Category Archives: Photography

Dakar Rally 2022: veterans, debuts and biofuels – a photo essay

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This year’s rally once again returned to Saudi Arabia where 750 competitors in 430 vehicles traversed more than 8,000km over 12 stages. The rally started and ended in Jeddah, going through canyons and cliffs in the Neom region, passing by the Red Sea coastline, into stretches of dunes surrounding the capital Riyadh.

Click here to check out images of the rally from yesteryear

From Jeddah to Riyadh and everywhere in between, this has been a visually spectacular year at the Dakar Rally in Saudi Arabia. Fourteen days of dunes, fast straight tracks, rocky sections, and cliff backdrops. Titles have been contested and first-time entrants have been broken in. All of the contestants were hoping for glory in the vast desert landscape where mistakes are rarely forgiven, but few claimed it.

The dust settles on the world’s toughest rallying event and a variety of stories emerge from the Saudi desert. Nani Roma, the seasoned veteran who has won the Dakar on both a motorbike and in a car, showed us how far biofuels have come in recent years.

Bahrain Raid Extreme driver Nani Roma and co-driver Alex Haro Bravo drive their Prodrive Hunter T1 on Stage 7 from Riyadh to Al Dawadimi. Photograph: Marian Chytka

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Joy and nakedness at San Francisco’s Dyke March: Phyllis Christopher’s best photograph

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‘The march is like our Christmas – the biggest night of the year, where women celebrate half naked and anything goes’

In San Francisco, the night before the annual Pride parade is reserved for the Dyke March, a celebration of lesbian life throughout the city. It was like our Christmas – the biggest night of the year – and half of us would be so hungover we wouldn’t make it to Pride the next day.

I remember getting a call from an editor at On Our Backs, a lesbian magazine run by women that billed itself as offering “entertainment for the adventurous lesbian”. It was a bedrock of the lesbian community – one of the few ways to communicate with one another, and to celebrate sex and educate each other about it at a time when Aids had brought so much devastation to queer communities. The editor wanted me to shoot a kiss-in, but the tone of her voice sounded almost guilty – like she couldn’t quite bring herself to ask me to work on the biggest party night of the year. But to me, it was the most fun I could imagine.

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‘He was a handful’ – Hunter S Thompson’s PA and photographer relives her wild job

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She cooked his weird dinners, dealt with his volcanic rants, and read his prose back to him from dark till dawn. As Chloe Sells’ photographs of the gonzo writer’s chaotic Colorado cabin are published, she remembers an invigorating, inspirational figure

One evening towards the end of 2003, Chloe Sells was entering the J-Bar in Aspen, Colorado, in search of a late night drink, when an older woman approached her. As Sells recalls in her new photobook, Hot Damn!: “She looked me up and down and said, ‘We’re looking for some help for Hunter. Are you a night owl? Would you be interested?’”

Hunter, as every local knew, was Hunter S Thompson, the celebrated creator of “gonzo” journalism, and the town’s most infamous resident. The woman was his wife, Anita. “It took me only a moment,” Sells says, “to answer ‘Yes’ to everything.”

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Justin and Dan Hawkins of the Darkness look back: ‘People are terrified of us. And rightly so’

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The brothers recreate a family photo and talk about how they came back from a huge fallout – and a best man’s speech starring a puppet testicle

Justin and Dan Hawkins are the Lowestoft brothers behind rock band the Darkness. Puncturing the genteel Dido and Keane-era mainstream of the early noughties with their stadium rock and low-cut catsuits, their music had a short-lived period of ridicule before their debut album Permission to Land went on to sell 3.5m copies. At the peak of their commercial powers they won three Brit awards, an Ivor Novello, and penned the modern Christmas classic, 2003’s Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End). The band split in 2006 after the release of their second album, but they’ve since reformed and released five more records. They are currently on tour.

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Bill Bernstein’s best photograph: joy and humanity in a homeless centre

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‘It was clear that these two had each other in their lives, and that was pretty much it’

In the 1970s I lived in SoHo in New York, which is not far from the Bowery, but the two districts were like separate universes. SoHo was full of artists and creative types but the Bowery was known as the place where you ended up when you were at the bottom of the barrel. There were a lot of flophouses and a lot of alcoholism and drug use. It was the darkest place in New York City for a long time.

The Bowery Mission is a Christian rescue centre for homeless people. Only men are allowed to stay overnight but it feeds anybody. I used to go there around Thanksgiving and Christmas time to help serve dinner. The face-to-face contact and interactions I had with people meant that I always felt a real connection with them, and it also made me grateful for what I had in my own life.

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‘She stood in silence, remembering’: photographing Gaza under airstrikes

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Fatima Shbair’s photo of a girl in her ruined home is an indelible image of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’s resurgence in May

For 11 days in May, Fatima Shbair hardly slept. When the most recent rounds of fighting in Gaza broke out between Israelis and Palestinians on 10 May, the 24-year-old freelance photographer said goodbye to her mother and left her home to document the stories of her neighbours in Gaza, as their lives were racked by terror.

The conflict featured waves of pre-dawn Israeli air raids and rocket fire from Gazan territory. Palestinians made up the vast majority of more than 250 people killed.

