On the Spanish island of La Palma the Cumbre Vieja volcano has been spewing ash for more than five weeks. Photographer Susana Vera takes a closer look
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Two lovers kiss behind a tree: Clifford Prince King’s best photograph
‘It’s a private moment but in a wide open public space. It made me think about how queer Black men struggle to be seen for our true selves’
In 2018, I was visiting my cousin in Dallas when I remembered that a friend from Portland had moved there. I hadn’t seen him in a while and heard he had a new partner, so I asked if he wanted to catch up. The minute I saw him and his boyfriend, I wanted to photograph them. They were both wearing similar clothes, and something about the matching colour palette made them feel like a pair. We took a walk through Como Park, where I spotted this tree. I asked them to stand behind it and embrace each other, with their faces obscured.
What struck me was the interplay of intimacy and anonymity. It’s this tender moment, slightly hidden. We can see that it’s an embrace, but we can’t see who it is. It’s a private moment but in a wide open public space. It made me think about how they – and I – as queer Black men, struggle to be seen for our true selves in different spaces.
Continue reading...‘Joyously subversive sex goddesses’: the artists who gave witches a spellbinding makeover
Thousands of women were slain after being accused of witchcraft. Don’t they deserve more than the evil cackling hag stereotype? A powerful new book blows away the satanic baby-eating myths
We all know what a witch looks like. A gnarled old face full of warts with teeth missing and bright green skin. Then there’s the long black coat, the tall black hat and let’s not forget the sizable crooked nose, sniffing the fumes rising from a bubbling cauldron in a room festooned with cobwebs.
But that’s not what witches look like at all, or at least not according a hefty new art book being published in time for Halloween. In this compendium of witchy women, from Renaissance paintings to modern Wicca, the caricature of the evil hag is turned upside down. Witchcraft, the latest volume in Taschen’s Library of Esoterica, finds evidence from artists as diverse as Auguste Rodin and Kiki Smith for its revisionist view that witches are typically young, glamorous practitioners of highly sexualised magick. The cover painting, by Victorian artist JW Waterhouse, depicts the ancient enchantress Circe in pale, red-lipped pre-Raphaelite ecstasy – and the fun just keeps coming. The witches here are powerful feminist sex goddesses whose rites and incantations are joyously subversive.
Continue reading...Lava streams continue to pour from La Palma volcano – in pictures
The Cumbre Vieja volcano continues to wreak havoc on the Canary island of La Palma. The eruption has continued for more than a month and is yet to show any sign of easing
Continue reading...Little Amal’s journey: the puppet that crossed Europe – in pictures
Since leaving Turkey in July, Little Amal, a 3.5 metre (11ft 5in) tall puppet of a nine-year-old Syrian girl, and her entourage of about 25 people have navigated Covid border restrictions to walk across Europe to the UK. Amal, whose name means hope in Arabic, was created by Handspring, the company that made the equine puppets in War Horse. The puppet represents the millions of children forced to leave their homes in desperate situations. The global pandemic has made them more vulnerable than ever
Continue reading...The Wardrobe of Gabriel García Márquez – in pictures
Four hundred items of clothing and accessories which belonged to García Márquez and his wife, Mercedes Barcha, go on sale this Wednesday to raise funds for a charity helping children of indigenous communities in Mexico
Continue reading...Haiti’s flamboyant funerals – in pictures
Celebratory wakes, lavish funerals, fanfare bands and dramatic displays are just some of Haiti’s death rites, which, like its weddings, are often extravagant social events despite the country’s poverty
Continue reading...A microcosm of segregated America: Michael von Graffenried’s best photograph
‘The people of New Bern liked the fact my ancestor founded their town. But the atmosphere changed when they realised I was there to show reality, not promote a touristy vision’
The guy on the left is Frank Palombo, the former chief of police of New Bern in North Carolina, a town I have spent the last 15 years photographing. In 2006, an organisation called Swiss Roots invited me to document New Bern as part of their mission to promote a positive image of Switzerland – my country – in the US.
