Grammy-winning Nigerian singer, Ayodeji Balogun, popularly known as Wizkid, shone at this year’s British Photography Awards, BPA, held in London at the weekend.

The Starboy’s performance picture at Glastonbury Festival earlier this year won the Event Category Award at the 2023 British Photography Awards.

The iconic picture was taken by London-based freelance photographer and graphic designer Nick Haill.

Wizkid has now become the first Nigerian celebrity whose image won a British Photography Award.

Get unlimited access with a subscription

One day, appreciating various types of houses, I took a walk around Lakeside On Preston in West Plano, Texas. Along the way, I came across an old lady arranging a heart-shaped decoration hung on the front door of her house.

“Happiness” and “Welcome” were the words inscribed on the stepping stones in front of the entrance. Also, instead of a nameplate, the words “Live Well” were written on the main gate.

I also noticed an iron sculpture standing proudly in the middle of the front yard. As I asked her its meaning, she said: “It means a mother lifting her child to the almighty God. It could also mean two crucifixes supporting each other.”

I looked at the sculpture attentively … Then, bid her goodbye. Just then, she replied, “My husband is a Catholic, but I don’t believe in God. I feel it doesn’t matter to me. We just touched one another while on our journeys, and we will all ultimately pass away someday.”

Well, it is true that each of us encounters others as we go on our life’s journey. Encountering various people along the way, we come and go endlessly. It seems that we meet one another by chance or coincidence, but it is God who provides everything for the good of each person.

When I stayed in Texas, I met Stella Ma who studied Photography at Chung-Ang University. Collaborating together with her husband, she manages TOV Studio Photography for weddings, family photos, babies and events with various items of professional photography equipment and learned techniques.

One day, with some of her friends, Stella joined in the retreat held in a Korean parish in Fort Worth. She was so touched during the retreat that she invited us to see and experience TOV Studio Photography.

Thus, we took some time to visit the studio. Especially because we needed a portrait photo, we were willing to accept her hospitality. Once we entered the studio, they asked us to try various poses and took many photos of each of us.

“Tov” in Hebrew means good. Tov also means beautiful, excellent, joyful, whole, goodness, blessing, happiness and welfare. The word appears in the book of Genesis in the Old Testament when God said, “It was good to see,” (Genesis 1:4,10,12,18,21,25,31). Looking at and appreciating every creature he made, God expressed the goodness of each being!

“Good deeds” (John 5:29), “a good work” (Philippians 1:6), and “all that is good” (Hebrews 13:21) are related to the goodness that God provides for us. It is so good, happy and pleasing to see and experience goodness in our lives! Selfless hospitality, generosity and cheerful sharing are all the fruits of good works and good deeds.

Slowly recovering from her health issue, Stella has to struggle a lot but she does her best to study the Bible, to read good spiritual books and to share food with others. Remembering the good examples of her parents, she is doing all this good work for others.

Surely, suffering and trials are challenging, but difficult moments can be a stepping stone toward spiritual growth.

“Mazel tov,” or good luck and well wishes, to all those who are undergoing personal trials at this time. Happy are those who are willing to share with others despite of challenging situations.

The author is a member of the Daughters of St. Paul. Please feel free to visit her blog “A piece of sunshine” at mtorchid88.blogspot.com.

The Italian-born silent-film star, photographer and model Tina Modotti took this picture in Mexico in 1927. She had moved to live full-time in Mexico City from Los Angeles four years earlier with her lover and fellow photographer Edward Weston and the pair of them became part of an artistic avant garde that included Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Modotti used her photographs to advance the cause of the campesinos – the mass of peasant farmers who demanded the agrarian reform they had fought for in the revolution and civil war of the previous decade. The headline of the newspaper here is a cry for fair redistribution: “All of the land, not pieces of the land!”

The newspaper El Machete had been founded by a group of artists and journalists under the slogan: “The machete is used to reap cane, kill snakes, end strife, and humble the pride of the impious rich.” Modotti had taken that message to heart, creating compositions like this one which conveyed, beautifully, both the unity of the campesinos – individually faceless under their traditional sombreros – and their subversive collective will. By 1927 she had split from Weston and was in a relationship with a Communist party leader, Xavier Guerrero.

