share their best images with the creative community in Hungary and eastern Europe
Continue reading...A surfing god rides The Cradle of Storms – Chris Burkard’s best photograph
‘This is Josh Mulcoy, the godfather of cold-water surfing, catching a wave in Alaska. The place is so windy and wild, it’s known as The Cradle of Storms’
The Aleutian Islands are fabled in surfing. Part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, they’re a raw chain of islands connecting Alaska to Russia. The area is known as The Cradle of Storms because it’s so windy and wild.
Most of the islands are made up of tundra and there are big active volcanoes. This island, Umnak, is home to a very small Aleut community. I went there in 2013. The planning alone took two years. You need to be completely self-sustained. You need to charter a small plane and have enough food and supplies for your entire stay, with the means to charge all your equipment.
Continue reading...Lunar new year celebrations 2022 – in pictures
Despite Covid-19 dampening travel plans, millions of people from across the globe are welcoming the Year of the Tiger
Continue reading...‘Killed by indifference’: France shocked by death on busy Paris street
Swiss photographer René Robert died from hypothermia after falling and being ignored for nine hours
The death of an 85-year-old man who reportedly succumbed to hypothermia after falling and spending nine hours sprawled and ignored on a bitterly cold street in central Paris has prompted grief, anger and incredulity in France and beyond.
René Robert, a Swiss photographer known for his shots of some of Spain’s most famous flamenco stars, died last week after slipping while on one of his nightly walks around the busy Paris neighbourhood where he lived.
Continue reading...Global SinoPhoto awards – Chinese culture in pictures
An image titled The Dancing Dreams of a Mountain Girl, depicting a young mountain girl dancing for her grandmother in a village in China, is the overall winner of an international photo competition celebrating Chinese culture. The Global SinoPhoto awards invited photographers to tell Chinese stories, imagining, interpreting and inspiring connections between Chinese culture and the rest of the world. The awards covered four categories: water (as 2022 is the year of the water tiger), home, work and play, and environment.
The Museum of East Asian Art (MEAA) in Bath is to exhibit the winning entries from 16 February until 14 May 2022
Continue reading...‘Wisdom and incredible strength’: the exhibition showing the lives built by Holocaust survivors
A new collection of photographs reveals the lives survivors have built and the legacies they have passed down the generations
The film and photographic images that emerged from the Holocaust, often in a blurrily dark monochrome, instantly became the visual definition of evil in the 20th century. So to set this brutal iconography against the cheerily crisp colours of modern English suburban homes in springtime – complete with armchairs, French doors on to patios, bright tulips in pots – might risk accusations of superficiality, or worse.
But when the people in these apparently mundane locations are themselves survivors of the Holocaust, the sheer joyful fact of their existence becomes a triumphant rejoinder to the unimaginable cruelty and depravity of three-quarters of a century ago. The new images are collected together in Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors, which opens later this week to coincide with world Holocaust day, at the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) gallery in Bristol after a showing at the Imperial War Museum in London.
Continue reading...Two men playing draughts on an abandoned train: Gosette Lubondo’s best photograph
‘Both of the people on this train in Kinshasa are me. I superimposed myself because I can’t afford models’
This image, part of a series called Imaginary Trip, was taken in an abandoned train outside Kinshasa station in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I was looking for a site to evoke an imaginary voyage to convey the idea of memory, the passage of time and the reappropriation of old places. A lot of young men hang around this area, which is a poor neighbourhood, and they squat in the trains during the day while doing various jobs such as helping people at the station. Sometimes they have something to do, other times nothing.
The two people in this photograph are both me. I took several digital images and then superimposed them to represent two young men playing a traditional game of draughts with bottle tops – as they do. When I started out on this project, I did not intend to put myself in the photographs – it was almost accidental. I did not have the money to pay for models, so it was partly a question of budget, but also of time. I spend ages in these places creating my photographs, too long for most people to hang around, so in the end I found myself in front of and behind the camera. I often work alone with a camera, a tripod and a remote trigger.
Continue reading...Spain’s festival of Las Luminarias – in pictures
The Spanish festival of Las Luminarias has been held for the first time since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic
Continue reading...Tonga’s volcano eruption: in pictures
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai undersea volcano eruption is thought to be the largest volcanic event in 30 years. Here are a selection of images of what we have seen so far
- Leaked New Zealand military photos show scale of damage caused by Tonga volcano eruption
- First pictures after eruption show islands blanketed in ash, as two deaths confirmed
Women behind the lens: ‘She was too beautiful not to be photographed’
Etinosa Yvonne recalls a chance encounter with a Fulani woman in northern Nigeria
I met this woman in Machina, in Yobe state, when I was on assignment in northern Nigeria 2020. It had taken us seven hours to get there – it’s right on the border with Niger – and it was already late afternoon, early evening.
We were waiting for people to come and collect water from a solar-powered water pump when I saw her: this extremely beautiful Fulani woman. I was particularly drawn to the marks on her face. I knew Fulani women always like to look good, but it was really beautiful to see up close. There was a bit of a language barrier as I don’t speak Fula and she didn’t speak English or Hausa, but she agreed to have her photo taken.
Continue reading...Martin Kemp and Steve Norman of Spandau Ballet look back: ‘We were stern young men who wanted to take over the world’
The bassist and saxophonist recreate an old photo and look back at a mortifying incident in a German sauna
Pioneers of the New Romantic movement, Spandau Ballet’s career launched in the late 70s within the walls of Blitz, an enigmatic club in Covent Garden known for influencing the sound and style of 80s pop. Formed by London school friends Gary Kemp, Tony Hadley, Steve Norman and John Keeble – and later Gary’s brother and former roadie Martin – Spandau Ballet went on to soundtrack the bombast and excess of the decade, selling 25m albums globally. Known for their bitter breakup – Tony, Steve and John launched an unsuccessful case against Gary for a share of the band’s songwriting royalties – they’ve since reformed but are now on hiatus. Martin has gone on to have a successful television career, while saxophonist Steve and his band, the Sleevz, celebrate the 40th anniversary of Spandau’s debut album with a UK tour later this year.
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