Dedicated to the art of monochrome and black-and-white photography in Australia and New Zealand, the Mono awards has announced its winners across three categories: people, places and animals
Continue reading...Category Archives: Photography
Staycationers on the English Riviera – in pictures
As unprecedented numbers of people take their holidays in the UK because of the travel chaos caused by the Covid pandemic, David Hares has been photographing the English Riviera in Devon
Continue reading...‘They call us bewitched’: the DRC performers turning trash into art – photo essay
Dolls found in rubbish dumps, radio parts and discarded flip-flops are among items used to create surreal costumes by a Kinshasa collective highlighting political and environmental issues
As a child, Shaka Fumu Kabaka witnessed the atrocities that took place during the six-day war between Ugandan and Rwandan forces in his home town of Kisangani in June 2000.
“It was not even our war, but a war between two foreign armies,” he said.
Continue reading...Evacuations continue in Afghanistan – in pictures
Following the Taliban’s military takeover of the country, westerners continue to leave. Afghans hoping to escape Taliban rule have gathered in Kabul, with many making desperate attempts to flee. There was chaos at the airport, where troops used guns and helicopters to clear the runways, and several people died in frantic last-minute attempts to escape by clinging to departing planes
Continue reading...The smooth compromise: how Obama’s iconography obscured his omissions
A look back at the official photographs of Obama’s presidency shows his skill at conjuring a sense of pride and possibility – but today his victories seem narrow indeed
From the beginning, Obama’s team was invested in constructing a certain image of what would be deemed a “historic” presidency. During Obama’s campaign, the artist Shepard Fairey, who designed the famous “Hope” poster, was widely acknowledged as his key iconographer. But, in retrospect, who Obama was and what he represented endures in the public imagination thanks to the work of the White House photographer Pete Souza, a longtime photojournalist who first had the assignment under Ronald Reagan. Over time, Souza helped create a new image of race in the US. This was an image of a postracial nation, where postracial didn’t mean liberation – it meant a US where race was solely affect and gesture, rather than the old brew of capital, land and premature death. Progress would deposit us in a place where black would be pure style – a style that the ruling class could finally wear out.
In the thick of the 2008 primary, in an essay titled Native Son, George Packer argued that after a half century when “rightwing populism has been the most successful political force in America”, there was finally hope for an alternative. “Obama is a black candidate,” he wrote, “who can tell Americans of all races to move beyond race.” The ensuing years bore out the impossibility of that widely held belief, but it was already evident in the language. How could a single person be black and capable of moving everybody beyond race?
Continue reading...The last nomad hippies – a photo essay
The hippy movement may have been in decline since its 1960s heyday, but there are still Europeans who choose an alternative lifestyle. During the pandemic, when many people are considering whether there might be a different way to live rather than returning to old ways, journalist Roberto Palomo journeys through Portugal with some of those who are living outside established society
The pandemic disrupted so many people’s plans, including mine. As a freelance reporter, my scheduled trip through South America in search of stories disappeared and I had to look for alternatives. In spite of everything, I got a job during lockdown in a logistics warehouse and was able to save some money. Once the restrictions began to relax, I bought an old van and, with the help of some friends, adapted it to make it my new home for the next months.
I am from Badajoz, a small city in the south-west of Spain a few kilometres from the Portuguese border. I have been visiting Portugal since I was a child but I never had the opportunity to explore the neighbouring country in more depth. With the world paralysed, this was my chance.
Continue reading...‘We always see sex from the man’s view’: Cammie Toloui, the peep show performer who peeped back
Turning her camera on her customers, the sex worker and photojournalist exposed the male gaze to itself – and opened up a world of shame and desire
“As a rebellious preteen, I sat down and made a list of my life goals,” writes Cammie Toloui in her photobook 5 Dollars for 3 Minutes. “It was pretty simple: 1. Sex. 2. Drugs. 3. Rock’n’roll.”
