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Roger Mayne review – destitute kids running wild in the battered, bombed-out city

✇The Guardian
Charlotte Jansen

Courtauld Gallery, London
‘Take our picture, mister!’ they shouted at Mayne, who not only captured children on the streets of postwar London, but helped turn photography into an art form

In its 92-year history, the Courtauld Gallery in London has never acquired or exhibited photography – until now. Its inaugural exhibition is Roger Mayne: Youth, devoted to some 60 works by the self-taught British photographer best known for his documents of working-class children on the poor and battered streets of postwar London.

When trying to open up programmes to new audiences, photography is a natural step for any institution that has previously ignored the medium. Mayne seems a safe choice for a gallery known mostly for its collection of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, one its usual audiences might not balk at. They might compare Mayne’s populated group shots to impressionism’s busy scenes of people at leisure. Even the ideas of the impressionists somewhat inform Mayne’s approach to documentary photography – the notion that there is a difference between what is in front of you and what you see.

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© Photograph: © Roger Mayne Archive / Mary Evans Picture Library

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© Photograph: © Roger Mayne Archive / Mary Evans Picture Library

‘It’s never a pleasant image’: why fashion’s hottest photographer has a leg fixation

✇The Guardian
Lauren Cochrane

He has worked with Miu Miu and shot Zendaya for Luca Guadagnino. But Alessio Bolzoni also makes artworks – from strangers’ bottom halves to people striking twisted poses while concealing their faces

Halfway through our interview, I tell Alessio Bolzoni that he is unusual: a fashion photographer without an ego. He snorts with laughter. “There’s no way you can do the work and share it with people without a bit of ego,” he says. “But I try to talk to it and work with it.”

Bolzoni’s ego has certainly been stroked recently: he worked on campaigns for brand-of-the-moment Miu Miu and took some very sweaty and sexy on-court shots of Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor to promote Luca Guadagnino’s stylish tennis film Challengers. But alongside this, the Italian-born photographer also produces artwork. An exhibition, There’s a Fine Line Between Love and Hate, You See, opens this month at VO Curations gallery in London.

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© Photograph: Alessio Bolzoni

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© Photograph: Alessio Bolzoni

Photoespaña: the exhibition where the staging is as impressive as the art

✇The Guardian
Guy Lane

Madrid’s yearly photography festival has shone light on new photographers, established industry names, and artists whose work has gone unrecognised for decades

By the end of September, PhotoEspaña, Madrid’s yearly photography festival, will have hosted more than 80 exhibitions featuring the work of nearly 300 photographers and visual artists. Shows by established figures such as Elliott Erwitt, Paloma Navares, David Goldblatt and Erwin Olaf lead a roster that also includes less familiar names, Lúa Ribeira, the Widline Cadet and Consuelo Kanaga among them.

Above: Erwin Olaf’s Narratives of emancipation, desire and intimacy at Fernan Gomez cultural centre. Photograph: La Fabrica. Right: Boris Savelev’s Viewfinder – A way of looking, at the Serrería Belga. Photograph: Oak Taylor Smith

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© Photograph: Gonzalo Juanes

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© Photograph: Gonzalo Juanes

‘In South Africa, you hear of disappearance all the time’: one photographer’s search for his sister’s missing years

✇The Guardian
Rachel Cooke

Lindokuhle Sobekwa has made a moving attempt to retrace the steps of a sibling, now dead, whose decade-long absence left a hole at his family’s heart

When the photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa was six years old, his half-sister Ziyanda disappeared. On the day in question, the siblings had had a fight, Ziyanda, who was about to turn 13, having demanded that he hand over some money he’d been given by his father. Lindo refused, and ran away, and his rebellious sister duly chased after him. But then, disaster. He wasn’t concentrating on the traffic; a car hit him, an accident that broke his spine. He would spend the next three months in hospital. Ziyanda, though, kept on running, not even stopping to check up on him. It would be 11 years before he saw her again.