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My best pandemic shot: Guardian and Observer photographers’ view on 2021

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We asked our photographers to pick their best image of the pandemic in 2021

From vaccination centres and ICU wards to family reunions and lockdown beards, the images selected by the Guardian and Observer photographers, accompanied by their thoughts, give individual takes on covering the ongoing pandemic.

The Covid-19 ICU ward at the University College hospital in London, 27 January

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‘It could explode at any time’: photographing Haiti’s gang warfare

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In a country dominated by gangs, photographer Rodrigo Abd’s images show both armed gangsters and the residents they terrorise

The two images are as stark as what they represent: the cause and effect of Haiti’s increasing woes. In one, a masked and armed gangster keeps lookout on a Port-au-Prince rooftop, just a few blocks from the presidential palace. In the other, a family recently displaced by gang violence takes shelter in a school that now houses dozens of families, a stone’s throw from their homes.

“Port-au-Prince is almost entirely controlled by gangs, and we wanted to show the efforts of people that are running businesses to survive,” says Rodrigo Abd, 45, an Argentinian staff photographer with the Associated Press who took the images. “But I was also trying to show another side to Haiti, to avoid the stereotypes that we always repeat, to show the violent without the violence, or the poor without the poverty.”

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Pandemic park life and a secret knitting cult: the best photography books of 2021

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From meditative portraits that nod at the Dutch old masters to an incendiary, epic exploration of the Troubles, these are the volumes that resonated this year

The photography book that I returned to more than any other this year was Encampment Wyoming by Lora Webb Nichols, an extraordinary record of life in a US frontier community in the early 20th century. Comprised of photographs by Nichols and other local amateur photographers, it emanates a powerful sense of place. Domestic interiors and still lifes punctuate the portraits, which range from the spectral – a blurred and ghostly adult plaiting the hair of a young girl – to the stylish – a dapper, besuited woman peering through a window. An intimate, quietly compelling portrait of a time, a place and a nascent community.

Perhaps because of the strangely suspended nature of our times, I was also drawn to contemporary books that dealt in quiet reflection. Donavon Smallwood’s Languor was created during the lockdown spring and summer of 2020, as he wandered through the woods in the relatively secluded north-west corner of New York’s Central Park. Smallwood’s images of glades, streams and ravines suggest stillness amid the clamour of the city and are punctuated by his deftly composed portraits of the individuals who were regularly drawn there during the pandemic. The book’s subtext deals with the fraught history of Central Park, a space that has often echoed the city’s racial tensions. “What’s it like to be a black person in nature?” asks Smallwood in this quietly powerful debut.

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‘I wanted the focus to be on their smiles’: Brunel Johnson’s best phone picture

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The London-born photographer on his image of Gambian football fans

There’s a strong Premier League following in the Gambia: just like Brunel Johnson, 14-year-old Musa is an Arsenal fan. The London-born photographer was on his way to lunch when he noticed the teen, in his favourite football shirt, huddled with friends. They were on the grounds of Spot Academy, watching game highlights on one of the older kids’ phones.

Brunel had been living alongside the boys for two weeks, documenting the work of the charity, which serves as a community school while providing boarding places for orphans. He’d left his digital camera in his room and knew the moment would pass if he went back for it. So he reached for his iPhone. The photograph’s angle was a spur-of-the-moment decision, chosen simply to fit as many faces in as possible; he added the black and white “Noir” filter later.

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Images of India: from courtesans and colonial rule to a child’s-eye view – in pictures

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Since its invention in the 1840s, photography has played an integral part in Indian art history. Although it is often said that India is the most photographed country in the world, the history of its representation is more complicated, and more political, than initially meets the eye. Visions of India: From the Colonial to the Contemporary is the first major survey of Indian photography in Australia and will be on show at the Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne until 20 March 2022

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A look at the Irish: photography in Ireland from 1839 to now – in pictures

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In Our Own Image: Photography in Ireland, 1839 to the Present is the first in a series of exhibitions forming the first comprehensive historical and critical survey of photography from across the island of Ireland. Coinciding with the centenary of the establishment of modern Ireland, In Our Own Image draws on material from from archives, private collections and contemporary commissions, charting how the medium has both reflected and shaped Irish cultural identity.

In Our Own Image: photography in Ireland, 1839 to the present curated by Gallery of Photography Ireland in partnership with Dublin Castle / OPW is at The Printworks, Dublin Castle until 6 February

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A new start after 60: ‘I was a globetrotting photographer. Then I stayed home – and my world expanded’

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His career took Roff Smith, 63, to more than 100 countries. But he started to feel jaded. Exploring his local area by bike led to a whole new approach to his pictures

Roff Smith’s photographs show a solitary cyclist – Smith himself – in a painterly landscape. His wheels appear to turn briskly, but really the bike moves as slowly as it can without a wobble. As a writer and photographer for National Geographic magazine, Smith, 63, visited more than 100 countries, but now he has squeezed the brakes and shrunk his world. His photographs are all taken within a 10-mile radius of his home, and yet travel has never felt so rich to him as it does now.

Before the pandemic, he had already begun to feel jaded: air travel made “the world everywhere look the same”.

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