Born in the San Francisco Bay Area in the Summer of Love, Toloui was in the right place to hit these targets, and by 1990 was a member of a feminist punk band, Yeastie Girlz, and working at the Lusty Lady strip club. Stripping was part-rebellion and part-necessity because Toloui was studying photojournalism at San Francisco State University and the Lusty Lady paid well, but when she was given an assignment to shoot her own life, it also became a project. Deciding not to photograph herself or her colleagues, because female nudes have been seen so many times before, she trained her camera on the customers.
Continue reading...Gerd Müller – a life in pictures
Gerd Müller, who scored 68 goals in 62 appearances for West Germany including the winning goal in the 1974 World Cup final, has died aged 75
Continue reading...Bryan Adams photographs Cher, Grimes and Iggy Pop for Pirelli calendar
Jennifer Hudson, St Vincent and other music stars also feature in touring-themed photoshoots conceived by rocker-photographer
Images of recording artists including Cher, Iggy Pop, Jennifer Hudson and Grimes will feature in one of the world’s best known photographic commissions.
For the 2022 Pirelli calendar, the rock star and photographer Bryan Adams has captured superstar singers as if they were touring – precisely what they have been unable to do for more than a year.
Continue reading...A bride waving a flag in bombed-out Beirut: Christine Spengler’s best photograph
‘Shortly after arriving, I was kidnapped by a militia group who said I was a spy. A decade later, I went back to show life and beauty returning to the city’
I spent my childhood in Madrid and I went to the Prado every week from the age of seven. I would cry at the works by Goya. His paintings of the Spanish war of independence moved me like nothing else. I never grew up around photography – I grew up around Goya. Even as a child, I was attracted to the dark fates of the world.
Over the course of my career, I’ve covered 13 conflicts, more than many of the famous war photographers of my generation. I’ve worked in Vietnam and Cambodia, Eritrea and Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and Iran. I’ve always tried to capture a glimpse of hope against a background of drama and destruction. That has not always been possible.
Continue reading...Hemingway ‘wannabes’ celebrate author with lookalike contest
Fans in Nobel prizewinner’s favourite haunt of Key West hold their 40th competition on his birthday
Ernest Hemingway is survived as much by his macho mythology as he is by his writing. Hemingway was in two plane crashes in two days. Hemingway shot himself in both legs while wrangling a shark. Hemingway had at least nine major concussions – and four wives. He had brain damage. He won the Pulitzer and the Nobel prize. He hunted and fished and wrote plays and books and articles and stories, for ever in pursuit of the truest sentence. He was rageful, charming, violent, brilliant and drunk.
Hemingway is also something of a Key West mascot, especially for a week every July, when a festival called Hemingway Days, which coincides with his birthday (this year, he would be 122) honours his legacy by gathering his lookalikes together.
Continue reading...Tokyo review – lust and loneliness in Japan’s pleasure quarters
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
A seductive encounter with past and present at the Olympic city shows that Tokyo practically invented modern art
Love hotels and cross-dressers make Tokyo’s nightlife eye-popping – and that’s just in 18th-century woodblock prints. The Ashmolean’s seductive overview of the Olympic city’s art sets these classics alongside images of contemporary Tokyo to create a thrilling and informative encounter with one of the world’s great art capitals.
Past and present meet for a sultry encounter in the night. A wall is lit up by Mika Ninagawa’s intensely coloured photos of blue- and pink-haired clubbers. They are so now – yet close by in the same gallery is a painted scroll from the 1600s that is just as provocative. It depicts the pleasure quarter of Edo, as Tokyo was then called, which became Japan’s capital when the Tokugawa shoguns united the country in the 17th century. It was famous for its pleasure quarter, “the floating world”, and the new art genre it inspired – ukiyo-e, “pictures of the floating world”. In the scroll, samurai warriors are seen visiting courtesans. But samurai were banned from the pleasure quarter so they wear straw hats pulled down to hide their faces. The comically phallic swords peeping out from their robes give them away.
