“At Yale University, I found myself in a place of ‘double consciousness’,” recalls Endia Beal, citing the writer, sociologist and activist WEB Du Bois. Beal was the only black person in the 2013 cohort for the fine arts MA in photography, and also in her workplace – an IT department. “I grew up in one culture and now inhabited another, becoming a mediator between these two worlds,” she says.

Upon learning that her hair, a red Afro, fascinated her colleagues, she turned the tables on them, allowing them to feel it but recording their impressions. “It felt like I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing but wanted to do,” admits one of them, while others spoke of the moment being “uncomfortable”, “voyeuristic” or “awkward”, highlighting the inappropriateness of the question, “Can I touch your hair?”

Beal’s work since has continued to question and provoke, often challenging the uniformity of corporate culture. In an amusing but no less incisive series, she styled seven white women in their forties with ‘black’ hairdos, then took head shots of them in corporate garb and pose. Their coifs stand out not merely because they look incongruous on the sitters, but because they contrast with the otherwise indistinguishable white shirts and dark jackets they are wearing.

Ellen, from the series Can I Touch It? © Endia Beal, which looks at the kinds of hairstyles typically worn by black women in the corporate world of work

Ann, from the series Can I Touch It? © Endia Beal, which looks at the kinds of hairstyles typically worn by black women in the corporate world of work

Evidently there’s little room for expressions of individuality within the corporate sphere – so much so that as soon as someone is different, it is immediately noticeable and therefore must be tamed. “These women had their own stories about being stuck in situations where they were made to feel uncomfortable for who they were,” the photographer told BJP for an article published in our May issue.

“For instance, one of them is called Ann but her real name is Desiree. When she started working, she was asked to change it because Desiree is too exotic for the office,” says the photographer. “It’s not just a minority thing. It’s a woman thing,” she told The Huffington Post. “All women can relate to that experience in some way. So I really learnt something through this project as well.”

Co-Worker, from the series Can I Touch It? © Endia Beal, which looks at the kinds of hairstyles typically worn by black women in the corporate world of work

Now an associate professor of art at Winston-Salem State University, a historically black institution in North Carolina, Beal still hears about her students being asked inappropriate questions when looking for work – about their hair, about whether they have children or not, and about where their ‘interesting’ name comes from. Reflecting on the moment when young women of colour prepare to enter the workforce, she began a project titled Am I What You’re Looking For?

Asking her subjects to dress as they would for a job interview, she poses them in their childhood home in front of a backdrop depicting the Yale office space she once worked in, juxtaposing the point at which their public and private meet. The edges of the frame show family pictures, trophies, musical instruments, heirlooms and other decorations that hint at how they grew up.

The subjects, presenting themselves as job candidates, then present the more anonymous front expected when seeking work, putting the viewers in the position of the interviewers. As such, the viewers are confronted with their own biases and presumptions – what is our conclusion and what is it based on?

Do we focus on what the applicant is wearing or the environment that surrounds her? Would we hire the one wearing patterned shoes and a bold dress or the one with a demure outfit and genteel haircut? What do our decisions say about us?

Jessica, from the series Am I What You’re Looking For? © Endia Beal

“No matter what I did – straighten my hair, put on less make-up, wear blue, black or grey, don pearls and earrings – I was still ‘othered’,” remembers Beal. “People would make comments that made me feel uncomfortable and like I didn’t belong. And the more I tried, the more I was losing myself.”

Ultimately she found herself questioning why she was trying to alter herself to fit a space clearly never designer for her, but rather than throw in the towel decided to try to transform the corporate culture.

She hopes to initiate a conversation around hiring practices, and allows her photographs to serve as the basis for talks on diversity and inclusion. She’s spoken to career counsellors across the United States as well as company managers, and is creating a book destined to be a teaching tool that combines her images with first-person testimonies.

“My job as an artist is to add to the existing narratives,” she says. “Although there are movies such as Working Girl and 9 To 5 that speak of women’s experiences in corporate spaces, there aren’t any about women of colour. It’s the same thing in fine arts. So I thought, ‘I’m a woman, I’m black and I’m going to do this right now’.”

endiabeal.com This interview is taken from the May issue of BJP, which is still available in good newsagents and via www.thebjpshop.com

Aja, from the series Am I What You’re Looking For? © Endia Beal

Martinique, from the series Am I What You’re Looking For? © Endia Beal

Kiara, from the series Am I What You’re Looking For? © Endia Beal

Jasmine, from the series Am I What You’re Looking For? © Endia Beal

Dontia, from the series Am I What You’re Looking For? © Endia Beal

Alexus, from the series Am I What You’re Looking For? © Endia Beal

Laia Abril is no stranger to themes of distress. Bulimia, coping with the death of a child, the asexual community, virtual sex-performer couples – these are all topics that the Barcelona-based photographer has explored and attempted to demystify with her multi-layered, story-based practice. The subjects she tackles are complex and provocative, but ones she is able to connect with by way of female empathy, “where I can be involved emotionally”, she says.

Her most extensive work to date explores the struggle of eating disorders and is divided into chapters, starting with a short film titled A Bad Day. Next came Thinspiration, a self-published fanzine exploring and critiquing the selfie culture used by the pro-ana community; and finally The Epilogue, which follows an American family in the aftermath of losing their daughter to bulimia.

