After discovering an album of Victorian cartes de visite in an antiques market, Paul Frecker gave up his day job to become a dealer in vintage photographs. Now collected in a new book, these cards were “a photographic craze that seized the imagination of the British public at the beginning of the 1860s,” says the Scotland-based author. “Queen Victoria was one of the format’s biggest fans.” Initially a way of distributing family portraits to friends, the phenomenon soon extended to images of royals, celebrities and larger-than-life characters. “It really was a fervour: crowds often formed to ogle displays in stockists’ windows, to the extent that pavements were blocked and traffic was impeded.”
The photographer got as close as he could when cadets’ endurance, strength and teamwork were tested at Canada’s Royal Military College
Every year, as spring blooms, first-year officer cadets of Canada’s Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, take part in a series of competitions. The challenges and obstacle course aim to test their strength, endurance and teamwork.
“As long as you don’t mind getting a little wet and don’t step on any of the smoke canisters, you can get really close to the action,” says Elliot Ferguson, who had captured the event before in his capacity as a news and sports photographer.
The perfect post-sundown shot has long proved elusive. But a new book called Night Fever is celebrating the trailblazers who caught not just what the small hours look like – but how they feel
In 2008, the celebrated photographer Dayanita Singh discovered that using daylight colour film stock at night yielded strange results. When she shot at dusk, the photos came out blue. Feeling experimental one night, she decided to leave her camera on a long exposure. The following morning, she woke to discover that she had been robbed. The thieves had taken her cameras and those rolls of exposed colour film from under her bed – with pictures still waiting to be revealed. “Obviously, the camera saw something it should not have seen,” she says.
The photos Singh made next capture the frightening and uncanny sensations this incident triggered. She set about capturing images like a robber might. She wore a headtorch and captured a parrot by its light. She trained her lens on the decorative fluorescent tubes lighting neighbourhood trees and marvelled at the surveillance-footage green they lent her images. The daylight film made indiscernible night colours lurid: the ground turned red, the trees yellow, the sky a galactic indigo.
Richard Wright hits Glasgow, London Gallery Weekend brings the glamour and fashion photography claims its place as art – all in your weekly dispatch
London Gallery Weekend The capital’s commercial gallery scene perhaps needs this booster celebration that features talks, openings and fun in a host of glamorous venues.
• Galleries across London, until 2 June
For many on Ghoramara, the general election is about the climate crisis and survival. The island, 150km south of Kolkata and named the ‘sinking island’ by the media, has lost nearly half its area to soil erosion in the past two decades and could disappear if a solution is not found.
As voters across India cast their ballots on issues ranging from the cost of living to jobs and religion, politicians trying to win votes in Ghoramara need to put the climate crisis to the fore as the island’s dwindling population fight to save their homes from the sea amid rising water levels and increasingly fierce storms
Her film Sisters, Saints, Sibyls made people flee and pass out when it was first shown. As it’s screened in Britain, the uncompromising artist talks about self-harm, censorship and the tragic life of her sister Barbara
Whispers, cries and accusing voices. Traumas passed down through the generations, self-harm and suicide – they are all part of Nan Goldin’s Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, a three-screen projection made exactly 20 years ago, now installed in a deconsecrated Welsh chapel in central London. “It is important that it is shown in a church,” Goldin tells me, as we sit together in her apartment in Brooklyn on a spring afternoon.
The story begins like a slide show, telling the story of Saint Barbara by way of a sequence of art-historical images. “They lock her up because of her beliefs,” explains Goldin, “and she manages to rebel and escape and she converts to Christianity and the walls weep and the holy ghost visits her. It’s a great story.” But it ends badly, with Barbara’s beheading at the hands of her father, who is then struck down by a bolt of biblical lightning.
In a new exhibition, artists find new ways to look at and investigate their natural surroundings and how they interact with human stories
The striking collection of photographic art presented in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Widening the Lens is very much a revision of the long tradition of landscape photography in the US. It may be very directly revising – as in AK Burns’s reinvention of landscape photographs literally ripped from photo books – or it may be much more subtly so, as with Sam Contis’s careful deconstructions of the iconography of the American west. However so, this is a show very much about counter-narratives, hidden histories, reinscription, reinvention, and revision.