No one in the family knew where she was until, in 2013, Lindo’s mother discovered that she was living in a hostel not far from the family’s shack in Thokoza, a township east of Johannesburg. She was very ill, and there were scars on her back, but now she came home at last, no longer the wild girl of old. Her brother was angry. He had a lot of questions. But the two of them didn’t talk much. She needed to rest, and something told Lindo, then about to finish secondary school, that he should tread carefully.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

Rare photographs by Dora Maar cast Picasso’s tormented muse in a new light

✇The Guardian
Donna Ferguson

London gallery shows intimate images, including portraits of the artist, that reveal a great talent in her own right

Dora Maar is renowned as Pablo Picasso’s “weeping woman”, the anguished lover who inspired him to repeatedly portray her in tears. Now a London gallery is seeking to re-establish her as a pioneering surrealist artist in her own right, with an exhibition showcasing photographs recently discovered in her estate.

The exhibition, which opens at the Amar Gallery in London on 16 June, will include rare surrealist photograms and intimate photographs dating from her time with Picasso. These include two extraordinary portraits of him from the 1930s and one charting the creation of his anti-fascist masterpiece, Guernica, in his studio surrounded by paint pots. The works were bought at auction from Maar’s estate two years ago and have never been exhibited in a public gallery before.

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© Photograph: Dora Maar Estate / Courtesy of Amar Gallery

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© Photograph: Dora Maar Estate / Courtesy of Amar Gallery

Potent images that shine a light on domestic abuse – in pictures

✇The Guardian
Lisa O'Kelly

Lingchi, or “death by a thousand cuts”, was a particularly brutal form of execution practised in Asia in ancient times: the condemned person was tied to a post and body parts were slowly sliced off one by one. The Indian-born photographer Sujata Setia uses this barbaric practice in her series A Thousand Cuts as a potent metaphor for a different kind of brutality – domestic abuse. In collaboration with the charity Shewise, Setia spent two years photographing survivors of abuse among the UK’s south Asian community. Using saanjhi, the Indian art of paper-cutting, she makes vivid red cuts in her portraits to express her subjects’ anguish: “I wanted to show how the scars are not only external but internal,” she says. Having grown up witnessing domestic violence, Setia initially resisted turning the camera on herself. “But there came a point where I realised I had to own my own scars.” Taking her own portrait and placing it alongside the others in the series has been “absolutely the most healing process,” she says.

• Setia is the winner of the creative category of the Sony world photography awards 2024, professional competition. The 2024 awards book is available to buy at worldphoto.org. In the UK, the national domestic abuse helpline is 0808 2000 247, or visit womensaid.org.uk

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© Photograph: All images © Sujata Setia , courtesy of Sony World Photography awards

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© Photograph: All images © Sujata Setia , courtesy of Sony World Photography awards

‘As their older sister, I feel a responsibility to protect them and be a role model’: Aleesha Coker’s best phone picture

✇The Guardian
Grace Holliday

The student on the image she took while working on a series for her photography A-level

Aleesha Coker, then 17, and her two younger sisters, Freda and Bintu, had stopped off at the corner shop for a snack on their way home from school. Coker had been working on a series for her photography A-level, shooting through glass from exterior to interior. As the girls passed by a payphone in Lorrimore Square, south London, Coker was inspired to set up a moment. She used an iPhone 12 set to portrait mode – “I don’t particularly enjoy using film cameras,” she says – and was pleased with how “the muted colours gave it an intimate feeling”.

“As their older sister, I feel a responsibility to protect them and be a role model. Freda is 13. She’s very quiet most of the time, but can be loud when she feels comfortable. Bintu is 10; she has a very bubbly character and can be outspoken. “I don’t think their expressions in the photograph necessarily reflect the excitable parts of their personalities,” she says, “but something deeper. When my little sisters gaze at the camera in this way, I’m reminded of how much they trust me.”

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© Photograph: Aleesha Coker

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© Photograph: Aleesha Coker

‘A set of clues to who they are’: artists and authors on their marvellous mantlepieces

✇The Guardian
Jess Cartner-Morley. Interviews by Hannah Booth

Fascinated by the objects on his mum’s fireplace and what they say about her, Orlando Gili embarked on a project to capture creatives’ collections

A mantelpiece is a place like no other. A snapshot of daily life in a home, it is solemn and esoteric, like a roadside shrine. The things that anchor us – the face of a beloved, a pebble from a favourite beach, pretty china out of reach of little hands – jostle for space with the fleeting joys of party invites and supermarket flowers. Pretty things, special things and funny things are strung together, like charms on a bracelet. Your own mantelpiece is a walk down memory lane that you can take from your sofa. Someone else’s is a set of clues to who they are.

