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...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...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...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 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...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...‘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...Antonella Bordon’s hair was her family’s pride and joy. But as the pandemic kept her out of school for 18 months, the 12-year-old Argentinian vowed to lop it all off as soon as she could return to class
When she finally cut her hair, Antonella Bordon had trouble sleeping. At the age of 12, her first haircut meant more to her than a simple change of style.
For most of her childhood, Bordon’s silky hair ran all the way down her back to her calves, such a deep brown it looked like a black mane. Her mother and sister would comb it every day, rubbing the locks with rosemary oil, and helping her style it in a way to keep her cool during the hot Argentinian summer.
Continue reading...In post-USSR Russia and neighbouring states, places now abandoned offer reminders of the region’s turbulent history, from the grandeur of a ruined Orthodox church, to the frescos that still adorn the crumbling walls of former barracks, schools and factories
Continue reading...The Guardian’s picture editors select photo highlights from around the world
Continue reading...When she started out 50 years ago, Fiona Clark’s work was met with rejection. Now she’s the subject of an admiring documentary
Whether documenting the crackling raw energy of Auckland’s fledgling punk rock scene in the 1970s or the hedonistic glamour of Karangahape Road’s queer culture, renowned New Zealand photographer Fiona Clark’s vibrant photos evocatively capture people and personalities in subcultures many people wouldn’t even know existed.
Seen as too confronting and radical by the New Zealand art world in the 1970s, Clark’s work was met with resistance from major art dealers who told her “we’re not handling your work”, and some of her images mysteriously disappeared from the Auckland art gallery. But Clark has never let this distract her from her singular vision.
Continue reading...At a time when international travel has been mostly out of reach, BirdLife Australia is turning the spotlight on some of the country’s mightiest and most threatened migratory birds in its 2022 calendar
How did the British fashion photographer Perou end up shooting a book of grimy, deserted underpasses around England? It started, he says, “when Karl Hyde of Underworld asked me to photograph one for his [2013] solo album Edgeland”. Hyde suggested they expand the idea, and the result, eight years later, is Tunnel Vision, featuring more than 200 English underpasses photographed at night, with gnomic captions (supplied by Hyde) taken from graffiti found nearby.
“The more I photographed underpasses the more wonderful I found them,” says Perou. “They’re all unique: they have different designs and lighting, different paint or municipal art on the walls. They’re almost all uniformly smelly and cold,” but, he insists, “beautiful and full of character.”
The Earth Project, in collaboration with Nature Picture Library photography competition, aims to raise awareness of the huge challenges faced by nature, as well as the impacts of climate change on global ecosystems. Some of the world’s leading photographers came together to illustrate nature under threat, linking to one of the main goals of Cop26: to help protect and restore ecosystems in countries adversely affected by the climate crisis
From reclining, topless men to survivors of the war in Azerbaijan, here are the best images from the Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize 2021
Continue reading...The winners have been announced in the environmental photographer of the year competition, organised by environmental and water management charity CIWEM and WaterBear, a free streaming platform dedicated to the future of our planet. The awards celebrate humanity’s ability to survive and innovate, and showcase thought-provoking images that highlight our impact and inspire us to live sustainably
Ahead of a UK exhibition of her photo series Journey in the Death Boat, Güliz Vural describes travelling with Syrians being smuggled to Greece from Turkey
Standing on a Turkish beach ready to join a group of Syrian refugees on an inflatable boat bound for Greece, the photojournalist Güliz Vural’s biggest fear was that the people traffickers organising the illegal crossing would not let her onboard.
If she had known that within a few hours of leaving Turkey she would be under arrest, accused of people trafficking herself, she would have thought twice about the journey.
The migrants carry the inflatable boat they will travel in down to the beach. They had to leave all their possessions as they crammed themselves in. Nearly 50 Syrians made the crossing in a boat designed to carry 12 people, adding to the anxiety felt by the children in particular.
Continue reading...Save the Children has been documenting the stories of children living on the frontline of the climate crisis, sending world-renowned photographers to Cambodia, Australia and Pakistan to learn about their lives
Continue reading...A new exhibition captures the changing face of Shanghai through the past two centuries and the development of the past 30 years, from street photography to fashion shoots, from the intimacy of the lilongs to the grandeur of public facades. The exhibition is presented by Porsche in collaboration with the Shanghai Centre of Photography
A new collection of photography aims to capture the upbeat, joyous side of life in the Arab world, away from war and suffering. Fouad Elkoury talks us through his project
On 4 August 2020, Fouad Elkoury was sitting in his home in Beirut when an enormous explosion at the port shattered his windows and blasted through his living room. Miraculously, the Lebanese photographer survived but his home was destroyed, along with those of an estimated 300,000 others. “When you go through such an explosion,” he says, “first, your memory disappears. Second, your hearing is ruined. And third, you stop planning. Things are so big, you realise you are nothing. This is where I am at the moment.”
One of Lebanon’s foremost photographers, Elkoury came to international recognition with his intimate photographs documenting life during the Lebanese civil war in Beirut in the 1970s and early 80s. Travelling in the years following the conflict, he found himself aboard the ship carrying Yasser Arafat during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He created Atlantis, a nautical series of images featuring the Palestinian leader.
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