Borne of a desire to consider how our relationship with images has shifted as photography has become shockingly more ubiquitous and prolific, Widening the Lens looks at photographs both as singular objects as well as pieces integrated into larger objects. It is a show that strives to be responsive to how the lines between photography and other artistic media have become blurred, and one that seeks to imagine what environmental photography looks like now.
‘He is the ultimate outlaw, one of the most brash and sparkling acts I’ve ever encountered, performing rock albums in a cabaret style. But I wanted this image to be clean, simple and free of narrative’
Provincetown is a fishing village turned art colony at the tip of Cape Cod, a curling peninsula on America’s north-eastern coast. In US terms, it’s an old town, and since the first half of the 20th century, it has been a haven for artists, musicians, queer people and bohemians who descend on the town every summer.
Tennessee Williams lived there, lots of the abstract expressionists holidayed there, and the Velvet Underground played there in the 1960s. There’s a cultural pedigree to the place that has made it a magnet for creative people, including the man in this image, my friend and fellow artist, Billy Hough.
In 1977, Janine Wiedel set out in her VW campervan to photograph potteries, jewellers, coal mines and steel works. It became one of the most important photographic works of its generation
The fans of Barça Femení were hopeful of a third consecutive Champions League triumph as photographer Hannah Cauhépé journeyed alongside them from Barcelona to Bilbao for the 2024 final against Lyon
On Sunday night, back in Barcelona, some people were wondering why some streets were blocked and people were decked in Barça gear – unfortunately, women’s football is still under the radar of most.
But things are slowly changing.
Barcelona fans make their way to Bilbao’s San Mamés stadium.
Three years ago, Charlie Tallott was in a dark place – and found escapism through his camera. Now the photographer’s blissful, flash-laden images have won a prestigious award
Charting the photographer’s pioneering work at Dazed & Confused magazine, a new exhibition captures a rebellious – and pre-Photoshop – era in fashion photography
The Indian photographer’s nocturnal studies capture the otherworldly feel of the small hours
For eight years from 2007, Dhruv Malhotra photographed after dark in Indian cities and suburbs. He was, he says, drawn to “the silence, the palpable sense of time and the unknown” as well as the chance “to make visible what is ordinarily dark and hidden”. To begin with, these scenes were uninhabited. He liked the idea of places on the edges of the urban, left alone overnight, waiting to wake again. To achieve his effects he exposed colour negative film over long periods, imprinting otherworldly early hours on film.
About a year into these insomniac studies he took a picture of a night sleeper he chanced upon. Malhotra was living and working mostly in Noida, the New Okhla Industrial Development Authority, a satellite zone of Delhi, which has expanded rapidly since it was created in 1976. After that first picture of the sleeper he made a series, going in search of where people might bed down, staking out likely benches and shelters. Mostly the people he photographed were not homeless. Summers are stifling hot in Uttar Pradesh, and sleeping outside is a regular custom. Some were migrant workers who chose to sleep close to their place of work, others were security guards between shifts. “When photographing,” Malhotra has said of the series, “I’m looking for spaces where the human figure and the urban environment form a symmetry with each other.”
Before, during and after the 1998 Good Friday agreement, Gareth McConnell went around Belfast photographing the sectarian murals that characterise the city’s streetscapes. “The murals are everywhere, and they’re huge,” says the Northern Irish photographer and publisher. “For years now, taxi drivers have been taking people on tours of them.” McConnell photographed murals from both sides of the conflict, but focused on such small details that they are not identifiable. “I wanted to explore the language of form and colour,” he says. “Abstraction as a means of accessing a different kind of spiritual realm, trying to tap into a deeper, more universal understanding.”
The photographer had to gain the trust of women in south Iran to capture this image
Iranian photographer Forough Alaei has a special interest in women’s rights: she has documented female football fans prohibited from entering her country’s stadiums, and for this project spent a month on Hengam Island. Alaei explains that here, in the south of Iran, “the women have a major role in the economy of the family. While they are very traditional and do housework, they also do fishing and crafts, and have jobs. This is Marziyeh; she’s 38 and a chef in an independent restaurant serving delicious, spicy seafood to the increasing number of tourists in the region.”