For photographer Orlando Gili, the lure of the mantelpiece began, appropriately, at home. See the one below with the jug of parsley leaves beside mustard and marmalade pots? That’s his mum’s house. “A mantelpiece is a still life, but with so much personality it is also a portrait of the person, or people, whose house this is,” says Gili. His favourite mantelpieces are “a jumble of sentiment and appreciation of design. They belong to people with rich hinterlands.”

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© Photograph: Orlando Gili

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© Photograph: Orlando Gili

‘Artists used to be forgotten, their work was thrown away’: how a Berlin gallery changed photography

✇The Guardian
Eliza Apperly

Co-founded before photo work was taken seriously as art, this Berlin venue is marking its half-century by celebrating the history of its collection – and the medium itself

When Annette Kicken’s late husband, Rudolf, founded a photo gallery in Aachen, Germany, in 1974, appreciation of photography as an art form was rare. Major German photographic museums, such as Museum Ludwig in Cologne or C/O Berlin, were years away from opening. In the UK, the National Portrait Gallery had only just appointed its first curator of photography. In the US, the Metropolitan Museum of Art would not establish a department of photographs until 1992. The number of galleries and collectors devoted to the medium was so small that they referred to themselves as an international “photo family”.

“It was a very, very small scene,” says Kicken, who joined the gallery in 1999. “There were very few institutional exhibitions. There was no market. Artists were forgotten, and their work was often just thrown away.”

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© Photograph: © Estate of Sibylle Bergemann

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© Photograph: © Estate of Sibylle Bergemann

Guardian Weekly readers: share your best recent pictures with us

✇The Guardian
Guardian community team

Share your recent photos and tell us where you were and why that scene resonated with you

The Guardian Weekly is our international news magazine, featuring the best of the Guardian, the Observer and our digital journalism in one beautifully designed and illustrated package.

We’re now on the lookout for our readers’ best photographs of the world around us. For a chance to feature in the magazine, send us a picture you took recently, telling us where it is in the world, when you took it and why the scene resonated with you at that particular moment.

Try to upload the highest resolution possible. The limit for photo uploads is 5MB.

Landscape images are preferable due to the page design

Tell us as much as you can about when and where the photo was taken as well as what was happening

When we publish an image we want to credit you so please ensure that we have contact information and your full name

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© Photograph: MarioGuti/Getty Images

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© Photograph: MarioGuti/Getty Images

This photo got 3rd in an AI art contest—then its human photographer came forward

✇Ars Technica
Kyle Orland
To be fair, I wouldn't put it past an AI model to forget the flamingo's head.

Enlarge / To be fair, I wouldn't put it past an AI model to forget the flamingo's head. (credit: Miles Astray)

A juried photography contest has disqualified one of the images that was originally picked as a top three finisher in its new AI art category. The reason for the disqualification? The photo was actually taken by a human and not generated by an AI model.

The 1839 Awards launched last year as a way to "honor photography as an art form," with a panel of experienced judges who work with photos at The New York Times, Christie's, and Getty Images, among others. The contest rules sought to segregate AI images into their own category as a way to separate out the work of increasingly impressive image generators from "those who use the camera as their artistic medium," as the 1839 Awards site puts it.

For the non-AI categories, the 1839 Awards rules note that they "reserve the right to request proof of the image not being generated by AI as well as for proof of ownership of the original files." Apparently, though, the awards did not request any corresponding proof that submissions in the AI category were generated by AI.

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Photographer takes on the machines in AI competition – and wins

✇The Guardian
Alex Hern UK technology editor

Miles Astray subverts trend of artificial pictures muscling in on human photography, but is disqualified

Ever since the advent of generative AI, the age-old battle of man v machine has been looking decidedly one-sided. But one photographer, intent on making the case for pictures captured with the human eye, has taken the fight to his algorithm-powered rivals – and won.

Miles Astray subverted the idea of artificially generated pictures muscling in on human photography awards by submitting his own human-made image, Flamingone, to the AI category in a prestigious competition.

