Seeking the Northern Lights was a family affair for this AP photographer

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Seeking the Northern Lights was a family affair for this AP photographer

BRUNSWICK, Me. (AP) — Robert Bukaty has covered nearly every type of story and event for The Associated Press in his 30-year career, from the somber to the exhilarating: a mass shooting, COVID-19, presidents, political campaigns, ski racing – a lot of ski racing – Olympics, and everyday life in Maine as staff photographer in Portland. With a little nudge from his daughter and a solar storm, he has now even shot the Northern Lights. Here’s what he said about capturing this extraordinary image.

$38,000 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize awarded to post-Apartheid series

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$38,000 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize awarded to post-Apartheid series

Lebohang Kganye has won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2024 with her exhibition entitled, Haufi nyana? I’ve come to take you home.

The South African-born photographer was awarded the $38,000 (£30,000) prestigious prize on Thursday at a ceremony at The Photographers Gallery in London, England. 

The other finalists were Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad, Hrair Sarkissian and Valie Export, who all received $6,350 (£5,000) each. 

The winning exhibition’s title is in Sesotho, one of the eleven official languages in South Africa, and the blending of images and words enable Kganye to explore the complex history of South Africa in a new light, “contributing to the process of decolonization,” says the Gallery. 

The annual award is in its 27th year, and recognizes bodies of work that have contributed to the world of photography over the past 12 months.

“The 2024 shortlisted projects all critically engage with urgent concerns, from the remnants of war and conflict, experiences of diasporic communities and decolonization, to contested land, heritage, equality and gender,” says the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation. 

“Together these artists demonstrate photography’s unique capacity to reveal what is invisible, forgotten or marginalized and imagine a path to redress.”

ABOVE: Watch the trailer for the exhibition. 

Born in 1990, the year apartheid ended, in Johannesburg, Kganye uses silhouettes and life-size cutout figures of her family in her large installations, taken from images found in photo albums.

Her work covers the experience of her family’s forced migration due to land acts and apartheid law. She also draws on collective as well as personal history, drawing from oral narratives and fictional texts, exploring South Africa’s multifaceted history before, during and after the apartheid and colonialism.

The exhibition features four projects that employ a complex array of media, from photographic montages in Ke Lefa Laka: Her-Story (“It’s my inheritance: Her-Story”, 2013) to spatial installation in Mohlokomediwa Tora (“Lighthouse Keeper”, 2018) and film animation in Shadows of ReMemory (2021) to patchwork in Mosebetsi wa Dirithi (“The Work of Shadows”, 2022).

“In her vast, experimental installations, Kganye creates a space that resides between memory and fantasy,” comments the Foundation. 

“Here she collects stories from her family with excerpts from South African literature, and rewrites them into theatrical scripts. Silhouettes, cutouts, puppets, shadows and ghosts, fashioned from material found in photo albums as well as her own compositions, (re-)enact these scripts and bring them to life.”

Her work is on display at The Photographers’ Gallery, external alongside the other shortlisted artists – Valie Export, Gauri Gill & Rajesh Vangad and Hrair Sarkissian – until June 2, 2024.

Smart Export, 1970, by Valie Export – among the shortlisted artists featured in the exhibition  (Image credit: Valie Export)

If you love photography exhibitions and are thinking of taking it up yourself, why not check out our list of best cameras for beginners. Equally, we’ve got a guide to the best cheap camera on the market.

If you’re a professional looking for the best new piece of kit, check out our guide to the best professional cameras around. 

Exhibition at Buckingham Palace traces the evolution of royal portraits

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Exhibition at Buckingham Palace traces the evolution of royal portraits

An exhibition at the Buckingham Palace is tracing “the evolution of royal portraits”, presenting photographs that have been taken since the 1920s.

Royal Portraits: A Century of Photography opened at the King’s Gallery on Friday. More than 150 photographic prints and documents have been sourced from the the Royal Collection and the Royal Archives. While there are several works that have become well known, some are only now making their public debut.

“This exhibition charts the evolution of royal portraits photography over the past century, so from… the high society glamour of the 1920s all the way to the coronation of King Charles III in 2023,” Alessandro Nasini, senior curator of photographs at the Royal Collection Trust and exhibition curator, told Reuters.

A portrait of Prince Albert and Lady Elizabeth Bowes, taken in 1923 upon their engagement, is the opening work of the exhibition. The couple, of course, would later be crowned King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. The portrait is presented near the official 2023 coronation portrait of King Charles.

An undated photo of a portrait by Dorothy Wilding of Queen Elizabeth II in 1952 is also featured on the exhibition. PA
An undated photo of a portrait by Dorothy Wilding of Queen Elizabeth II in 1952 is also featured on the exhibition. PA

The two portraits, Nasini pointed out, were taken exactly 100 years apart and between them, show the changes the medium of photography underwent during that time.

