Category Archives: Photography

Porch Diaries: portraits from Melbourne’s coronavirus lockdowns – photo essay

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Comprising more than 200 colour photographs, Porch Diaries is a series by Melbourne-based photographer Alana Holmberg featuring portraits of neighbours, strangers, workers and loved ones who passed by her Brunswick home during the 2020 pandemic lockdown months in Melbourne. With the recent spike in cases, Melbourne was back in lockdown and Holmberg was back on the porch

30 March 2020

Some days I feel like a creep. My spot up here on the porch, partially obscured behind the lemon tree, kept vertical by a stake, and the row of spindly roses. Twice this morning my presence went undetected. A metre or so above the path, I sit on a worn-out couch with a worn-out laptop, my eyes flicking from screen to street and down to screen again. Who else will pass by today? Mara, my housemate’s dog, takes her usual position to my right, propped up on my thigh. We watch and we wait.

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Second world war through the lenses of German soldiers – in pictures

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In 1939, thousands of German soldiers, many of them conscripts, were dispatched across Europe. They went armed not only with weapons but with cameras – the famous German Leica and Rolleiflex – in their bags and orders to capture what they saw.

As Britain, France and the Allied countries mark the 77th anniversary of the Normandy landings on D-day this weekend, a recently released book All at War: Photography by German Soldiers 1939-45, is a compilation of these photographs taken from a vast collection held by the Archive of Modern Conflict in London. Here are some of the photographs from the book

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‘They had soul’: Anton Corbijn on 40 years shooting Depeche Mode

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He thought they were pop lightweights – then turned them into moody megastars. The photographer recalls his adventures with the band, from desert trips to drug-induced near-death experiences

By his own cheerful admission, Anton Corbijn’s relationship with Depeche Mode did not get off to a flying start. It was 1981 and Corbijn was the NME’s new star photographer, having previously been lured to the UK from his native Netherlands by the sound of British post-punk, particularly Joy Division. His black and white portraits became iconic images of that band’s brief career, and Corbijn had gone on to take equally celebrated shots of everyone from Captain Beefheart to David Bowie.

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1921 Tulsa race massacre remembered – in pictures

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One of the darkest chapters in the long and turbulent history of racial violence in America is commemorated in Oklahoma on Monday, the 100th anniversary of a rampage by a white mob that left an estimated 300 Black people dead. Hundreds of Black-owned businesses, churches and homes were burned, leaving about 8,000 homeless and a further 800 injured

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‘This is our cultural heritage’: Spanish photographers seek national archive

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Lack of permanent photography hub means precious work is being lost forever, says group

Spain’s best-known photographers have thrown their weight behind a new campaign to establish a national centre to catalogue, share, protect and promote the country’s rich and diverse photographic history.

The Platform for a Centre of Photography and the Image – whose members include Ramón Masats, Isabel Muñoz, Alberto García-Alix, Juan Manuel Castro Prieto and Cristina García Rodero – points out that Spain is one of only a handful of EU countries that does not have a centre exclusively dedicated to photography.

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Outback camel trek: one woman’s 5,000km journey across Australia

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After working with camels for five years, 32-year-old Sophie Matterson decided to embark on an epic trek across Australia, with nothing but the animals she had come to love for company. She trained five of them to carry her provisions before beginning a 5,000km coast-to-coast walk from Australia’s western-most point in Shark Bay, Western Australia, to the eastern-most point in Byron Bay, New South Wales

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On my radar: Fiona Shaw’s cultural highlights

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The award-winning actor on the genius of Fritz Lang, the human cost of Homer’s Iliad and where to find the best live music in Ireland

Born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1958, Fiona Shaw studied philosophy at University College Cork before training at Rada. Her stage roles have ranged from Sophocles to Shakespeare, Beckett to Brecht; she has won two Olivier awards and directed theatre productions and operas including Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia. She has also appeared in numerous films, including My Left Foot and the Harry Potter movies, and television series such as True Blood and Killing Eve, for which she won a Bafta. Her latest film role is in Ammonite, a romantic drama about fossil hunter Mary Anning, now streaming and in cinemas from 17 May.

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Cuba during the pandemic – photo essay

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Photographer Leysis Quesada Vera describes life during the pandemic in Havana’s Los Sitios neighbourhood. Her work is supported and produced by the Magnum Foundation, with a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Magnum Foundation is a nonprofit organisation that expands creativity and diversity in documentary photography. Through grant making and mentorship, Magnum Foundation supports a global network of social justice and human rights-focused photographers and experiments with new models for storytelling

Los Sitios lies to the south of Centro, the careworn barrio that gives Havana its coarse voice and whose northern limit is the Malecon, the famous corniche set against the Florida Straits.

The photographer Leysis Quesada Vera describes Los Sitios – her neighbourhood – as home to “people who work with tourists but not in the hotels. They sell cigars, probably illegally, clean the houses where tourists stay, sell souvenirs.”

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