They approached me partly because my ancestor is the settler Christopher von Graffenried, who founded New Bern in 1710 after conflict with a Native American tribe known as the Tuscarora. I knew nothing about him and, initially, neither the project nor my family history interested me. But a month later, I changed my mind – it was a chance to find out whether Swiss-held prejudices about George Bush’s America were true.
Continue reading...Taliban patrols return to the streets of Kabul – in pictures
The Taliban fighters who were once embedded in Afghanistan’s rugged mountains are now a feared urban police force. Felipe Dana joins them on patrol
Continue reading...Al Capone at auction – in pictures
Guns once owned by Al Capone, one of the most notorious gangsters in United States history, are among 174 lots to go under the hammer this week at a California auction, A Century of Notoriety: the Estate of Al Capone. Auctioneers are billing the sale as ‘one of the most important celebrity auctions in history’.
Continue reading...‘I didn’t really watch any tennis’: how Martin Parr captured the Grand Slam’s real champions
The photographer toured the four tournaments shooting thrilled fans instead of sweaty stars. He talks about why street photography is becoming impossible – and life after his cancer diagnosis
It’s the morning after the night before at the US Open and the sports sections contain images of triumph and defeat. Ecstatic Emma Raducanu lying prostrate on the tennis court. Bereft Novak Djokovic sobbing into his towel. The photographer Martin Parr would have liked to have watched the finals, but he’s been unwell and incapacitated, stuck on one floor of his house with the TV on the other. He briefly considered watching on his laptop but it just seemed too much bother. “I like tennis tournaments,” he says, a little sheepishly. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that I like tennis per se.”
In this, one suspects, he is not alone. Parr’s new book Match Point offers a vivid globe-hopping tour of the four grand slam tournaments, bounding from Melbourne to Paris to London to New York and mingling with the spectators as they ogle their iPhones or sunbathe on the grass or guzzle iced coffee at the refreshment stand (the book was commissioned by the Italian coffee firm Lavazza). Most people, he points out, visit Wimbledon in the same spirit that they would attend Ascot or the Chelsea flower show: it’s a social event, an excuse to dress up. They might spend the entire day in the grounds at SW19 and go home without seeing a single ball being served.
Continue reading...‘People arrived for work and got vaporised’: how Kikuji Kawada captured the trauma of Hiroshima
The holy grail of Japanese photobooks, Kawada’s Chizu was five years in the making and changes hands for £25,000 a copy. Now a new edition revisits his personal archeology of a nation’s pain
Kikuji Kawada was 25 when he visited Hiroshima for the first time. It was July 1958 and he had been assigned by a Japanese news magazine to assist Ken Domon, a renowned photographer 14 years his senior. As Domon worked in and around the Hiroshima Peace Park, Kawada found himself drawn to the ruined shell of a once ornate, steel-framed building that had been badly damaged, but somehow remained standing, when America dropped the first atomic bomb on the city at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945, obliterating everything else within a mile radius.
“That’s when I found them,” he would later recall, “the stains on the walls of the rooms beneath the dome.” The bomb had been dropped from almost directly above the building, which was then called the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. Alone in the dank ruins, Kawada realised that the stained walls held the only traces of some of the dead. “When the place was destroyed,” he told Aperture magazine in 2015, “there were about 30 people (who) had arrived for work and ended up vaporised. The place had a horrible atmosphere. Just looking at it was overwhelming.”
Continue reading...Leonard Cohen goes to the doctor: Ian Cook’s best photograph
‘He said he had to see a throat specialist then added: “Do you want to come along?” Later, we drove to a party with me sitting on his lap in a limo’
In 1979 Leonard Cohen was in London for a few days on a European tour and I had been assigned to photograph him by the US magazine People. I arrived at the Dorchester Hotel and was shown up to his room. He announced that he had picked up some sort of larynx infection on the plane and that he might not be able to perform. He said that he had an imminent appointment with a Harley Street specialist. My heart sank and I thought: “There goes the assignment.” Then he said brightly, “Do you want to come along with me?”