Alaei stayed for an extended period in order to gain the women’s trust, and found it easiest to document their lives and work using a phone. “They’re familiar objects,” she says. “Digital cameras can be intimidating or off-putting to people in the small, traditional regions.”
The Italian photographer is no stranger to altercations, but when he set off for Harry’s Bar, it had been a while since his last celebrity contretemps
Not for nothing is Rino Barillari known as “the king of paparazzi”. Over a career spanning more than six decades, he has masqueraded as priests, gardeners and bricklayers in his quest to capture up-close photos of the rich and famous, from Princess Margaret and Jackie Kennedy to the Beatles, Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra.
But until Tuesday, it had been a long time since Barillari was involved in a contretemps with a celebrity.
Photographer Phillip Buehler, who captured the death of the American mall in a 2022 photo series, has a new exhibition of pictures from the last 50 years that trace the often forgotten history of the islands surrounding Manhattan. No Man Is an Island: Poetry in the Ruins of the New York Archipelago is now on show until 23 June at the Front Room Gallery in Hudson, New York.
Accredited royal photographer Anwar Hussein’s images, and those of his two sons, each tell a story of the late Diana’s life
From her famous “revenge” dress to the lonely Taj Mahal pose, the late Diana, Princess of Wales knew the power of the photograph, and more often than not the acclaimed royal photographer Anwar Hussein was on hand to help her harness it.
Now some of these images, including ones of her walking through an Angolan minefield and shaking hands with an Aids patient, form a London exhibition by Hussein, 86, an accredited royal photographer for more than 50 years.
Photographer Dafydd Jones’s new book documents the upper crust of the Big Apple in an era of gaudy excess: doggy canapes, ladies who lunched, and a ‘mob-like’ real-estate mogul
Her face is covered, but you can tell it’s Ivana Trump from her beehive. The picture was taken in 1990, at a fashion show in the gilded environs of New York hotel the Plaza. She sits alone, surrounded by empty chairs, as rapacious photographers press in from behind, while hotel security guards loom from one side. A trio of well-dressed guests appear to laugh in her direction.
The photograph is one of the highlights from a new book by Dafydd Jones. New York: High Life/Low Life features images taken between 1988 and 1999, when the Wales-born society photographer moved to the US to work for titles including Vanity Fair and the New York Observer.
The British Press Photographers’ Association’s annual Assignments exhibition is back at the Bargehouse in London until 2 June. Curated by five leading industry figures, this year’s exhibition covers news stories from March 2023 through to the spring of 2024
Photographer Steve Fitch has captured motel signs across the US, showing a range of styles during different decades, displayed at a new exhibition at the Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla, California. ‘What does matter is the idea of theme and variation, how a collection can be interesting because of the variety of specimens,’ Fitch said. ‘A collection of butterflies illustrates this idea, for example, and photography is such a great medium for collecting and comparing, which is what my motel sign project is ultimately all about’
‘This was the first march of the Women’s Liberation Movement. The figure that’s usually given is 4,000 – but I’m sure there were tens of thousands of us. It was chocka!’
It was early March in 1971 and bitterly cold, but the snow and sleet didn’t dampen our spirits. Thousands of us had gathered for the first Women’s Liberation Movement march. We were singing and dancing as we walked through London and there was street theatre at Trafalgar Square, where the march ended. It was a joyous occasion. Our banners reflected our primary focuses: equal pay and equal opportunity, free contraception and abortion on demand. There were also lots of men of all ages taking part, kids too. And there was a huge police presence – we were surrounded by them, walking alongside, in front and behind. They were on the march too – whether they liked it or not!
I was taking pictures the whole time, running to get ahead, climbing up lampposts or on to bins. I remember passing Billingsgate fish market was a whole lot of fun, as workers came out to watch and cheer. I’ve got lots of pictures of passersby laughing with us – and some of them at us. But even if there was the occasional bit of mocking, things were never nasty. We weren’t being aggressive, so that wasn’t the reaction we got.
