Author: Georgia Weston

Chris Hoare was raised close to Southmead, on Bristol’s northern edge. This area of the city isn’t shown on tourist maps, isn’t featured in weekend supplements, and isn’t particularly appealing to young professionals moving from London in search of less expensive housing and a little edge. It is nearly entirely working class, physically isolated from the rest of the city by hills and customs, and it has influenced Hoare’s perspective throughout his career. Not what Bristol wants you to see. at the remnants of it. The fullest manifestation of that instinct to date can be found in his 2024 photobook…

Driving malformed carrots from a North Yorkshire farm to a studio in London for a year requires a certain kind of stubbornness. Not when someone is adamant about their point. The more reserved type—the obstinacy of someone who genuinely cannot turn away from something that everyone else has already written off. Before attempting to classify Tim Smyth, it is worthwhile to take a moment to consider that, as it is essentially the defining characteristic of his work. Although the description somewhat misrepresents him, Smyth is a documentary photographer. In reality, what he does is more akin to forensic tenderness: he…

To honor photography, a specific type of festival is held. The Belfast Photo Festival, on the other hand, exists to challenge it. You get the impression that the organizers aren’t really concerned with making anyone feel at ease as you stroll through thirty venues in June across a city that has its own complex relationship with images and the stories they tell. The theme for the entire month of June in the 2026 edition is Horizons, which sounds hopeful until you read what they mean by it. The framing of the festival is remarkably honest: they contend that the horizon…

Migration was not chosen as the 2026 theme by a group of people. It is worthwhile to pay attention to this. Photographers, curators, institutions, and festival programs from twelve different countries have all come to a similar conclusion in quite different ways. The accumulation of this information, when viewed all at once, is hard to write off as a coincidence. Bieler Fototage in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, has the most straightforward curatorial framework. This year’s theme for the festival is vulnerability, but not the intimate, reflective kind that photography festivals occasionally turn into. It is organized around four axes: reparative artistic gestures,…

There’s something subtly peculiar about what you see when you walk into Le Hangar in Brussels on a gloomy January morning. The walls are covered in photographs or objects that resemble photographs, such as historical figures, faces, and landscapes. However, none of them were taken. Not with a camera, not with a shutter, and not by someone standing in a spot where light is falling in a specific direction. They were produced. spurred into being. And whether that changes everything or virtually nothing at all is the question that lingers in the air, unsaid but unrelenting. For European photography, the…

The idea of holding a photography festival inside one of Italy’s oldest libraries is subtly confrontational. Since the 18th century, the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan has been cataloguing human knowledge. It has a distinct smell of old paper, rows of gilded spines, and an institutional gravity that tends to keep people silent. The contrast isn’t coincidental when you stroll through it during fashion week, with that specific outdoor noise of the city moving at its seasonal fever pitch. It seems to be the main idea. In that same building, the 10th edition of the PhotoVogue Festival, Women by Women,…

A fair that, after ten years, outgrows its current location and relocates to a structure that is undergoing renovations is telling. This May, Photo London held its eleventh edition at Olympia in Kensington, inside a Grand Hall that was first finished in 1885 but is currently undergoing a £1.3 billion renovation that was created by Heatherwick Studios. The hallways have construction hoardings. Just beyond them are shiny new interiors. Unintentionally, it seemed to be a metaphor for the entire event—something historic attempting to determine its future. Photo London’s personality came from Somerset House. The Thames light, the neoclassical courtyard, and…

There’s a picture from The Last Resort that, once you see it, stops you cold. On a crowded beach, a woman wearing a floral swimsuit eats chips from a paper wrapper while the sea glitters in the distance. She was surrounded by bodies crammed together, noise, litter, and the remnants of a resort that was making a valiant effort to avoid appearing dilapidated. It is almost unbearably vivid—too bright, too close, and too honest—because Martin Parr used a daylight flash to capture it in saturated color. It remains one of the most talked-about images in the history of British documentaries.…

Ask the straightforward question, “What should I charge for a half-day corporate shoot?” in any Tuesday afternoon photography forum where enthusiastic beginners and working professionals coexist in uncomfortable proximity. Seldom is a number what is returned. It’s a mist. “Charge what you’re worth.” “It depends on your market.” “DM me.” A dollar figure is the one thing that very few people publicly discuss. Over the course of two decades, this silence—repeated in thousands of threads—has caused more harm to the photography industry than poor equipment or a sluggish economy could. When you consider it, it’s an odd problem. Public databases…

Tim Smyth’s work contains a certain kind of tension that you experience before you fully comprehend it. The Bristol-born documentary photographer created two sets of images during his stay in Spoleto for the Festival dei Due Mondi, which at first glance appeared to be completely unrelated to one another. One was a set of portraits of carrots. The other captured the silent, worn-out expressions of refugees reaching the periphery of Europe. They were odd together. They made a sort of brutal sense when combined. Artists are affected by Spoleto itself. Giancarlo Menotti, a composer, established the Umbrian hill town as…