No two journeys are quite the same, but in the BJP‘s latest issue, we explore just how different journeys can be. We transport you on journeys around the country; we invite you to join us on spiritual journeys of faith; we venture on journeys to the heart of business communities; we journey into the wilderness.
Starting close to home, Simon Roberts has been on tour around the UK, working on his upcoming photobook, Merrie Albion: Landscape Studies of a Small Island. Together, the images read almost as a visual journey to Brexit. From riots to campaign elections, the Diamond Jubilee to rock concerts, the photographs depict a country at odds with itself. The fragments provide a rich tapestry into the lives of people across the UK almost as epistolary episodes, love-letters from residents yearning for an imagined glorious yesteryear.
“The important thing with anything you do, but particularly when it comes to a visual art form of self expression, is that you have to question where you come from and ask how it has created the person you are, and how you use that as an extension of what it is you want to express,” explains Simon Roberts. “That takes a long time to understand and it’s been a long journey for me.”
In Money Must Be Made, Lorenzo Vitturi journeys much further afield to Lagos, a Nigerian city in which objects seem to take on a life of their own in the bustling market place. Arranged in what the photographer describes as “a chaotic composition”, Vitturi’s collages depict the huge numbers of people in the market, layering people on top of more people. “I wanted to recreate the anatomies made by the crowd,” says Vitturi.
“Some of those experiences have played games with my head,” admits Bendiksen. “It’s not a place for a loser who has lost their way in life, it demands something of you and lots of artists and thinkers are there performing rituals in nature with a very sensual aesthetic. All that is very seductive to me and I loved everything about that place. I could move there in a different life.”
Reevaluating our relationship with the world around us provides a starting point for Lucas Foglia’s latest book, Human Nature. Here the photographer is looking to question the impact we have on the world around us in a photobook that was shot between 2006-2017, a period in which a significant increase in climate change data has altered our perceptions on how to treat our planet.
“I realised that if humans are changing the weather then there is no place on earth unaltered by people. In that way we are big. But we are also vulnerable to the storms, droughts, heatwaves and freezes that result from climate change. In the face of those events, I feel rather small,” says Foglia.
In addition we preview Paris Photo, go behind the scenes of the War on Terror at Guantánamo Bay, visit the Italian Alps, descend to the beaches of Belgium, and pop in on Marin Parr as he moves his Foundation to a new location in Bristol.
Our latest issue, Journeys, is available to buy now from The BJP Shop. Find it in the App Store from 3 October and in shops from 4 October.
