Landscape photography often requires a large amount of physical exertion simply to get to a location, particularly when you are carrying a heavy bag of gear. While you might want to stick to the trails and the paths of least resistance, sometimes, it pays to embrace the more difficult locations. This great video tutorial discusses why you should head off the beaten path every once in a while.

Coming to you from Christian Irmler Landscape Photography, this excellent video tutorial discusses the value of embracing less common locations in landscape photography. One of the greatest benefits of this is simply that you are more likely to get shots that no one else has gotten before. On the other hand, it is important to exercise appropriate safety precautions. Be sure you are not going anywhere beyond your physical abilities, that you are carrying appropriate food, hydration, and safety gear, and always carry means of communication in case something goes wrong. But more than anything, enjoy the exploration, time in nature, and chance to explore your creativity! Check out the video above for the full rundown from Irmler. 

And if you really want to dive into landscape photography, check out “Photographing The World 1: Landscape Photography and Post-Processing with Elia Locardi.” 

Carrie Mae Weems was the first African American artist to have a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The veteran film-maker and photographer is so famous over there that she appears as herself in Spike Lee’s Netflix adaptation of She’s Gotta Have It, and yet she is still scarcely known in Britain. The Barbican retrospective Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now – huge, historic, enthralling, ranging over 40 years of work – will surely change that.

It opens with a shock: a group of large abstract paintings, very beautiful, reminiscent of the New York school of male painters of the 1950s. Except that your eyes, and these works, deceive you. They are in fact photographs of American walls in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020. Protesters in Portland, Oregon, painted slogans on boarded-up buildings; the authorities painted over them with swathes of black, brown and grey. And so the cycle of cover-ups continues.

As a sequence, Painting the Town (2021) tacitly alludes to the exclusion of black people from history and art. But it also relates directly to the suppression of speech. And a very unusual and distinctive aspect of Weems’s art appears to be this tension between word and image.

Perhaps her most classic work is the photographic essay titled From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-96). Thirty-three images of black Americans – many of them from a harrowing archive compiled in 1850 by a Harvard scientist to “prove” his theory that black people were an inferior race – are tinted blood red and overlaid with the artist’s words.

Some are pungently angry – A Negroid Type – others deeply tender. ‘‘You became the joker’s joke” is the lament written over a devastating picture of a black man on display as an “exhibit” to the public, alongside a clown who is laughing at him. A commemoration of the long-ago dead, without a voice, without any rights before the tyrannical camera, these works are a tremendous indictment of photography as itself a form of enslavement.

That sinister echo runs all through the show. It is there in Weems’s monochrome photographs of herself got up as a minstrel performing a vaudeville turn in black hat and white gloves, but each time with the head of a different African creature – zebra, elephant, ape – looming out of the shadowy past. It is there in the marvellous Constructing History series of 2008. For this, Weems worked with students at Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia to re-enact tragic photographs from 20th-century history.

From the wake for Martin Luther King to the assassination of JFK and the moment before Benazir Bhutto is gunned down in her cavalcade, these scenes are instantly recognisable and yet as remote as nativity tableaux from our sense of what must really have happened. Photographs freeze, isolate, alienate, extracting a second from the chaotic continuity of human existence. All we can do is remember as best we may, and keep interrogating these overworn images.

The 70-year-old Weems was a dancer before she became a writer and artist. She herself appears regularly through the exhibition, a black-clad figure, sometimes with her back turned to us as if witnessing history, sometimes facing us in the Kitchen Table Series (1990) in which she narrates domestic drama against women’s experience across the globe.

She meets a man, they marry, a child is born. Everything seethes with passion, then tension – that of a woman oppressed by men (trying to study for night school, while he goes out boozing) and by race. The woman “ruined dinner parties with her insistent demand that everything… be viewed politically”. The images are trenchant, but so are the texts on the wall. Weems writes as well as Toni Morrison.

The latest work here is a vast seven-part film projecting along a sweeping curve. The Shape of Things (2021) takes in US history from the election of Donald Trump to the assault on the Capitol and all the way backwards to race riots, lynchings and slavery. It cuts from desperate scenes of migrants trying to escape poverty, tyranny and hunger to a recurrent trio of dancers moving in dark silhouette, costumed to imply different eras.

White racists force their shrieking way across the screen to the left, black protesters walk in the opposite direction, sometimes appearing frame by frame like the stop-motion figures in Eadweard Muybridge’s early photography. The music is harmonic, elegant, gentle, connecting every repetition to another.

Just as you are beginning to think the whole experience too gracefully choreographed, not to say high-production, up flashes a clown, a trained elephant, a performing ape. Never forget the circularity of human cruelty, to which the dancers are now becoming a Greek chorus, watching the endless cycle of the American circus.

The National Portrait Gallery’s show of Paul McCartney’s photographs is a time capsule exploding in more than 250 images taken on a 35mm Pentax. Most were forgotten in storage; none have been seen in public before. They cover the bare three months from December 1963 to February 1964 when the Beatles went from the Liverpool Empire to stupendous international glory.