After recently unearthing some images that he took during 1985, and with this season coming to an end, photographer Steve Pyke was led to consider how the experience of football fans in the UK has changed over the past 40 years and also recall his youth and the role that football played in his relationship with his father
My father has just moved into a residence for the elderly from which he will not return. He’s 92. Care assistants attend to him. He’s succumbed without protest to things he’d have once thought of as indignities. Dementia is taking him, his memory slipping away like wrack drawn by a tide.
He’s in Leicester, where he grew up, where I grew up. I’m in New Orleans, far away in space but also in experience and outlook. He followed, and surpassed, the models for English working-class men of his time. He was taciturn, undemonstrative. He contained himself with an acute and I think painful vigilance. I had punk.
The maverick director and Emma Stone reflect on how they took their creative collaboration to the next level – by developing a brilliantly bizarre photobook
The travel photography site Capture the Atlas has published the seventh edition of its Milky Way photographer of the year collection. The Milky Way season ranges from February to October in the northern hemisphere and from January to November in the southern hemisphere. The best time to see and photograph the Milky Way is usually between May and June, when hours of visibility are at their maximum on both hemispheres – away from light-polluted areas such as cities, and preferably at higher elevation
The pioneering photographer, who would have been 100 next month, showcases her eye for the uncanny with this image of a newspaper stand
From the moment her father took his Leica camera from around his neck and gave it to Dorothy Bohm as she boarded a train out of Nazi-occupied Lithuania in June 1939, she seemed fated to her vocation. Bohm – then Dorothea Israelit – was 14 at the time and the journey took her to England as a refugee; she lodged with a family in Hassocks in the heart of the Sussex countryside. She did not see her parents – eventually sent by Russian forces, separately, to detention camps in Siberia – for another 20 years. The separation, she later said, gave her a profound sense of impermanence; the Leica felt like one antidote to that: “The photograph fulfils my deep need to stop things from disappearing,” she wrote. “It makes transience less painful.”
Over her long life – Bohm died last year aged 98 – that need never left her. This picture, taken in Lisbon in 1996, is included in a small exhibition and a wonderful retrospective book of the photographer’s work, Dorothy Bohm at 100, in which notable friends and fellow photographers pay tribute to her pioneering influence. Her career began when she set up a portrait studio in Manchester in 1946, but she subsequently travelled extensively with her camera across Europe and beyond, before settling in London, where she was a prime mover in creating the Photographers’ Gallery in 1971.
These images highlighting themes of climate resilience, personal trauma and identity are part of an exhibition of the work of students from more than 25 different countries
The annual student showcase will be on view at the International Center of Photography in New York from 18 May until 2 September
Tal Danino’s day job at Columbia University, New York, is engineering “living” medicines. “We program microbes for cancer therapy using synthetic biology,” he says. As a side hustle he manipulates and photographs the microbial world; his images are collected in a book, Beautiful Bacteria. Taking bacteria from substances such as wastewater, dental plaque or kimchi, Danino lets them multiply in a petri dish, adding dyes. The results are artworks differing from the digital enhancements often made in scientific photography to make images more informative. Indeed, he says, the microbes deserve some credit: “They do often deviate from our plans, becoming active collaborators in the creation of the work.”
Beautiful Bacteria: Encounters in the Microuniverse is published by Rizzoli (£38.50). To order a copy for £33.88 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837
The photographer and her husband came across an abandoned boat while out walking and took the opportunity to float a surreal idea
Every September, Carla Vermeend and her husband go on holiday to Terschelling island, in the Netherlands.
“It has lots of nature, right in the middle of the Wadden Sea, which is listed by Unesco as a world heritage site,” says Vermeend, a Dutch photographer. During their visit in 2014, the couple were walking by the sea together.
The internet and its associated digital industry are estimated to produce about the same emissions annually as aviation. But we barely think about pollution while snapping 16 duplicate photos of our pets, which are immediately uploaded to the cloud.
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