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© Photograph: Miles Astray

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© Photograph: Miles Astray

The work of Sam Hanna, the ‘Lowry of film-making’ – in pictures

✇The Guardian
Guardian Staff

Sam Hanna (1903-96), a pioneering film-maker from Burnley, Lancashire, was once called the ‘Lowry of film-making’. His work depicts people of all ages as they lived and worked in a region that was rapidly losing its economic role and industrial identity in postwar Britain. A collection of his work is available to view at the North West Film Archive at Manchester Metropolitan University

Round Our Way: Sam Hanna’s Visual Legacy by Heather Norris Nicholson is published by Pendle Press

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© Photograph: Sam Hanna

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© Photograph: Sam Hanna

Digital manipulation with surreal consequences...

✇MetaFilter
cupcakeninja
"Lissyelle is a photographer and art director based in Brooklyn, New York and Los Angeles, California. She grew up in rural Ontario where her interest in photography began at the age of 12, spurred by an obsessive fear she would one day forget her entire life were she not to document it. Her body of work is often still inspired by this compulsion to photograph, as well as by the vivid colors of early childhood, reoccurring dreams, the blurry way we see things when we are either too happy or too sad, and the soft hands of the high renaissance." [NSFW]

Glasgow International review – so how many art critics can you fit in an Opel?

✇The Guardian
Hettie Judah

This year’s biennial takes you up tenement staircases and into city centre car parks to see fine work from Delaine Le Bas, Cathy Wilkes and Lawrence Abu Hamdan

It’s a dreich – as they like to say in these parts – afternoon in June. Four strangers are crammed into an Opel in a city centre car park, listening to the radio. A broadcast of field recordings and vocal fragments is punctuated with bleeps and static. It is a very Glasgow International (GI) experience. In this biennial, art leads you up tenement staircases, across industrial estates, through community gardens and into car parks.

The broadcast is an homage to Jean Cocteau’s film Orpheus, and composed by students in Dresden and Glasgow under the tutelage of Susan Philipsz. This most private of public listening experiences recasts you as Orpheus himself, scrutinising transmissions for hidden meaning. But as Eurydice tells him: “You can’t spend your life in a talking car.” Other delights await.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of the artists

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© Photograph: Courtesy of the artists

Two miles above ground: Donn Delson’s aerial photographs – in pictures

✇The Guardian
Donn Delson

At 75 years young, Donn Delson specialises in large-scale, often abstract aerial images shot from ‘doors off’ helicopters at heights up to 4,000 metres (12,000ft). Strapped into a doorless helicopter over two miles above ground, Delson has spent more than 300 hours watching the world from a bird’s eye view, travelling from Japan to The Netherlands, England to Israel, and across the US

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© Photograph: Donn Delson

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© Photograph: Donn Delson

The urban eye of Russian–Ukrainian photographer Boris Savelev – in pictures

✇The Guardian
Guardian Staff

Extensive retrospective celebrates the work of Boris Savelev, a leading independent Russian–Ukrainian photographer who first worked in the Soviet Union. He lived in Moscow before returning in 2010 to his native Ukraine, where he remained until moving to Spain as a refugee at the start of the 2022 invasion

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© Photograph: Boris Savelev

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© Photograph: Boris Savelev

William Anders obituary

✇The Guardian
Michael Carlson

American astronaut who took the celebrated 1968 Earthrise photograph during the Apollo 8 mission to orbit the moon

It may be that the most famous picture from the US space programme is not the shot of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, but the image of Earth, seen rising above the moon’s horizon, an image relayed from space on 24 December 1968 by the crew of Apollo 8 – Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders.

It was Anders, who has died aged 90, who snapped the “Earthrise” photograph, which was not part of the mission’s scheduled protocol. And it was he who read first from the Book of Genesis during their live transmission from lunar orbit that Christmas Eve.

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© Photograph: William Anders/AP

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© Photograph: William Anders/AP

The big picture: Bertien van Manen’s otherworldly arrivals hall

✇The Guardian
Tim Adams

After years working for fashion magazines, the Dutch photographer, who died last month, set off on an adventure to Budapest in 1975, where she found the curious Narnia she had dreamed of

There is a fairytale quality to Bertien van Manen’s 1975 photograph of the arrivals hall at Budapest Keleti train station. Among the questions it demands is: who are the two women in shawls and where might they be going? (And then there is the slight double take required to be sure that the pointing woman’s arm is not somehow on both sides of the right-hand shawl-wearer’s head.)