Hats, cigs and taxis, the Fab Four fooling around, George Martin dapper with a cocktail – and yet the constant labour is intense. A touching itinerary has them in and out of Paris with just enough time to bus it to the Eiffel Tower before playing to screaming teens at night. Here are Cynthia Lennon, George’s mother, aunt and father, some awkward shots of Paul’s girlfriend Jane Asher. But it is John who fascinates: so many psychological nuances, so many changes of appearance. Paul’s camera is so often upon him.

Enlargement (sometimes colossal) doesn’t always enhance. Some pictures, developed from surviving contact sheets, are too soft or blurred. But the show is joyful, hopeful, gregarious, comic, and it has an astounding shift. This comes when the Beatles depart for the US to hysteria at the airport, fans writing their love in the sand beneath Miami hotel windows, drinks by the pool and the industry closing in. The sensation goes global – and into the music of living colour.

Star ratings (out of five)
Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now ★★★★
Paul McCartney: Photographs 1963-4 ★★★★

Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now is at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, until 3 September

Sometimes a (camera’s) eye in the sky can cast new light on the world we live in – highlighting changes or celebrating beauty we might be oblivious to on ground level.

And that’s what you’ll see in the winners from this year’s Drone Photo Award winners. From a bird’s eye view, a bright yellow rice field in Bangladesh turns into a symmetrical pattern, a precisely-designed Polish playground looks like a mosaic of precious stones and a holy religious tradition amid the crumbles of a war-ravaged city in Syria conjures up both sorrow and holiness.

The photography competition, now in its sixth year, received nearly 14,000 images from amateur and professional photographers from 104 countries for the nine categories of the competition. All photos were taken from above using a drone.

Drone photography offers “the possibility to see things differently,” says Emanuela Ascoli, head of photography for National Geographic-France and one of this year’s judges. It allows you “to have a global perception of a landscape or scene.”

Ascoli says the caliber of submissions was more impressive than ever this year, making it tough for the judges. To earn an award, the photo must “transmit some emotion,” says Ascoli. “It must teach you something that you might not have known before.” And all of this “should be done in a beautiful, elegant way.”

Here’s a look at some of those award-winning photos and honorable mentions from around the world, including the countries of the Global South that Goats and Soda covers.

The art of rice processing

“Rice Processing” shows the artistic beauty of a mundane task in Rohan’s home country of Bangladesh. “From the ground, it’s not that easy to see how beautiful the [rice] field is,” says photographer Md Tanveer Hassan Rohan, who’s based in New York City. But from an aerial view “you can see the lines and patterns as the [field workers] walk step by step to create this separation.” The symmetry of the lines contrasted against the bright yellow fields turns the workers into artists.

Breaking the fast amid the rubble

Mouneb Taim, a freelance photographer based in Turkey, calls his piece “Ramadan meals among the ruins in Idlib, Syria” and says it shows a “mixture of hope, pain and determination.”

Born in 2001, Taim has been a photojournalist since he was 12 years old, when he began documenting his life under siege in Idlib, Syria. This photo shows that “neither war nor destruction prevented the people from holding a collective iftar, or breaking of the fast, for the people,” says Taim, “which is an important custom in the month of Ramadan.”

Taim, who won many international awards during the ten years he lived under siege in Idlib, says that while he has “thousands of drone photos in his archives that show killings, destruction and war” this photo “shows the hope I want to convey to the world.”

Chaos at the border

“Dominican Republic Haiti Daily Life” depicts the everyday “chaos on the northern border between the two countries,” says freelance photographer Matias Delacroix. They share the island of Hispaniola.

The Associated Press and the Pulitzer Center sent Delacroix, who is now based in Venezuela, to the border for a special assignment. The border is crowded with people on a daily basis, says Delacroix. “[Haitians] try to pass legally to the Dominican Republic, some to trade, others to flee the current violence in Haiti.” Drone photography allowed him to “show this chaos in a subtle way, without harming any migrant” and to convey “the amount of people that want to pass from one place to another that from the ground can not be seen in its totality.”

For Delacroix, this photo highlights the common human experience of migration, which is part of his own story — he was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but then his family moved to Chile. “Many of us in one way or another have had to migrate from where we were born, that is why I identified a lot with this story and with this photo.”

A cherished wetland drowning in trash

Raj Mohan’s photo “Boon to Bane! – the 300 acres of dumpyard” focuses on his own backyard. A computer scientist and engineer based in Chennai, India, Mohan grew up exploring the local Pallikaranai wetlands to observe the flamingos that flew there during migratory seasons. Seeking to understand recent decreases in migratory birds, Mohan was “baffled to see from a drone view the amount of wetland that was being exploited.”

As a photographer, Mohan says he tries to “offer a captivating glimpse into the beauty and diversity of India, weaving together rich narratives and unforgettable moments.” But this photo has a different aim – showing how the wetlands — their beauty and their integral role in the ecosystem — are being polluted with trash. While the wetlands are only a few miles from where he lives, Mohan faced challenges with this photo: “It was hard to look at and the foul smell was unbearable.”

Strawberry fields forever, Act I, Scene 1

Whales meet boat

Polished Polish playground