Tag: London College of Communication

Collective Strategies

London College of Communication and pic.london launch a public programme of workshops for recent graduates that puts collaboration at the fore

12 April 2019

Silvia Rosi and Theo Simpson win the UK’s Jerwood/Photoworks Awards

Silvia Rosi and Theo Simpson have won the UK’s Jerwood/Photoworks Awards for emerging photographers. Each receives £10,000 to make new work plus an additional fund of £5000 and print support from Spectrum Photographic, plus high-profile mentoring and a two-person exhibition that will start at the Jerwood Space in January 2020 and travel throughout the UK.

Born in 1992 in Scandiano, Italy, Rosi is a Togolaise/Italian artist living and working in London. Graduating from the London College of Communication in 2016 with a BA in Photography, she makes work that references the West African studio portrait to explore her family and its experience of migration. Born in 1986 in Doncaster, Theo Simpson lives and works in Lincolnshire, UK, and has shown his work at institutions such as FOAM in Amsterdam, and Webber Gallery, London. His work considers the long game and the transformations of the globalising world, and has previously been published on bjp-online www.1854.photography/2017/02/theosimpson/

7 December 2018

Tracing the collective history of North Korea

“There is a term to describe the cultural ache that Koreans go through: Han. A complex intermingling of historical, collective and personal sorrow, acceptance of a bitter present, and a hope of a better future.” Introduced to the term by a North Korean defector, Herman Rahman decided to adopt it as the framing concept for his project of the same name.

Han traces the collective history of the notoriously closed regime of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, relying largely on archival imagery and found text to probe at the borders of a near-impenetrable subject. The work is an interrogation, not only of the secrecy of the North Korean state, but also of the nature of photography itself.

14 August 2018

Crunch time for students at Free Range and more…

It’s show time for a new batch of graduates, with photographers and artists around the UK showing off the last work they’ve completed as students. The BA Photography and BA Photojournalism & Documentary Photography shows have already taken place at the London College of Communication, for example with strong portfolios by Herman Rahman and Freya Clayton-Payne, among others; the University of Westminster’s MA Documentary Photography and Photojournalism and MA Photography Arts students are showing their work at Ambika P3, London from 23-28 June, meanwhile, with new graduates including Cheryl Newman, former photography director of the Telegraph Magazine.

Free Range at London’s Old Truman Brewery, meanwhile, offers institutions based outside the UK’s capital the chance to show work in it, taking over the East London warehouses for two photography weeks – 22-25 June, and 29 June-2 July. Exhibitions are free and open from Friday-Monday both weeks, and institutions taking part include Falmouth University, Arts University of Bournemouth, and University of East London. Here BJP picks out our selection of the works that will go on show.

12 June 2018

Losing ground in Matthew Benjamin Coleman’s Heygate: A Natural History

Completed in 1974, London’s Heygate Estate was once a symbol of triumph over destruction, housing some 3000 people on the site of Victorian tenements destroyed by World World Two bombing. The estate was also home to an ‘urban forest’ planted in the 1970s, which included the best part of 500 mature trees by 2011, when Matthew Benjamin Coleman started to photograph the site.

But by 2011 Southwark Council, which owned the estate, had also already moved out many of its tenants and leaseholders, starting a process which culminated in it selling the land in 2013 to the Lendlease property developer. As the estate depopulated, “guerrilla gardeners, graffiti artists, skateboarders and parkour enthusiasts, as well as photographers, film-makers, and other assorted ruin-tourists” moved in, says Coleman; he adds that, of the 406 trees on the estate in 2013, 286 were felled to make way for building work. 

1 June 2018

Following female deminers in Nagorno-Karabakh

Unexploded landmines are responsible for the deaths of 15-20,000 people every year, and currently contaminate 78 countries worldwide. Nagorno Karabakh, a landlocked, mountainous region in South Caucasus, Eastern Europe, has one of the highest per capita incidences of landmine accidents in the world, and a third of the victims are children. Eva Clifford, former online writer at BJP, spent a week with the world’s largest mine clearance organisation, HALO, and their first female demining team in Nagorno Karabakh. Since employing its first female demining team in 2015, HALO now employs 11 women, with more undergoing training this year.

22 May 2018