The otherworldly atmosphere of the photograph was appropriate to Van Manen’s quest. Her journey to Budapest marked a sliding doors moment in her career. Up until then, the photographer, who died last month aged 89, had a successful career in Amsterdam working for fashion magazines. But then she started looking hard at the pictures in Robert Frank’s landmark odyssey, The Americans. She felt the need to be on the road, in curious places. She was 40, her children were growing up, so she took a trip to Budapest, then almost as inaccessible as Narnia.

I Will Be Wolf by Bertien van Manen is published by Mack (£25)

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© Photograph: Harold Strak/Bertien Van Manen/MACK

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© Photograph: Harold Strak/Bertien Van Manen/MACK

‘After months of social distancing, my whole family came together’: Matteo Fagiolino’s best phone picture

✇The Guardian
Grace Holliday

The Italian photographer on capturing a moment of peace on the Rimini riviera during a difficult time

As a portraitist and wedding photographer, Matteo Fagiolino likes to reflect his subjects’ personalities in his work. This photograph was taken after the first Covid lockdown ended, at the beach at Torre Pedrera, a town on the Rimini riviera in Italy.

“It was a summer afternoon after months of social distancing,” he says. “It had been so long since my whole family had spent the day together, it was a breath of fresh air for everyone.”

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© Photograph: Matteo Fagiolino

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© Photograph: Matteo Fagiolino

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL BIRD PROBABLY!

✇MetaFilter
spamandkimchi
The Thing with Feathers podcast , hosted by Courtney Ellis, has lots of great episodes. Check out the interview with the Inept Birder (twitter) who prompted the#WorstBirdPic trend almost a decade ago and is still chugging along. @TheIneptBirder is here with vaguely reassuring words about your terrible and/or blurry picture of a bird or a bird butt!

The best internet trend of 2015 so far has arrived - and it's a series of blurry photos and half-photos of what looks like, or could possibly be (maybe), some type of bird. In a valiant rejection of the strict norms of birding, one nearsighted Twitter user - appropriately named @TheIneptBirder - tweeted a crappy photo of a bird he saw. An actually-good birder, @AmOrnithologist, then responded using a hashtag that will go down in the annals of birding history #WorstBirdPic

These light paintings let us visualize invisible clouds of air pollution

✇Ars Technica
Jennifer Ouellette
Night scene of Airport Road, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where light painting reveals a cloud of particulate pollutants to the right

Enlarge / Light painting reveals a cloud of particulates on Airport Road, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (PM2.5 10-20 micrograms per cubic meter). (credit: Robin Price)

Light painting is a technique used in both art and science that involves taking long-exposure photographs while moving some kind of light source—a small flashlight, perhaps, or candles or glowsticks—to essentially trace an image with light. A UK collaboration of scientists and artists has combined light painting with low-cost air pollution sensors to visualize concentrations of particulate matter (PM) in select locations in India, Ethiopia, and Wales. The objective is to creatively highlight the health risks posed by air pollution, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Air pollution is the leading global environmental risk factor," said co-author Francis Pope, an environmental scientist at the University of Birmingham in the UK who spearheaded the Air of the Anthropocene project with artist Robin Price. "[The project] creates spaces and places for discussions about air pollution, using art as a proxy to communicate and create dialogues about the issues associated with air pollution. By painting with light to create impactful images, we provide people with an easy-to-understand way of comparing air pollution in different contexts—making something that was largely invisible visible."

Light painting has been around since 1889, when Étienne-Jules Marey and Georges Demeny, who were investigating the use of photography as a scientific tool to study biological motion, created the first known light painting called Pathological Walk From in Front. In 1914, Frank and Lillian Mollier Gilbreth tracked the motion of manufacturing and clerical workers using light painting techniques, and in 1935, Man Ray "signed" his Space Writing series with a penlight—a private joke that wasn't discovered until 74 years later by photographer/historian Ellen Carey in 2009.

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