BJP-online Loves…

Lei Lei and Pixy Liao win at the 2018 Jimei x Arles festival
bjp-online has been following both Lei Lei and Pixy Liao for a while, so we were happy to see them both win prizes at the Jimei x Arles festival. Lei Lei picked up the Jimei x Arles Discovery Award, giving him 200,000 RMB plus a spot in Arles’ prestigious Discovery Award exhibition and competition next summer; Pixy Liao won the Jimei × Arles – Madame Figaro Women Photographers Award. And bjp-online loves the Jimei x Arles initiative in general, which is packed with interesting work by image-makers from China and beyond.

Potted Landscape Art Exhibition, Bonsai Art Exhibition Office, 1979 © Lei Lei. From the Jimei x Arles Discovery Award

Don McCullin talks war and peace
He’s one of the UK’s best-respected photojournalists and he’s opening a retrospective at Tate Britain in February, the first big exhibition of photojournalism in the institution. But bjp-online loves Don McCullin’s thoughtful take on reportage, as discussed with former Observer Magazine and Independent Magazine picture editor Colin Jacobson. “Must you mess around with other people’s lives for your own career?” he muses. “When I see terrible things, I don’t always get upset…It’s an emotional weakness.”

The Bogside, Londonderry, Northern Ireland, 1971 © Don McCullin, courtesy Tate

California’s wildfires incinerate a world-renown photobook collection
bjp-online loves photobooks, so we were sad to hear that Dutch collector Manfred Heiting’s 36000-strong library fell victim to the wildfires in California. Considered one of the most complete in the world, his collection included a copy of most of the important photobooks published from 1888-1970 in Europe, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan, and had been used to make many respected publications. Heiting had recently donated his library to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston but just a few thousand books had been transferred so far. “It is terribly disappointing. For us all,” Heiting told Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

The Soviet Photobook 1920-1941, edited by Manfred Heiting and published by Steidl

Tom Wood: Women’s Market
bjp-online loves British photographer Tom Wood’s work and Women’s Market, the photobook newly published by Stanley Barker, is a great example of why. Shot from 1978-1999, the images shine a gentle light on the people Wood found in a bustling local market, most of whom were women and children. “The main thing that gave me authenticity I guess is going to the same places again and again,” he tells bjp-online. “I could have gone there three or four times and got what I considered a good set of pictures. But clearly I was after something much more elusive than that.”

© Tom Wood, from Women’s Market published by STANLEY BARKER

Angkor Photo Festival
“One of our long-term aims is to help encourage the development of uniquely Asian approaches and perspectives to photography. There is certainly more than enough talent in Asia for this to happen. Think of it as a postcolonial response that is very long overdue.” bjp-online loved Jessica Lim’s comments on the Angkor Photo Festival, which she now directs, and which opens on 08 December, featuring work by image-makers such as Sopheak Vong, Sovan Philong, Ore Huiying, Eleonore Sok, Roun Ry, Yang Yankang, Neak Sophal, Shoji Ueda, and many more.

© Sopheak Vong

Obituary, Jacqueline Hassink
bjp-online loves the work of Dutch documentary photographer Jacqueline Hassink, so we were sad to hear she’s died, aged just 52. Breaking onto the scene with The Table of Power in 1992, a dissection of multinational corporate power as expressed through company boardrooms,  she also photographed the commoditisation of women at car shows, and our contemporary fascination with our smart phones.

Jeep girl, Shanghai 21 April 2005 by Jacqueline Hassink. From Car Girls by Jacqueline Hassink, published by Aperture

Chinese photographer Lu Guang disappears in Xinjiang
bjp-online loves press freedom, so we were sad to hear reports that Chinese documentary photographer Lu Guang has disappeared. A three-time World Press Photo winner who has shot images on social, environmental, and economic issues in China, he was picked up by national security offers during a visit to Xinjiang, according to his wife Xu Xiaoli – who also says she last heard from him on 03 November.

Development and Pollution by Lu Guang, commissioned by Greenpeace International. April 9, 2005. Most factories in Hainan Industrial Park of Wuhai City in Inner Mongolia are high-energy consuming and high-pollution producing. China is now the world’s second-largest economy. Its economic development has consumed lots of energy and generated plenty of pollution. A habit of directly discharging unprocessed industrial sewage, exhaust gas and waste material has led to pollution of farmlands, grasslands, and drinking water as well as the ocean and the air. Over the past 10 years, factories have been moved from the country’s east to its central and western parts, thus greatly expanding the polluted area and increasing the severity of the situation. Photo courtesy of the World Press Photo Foundation
Diane Smyth

Diane Smyth is the editor of BJP, returning for a second stint on staff in 2023 - after 15 years on the team until 2019. As a freelancer, she has written for The Guardian, FT Weekend Magazine, Creative Review, Aperture, FOAM, Aesthetica and Apollo. She has also curated exhibitions for institutions such as The Photographers Gallery and Lianzhou Foto Festival. You can follow her on instagram @dismy