Separating the work into sections allowed her to approach different aspects through different platforms, not only in the multiplicity of perspectives but also in a constantly evolving visual stimulation. Her new work, A History of Misogyny, also adopts the use of a layered representation. “The ‘history’ part is important,” she told BJP for our May 2017 issue, which focused on the ‘female gaze’.

“Every time I tried to talk about female issues or any kind of situation that I saw was not right, I was confronted with people telling me that it was in the past and it doesn’t apply to the situation we are in now. But just because something is now the law, that doesn’t mean it’s fine. There’s always a risk.” For Abril, looking back is necessary to “highlight the long, continuous erosion of women’s reproductive rights”.

She begins with A History of Misogyny, Chapter One: On Abortion, the first episode of a project that will attempt to “visualise the comparison between the present and the past, so we understand that we have always to be conscious that things are not as certain as we think”.

Portrait of Marta, 29, Poland. “On January 2, 2015, I travelled to Slovakia to have an abortion. [In Poland, abortion is illegal except in cases of sexual assault, serious fetal deformation, or threat to the mother’s life] I was too scared to take DIY abortion pills alone. What if something went wrong? So I decided to get a surgical abortion in a clinic abroad. I felt upset about borrowing money for the procedure, and lonely and frustrated because I couldn’t tell anyone what was happening. The hardest part was facing my boyfriend, who opposes abortion. All the same, I felt stronger and more mature afterwards.” Image © Laia Abril.

Photonovel of Marta, 29, Poland © Laia Abril.

In the UK it has been legal to terminate a pregnancy of up to 24 weeks since 1967, yet it was only in March this year that MPs voted to decriminalise it entirely, regardless of circumstance or time constrictions. Western society is considered to have liberal views on cases of abortion but in the Republic of Ireland and in Poland it is illegal, with the exception of cases posing a risk to the health of the woman or in the event of a pregnancy arising from rape or incest. In Malta, it remains forbidden altogether.

The project is not about the experience of abortion itself but about the repercussions of women not having legal, safe or free access to the procedure, often forcing them to use dangerous alternatives and causing physical and mental harm. “A woman was using a coat hanger to perform a DIY abortion in Uganda and I hear the same story in Tennessee. [The problem] is everywhere, with pretty much the same consequences.”

Rather than focusing on one story in one location, as has been the tendency, she casts her net wide, “trying to create a conceptual map to connect the repercussions so that we can empathise more with these women”.

Most photographs are one-night stands, quickly consumed then forgotten. Very few offer the possibility of a long-term relationship, but for quite a few years I have found myself returning to one very unlikely picture. I say ‘unlikely’ partly because it’s so unusual, but really because I don’t even know if I like it. I know it fascinates me, and fascination doesn’t have much to do with likes or dislikes. To be fascinated is to be captivated, compelled, absorbed, beguiled even.

The photograph in question was made in 1920. The author, Man Ray, had been asked by a collector to photograph a number of her artworks. “The thought of photographing the work of others was repugnant to me, beneath my dignity as an artist,” he recalled in his enjoyable memoir.

Pondering the commission, he visited his friend Marcel Duchamp in his New York studio. The place was filthy and in the middle was a horizontal sheet of glass covered in dust. Duchamp had been letting the dust accumulate as one of countless stages in the making of his great opus, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (also known as the Large Glass) 1915-1923.

Duchamp suggested Man Ray practise his documentation. The resulting image was strange: an oblique gaze down at an obscure surface with no obvious subject matter or scale. When it was first published, in October 1922, it was captioned View from an aeroplane. That same month, in London, TS Eliot published the great poem of the modern era, The Waste Land, which contains the line: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” Also that month, Ernest Hemingway flew over France, later writing that having seen Paris from above, he now understood Cubism.

Aerial view of British Royal Air Force aircraft taking off in the deserts of Palestine c. 1917. Photographer unknown. Collection David Campany

In the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, the photograph led a curious life in and out of various avant-garde journals, each time cropped, titled and contextualised a little differently. This was the period in which vanguard artists were exploring new angles, new relations of image to language, and the uncertain terrain between the photograph as document and artwork.

In 1964 it came to be formally titled Dust Breeding [Élevage de poussière], and an edition of ten prints was signed on the front by both Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. In books and shows about Man Ray’s work the photograph tends to be presented as a visionary image by a pioneer of photographic art. In the context of Duchamp however, it is regarded more as a document – a production shot simply showing his Large Glass in the making.

As Duchamp’s reputation grew in the 1960s, the image appealed to mixed media artists looking to make work at the interface of photography, sculpture, process and performance. Dust Breeding is even reproduced as a keynote work in the 1970 catalogue of the first major survey of conceptual art (Information, Museum of Modern Art, New York), and by 1989, when photography reached its 150th year, it was included in many of the big celebratory shows.

It was there on the wall when the Royal Academy of Art in London finally accepted photography as an ‘independent art’, as they called it; that’s where I first saw it, and I could not think of a less independent image. It seemed tied to so much, so dependent on other bits and pieces of knowledge.

Ruins in Reverse, 2012 © Mona Kuhn, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery

In more recent years, Dust Breeding has continued to haunt photography. It often crops up in debates about the medium’s status as index or trace, in shows about abstraction or artists’ interest in simple materials (you can’t get simpler or plainer than dust), and even in discussions of landscape imagery.

Recently, Le Bal in Paris asked me what my ideal exhibition would be. One ought to be wary of speaking about such things, just as one should be wary of blurting out one’s dreams – and I must admit, I have been thinking about this photograph for so long that there are indeed moments when it seems slightly dreamlike to me.

