#BJP 7857: Habitat

“I wanted to offer up experiences concerning the complexity of our existence on the planet,” Louise Clements, director of the Format festival, told BJP of its theme this year – Habitat. “Climate, migration, technology: they all seem to be accelerating and the consequences are quite momentous.
“We are impacting the geology of Earth. It was important to me to do something vital. As a festival, we’re not just here to celebrate the achievements of the artists: we also want to have some kind of impact.”
March 2017 Clements
She’s gathered together work by more than 300 artists that fits the theme – along with Hester Keijser, co-curator of the lead exhibition Ahead Still Lies Our Future – and BJP is proud to have partnered up with Format to present our take on some of their shows.
We interview Clements and Keijser about the thinking behind their investigation of the Anthropocene; we interview the photographer John MacLean about his project Hometown, which saw him tracing the origins of image-makers such as John Baldessari, Richard Long, William Eggleston and Ed Ruscha.
March 2017 John MacLean
We visit the world’s longest-running portrait studio, and we speak with Jon Tonks about his ongoing examination of the remnants of colonialism – which has this time manifested in a project on the ‘cargo cults’ of Venatu. “I never wanted to do a series saying, ‘Look at these guys with their strange beliefs’,” says Tonks. “We went there with an open mind, just to mine the place and see what it revealed.”
March 2017 Tonks
Plus we speak to the winner of our International Photography Award, Daniel Castro Garcia, and feature new work by Alexey Shlyk, Nishant Shukla and Dominika Gesicka; we catch up with Aaron Schuman about his photography archive, and find out more about the Hasselblad X1D-50c.
#BJP 7857 The Habitat Issue is available in good newsagents and via The BJP shop