Celebrated at Photo London 2024, three new photography books offer a quirky, behind-the-scenes insight into three luxurious Belmond hotels and escapes – the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, the Caruso Hotel on Italy’s Amalfi coast, and Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town. In line with the LVMH-owned hospitality group’s sponsorship of the photography fair (16-19 May), images from the latest books in Belmond’s As Seen By series take over the Portico Rooms at Somerset House, the venue’s second-largest gallery space. 

The exhibition is an exciting display of work by photographers Coco Capitán, Letizia Le Fur and Rosie Marks, captured during their respective experiences at a Belmond destination. The images reflect their individual photographic approaches, but also their personal fascination with travel and the properties they have documented. 

See a new side to three Belmond hotels and escapes

Venice Simplon-Orient-Express by Coco Capitán

‘You stare through the train window, and that place where you are is both the same and not the same to the one you were a minute ago,’ wrote the London-based Spanish photographer Coco Capitán of one of her many gazing-out-the-window sessions during her time at the Belmond Venice Simplon-Orient-Express. Capitán’s photography is renowned for its spontaneity and precision, capturing beautiful, fleeting moments that would have otherwise vanished into the ether.

‘The power of the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express is undeniable. It is shrouded in mystery and glamour, very much like Agatha Christie’s novel [Murder on the Orient Express]. I aimed to portray a contemporary and updated vision while staying true to its lavish essence. Coming from a non-upper-class background, I sought to bring a down-to-earth experience to my images. The goal was to normalise the journey without neglecting the luxury of the Belmond experience. Having familiar faces around helped me achieve that sense of naturalness,’ Capitán tells Wallpaper*.

‘I have always loved travelling by train. There’s something about the old-world charm of analogue transport methods that appeals to me more than airports or planes, which always seem too crowded. What’s more inspiring than sitting on a train and gazing out the window? Time stands still, and you get transported to another world.

What I loved most about the experience was the sense of being at home on the move. Riding on a luxury train is such a unique experience because it feels like being in a five-star hotel on wheels. The bar was my favourite spot, with its unique moody atmosphere. I would sip on an espresso martini and play a table game to get myself pumped up for the night ahead.’

Caruso Amalfi Coast by Letizia Le Fur

Letizia Le Fur describes Belmond Caruso as a ‘place where even the stones seem to whisper secrets to the ear of the sun’. The French photographer, who graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in France in 1998 and first trained as a painter, has a distinctive visual style that goes beyond what meets the eye. Her visceral photography shows a whole new side to this property on the Amalfi Coast: one that feels otherworldly and enchanting.

During her time at Caruso, Le Fur sought to capture the timeless essence of the Amalfi Coast. ‘I wanted each image to feel like a small window open to a world full of mysteries,’ she says.

‘The air is filled with romance, and the property exudes the most vibrant colours. Caruso Amalfi Coast has a palpable history that hangs in the air like an invitation to dance with the past – it’s as if every street corner has its own story to tell. I found myself immersed in this lively theatre of the Mediterranean.’

Mount Nelson Hotel Cape Town by Rosie Marks

British photographer Rosie Marks brought her inquisitive eye to Belmond’s Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town, South Africa. In her series of photographs, she takes on the role of an observer, capturing the day-to-day moments of the hotel and its staff: a black cat caught in the act of stealing a cookie from a laid tea table, the newspaper break of one of the gardeners, the first person to cause a splash in the pool on a sunny day: Marks’ photography is sincere, energetic and evocative.

Read more about Belmond’s As Seen By photobooks by Coco Capitán, Rosie Marks and Letizia Le Fur at Belmond.com. The series is published by RVB Books and available from rvb-books.com

Capturing wildlife scenes can be difficult due to ever-changing landscapes and easily startled animals. Because of this, it can take photographers and videographers years before they’re able to capture the clear shot they strive for. But as new models of cameras are being constantly invented and upgraded, they’re accounting for these difficulties and improving their capabilities. The Excope DT1 by Beaverlab Tech is one camera that has the potential to forever change the industry with an incredibly affordable price point.

The Excope DT1 features an impressive array of technological features, including its lightweight design, 4K video capabilities, and 400mm focal length. All of these attributes are intended to help the user remain as inconspicuous as possible, which is perfect for high-resolution wildlife photography. Additionally, the camera is powered by a rechargeable battery that normally lasts for two and half hours and an optional power bank, allowing for lengthy shooting sessions.

Even better, the camera can be connected to the user’s smartphone, allowing them to see a live feed through their screen. The Excope DT1 can also be controlled through the phone, allowing photographers and videographers to zoom in and out and focus, all via touchscreen. The accessible user interface is helpful for such a high-tech camera, especially since the Excope DT1 can easily take up to 25 frames per second, ensuring you don’t miss out on anything. Additionally, the camera’s mount is compatible with all regular smartphones and standard tripods, meaning that it can be incorporated seamlessly with other technology.

Once users have taken photo and video, the camera saves the content to its online storage system, streamlining file management. The Excope DT1 supports both JPG and RAW files, which means that users can save files in whatever format they prefer.

Those interested in purchasing the Excope DT1, Beaverlab has a crowdfunding campaign currently running on Kickstarter until 10 a.m. EDT on June 15, 2024. The perk tiers begin at $219 for the main Excope DT1 kit which includes a 40mm lens. For just $50 more ($269), you can get both the 40mm and 400mm lens. Check Kickstarter for more tiers.