Nevertheless, Le Bal is nothing if not an experimental institution, so the team gave me a chance to put together a show and an accompanying book taking this image as its starting point. It amounts to a speculation about photography, about artworks, about documents, about our relation to dust and about the last century more broadly. What if that strange photograph, taken in 1920, really does signal the dawn of the modern age, with all its complications? Can a history be assembled from the perspective of dust?

A Handful of Dust is on show at Whitechapel Gallery until 03 September; a related symposium, Notes on the Index, will take place on 17 June, and a curator’s tour lead by David Campany on 20 July. www.whitechapelgallery.org The accompanying book is published by MACK Books and costs £30. www.mackbooks.co.uk The exhibition first went on show at Le Bal, Paris, from 16 October – 31 January 2016. www.le-bal.fr. This article is taken from the November 2015 issue of BJP, which is available via www.thebjpshop.com

Erosion, Mississippi, 1936 by Walker Evans. Library of Congress press photograph. Collection David Campany

Benito Mussolini’s dust-covered motor car languishes in a Milan garage ten years after his death, 1955. Press agency print

Implosions of Buildings 65 and 69, Kodak Park, Rochester, New York [#1]. October 6, 2007 © Robert Burley, Courtesy the artist and Musée Nicéphore Niépce

“From day one, I responded to photography’s stillness,” says Gregory Crewdson. “It’s a moment frozen in mute, without a before or an after. It’s of this world, but separate to the world as well.”

Crewdson is dyslexic, “like a lot of visual artists”, but he discovered an ability to read and understand a still image, to analyse the way an artist had framed, lit and composed a subject, as a child. “It came very naturally to me,” he says. “I grasped how a photograph is connected to our actuality, but also has way of fictionalising our realities as well.”

It’s a perfect way to describe Crewdson’s very singular creations. We’re facing each other on two fold-out chairs surrounded by his large-format works from Cathedral of the Pines, Crewdson’s latest series, on the top floor of The Photographers’ Gallery in London. The series, a set of intimate, fragile pictures of people in various forms of undress, situated in makeshift homes in the vast pine forests of Massachusetts, takes up all three floors of the gallery – the first time the photography space has given itself up to one artist.

In a few hours the exhibition will launch with a private view, before opening to the public tomorrow. Crewdson flew in from the East Coast yesterday. If he feels in any way hustled by events around him, he doesn’t betray himself for a second – such is the sense of calm and self possession he exudes.

But the work surrounding us does not speak of calmness, nor did it come from a calm mental space. Cathedral of the Pines has had a long gestation, and is the product of a lot “personal upheaval”, brought on by a “very tormented relationship” and, finally, a bad divorce. It is, by some stretch, Crewdson’s most personal work to date.

Father and Son, 2013, from the series Cathedral of the Pines © Gregory Crewdson, courtesy Gagosian Gallery

The series came after Crewdson left New York, where he was born and where he lived for more than 25 years, and moved into a converted church in Becket, Massachusetts. It’s a small town of around 2000 people, but Crewdson often visited close by with his family as a child. “I always saw Becket as a refuge,” he says.

“It’s a place I associated it with making work and reconnecting. I love New York and I love Brooklyn, but it was necessary to leave, because I felt completely in crisis. It was hard because I have two children, but I knew this was what needed to be. I still go back and forth all the time, but as soon as I set foot in the church, which I rented at first, I knew this was going to be my home.”

The Church itself had a huge impact, he says, though he only came across it because it was owned by his longterm cameraman’s ex-girlfriend. “I found the church to be beautiful and transcendent, and then there was a second building which I could use as a studio,” he says. “It used to act as the firehouse of the town, and the idea of being able to use the church and the firehouse of the town was very special to me.”

The Haircut, 2014, from the series Cathedral of the Pines © Gregory Crewdson, courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Crewdson originally studied photography at Yale in the 1980s. It was, he says, quite a serious, conservative look at the great documentarians of American photography – figures such as Walker Evans and Robert Frank. “Then I would travel to stay in New York and see shows by Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall and Richard Prince, and the first generation of post-modern photography. And then I’d also look at new documentarians like William Eggleston and Joel Sternfeld

“I think my work came out of both traditions – documentary and post-modern,” he continues. “I see my work as the photography of truth and the documentary of fiction coming together.”

This marriage of two approaches is evident in Cathedral of the Pines – as well as the natural landscape that Crewdson revelled in after so long in the big city. “I started taking these long walks up the Appalachian trail and these long swims in Goose pond, and then during the winter I’d cross-country ski,” he says.

One day on a walk deep in the forest, he found a little trail with the name ‘Cathedral of the Pines’. “I immediately knew that was going to be the title of the body of work, and I immediately could visualise the entire project in my mind’s eye,” he says, adding that he responded to both the natural and spiritual references of the title.

“I’m not religious in any way, but it was certainly a time of searching for something,” he says; he was also struck by the light that he found in the forest. “Light is at the core of all photography, but for me light is the essential element of my pictures,” he says. “It’s how I tell the story. I see a spiritual dynamic, a spiritual presence to it.”

The Shed, 2013, from the series Cathedral of the Pines © Gregory Crewdson, courtesy Gagosian Gallery

In previous series Crewdson has used cinematic lighting rigs to create this dynamic – closing entire Brooklyn streets to shoot Twilight and Beneath the Roses, for example, and working with a producer and a casting director as well as a director of photography and his team. “Since my very early stages as artist,” he says, “I’ve always been fascinated in cinematic production.”

