The effects of Covid-19 continue to be felt, but in many places the fallout from civil war, displacement and natural disasters provide more pressing concerns. We look back on some of this year’s best shots from Global Development galleries and photo essays
Continue reading...Category Archives: Photography
Winter wonderlands: snow covers northern world – in pictures
From the US to Ukraine, Canada to Kashmir, winter has tightened its icy grip on the northern hemisphere
Continue reading...Who were the real stars of 2021? Guardian portraits of the year – in pictures
From music icons to housebound families, from climate activists to bike repairers, from comedy giants to asylum-seeking cricketers, we look back at the great portraits taken by Guardian photographers
Continue reading...‘She stood in silence, remembering’: photographing Gaza under airstrikes
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.
Continue reading...My best pandemic shot: Guardian and Observer photographers’ view on 2021
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
Continue reading...‘It could explode at any time’: photographing Haiti’s gang warfare
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.”
Continue reading...Pandemic park life and a secret knitting cult: the best photography books of 2021
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.
Continue reading...‘I go too far, too deep’: the Swiss wanderer who found the soul of Japan
In 1951, Werner Bischof was sent to cover the war in Korea. The photographer instead found himself captivated by Japan, where US soldiers took their leave, and spent a year exploring ‘the depths of the Japanese soul’
Continue reading...‘I wanted the focus to be on their smiles’: Brunel Johnson’s best phone picture
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.
Continue reading...Images of India: from courtesans and colonial rule to a child’s-eye view – in pictures
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
Continue reading...La Palma’s changed landscapes – in pictures
Cumbre Vieja, the La Palma volcano that has been spewing lava in the Canary Islands for almost three months, has quietened but scientists have warned the lull does not necessarily mean the eruption is over. Photographer Jorge Guerrero surveys the island’s changed landscapes
Continue reading...A look at the Irish: photography in Ireland from 1839 to now – in pictures
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
Continue reading...A new start after 60: ‘I was a globetrotting photographer. Then I stayed home – and my world expanded’
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”.
Continue reading...Freedom in the making: Bangladesh by Anne de Henning – in pictures
Anne de Henning travelled through Bangladesh between 1971 and 1972, during the war of independence, photographing freedom fighters, families, refugee trains, and women fleeing villages
To mark the 50th anniversary of Bangladesh’s independence, her images are on display at the National Art Gallery in Dhaka, 10–31 December
Continue reading...On my radar: Adjoa Andoh’s cultural highlights
The actor on her hopes for Brixton’s new theatre, an offbeat western and the sophistication of African art
Adjoa Andoh was born in Bristol in 1963 and grew up in Wickwar, Gloucestershire. A veteran stage actor, she starred in His Dark Materials at the National Theatre and in the title role of an all-women of colour production of Richard II at the Globe in 2019. On TV, Andoh plays Lady Danbury in Bridgerton, which returns next year, and she will appear in season two of The Witcher on Netflix from 17 December. She lives in south London with her husband, the novelist Howard Cunnell, and their three children.
Continue reading...Filming wild beasts: Cherry Kearton interviewed – archive, 11 May 1914
11 May 1914: The British wildlife photographer tells the Guardian about filming animals ‘unmolested and unharassed in their native wilds’
I found Mr Cherry Kearton, who has just returned from crossing Africa with a kinema camera for the third time, in the private room of his London office (writes a representative of the Manchester Guardian).
He was endeavouring to conduct a business conversation on the telephone. Round him stood half a dozen merry friends, whose joy at welcoming him home was so ebullient that they refused to be serious. The author of several standard books was giving lifelike imitations of a roaring lion, while the others were laughing loudly at his performance.
Continue reading...From utopian dreams to Soho sleaze: the naked history of British nudism
A new book details how nudism began as a movement of intellectuals, feminists and artists, only to be suppressed by the state. But our attitudes to nakedness also tell us a lot about ourselves
When Annebella Pollen was 17, she left behind her strict Catholic upbringing for the life of a new-age hippy, living in a caravan and frolicking naked among the standing stones of Devon, while earning a living by modelling for life-drawing classes. That early experience, followed by a relationship with a bric-a-brac dealer, shaped her later life as an art historian. “I’m very interested in things that are culturally illegitimate,” says Pollen, who now teaches at the University of Brighton. “A lot of my research has been looking at objects that are despised.”