The picture was included in Modotti’s only lifetime solo exhibition in Mexico City in 1929, which resulted in her being expelled from the country for refusing to renounce her seditious beliefs. It is included in a full retrospective of Modotti’s work at the Foam gallery in Amsterdam later this month. Modotti made very few pictures – after leaving Mexico she married another revolutionary in Moscow and gave up photography altogether, a fact that has given her work enormous value. An original print of this picture sold for $225,000 (£184,000) at Sotheby’s in New York in 2015.

• Tina Modotti – Artist and Activist is at Foam, Amsterdam, 17 November–31 January 2024

In Warrnambool, in south-west Victoria, there is a vanguard disability movement growing, charged by a grassroots group called the Find Your Voice Collective.

Most recently, they’ve produced a striking set of photographic portraits that topple preconceived notions of disability.

The exhibition, Alter Ego, asks, “Who would you be, if you could be anyone? And how do you wish the world would see you?”

Artists in the group say the images present a potential future, an inclusive world where power, beauty, fame and career success are commonplace experiences for people who identify with a disability. 

The artists are part of a larger group called the Find Your Voice Collective, a grassroots disability juggernaut that began as an all-abilities choir in 2018.

The choir has evolved to become the collective, something close to a political movement.

It advocates for the human rights of people with a disability, using art and music as a powerful form of creative activism.

At just 20 years old, Grace Kenny (GK) has become a lead singer in the group, writing and performing her own hip hop music in front of festival crowds, backed by the choir. 

Kenny says her alter ego, Greatness Known, is an expansion of her current life and career path: the manifestation of her dream to take the world by storm.

“The whole Alter Ego series is made out of who we really see ourself as, like it really goes down to the depths of our identity and the way we want to be seen,” Kenny says.

Kenny says her alter-ego portrait is a call for the world to see her potential.

“I just really want to be in a world where I’m a singer, taking on the world and I’m touring and people can see who I really am as a person,” she says.

Empowered by costumes

Find Your Voice Collective theatre facilitator Megan Twycross says the exhibition is both a proclamation and an invitation. 

“I think part of the program is asking other people to experience an alter ego too,” she says.

Twycross has her own portrait in the exhibition, along with a few other artists who also do not have disabilities. 

“We want to demonstrate that anyone can do this and the bravery of what we are doing is hopefully encouraging others,” Twycross says.

As an example, Twycross describes a portrait of artist Melissa Johnson depicted as her alter ego Mizz Wynter Vizion.

“It kind of emulates Girl with the Pearl Earring meets Queen Victoria,” she says. 

In the image, Johnson depicts herself as royalty, an object of power and beauty, someone who commands attention.

“Everyone has the right to feel beautiful, and to use costume and fashion to feel empowered and to feel beautiful,” Twycross says.

Over the months leading up to the exhibition, artists were mentored by costume and performance art specialists like Warrnambool-born Dandrogyny. 

Under Twycross’s guidance, artists directed their own photographic portraits, inhabiting a self-assigned alter-ego, developing backstories and catchphrases, and collaborating on costume design.

Johnson’s disability limits her capacity to talk, but she can write and communicate via smart devices.

Johnson worked with costumers Janet Punch from Warrnambool Theatre Company, and Yvonne Lefebvre, a Brauer College textiles teacher, to communicate her wintry vision, steeped in old-fashioned glamour and grace. 

“We sat down together and said, ‘Alright, so this is your character. How do you see them?'” Twycross says. 

“When the artists stood in front of the camera, they stood as their character and they’d already worked out the movements and the facial expressions and the voice.”

‘Transformative and magical’

Taking part in the photographic project was transformative for many of the artists involved.

Tom Leembruggan works at a recycled goods shed in Warrnambool, Are-Able Big R Shed, and has cerebral palsy.

His alter ego is a dark magician and escape artist, Mr Bang Bang Surprise.

“Mr Bang Bang Surprise is a really powerful, dark magician and he also likes chai lattes,” Leembruggan says.