But here he worked with a stripped-down, skeleton crew, letting the light of the forest do the work. From his initial inspiration he spent a lot of time location scouting in the forest; when he had found a location he liked, he would work out the framing and angle, then write a description of how the final image would look, including the objects or subjects he wanted to insert. Only at that point would he talk to his long-term director of photography, Richard Sands, to come up with a lighting scheme.

Working this way “precipitated a real change” he says. “We’re used to closing down full streets and working with huge lights in the sky. This was a much more introverted enterprise, so we had to work with a sensibility that felt quieter in tone. The ambient light was light number one. Even in the interiors, we waiting for the perfect moment with the light outside.”

Mother and Daughter, 2014, from the series Cathedral of the Pines © Gregory Crewdson, courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Crewdson, Sands and the rest of the crew would work in the evening when the shadows lengthened, before trekking back to civilisation as the sun set. “I’ve worked with the same cameraman and line producer and casting director for five years or more, so I have a team now,” he says. “And the longer you work with a team, the less you have to say. You develop a shorthand. We barely have to speak sometimes.”

He breaks from our conversation to pause and look at the works around him. “I love their vulnerability, their stillness,” he says. “These pictures seemed to capture exactly where I was at that time. It was one of those unusual aesthetic awakenings. We have a few of those in our life. They came once in a great while.”

Gregory Crewdson: Cathedral Of The Pines is on show at The Photographer’s Gallery until 8 Oct 2017. http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk

“Leonard Suryajaya really is the child of a transnational world,” says his nominator, Vogue Italia photo editor Chiara Bardelli Nonino. “A queer boy born of Chinese parents in conservative Indonesia, he was raised by a Muslim nanny and educated in Catholic schools, despite coming from a Buddhist household. It’s safe to say that he understood very early on the meaning of otherness.”

Growing up surrounded by oppression in a country where violent religious and ethnic clashes were commonplace and close at hand, Suryajaya was constrained by strict traditional and conservative values that condemned homosexuality. He needed to get out. He turned 18, alone, on a flight bound for the United States, leaving behind his family and his old life in Indonesia.

After finding photography in the third year of his undergraduate theatre studies at California State University, Suryajaya began to ask questions he was unable to pose back home. Using stills, installation and film, his work juxtaposes diverse cultural perspectives of identity and presents them within the scope of ‘normality’, inclusive of everyone.

“I don’t want to make photographs that socially profile my subjects,” he says. “I can’t bear the idea of making images that will only reiterate that my subjects are simply Asians, minorities, victims, inferiors, the persecuted. What good is it to me if my work only tells the viewers and reminds my subjects that they are individuals who have gone through trauma?”

Image © Leonard Suryjaya

The vibrant aesthetic and peculiar performances of his characters might be unsettling to some but by relying on “elements of humour, purposeful confusion and absurdity to challenge any preconceived ideas about other people”, he hopes to intrigue and encourage their questioning. “I want to entice the viewer with candy and then slap them,” he says.

Suryajaya returns to Indonesia once a year. His partner and members of his family often feature in inherently personal, staged scenes – such as in his most recent work Bunda, which translates as Mother in Indonesian. His last trip was made immediately after Donald Trump was elected as US president. He hopes to observe the impact of the new administration on individuals with complex and internationally layered identities like himself, not least because Indonesia has one of the largest Muslim populations in the world.

Suryajaya graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an MA in Fine Art in 2015; his work has achieved recognition thus far through solo exhibitions at local institutions such as the Chicago Artists Coalition at Expo Chicago, and further afield in Indonesia. Last year he received the Robert Giard Foundation Fellowship.

“By leaving his subjects the freedom to actively participate in both this intimate exploration and in the final result of it, he allows the viewer to eventually understand that the photograph itself is merely a stage of a much more complex art process, and by no means the only important one,” says Bardelli Nonino.

leonardsuryajaya.com This article was published in the June 2017 BJP, issue #7860 – Ones to Watch, The Talent Issue, which is available via www.thebjpshop.com

Image © Leonard Suryjaya

Image © Leonard Suryjaya

Image © Leonard Suryjaya

Karen Paulina Biswell spent much of her upbringing in Paris, having moved there with her parents when barely a teen in the early 1990s to escape the political unrest and violent clashes plaguing her native Colombia. It was an experience that shaped the way she looks at life and its “arbitrary nature” but also nurtured “a greater empathy towards others, their circumstances and life stories,” she says.  “I hope that through my work I can help create silent spaces for reflection, mirrors and windows that allow questions to be explored by the audience and the viewer.”

Her career began when she was 19, still living in the French capital and studying History of Art, when she met fashion photographer Vanina Sorrenti, who asked to take her portrait. Biswell became fascinated with photography as a medium of expression and went on to be Sorrenti’s assistant, developing negatives in the darkroom. “I had experienced absolute freedom and felt that the world was without boundaries and that I had many stories to tell,” she recalls.

Biswell now splits her time between Bogotá, the capital of her home country, and Taganga, a fishing village on its Caribbean coast, as well as Paris. Her work addresses themes of identity within the context of vulnerability, discomfort and imperfection, but not weakness. She finds her subjects in all these places and more, whether they be indigenous communities living in central Bogotá, or the remains of unlikely objects left on the river banks in Bamako, Mali.