Foraging trips with her partner to car-boot sales alerted her to a rich seam of 20th-century nudist literature that is still emerging from the attics of middle England: magazines whose wholesome titles – Sun Bathing Review or Health & Efficiency – concealed a complex negotiation with both public morality and the British weather. This is the subject Pollen has picked for her latest book Nudism in a Cold Climate, which tracks the movement from the spartan 1920s through the titillating 50s, when the new mass media whipped up a frenzy of moral anxiety, to the countercultural 60s and 70s, when the founding members were dying off and it all began to look a bit frowsty.
Continue reading...‘I was part of the Beatles’ act’: Mike McCartney’s best photograph
‘I call our kid “Rambo Paul” in this one, because he reminds me of Stallone. I have no idea why George is pointing at his nipple’
I didn’t intend to pick up a camera. I’d been practising on drums that had fallen off the back of a lorry into our house on Forthlin Road, Liverpool. But when I was 13, I broke my arm at scout camp, so Pete Best got the job in our kid’s group. That’s when I started taking photos on the family box camera. It was fortuitous, though, because if I had become the Beatles’ drummer, we’d probably have gone the Oasis route.
I would go everywhere with the Beatles. I was part of the act. It’s like if Rembrandt’s kid brother was in the corner with a pad and paper, sketching his older brother. I was lucky – you couldn’t have had a better group to practise on, could you?
Continue reading...Bikers, rappers and rude boys: the photographer who got to the heart of subcultures
Janette Beckman has spent four decades documenting underground movements from London’s punks and the birth of hip-hop to LA gangs and illegal girls’ fight clubs. How does she win her subjects’ trust?
It was the tension between Janette Beckman’s shyness and her curiosity about people that helped spark a career photographing subcultures. “I realised that having a camera gave you licence to go up to strangers and say, ‘Hi, I’d like to take a picture of you,’” she says. This epiphany jump-started a 45-year adventure in street photography, documenting the punk and two-tone youths of 70s Britain, the birth of hip-hop in New York, Latino gang members in Los Angeles, bikers in Harlem, rodeos, rockabilly conventions and demonstrations from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter.
As we talk on a video call, 62-year-old Beckman gives me a tour of her home studio in New York, just off the Bowery where the famous punk venue CBGB used to be. There’s a Salt-N-Pepa snowboard, a Keith Haring painting and gold discs from hip-hop stars Dana Dane and EPMD. On one strip of wall hang a selection of images from Occupy Wall Street in 2011, “for a book,” she says. And on another are pinned a vast selection of her images, for her monograph Rebels: From Punk to Dior.
Continue reading...Fabrice Monteiro’s best photograph: a spirit emerges from a rubbish dump in Senegal
‘The model is holding a child’s doll, looking out over the wreckage. It represents the future generations we’re condemning to environmental catastrophe’
Outside Dakar, Senegal’s capital, is a rubbish dump with its own name: Mbeubeuss. The land on which it sits was once flat swampland. It began as a landfill site in 1968; today, it is a mountain of rubbish. It has accumulated so much plastic waste from the city that to reach it you have to drive on a road of compacted trash.
This is not the Africa I grew up in. As a child here in the 1970s and 80s, it was not like this. But when I returned in 2012, I was shocked at what I found. Here in Senegal, there was plastic waste everywhere – at roadsides, in trees, everywhere. The younger generation don’t know any different: it’s just part of their environment now. I decided I wanted to shoot a series to raise awareness of environmental issues in Senegal, in the hope that people would realise that things do not have to be this way. I wanted to connect environmental issues with the cultural interests of the population, and started researching animism – the belief that objects and the natural world are imbued with spirits.
Continue reading...