Continue reading...‘We need a lot of help’: Germans sift through debris after devastating floods
Trucks, diggers and volunteers try to clear mud and ruined belongings from wrecked homes and businesses
A brown line one and a half metres high on the kitchen wall marks where the waters reached when Christian Ulrich’s house was inundated. The electrician stands amid the mud-splattered walls and his voice breaks as he recalls how he had barely enough time after the warning came to reach the cellar to get food and water and send his mother up the stairs. He had just managed to let in the neighbours who had banged on the door for help, when there was an “almighty crash – like an explosion” as a huge wave of water rolled in from the back and front of the house, so strong it pushed out the front door and many of the windows.
Continue reading...Pop-up beaches and donkeys: Friday’s best photos
The Guardian’s picture editors select photo highlights from around the world
Continue reading...Gaza’s silent children – in pictures
Brazilian photographer Felipe Dana arrived in Gaza to cover the aftermath of the last war in May and was struck by how children were suffering psychologically
Continue reading...‘I shoot for the common man’: the photographs of Danish Siddiqui
The photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was shot dead last week while documenting the Taliban offensive in Afghanistan. His award-winning work for Reuters spanned some of the world’s most era-defining crises.
He said: ‘I shoot for the common man who wants to see and feel a story from a place where he can’t be present himself.’
Siddiqui leaves behind his wife, Rike, and two children. And a breathtaking body of work
Muslims celebrate Eid al-Adha – in pictures
Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice, is celebrated throughout the Muslim world to mark Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son for God. Cows, camels, goats and sheep are traditionally slaughtered on this day
Continue reading...Parklife: the year we fell in love with London’s green spaces
Sophia Spring’s photographs celebrate how London’s many parks became a lifeline for locals during the pandemic, writes novelist David Nicholls
We didn’t call it the park; it was the “rec”, as in “recreation ground”. A flat, featureless oblong of patchy grass, sodden in winter, parched in summer, scattered with ring-pulls and dog mess – this was the late 70s – its great featureless expanse broken only by buckled goalposts and a few skinny, unclimbable trees. I hated the rec, partly because of the threat of team sports, partly because of the possibility of violence – the two seemed to go together – but during those long, endless days of summer, when the glare of sunlight on the TV screen became too much, we were harried out of the house to “get some fresh air”. And so we loitered on that great barren prairie, an immense waiting room, wondering why anyone would go to the park out of choice.
Last summer, there were queues at the gates of Clissold Park and anyone wanting to exercise in Highbury Fields was advised to go early to avoid the rush hour. All over the city, the parks began to resemble the sites of the festivals that had all been cancelled and if Londoners had ever taken their green spaces for granted, there was no danger of that now. In the space of six months, they’d been repurposed as meeting rooms, nightclubs, concert halls, theatres and cinemas, cafes and restaurants, impromptu markets, family living rooms, gyms. London is supposedly a city of 3,000 parks and while I’m a little sceptical of that number, it’s true that the city had never seemed greener than that summer. On early morning bike rides I discovered Bushy and Ruskin and Trent, Peckham Rye and Beckenham Place and Ladywell Fields. I discovered the canals and waterways that link them too, the bloodstream of London, captured so brilliantly by Sophia in these photographs. Walk north on the Lea, west or east on the Grand Union, south on the Wandle or the Waterlink Way and you can see the ghosts of London’s old industries, cranes and disused warehouses and old pumping stations. Keep walking for the rest of the day, under the pylons and past the depots, and you can feel the city fading behind you, the skies opening up.
Continue reading...Aftermath of Germany and Belgium floods – in pictures
At least 110 people have died in devastating floods across parts of western Germany and Belgium. Search and rescue operations are continuing with hundreds still unaccounted for
Continue reading...France celebrates Bastille Day – in pictures
Thousands of troops march in a Paris parade, warplanes roar overhead and traditional parties take place around the country as France celebrates its national day after last year’s events were scaled back because of the pandemic
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