She is now putting together her first monograph that visualises in black-and-white the story of a small Colombian village inhabited by people with a mix of African and Indian heritage. It will be published by Kominek and shown at La Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Biswell’s energies are also channelled into her new project on femininity, “without judgement and without censor,” she says.

From the series Ellas © Karen Paulina Biswell

Ellas, on show in La Vuelta – 28 Colombian photographers and artists at Les Rencontres d’Arles, is at once a study of power and vulnerability, which is unafraid to flaunt the models’ sexuality by placing them in provocative positions but retains their dignity and mysteriousness. They are, says Biswell, “in the spirit of Manet’s Olympia, imperfect goddesses, strong enough to stir us.”

“It all begins by my choosing the female characters who will give life to this work,” says Biswell. “Authentic human beings within the confines of a system, not conventional or traditional beauties. I’m always very focused and connected to these women. My pictures are not made to entertain; I work with the female body in a very intimate way.”

karenpaulinabiswell.com www.rencontres-arles.com/en This article was published in the June 2017 BJP, issue #7860 – Ones to Watch, The Talent Issue, which is available via www.thebjpshop.com

From the series Ellas © Karen Paulina Biswell

From the series Ellas © Karen Paulina Biswell

From the series Ellas © Karen Paulina Biswell

In our third annual edition focusing on photography education, BJP visits schools around the world to discover what it takes to “see photographically”. From one of the oldest photography schools in the UK, to pioneering institutions in Germany and Denmark, tutors stress the need to appreciate the mechanics of a photograph – light, shape, space and perspective.

“Our bodies learn to adapt to the camera that is shaping our experience,” explains Thomas Sandberg, photographer and co-founder of the Ostkreuz School for Photography in Berlin. But Sandberg adds that learning about photography is just as much about getting to know yourself, and the school promotes this self-exploration with every project. “I do strongly believe that photography goes through the body, and that you have to learn, train and try it out,” he says.

Ostkreuz has a back-to-basics approach which ensures undergraduates appreciate the fundamentals of making a photograph – first-years are expected to complete one module using neither a camera nor a computer, and another using a basic 1950s camera. “How your body and vision work with different formats dictates how the photograph is, and this should not be underestimated,” reasons Sandberg.

North of the border in Copenhagen, his ideas are echoed by Morten Bo, who founded Fatamorgana, the Danish School of Photography almost three decades ago – and has changed very little since. “I always say that to be an artist is not a profession, but a way of life,” says Bo, adding that photographers should organise their domestic lives around their work, and not the other way around.

Fatamorgana, whose name roughly translates as ‘mirage’, has an open, harmonious philosophy, in which students are encouraged to discuss “photography and [develop] our own language for it”. The students run the faculty, Bo tells BJP, adding: “I tell them on the first day that this is their school. They all have keys and have total access to the school 24 hours a day.”

The story is echoed closer to home at the University of South Wales in Cardiff, in a photography department that’s moved from Newport to the Welsh capital but remains otherwise exactly the same. Set up in 1973 to help re-skill miners and steelworkers, it swiftly became known as cutting-edge, and has retained the reputation ever since.

The school’s mission is to teach how “to understand the industry of pictures and how you tell those stories” according to Paul Reas, the course director, adding that each image should be an evocative and bold statement. “[Students] acquire what we call the ‘alphabet of the visual language’, to make pictures that clearly and unambiguously communicate what you’re thinking,” he tells BJP.

The recurring theme is the need for photographers to perfect their craft, and explore themselves. This ethos is replicated by the winners of our Breakthrough Awards for graduates and emerging photographers – Ryan James Caruthers, Jocelyn Allen, Cathal Abberton and Todd R Darling, whose projects consider sexuality, displacement and identity politics.

Plus, we investigate an all male liberal arts college in the California desert, reflect on social divisions since the struggles in Northern Ireland, and review the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II.

Our latest issue, Look & Learn, is available to buy now from The BJP Shop. Find it in the App Store from 4 July and in shops from 5 July.

BJP’s Education Issue 2017, featuring work by Cathal Abberton, Undergraduate Single Image, and Todd R Darling, Undergraduate Series winner, in our 2017 Breakthrough Awards

BJP’s Education Issue 2017, featuring work by Todd R Darling, the Undergraduate Series winner in our 2017 Breakthrough Awards

BJP’s Education Issue 2017, featuring work by Ryan James Caruthers, the Graduate Series winner in our 2017 Breakthrough Awards

Buy the latest issue now from The BJP Shop. 

Jonathan Swift, the 18th century author best-known for Gulliver’s Travels, once said “Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others”, and this is an apt sentiment for the latest edition of the British Journal of Photography. BJP‘s Invisible World issue, much like Swift’s novel, questions our perceptions, and reveals the hidden realities behind apparently benign or everyday scenes.

Exploring the unobserved physical and social scars of the Soviet era across Eastern Europe, the Sputnik Photos collective has crowdfunded to release its latest photobook, Fruit Garden.“These images represent the relations between human and nature. And by ‘human’, I mean the state as an oppressive machine using nature in its ideological understanding. Nature is just this innocent thing,” says Rafal Milach, one of the Sputnik founders.

The third chapter of the Lost Territories project, Fruit Garden doesn’t present simple bucolic scenes: there are barren landscapes, towering dead trees, an orchard next to a radioactive waste disposal site. Stark juxtapositions between the natural and manmade reference the troubled recent history of the area: both the land and the local people were subject to war, experimentation and displacement.

