Photo London 2019: Stephen Shore and Vivian Maier star
Photo London is back at Somerset House this May for its fifth instalment, with a special exhibition of new and unseen work by this year’s Master of Photography, Stephen Shore, plus Vivian Maier, Roger Fenton, Eamonn Doyle, almost 100 galleries from 21 different countries, and a giant egg sculpture. Known for his pioneering use of colour photography, Shore’s newest body of work, Details, will be shown for the first time in the UK at the fair, as well as a series of 60 small photographs titled Los Angeles, taken through a single day in the city in 1969.
Don McCullin talks war and peace
An interview with Don McCullin is never going to be a dull affair – he is a complex man who has told the story of his life many times before. He is unfailingly polite and gentlemanly, but one detects a slightly weary tone as he goes over the familiar ground. He often pre-empts the questions with clinical self-awareness. We revisit an interview with Don McCullin, as an acclaimed retrospective of his world-renown photojournalism opens at Tate Britain. “I’m a lost soul without photography,” he says.
Q&A: Manfred Heiting, photobook expert
Starting to collect photobooks in the 1970s, Manfred Heiting amassed one of the world’s best libraries. Considered one of the most complete, it included a copy of most of the important photobooks that appeared from 1888-1970 in Europe, the United States, the Soviet Union. Tragically, last year it was consumed by the California wildfires. As Heiting’s latest book, Czech and Slovak Photo Publications, 1918-1989, is published by Steidl, BJP catches up with him. “Yes, it is devastating and certainly a great loss,” he tells us, “and not only for me personally.”
Siân: Portrait of a Photographer
“I would not normally, ever, want be on that side of the camera,” says Sian Davey, the subject of a short documentary by student filmmaker Dylan Friese-Greene. The pair met when Davey was photographing her daughter, Martha, at a party in their hometown near Totnes in Devon. “Sian likes to make a point of getting to know the people she’s photographing, so naturally I got to know her really well,” says Friese-Greene, who is in his second year of film-making at Kingston University in southwest London.
Shortlist announced for the 2018 Gomma Photography Grant
42 shortlisted photographers have been announced for a prize for emerging image-makers, including Berangere Fromont, Caleb Stein, Carla Kogelman, David Molina, Fatima Abreu Ferreira, Jean-Marc Caimi & Valentina Piccinni, Jens Schwarz, Julie van der Vaart, Pierpaolo Mittica, Simon Johansson, Tatiana Cedillo, Tomasz Laczny, Tomasz Lazar, Valerio Polici, and Yorgos Yatromanolakis.
Andy Warhol’s Polaroid Pictures
In 1971 Polaroid introduced the Big Shot camera; featuring an integrated flash, viewfinder and fixed focus lens, it was aimed at shooting portraits – and was enthusiastically taken up by artist Andy Warhol. The camera was discontinued in 1973 but Warhol kept using it until his death in 1987, capturing shots of actors, artists, politicians, clubbers, and Factory hangers-on. He also used it to photograph himself, creating a self-portrait in 1979 in what he called his “fright wig” that measures a whopping 81.3cm x 55.9cm. BASTIAN gallery is now showing this huge self-portrait in a London exhibition of over 60 of Warhol’s Polaroids.
Radici by Fabrizio Albertini
Fabrizio Albertini’s latest project began in his vegetable garden. “It was a stream of consciousness that lasted for a couple of years, from 2015 to 2017. I started taking pictures in my garden,” he says, “I was looking for something close to me”. Radici is Albertini’s newest book, published by Witty Kiwi, and the winner of this year’s Unveil’d Photobook Award. Its title means “roots” in Italian, “like the ones in my garden,” the photographer explains.
A Bird Flies Backwards
“In a nutshell, A Bird Flies Backwards is a coming-of-age piece. Learning how to cope with the fact that stuff can hurt you, and life can get pretty weird,” says 23-year-old photographer Cole Flynn Quirke, whose latest project is now on show in London. It started in the early summer of 2018, when Cole Flynn Quirke’s grandmother passed away after suffering from a long-term illness. “It was the first time I ever lost someone I adored so much,” he says. “It affected me in a way that I didn’t really think things could.”
