Author: Georgia Weston

The announcement of Martin Parr’s death, made from his home in Bristol on a gloomy December weekend, has evoked the same mixture of love and anxiety that characterized his career, which is somewhat fitting given that Parr spent decades teaching the British public to recognize itself in his photographs. He took pictures of shoppers meandering through supermarket aisles as if they were sleepwalking through a dream that only he could see clearly, sunbathers sprawled next to excavators, and retirees holding ice cream under fluorescent lighting. It’s difficult to ignore how odd it seems that the man who once made boredom…

The fact that Martin Parr, a photographer who spent forty years capturing British people at their most vulnerable, is now the focus of an exhibition that invites viewers to sit in silence with sorrow is a unique form of irony. Tucked away in a converted warehouse space in Bristol, the Martin Parr Foundation is reopening this year with something old instead of something new: The Last Resort, the body of work that made him famous and, for a while, caused a lot of people in the British photography establishment to feel uneasy. Parr passed away on December 6 of last…

An hour before the doors open at a photography festival, a certain kind of silence descends. Somewhere, a technician is still adjusting a projector that won’t sit level, lanyards are arranged into tidy piles, and cameras are checked one last time. In Sharjah, that silence was broken this year by something louder than normal. When the gates finally opened, Xposure had just received over 29,000 photography submissions, and no one on staff seemed fully prepared for the significance of that figure. Sitting with that figure for a moment is worthwhile. Twenty-nine thousand photos were submitted over ten days on a…

A portion of Sharjah transforms into something difficult to explain without coming across as hyperbolic every January. Even with the more than 500,000 square feet of gallery walls, screening rooms, and tents, people manage to get lost in it. It’s not a grievance. At Xposure, taking the wrong turn usually leads to something worth stopping for, and this year—the tenth edition of the festival—that seemed to happen all the time. It’s difficult to deal with the numbers alone. From more than 60 countries, more than 420 photographers, filmmakers, and visual artists came. The festival received a record 29,000 photography submissions…

On a rainy Tuesday afternoon, the sound of the kettle ticking on the range and the mud still drying on the boot mat by the door create a certain kind of silence in the kitchen of a Yorkshire farmhouse. It’s the kind of place where food seems effortless. Perhaps a Yorkshire pudding saved from a tin older than the farmer’s oldest child, a Sunday roast, and a little Wensleydale. However, if you take a far enough step back, that simplicity begins to appear to be an illusion. This land is owned by someone. What grows on it is determined by…

One type of carrot never makes it to the shop floor. It’s not particularly old, nor is it rotten or bruised. It simply has two legs instead of one, is bent incorrectly, or tapers off at an angle that a buyer somewhere decided wasn’t quite right. Although they don’t always express it politely, farmers have a term for this type of rejection. The topic of vegetables that no one wanted to grow anymore kept coming up at a recent meeting of dairy farmers and members of a food policy council because selling them was the problem, not properly growing them.…

Some people arrive at protests without a sign, without a prepared chant, and without any plans to march in the front row. As the crowd moves around them, they reposition themselves every few seconds while standing slightly to the side with their eyes fixed on a viewfinder. It’s simple to wonder what precisely they believe they are doing. Keeping records? Taking part? Something more difficult to identify? Even seasoned observers were taken aback by the sheer number of people who showed up at the “No Kings” protests that swept through American cities last spring. Not photojournalists in the press pool…

When you open a long-form photo essay, a certain kind of silence descends upon you; it’s not the artificial tranquility of a meditation app, but something more genuine. You are sitting with a doorway that a photographer in a village you’ve never heard of has been observing for three weeks at six in the morning. Only a few uninterrupted minutes are required of you. That quietness feels almost radical after years of content that practically begged for attention. For a very long time, the consensus was straightforward: shorter is smarter. The single image was viewed as the building block of…

The majority of people will never see this particular photo. It was taken in an unglamorous setting, such as a kitchen table in the middle of a fight, a waiting room, or a roadside. The light was not set up by anyone. No one double-checked the frame. Whoever took the picture most likely didn’t consider their personal brand at the time because it was just a person, a moment, and a camera. Finding that kind of image is getting more difficult, not because cameras have gotten worse, but rather because the platforms we share them on have drastically altered what…

Once you recognize it, there is a specific moment that sticks with you. As you browse through the pictures of a friend, coworker, or even a stranger, something seems a little strange. The face has too much smoothness. The jawline is too sharp. The eyes are a bit too bright. Technically, it is a real person. However, it is also not exactly anyone. An increasing amount of research indicates that the consequences are more severe than most people would like to admit, and the gap between the filtered image and the real human being is growing. According to a study…