BJP’s Invisible World issue, featuring the work of the Sputnik Photos collective

BJP’s Invisible World 2017, featuring the work of the Sputnik Photos collective

Poulomi Basu’s Centralia, a photobook focusing on the harrowing 50-year war on the Indian subcontinent, does not make for easy reading. The myriad of images is overwhelming: locals photographing crime scenes, revolutionaries, huge landscapes are all testament to a conflict which shows no signs of relenting. It is a “fluid political situation where the allegiances and motives of the actors are constantly shifting,” explains Basu.

A complex geopolitical struggle, the conflict has almost precipitated civil war on several occasions. Centralia puts the onus back on the viewer to pay attention: it is an investigation and these photographs are pieces of evidence. “The adage, ‘the first victim of any conflict is the truth’, is particularly apt here,” says Basu. “The conflict, with its many actors all occupying opaque roles, has created a space with its own internal logic and landscape.”

Reclaiming their own truth and narrative, the subjects of Hoda Afshar’s new series Behold present a vulnerable image of male intimacy. Afshar, who was granted access to a male-only bathhouse, has exposed a personal and tender world that allows for free expression amidst mutual secrecy. This is a private environment, a safe haven: the men come to the bathhouse to explore their sexuality and their society.

“These are real people playing themselves; they are consciously re-enacting their everyday lives in this real environment but for my camera,” says Afshar, who has not disclosed the location of her series. In a suspended mystery, her steamy images unveil a gritty realism of taboos, social standards and physical negotiations. The photographs are confessions of each man’s wish to be seen in a different shade from in their public life. “As social beings, we all demand to be seen. We want recognition and that is partly what these images are about,” concludes Afshar.

BJP’s Invisible World 2017, featuring the work of Sanne De Wilde

BJP’s Invisible World 2017, featuring the work of Sanne De Wilde

Perceptions and how we see our world take on a much more literal meaning for Sanne De Wilde’s The Island of the Colour Blind. Taking its name from the Oliver Sacks book, the project focuses on Pingelap, an atoll in the mid-Pacific on which an unusually high proportion of the population is completely colourblind. “I’m very interested in how our physical identity is created,” says De Wilde of her project. “What it means to be born into a particular body or to transform yourself into something else.”

Her photoseries, which has been on display at the Rencontres d’Arles Voies Off fringe, explores the visual effects and manipulations of using black-and-white film and infrared cameras. The photographer sees her work as an ongoing visual experiment and encourages the viewer to reconsider what they consider to be the ‘right’ perception. “For me, it wasn’t about good or bad, I was just interested in different ways of seeing,” she says. “I wanted to find ways to integrate unexpected ways of looking at things.”

Plus, we feature projects from undergraduates Luke Richards, Omar Khaleel, Ollie Ma’, Daniel Adams and Jack Orton, exploring contemporary issues from identity to racism, plus we preview some of the best photo festivals of the autumn, including shows in Oxford, Croatia and Amsterdam.

Our latest issue, Invisible World, is available to buy now from The BJP Shop. Find it in the App Store from 1 August and in shops from 2 August.

BJP’s Invisible World 2017, featuring previews of Unseen Amsterdam

BJP’s Invisible World 2017, featuring the previews of the Organ Vida festival, Croatia

BJP’s Invisible World 2017, featuring the work of undergraduate talents including Daniel Adams

Recently, waiting outside a magazine editor’s office, I picked up a publication produced by the newly reinvigorated Spanish luxury brand Loewe. An unassuming grey linen cover is wrapped in part by a colourful folded poster, an almost abstract image of contrasting textiles. Alongside an interview and a quote from Wordsworth, the tall, sober pages contain a 14-image essay that combines black-and-white with colour photographs; constructed studio images with others in a documentary style. Some are peculiar, wet landscapes, contrasting with rich, intimate interiors, a kind-of portrait and some sort of fashion photographs.

Schoolboys are playfully balancing bags on their heads like silly helmets or hiding under patterned beach towels in a studio. The emotional measure of the book is  gentle, warm and kind, and this overrides the lack of ‘sense’ being made. I am reminded of how I felt when I first saw Julian Germain’s wonderful For Every Minute You Are Angry You Lose Sixty Seconds Of Happiness, published a decade ago. I think this is the loveliest photography book I have seen this year – not that it is likely to be understood in those terms.

This promotional catalogue, or lookbook as they are known in the fashion industry, was produced in an edition of 1200 to be sent free to clients and media outlets to showcase Loewe’s Spring Summer 2015 collaboration with textile designer John Martin. There has been a marked decline in the production of lookbooks since their heyday in the 1980s and ’90s – online catwalk reporting put pay to the costly production of these exclusive yet disposable publications.

But when I first came into professional contact with the fashion industry in the late 1980s, I was particularly transfixed by Bruce Weber’s lookbooks for Versace and Nick Knight’s for Yohji Yamamoto. Though very different in their photographic approaches, both men were pushing the limits of their particular angles on fashion photography. Weber constructed dream-like histories to fill cultural voids, while Knight went on to take the form to exquisite heights of specialist production values with his work for Martine Sitbon and Jil Sander in publications that are now virtually impossible to find or see.

Shortly after stumbling across the Loewe publication, a rare example of a contemporary lookbook with similar aspirations, I saw an arresting advert in a fashion magazine for the young and much-lauded designer JW Anderson. A ring of healthy looking young women in a sunlit field, waving to photographer Jamie Hawkesworth, his shadow falling long into the scene. The emotional charge of the picture felt almost too real to be a fashion advert. They looked like they really were waving to the camera, really were enjoying themselves. The shock of apparent emotion in a context that has become increasingly dour and poker-faced in recent years was something of a ‘stoop to conquer’ tactic.