“We have analogue technology one side, digital technology (on the other), monochrome, colour and a private commission and the official,” Nasini said. He added there was another notable difference between the two works that the exhibition, as a whole, strives to point out: the range between “the very private to the very public, the official”. The works touch upon some of the close relationships between the photographers and their royal subjects, most notably through photographs taken by Antony Armstrong-Jones, first Earl of Snowdon, who was married to Princess Margaret from 1960 to 1978.

Andy Warhol’s famous 1985 screen print of the late Queen Elizabeth II is also on display. The work has all the vibrancy expected from the US artist artist and utilises “diamond dust”, or particles of crushed glass.

Queen Elizabeth II by Andy Warhol. Reuters
Queen Elizabeth II by Andy Warhol. Reuters

There are also photographs taken by Cecil Beaton. The British photographer was renowned for taking portraits of the royal family over many decades. His works were instrumental in presenting the monarchs to the public. The photographs on display include images of Princess Margaret, as well as portraits of the royal family taken during wartime.

A portrait of Kate, Princess of Wales, and wife of Prince William, taken to mark her 40th birthday, is displayed beside the work, the composition of which is inspired by a painting of Alexandra of Denmark, who also once had the title of Princess of Wales.

The works of several famous photographers are also on display, including portraits taken by Annie Leibovitz, Dorothy Wilding, David Bailey and Rankin. The exhibition also presents handwritten annotation of photographers to their correspondences with the Royal Family and their staff.

Royal Portraits: A Century of Photography is running at the King’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace until October 6

Updated: May 19, 2024, 11:16 AM

Elton John’s photos at V&A span fame, fashion, and 9/11’s Falling Man

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Elton John’s photos at V&A span fame, fashion, and 9/11’s Falling Man

An exhibition of photographs owned by singer Elton John is everything one might expect from a star who has a fascination with image, a love of excess and a very large budget. Understated, it isn’t.

The show, which opened last week at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, includes more than 300 pieces by 140 photographers selected from the vast collection of John and his husband David Furnish.

Covering the period from 1950 to the present day, they include iconic fashion shots by Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Herb Ritts, portraits of stars including The Beatles, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe and Chet Baker, and photojournalism capturing moments from the black civil rights movement of the 1960s in the United States to 1980s Aids activism and the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington DC.

“It’s a little bit overwhelming sometimes, but it’s just wonderful,” Newell Harbin, director of the couple’s collection, said at a preview on Wednesday.

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Some of Elton John’s photos in the Fragile Beauty exhibition at the V&A Museum in London. Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum

The exhibition is entitled “Fragile Beauty”, a name chosen by John that reflects his ethos, said curator Duncan Forbes, the museum’s head of photography.

“I think key to Elton is the sense of vulnerability and fragility that underpins creative expression and human experience,” Forbes said. “That’s the thing I think runs through the show.”

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Black Americans, New York, 1962, by Bruce Davidson features in Fragile Beauty. Photo: Bruce Davidson Magnum Photos/Victoria and Albert Museum

He said John had instructed that the show “should be mischievous and it should be very serious”.

“What we’ve tried to do is create a really absorbing, big show about photography, but also relate it to who they are (and) the passions of the collectors,” Forbes said.

The exhibition opens with elegant fashion photos from the 1950s, then gets into edgier territory with work by chroniclers of outcasts and rebels, such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, both artists John has collected extensively.

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Richard Drew’s haunting Falling Man photo from the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York. Photo: AP
Many of the greats from seven decades of photography are represented, from Diane Arbus, Eve Arnold, Bruce Davidson and Robert Franck to Wolfgang Tillmans, Cindy Sherman and Ai Weiwei.

There are several works by Associated Press photographers, including Richard Drew’s haunting Falling Man image from 9/11 and Julio Cortez’s 2020 photo of a protester with an upside-down American flag amid unrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

John, now 77, began collecting photographs after getting sober in the 1990s – he later said he replaced alcohol with “a much healthier addiction”.

He and 61-year-old Furnish have assembled one of the largest photographic collections in private hands, amounting to more than 7,000 works.

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A protester carries an American flag upside down next to a burning building in Minneapolis in a protest following the murder of George Floyd, in 2020. Photo: AP/Julio Cortez
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Mevlut Mert Altintas, an off-duty policeman, shouts after shooting the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, at an art gallery in Ankara, Turkey, in 2016. Altintas was killed by police shortly afterwards. Photo: AP/Burhan Ozbilici

They frequently loan photos for exhibitions, including some 200 for a show at London’s Tate Modern in 2016 that focused on black-and-white photographs from the early decades of the medium.

Harbin said John and Furnish “collect from the heart”.

“They collect what speaks to them,” she said – and continue to acquire new works, although they have slowed down a little. The most recent piece in the exhibition was bought two months ago.