“I like doing magic and I like escaping out of the coolest things.

“I want to be doing my own show with a lot of magic and surprise.”

Leembruggan says he found the day of the photo shoot taxing, but also transformative and magical.

“It was really busy and really hard to do. There was a lot of getting ready and getting all your costumes and makeup on. 

“Looking in the mirror was magical.”

Backed by a choir 

Since 2018, The Find Your Voice Choir has now expanded to about 250 members from more than 16 regional south-west Victorian communities.

The choir has collaborated with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, The Wiggles, Mama Kin Spender and Electric Umbrella (UK).

It performs regularly at events including Port Fairy Spring Music Festival and the Port Fairy Folk Festival, sharing the stage with headline acts such as The Waifs and Eric Bibb.

Singer-songwriter Tom Richardson co-founded the choir with Kylie Thulborn, a lifelong disability ally and the mother of Harves McCorkell, who is a multimedia producer and choir member, and part of the Alter Ego exhibition. 

Richardson said that the idea for Alter Ego came from themes exploring identity.

For Richardson, this exhibition, like everything their collective does, is a form of disability-led activism.

“Our aspiration as a collective is to be disability-led. So every idea starts or comes from our artists who identify with disability.

“Anything that we put out into the world, there is absolutely this sense of underlying creative activism.

Richardson says the collective is striving for an inclusive reality that doesn’t yet exist, but is within the realm of possibility. 

“Sometimes, where I think the world is, is further advanced than what it actually is,” he says.

“Everything that we do at Find Your Voice, I hope can be a real-life, living example of how the world should be, could be, as guided by the lived experience of disability.”

The Alter Ego photography exhibition launches on Friday, November 27 for one weekend, with live performances by Grace Kenny and DJ Cooper Smith at The Space in Warrnambool. 

Greetings, stargazers.

In 1995 the Hubble science team released the image of the “Pillars of Creation.” This photograph fundamentally changed the way most of us think of astrophotography. Yes, the high resolution and image details were quite impressive, but it was the color palette that made this image unique. I have written individual columns about nebulae, astrophotography, astronomical filters, and a bit of spectroscopy, but these topics all come together to create these “assigned color” photographs.

The Pillars of Creation are part of the Eagle Nebula, which was discovered in the eighteenth century and is the 16th object on Charles Messier’s list of “fuzzy things that are not comets.” It was first photographed in the late nineteenth century and had been a regular late twentieth century target for astronomers using film cameras. While the first images were black and white, color film can produce some really nice images that would match (at least somewhat) what we might be able to see with our naked eyes if they were sensitive enough.

Because the Hubble telescope was primarily a science mission, there was great interest in studying the composition of the universe by looking at specific wavelengths of light. Each element has its own unique spectral signature, or fingerprint, so looking for a certain wavelength of light associated with a specific element will reveal the distribution of that element. For example, excited hydrogen atoms emit a prominent red line at 656 nanometers, and taking a photograph through a filter that passes 656 nanometer light will show the distribution of hydrogen atoms.

Narrowband filters are made by building up multiple layers of dielectric coatings on a glass surface. These coatings are the same as the anti-reflective coatings you can get on your eyeglasses, but by using specific thicknesses and layers, selected wavelengths of light can be allowed to pass through, while others are reflected.

Instead of simply looking at one element at a time, it is possible to associate an element to one of the red, green, or blue portions of a 3-color photograph. In what is now called the Hubble Palette, a line of sulfur was assigned to be red, a line of hydrogen was assigned to be green, and a line of oxygen was assigned to be blue.

Narrowband filters are now readily available, although they are not cheap. As the quality of digital cameras has improved over the last couple of decades, so has the quality of Earth-based narrowband images. It is easy to recognize narrow band images because of the vivid colors, instead of the overall magenta tones from hydrogen gas seen in “natural” light.

As the use of the Fort Lewis observatories continue expanding, I hope that more of these narrowband images will be produced locally.

This month

Charles Hakes teaches in the physics and engineering department at Fort Lewis College and is the director of the Fort Lewis Observatory.