Both the Loewe lookbook and this JW Anderson advert were photographed by Hawkesworth, who had first picked up a camera in 2007 and graduated in 2009. His trajectory has been extraordinary, and to my mind, a delightful fairytale of just rewards.

Despite my peripheral engagement with the form, I feel invested in fashion photography and disappointed by its recent demise. Hawkesworth’s editorial work offers me hope. Since working on my first editorials in 1989, arguably the tail end of a particularly exciting time in London’s publishing history, I’ve seen a genre I often felt intellectually and emotionally excited by whither into the closed loops of repetition and reference culture.

I thirst for new voices, for an unknown visual sophistication, busting stereotypes, new approaches to talking about aesthetics, styles and culture. It’s something that fashion photography does so well, but to my taste, the pickings are slim these days, with more at stake and less risks being taken.

I admit didn’t really get the fuss about Hawkesworth when he first started to make ripples in 2010 with his portraits shot in Preston Bus Station (a centrepiece of Brutalist architecture set for demolition ahead of a successful campaign to have it saved and listed), and his signing to Julie Brown’s M.A.P agency, but I have been won over by the ongoing developments in his work.

His curveball subjective documentary approach melded with an unashamed research-based practice that should not work in the conservative world of fashion photography, but is actually going down a treat. I have been watching him grow, artistically, in public, and a combination of his rigid sense of what is appropriate, along with an impressive cohort of collaborators, has made for fascinating watching.

Talking to Hawkesworth in his darkroom-cum-office where, it turns out, I used to live next door around 20 years ago, I am struck by how his ambition is driven by a wholesome, experiential curiosity, which has more to do with a fascination for the medium and his subjects than to dominate in his field. He shares his passion candidly, totally unguarded, carried along with our shared enthusiasm, overlooking any mention of his new book (featuring work shot at Preston Bus Station, published by Loose Joints) coming out a few weeks after our meeting.

Hawkesworth grew up in Ipswich and studied forensics at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston. The recording of constructed crime scenes put a (digital) camera in his hands for the first time, but after a year on the course he realised that the legal emphasis of the subject area was not right for him. He failed that year, and while reconsidering his future that summer, a friend who was studying photography at Norwich introduced him to Johnny Stilletto’s “amazing to look at” Shots from the Hip. His excitement about the book and the idea of street photography led him to put together a portfolio that summer and apply to transfer to the photography course at Preston.

He gained direct entry to the second year of a course that put an emphasis on the use of analogue cameras and so, having missed the introduction to 35mm, he was introduced to medium format and the Mamiya RB 67. “It sounds cheesy,” he recalls, “but I fell in love with photography, and from that moment I spent every second that I could on making pictures. I had a girlfriend at the time and I didn’t see her at all, I just got my head into photography and that was it. It came completely out of nowhere.”

He has used the same camera and lens combination since and only works with film. Next came the college library, where he started looking at Nigel Shafran and Jem Southam and various British documentary photographers. He experimented in the studio with flash and whatever he could get his hands on, but at that stage he was still only working in black-and-white as there were no colour darkrooms at the Preston campus. When he began seeking out some work experience, he was advised to approach commercial photographers, despite his natural disposition towards the documentary tradition, whose practitioners tend to work alone.

Taking the initiative, he spent his spare time in London interning for Nik Hartley who, in return, taught him how to colour print. Through Hartley he met Dan Burn-Forti, who demonstrated how “to appreciate everything equally – everything has the potential to be an image and for you to put your eye on it”.

When I ask Hawkesworth to expand on this, he replies, “When I’m out on my own and I’m reacting to what catches my eye in the most basic way – when I see something, anything, anybody and there’s something about them I want to photograph. Not trying to comment on anything, there’s just something I like about that object or that person or that colour or the way that something falls on something else, just the way it catches my eye – it doesn’t get any deeper than that.”

His tone is almost apologetic, yet his frank self-awareness is refreshing where the common tendency is to dress stuff up with pseudo academic jargon. This is due in part to a trend in photography education to establish reasons for making photographs in relation to ‘meaning’ or ‘the critical discourse’ which simply does not suit everyone. This emphasis on the cerebral can be hard to reconcile for the compulsive, the habitual and the amateur, disenfranchising important modes of photographic production.

I am reminded of an awkward ‘in conversation’ I chaired at Kassel Fotobook Festival with another brilliant innovator, Viviane Sassen, who exhilarates fashion photography with her light sensitivity and exacting formalist plays. There seemed so little to say about her photographs that the pictures have not already alluded to. Her non-linguistic communication form is dependent on so many subjectives, and despite my efforts she would not be drawn to extrapolate. Talking about a great photograph rarely makes it any better… Often times talking about an image can detract from it’s initial enigma, there is a reward in not knowing, in feeling your way through something, in allowing something to resonate personally rather than generally.

One of Hawkesworth’s tutors at UCLAN was Adam Murray, co-founder of Preston is my Paris (who first published the bus station work in zine format), who has a wide-reaching understanding of what fashion photography might be, framing it from a sociopolitical perspective, the emphasis being on vernacular culture. Hawkesworth remembers how important it was for him when Murray described his pictures of teenagers, taken every day while walking to college, as relevant. Not a removed construct or photography-about-photography, but seeking to establish his own connection with his immediate, lived experience.

