Author: Georgia Weston

Somewhere on a farm in Britain, there is a sorting machine that lacks irony. Thousands of carrots are processed in an hour, and each one is measured against an exact template that specifies acceptable length, curvature, and other characteristics. Before they ever make it to a grocery store shelf, those who fail—too bent, too forked, or too aggressively themselves—are turned down. At the conclusion of that process, photographer Tim Smyth concluded that it was worthwhile to take a closer look at what the machine discarded. At first glance, his bright orange book, Defective Carrots, which includes 56 of those rejected…

There was a change in the fine print. In 2025, photojournalists began to notice a new clause in contracts they signed with some editorial outlets and wire services: the requirement that images submitted for publication have verified C2PA content credentials. Not a recommendation. It’s not a style guide recommendation for best practices. a clause in a contract. Photographers who disregarded the issue six months ago are now frantically trying to figure out what they truly agreed to, even though it’s still a small percentage of contracts, and enforcement is inconsistent at best. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, or…

There’s a certain picture that sticks in your memory—not the one with the flawless gradient sky or the porcelain-smooth skin, but the one where someone’s eyes convey something spontaneous, and their hand is slightly blurry because they were mid-gesture. There has always been an image like that. In 2026, people’s desperation has changed. According to surveys that track thousands of working photographers worldwide, documentary photography has quietly emerged as the genre that photographers are most drawn to this year. Along with landscape and fine art, documentary work is spearheading the shift, as nearly half of the respondents say they intend…

By now, one of the most talked-about photos of the year is Carol Guzy’s shot of two girls clinging to their father while ICE agents drag him out of a New York courtroom. It won the 2026 World Press Photo of the Year award, which is the highest accolade in photojournalism, and it did so with little difficulty. A single frozen moment that captures a whole political era, the image is devastating in a way that only documentary photography can. The fact that Guzy shot it in a field where women made up only 22% of all entrants is something…

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.…