We hopped in a taxi and I followed him into the surgery. The doctor examined him, sat him in a chair and gave him a nebuliser. With his dark glasses on, a scarf wrapped around his neck and a large silver-coloured mask covering his nose and mouth, he looked quite bizarre but it made an unusual photograph, not like any others I’d seen of him. Forty minutes later, much to his relief – and mine – he said he felt much better.
Continue reading...Campervan fans conquer Covid restrictions in Japan – in pictures
With travel restrictions in place, campervans provide a way of travelling with the family and are currently very popular in Hidaka of Saitama prefecture, a suburb to the west of Tokyo
Continue reading...Forced from home: the humans and animals under threat – in pictures
Nick Brandt visited five animal sanctuaries in Africa to portray the people displaced by droughts and the creatures whose very existence is under threat
Continue reading...La Palma’s Cumbre Vieja volcano erupts – in pictures
A surge of lava has destroyed about 100 homes on Spain’s Canary Islands a day after a volcano erupted, forcing 5,000 people to leave the area. Cumbre Vieja erupted on Sunday, sending vast plumes of thick black smoke into the sky and belching molten lava that oozed down the mountainside on the island of La Palma, one of the most westerly of the Atlantic archipelago off the coast of Morocco
Continue reading...‘It’s heartbreaking’: Steve McCurry on Afghan Girl, a portrait of past and present
The US photographer’s image of Sharbat Gula captured the story of a country, its people and refugees across the world. Thirty six years on, another picture tells a similar tale – but also one of hope
On 1 September, a young Afghan girl stood in line with her family at a US base in Sicily waiting to board a flight to Philadelphia. She is about nine years old and is one of more than 100,000 people evacuated from Kabul by allied forces after the Taliban took control of the country in August.
Her photo, taken for the Guardian by Italian photojournalist Alessio Mamo and featured on the front page of the UK print edition, resembles the Afghan Girl by American photographer Steve McCurry. McCurry’s portrait, of a Pashtun child, Sharbat Gula, which appeared on the June 1985 cover of National Geographic, became the symbol, not only of Afghanistan, but of displaced refugees across the world.
Continue reading...One month in Kabul under Taliban rule– a photo essay
Photojournalist Stefanie Glinski reports from Kabul on the events of the past four weeks and the capital’s new rulers
Above its tightly clustered houses and peaks of the Hindu Kush mountains, Kabul’s blue skies were once dotted with countless colourful kites, flown by children from the hilltops or their rooftops. Since the Taliban took the Afghan capital a month ago, they have disappeared.
Continue reading...Deep impact: the underwater photographers bringing the ocean’s silent struggle to life
Kerim Sabuncuoğlu – just one winner in this year’s Ocean photography awards – tells the story behind his picture of a moray eel that also shows the wider perils of ‘ghost fishing’
In July, off the Turkish port city of Bodrum, Kerim Sabuncuoğlu stepped from the edge of a boat into the azure Aegean Sea and began to descend. A scuba diver with more than 30 years’ experience, he took up underwater photography in 2002 and has since devoted considerable amounts of time and money to his “out-of-control hobby” – capturing the wonders of the ocean on camera so that “the less fortunate people above” can also marvel at them.
Sabuncuoğlu has travelled the world, photographing marine life in Palau, Cuba and the Galápagos islands and winning several awards for his work. Closer to home in Bodrum, he was embarking on a standard dive with a group of friends, equipped with a Nikon D800 camera. The camera had an 85mm micro Nikkor lens and was clad in Nexus underwater housing, with a single Backscatter snoot to train light on the subject.
Continue reading...‘It helped me get away from crime’: Cape Town’s College of Magic – a photo essay
Photographer Tommy Trenchard documents students whose stories of transformation at the Hogwarts of South Africa are more than just fairytales
To fans of JK Rowling’s books, the story may sound somewhat familiar: a young boy living in difficult circumstances is enrolled in a mysterious school far from home, where his life is changed for ever by the transformative power of magic.
Anele Dyasi’s story is no fairytale, though, and the school in question is not Hogwarts, but the College of Magic in Cape Town, a unique institution that has been training some of the continent’s most skilled illusionists since the 1980s.
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