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The exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, features 300 photographs from the extensive collection of Elton John (left) and David Furnish. Photo: AP

Many of the works are displayed in an often-changing line-up on the walls of their multiple homes. Harbin said the household had a running joke in Atlanta, Georgia, where John had a home for many years, “that no one ever knew the true colour of the wallpaper”.

“I had it frame- to-frame, and that’s how he wanted it done – so that the two of them could be engulfed in that creativity and that genius of these other artists,” she said.

“Fragile Beauty” runs at the V&A until January 5, 2025.

Take a Walk Through the Hamptons With a Photographer and Her iPhone

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Take a Walk Through the Hamptons With a Photographer and Her iPhone
image

The photographer Susan Kaufman fell in love with the Hamptons at the age of 8. She was seated in the back of her parent’s car, on her way from her childhood home in New Rochelle, N.Y., to visit her aunt and uncle’s East Hampton house for the very first time.

  1. Susan Kaufman

  2. Susan Kaufman

  3. Susan Kaufman

  4. Susan Kaufman

It was 1966. Out the window, charming, hydrangea-covered farmhouses, duck farms and potato fields streamed past. And Ms. Kaufman, who would grow up to become a fashion director at Condé Nast and the founding editor of People StyleWatch, felt a flutter in her heart.

In 1997, she and her husband made a slice of the Hamptons their own, purchasing an 1890 cottage in Amagansett. For the three decades since, the house has been a sweet bastion of escape from their Greenwich Village apartment whenever they feel a need to break out of the city and into fresher, quieter air.

In 2022, Abrams Books published Ms. Kaufman’s “Walk With Me: New York,” a collection of streetscape photographs snapped on her daily walks around Manhattan. The compact coffee-table volume is now in its 10th printing, and she has now followed up with “Walk With Me: Hamptons.”

In the chapter on Bridgehampton and Water Mill, Ms. Kaufman captures a farm cart from the Milk Pail Farm and Orchard.Susan Kaufman
In the chapter on East Hampton, Ms. Kaufman showcases blooms of roses and hydrangeas on a shingled shed on Newtown Lane.Susan Kaufman

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Photography exhibition shows extensive history of P.E.I.’s many libraries

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Photography exhibition shows extensive history of P.E.I.’s many libraries

Prince Edward Island has 25 libraries, and photographer Doug Dumais has explored all of them.

Circulations, his exhibition at the Charlottetown Library Learning Centre, shines a spotlight on some of the Island’s smaller libraries.

He says he set up for a few hours in each one, photographing the spaces and talking with the librarians about their histories.

The project started because Dumais wanted to find out how P.E.I. ended up with so many libraries in such a small place. 

‘A public good’

“The Carnegie Corporation of New York was doing these pilot projects of rural libraries,” Dumais said in a recent interview with Island Morning’s Laura Chapin.

Doug Dumais sits, looking into the camera, with a colourful background.
Fascination with the history of P.E.I. libraries led photographer Doug Dumais to create his Circulations exhibit. (Jared Doyle)

“So there was a plan of putting libraries all across the United States, and they wanted kind of a nice space that they could test out these regional libraries.”

That space was Prince Edward Island.

In 1933, the corporation hired a librarian named Nora Bateson from McGill University. Her job was to set up a regional library system over three years.

“She would go to these communities and talk to women’s organizations, and kind of garner support for libraries,” Dumais said.

He says a lot of these libraries she helped set up at the beginning were in people’s homes, or in available spaces in the communities.

“She would drive around to the small communities with a very early car. You can imagine in the ’30s, that she modified [the car] to hold 300 books,” said Dumais.

When Bateson started, there were three libraries on P.E.I. By the end of the three years, there were 22.

An image of computers at a library.
The photos in the collection are styled to resemble book covers. (Gregory Ellison)

When she published her report on the project, it showed that people were taking out thousands of books over a period of several months, making the program a resounding success.

Bateson was a tireless champion of rural libraries. The Circulations exhibit includes a pamphlet Bateson published in 1944, called Rural Canada Needs Libraries.

“It was sort of like a manifesto for after the war, how important these community spaces would be as we kind of rebuild what Canadian identity looks like.… This idea that you have to provide a public good for your people, and that’s what democracy looks like, and that’s something that shouldn’t be taken for granted,” said Dumais.

Exhibiting P.E.I.’s past

Dumais likes photographing subjects associated with change: construction sites, shorelines and now libraries, because many of the Island’s libraries have shifted from small spaces set aside in people’s homes to their own buildings, changing hands and contents over the years.

A series of photos over a library shelf.
The exhibit runs until May 25. (Gregory Ellison)

“It’s up to communities still today to provide the spaces.… It could be an old P.E.I. Liquor location like in Stratford, or it could be an old train station like in Alberton,” said Dumais.

He loved touring the libraries, and he says it’s tough to choose a favourite, but his is probably the Alberton Public Library because of that historic location.

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