I ask how it feels to Hawkesworth to approach people in the street. “I feel a bit sick when I go up to someone and ask to make their portrait, though nine out of 10 people say yes. When I was in Preston, I would have the tripod with the RB, and I figured that if I said something very specific about a person, drawing attention to an item of their clothing rather than just saying ‘you look amazing’, they were more likely to say yes.”

As a tall, caucasian man, Hawkesworth has that air of authority, backed up by his approachable good looks and soft brown eyes. His unthreatening physical presence reminds me of Daniel Meadows or Albrecht Tübke or Derek Ridgers or Martin Parr – maybe there’s a physical type suited to this kind of street work. It seems the genre is dominated by male practitioners, something of a condemnation of our gendered public places. He had not considered his position as being one of male privilege, but is aware that as he gets older he might not always be able to make these approaches.

Image © Jamie Hawkesworth

Taped up on the wall of Hawkesworth’s darkroom is a large, typically golden print of a young girl with perfectly disarrayed hair. Taken on one of his many self-initiated wanders into Britain’s everyday exotica, he saw her come in last at a pony trial in Shetland. He also has this picture framed up at home because it reminds him to, “just go, because you will always find something. If I ever found myself sitting at home thinking about things to photograph, I’d say to myself, ‘This is ridiculous, I just need to go out and take pictures’.”

He could not believe his luck when he received his first commission from The New York Times’ T Magazine, to photograph Swedish potato farmers. However, as these kinds of assignments are infrequent and probably would not sustain a practice, there needed to be other ways to apply his approach. Recently, the predominant trend in fashion editorials was a pseudo-documentary style championed by Alasdair McLellan, with models posed so as to appear ‘real’ – an approach that began as an Anglicised version of Bruce Weber’s sentimental take on America. Hawkesworth’s work had the potential to take the model agency and a layer of pretence out of the loop, an opportunity spotted by French stylist Benjamin Bruno.

“For a long time, I couldn’t photograph models,” he says. “I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I had to work with people from the street. I think I had to learn to understand what I like about things. Then I got to work with Benjamin, for Man About Town, and he was up for going off and dressing the people that we found. So we went to South Shields with a bag of clothes and this was the first fashion thing I’d done.”

He points to an image of blonde teenage girl strangely defiant in a masculine cobalt ensemble. “It was the first time someone said, ‘OK we’ve got an amazing character, let’s take it somewhere else…’ She had a flowery dress and we asked her to put the blue suit on, and that was a pinnacle moment for me; I realised you could completely fabricate something else.”

Pulling out another magazine he tells me the amazing story of how T Magazine flew two street-cast youngsters and their fathers out to New York to work with senior American stylist Joe McKenna. This unlikely combination featured on the cover in October 2014.

The lack of self-consciousness often encountered in street-cast subjects can lend a candour to an image, and can carry all kinds of outlandish outfits in a way that is harder to achieve with professional models. The importance of the choice of models – the casting – should not be underestimated, and not only for their looks. This also plays out in the ways Hawkesworth and Bruno direct their subjects.

There is often an oddness about how they ask a subject to stand, which Hawkesworth sees as a counter-intuitive gesture. “I take it a million miles away from what I’m comfortable with, but then it goes full circle and brings it closer to the documentary tradition.”

This can make the subject complicit with his own appreciation of awkwardness… where the conspicuous unlikeliness of the outfit and the pose makes the whole thing make a sense. He ventures that “the more extreme it becomes, the more authentic it appears. When I was making a fashion image with Ben, everything started to make sense in a strange, heightened way. ”

That encounter with Bruno in 2011, two years after graduation, should not be underestimated. It also brought Hawkesworth to the attention of M/M (Paris), who were art directing Man About Town magazine at that time. M/M (Paris), AKA Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag, are without doubt one of the most influential forces in fashion’s visual culture in the last 20 years and, like Hawkesworth, they have a reputation for defining their own parameters. They were tasked by Loewe’s creative director, J W Anderson, with overseeing art direction at the brand, and the opportunities they have offered Hawkesworth immediately propelled him into the limelight.

Initially they would only lay out his pictures of people modelling clothes, but while on their trips together, other material invariably presented itself while hanging around waiting for potential subjects to show up. The combinations of scenes and stuff and people in his work has led to all kinds of unlikely juxtapositions. A personal favourite is an old-fashioned pram, the antithesis of the contemporary techno-buggy, laden with candy floss – a scene way more weird than any fiction.

Hawkesworth gets a certain satisfaction in placing these moments of street poetry onto the staid pages of fashion magazines. As our meeting winds down, he reaches for a copy of American Vogue, where one of his recent Miu Miu adverts juxtaposes a model with an angular dead-looking tree. This is prime fashion real estate, and all images are stage-managed accordingly, so there’s a satisfaction in sneaking a lowly, eccentric-looking tree into the mix.

We’re flagging now, the heat of the afternoon has left us thirsty and talked out. As we head out for refreshment, a pile of contact sheets catches my eye. Unguarded, he talks me through this latest experiments. Despite being made with the same camera/lens combination, this is nothing much like his previous work, except that his curiosity has got the better of him again.

This article was first published in the October 2015 issue of BJP, which is available at www.thebjpshop.com Landscape with Tree, by Jamie Hawkesworth is on show at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam from 09 September – 03 December 2017. www.huismarseille.nl