Beaverlab Tech recently released a new camera system called Excope DT1 that can link up directly with a user’s smartphone.

It is a compact device with barely any setup time necessary.

The Excope DT1 is specifically designed for wildlife and landscape photography.

It’s made to be as unobtrusive as possible.

Check out a preview of the Excope DT1 in action and how it compares to other devices:

Beaverlab Tech: Website | Instagram
h/t: [Yanko Design]

All images via Beaverlab Tech.

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The reFocus Awards Colour Photography Contest is an annual competition that recognises both professional and amateur photographers across several categories. Take a glance at the winning entries submitted by professionals in the Landscapes sub-category that are curated by the jury from thousands of photos.

Gold: Northern Silk Road by Rolf Gemperle

Silver: Untitled by Dean Lhospital

Frozen Pocket by Norman Mccloskey

10 years after I first learned of this place, I journeyed from the west coast of Ireland to the surreal landscape of this remote part of Arizona to photograph a complete contrast to the landscape I live and work in normally.

Bronze: The Texture of Light by Norman Mccloskey

The Lonesome Volcano by Rolf Gemperle

People’s Vote Award: Twenty years after the siege by Alex Elena

For the first time since the war, I returned to Sarajevo. The fog was disappearing and it was bitter cold. Smoke was rising from the chimneys and the sun was hiding behind the clouds. A stunning view with many layers. The many layers that represent the soul of the city.

The 2024 winners received over $4,000 in cash prizes. In addition to cash prizes, winners also receive a custom engraved crystal and metal trophy and their work is featured in a global Artist Directory.

I started my Shifting Sands series seven years ago to look at how the world is running out of usable sand. It’s the next big resource crisis. I’m from Singapore, the world’s biggest importer of sand per capita, due to the scale of its land reclamation. That was the starting point of what I had initially mapped out as a global project, investigating the extraction of and uses of sand, its consequences and alternatives.

I photographed in Singapore, China, Malaysia and Vietnam. The Mekong Delta in Vietnam is experiencing rapid erosion due to large-scale sand mining and China damming the river upstream. I went to a number of villages with researchers. We went to the commune of Hiep Phuoc, southeast of Saigon, where this picture was made, just five days after a number of villagers – including tea-seller Nguyen Thi Hong, 45, who appears in this image – had lost their homes.

One woman, a seamstress, described how she heard tree branches snapping loudly at midnight and jumped out of bed, just in time to see her mattress float away, as the back half of her house melted into the river, into the darkness. I recorded her testimony and those of several other women who had lost their ancestral land to that landslide. I wrote a script based on the testimonies, narrated by Vietnamese poet Khai Don, as a voiceover in the VR piece I made with this work for a show in Berlin last year. In it, the viewer is placed in an abstract world with swirling sand and water, transported to a site of erosion.

By the time I got there, Ms Nguyen had already set up a new tea stand in another spot. She had lost her property, like the others who had houses along the river. I tried not to show her as a victim, but I did want to visualise the loss. This is among the more literal pictures in the series – the rest of Shifting Sands is mostly abstract aerial and landscape photographs. I think it works as a documentary image, but I have also started to question the efficacy of my documentary photography in recent years.

I’m now examining the evidential, the document. For the past decade, I’ve been working with colonial archives, for a project on the anti-colonial war in British Malaya, what is now Malaysia and Singapore. My paternal grandfather was in the anti-colonial movement there, and early on in the conflict, which ran from 1948 to 1960, he was deported to mainland China. In fact, more than 30,000 Malayans were deported by the British during the Malayan Emergency, yet this aspect of the Malayan war remains under-researched, under-told.

My grandfather was executed by the rival Nationalists shortly after arriving in southern China – in mid 1949, as China was in the final months of its civil war. He died for socialism, and his five children in anti-communist Malaya/Malaysia were told never to speak about him again. His name is not on my grandmother’s gravestone. There was silence for six decades – until I was in my early 30s. I was working as a foreign correspondent in Beijing, trying to figure out my relationship to mainland China as a Singaporean, when I remembered that my dad had mentioned grandad was buried in southern China. When I quit my job at the newspaper in 2010, I decided to find out what his story was. It blasted open a 13-year project: One Day We’ll Understand.

This has been shown as photo and film installations, glass works, and books. A video work from it is showing at the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale. I’m also making a theatre performance from it, which premieres in Singapore in August. This is not just about my family history – it’s also to do with the fact that Malaya is a largely forgotten war despite its outsized importance in the history of warfare. It is where Agent Orange and strategies of ring-fencing rural populations were piloted, then applied to other wars including Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The project also asks broader questions about the archive: what’s in and what’s out, and how we can interrupt its trauma and violence? How do we remake this representation of the past we’ve inherited, to hand on to the future?

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Sim Chi Yin’s CV

Born: 1978, Singapore
Trained: BA in History and MSc in History of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London, PhD candidate at King’s College London, self-taught photographer.
Influences: “Saidiya Hartman, Amar Kanwar, John Akomfrah and other strong artist mothers”
High point: “So far, this year’s Venice Biennale participation; but still working on it: I check in myself every six months or so, and if I feel like I’ve grown in my work, I’m grateful. I can only be as ‘good’ as I can get to myself.”
Low point: “When I had my right thumb ligament ripped by North Korean women migrant workers on the China-North Korean border in 2015. And when I heard, ‘Her work is not as good now after she’s had a child,’ in a photographers’ meeting in 2021. That’s total rubbish of course. I’m excited about being an artist-mum: my child has made his way into my work now and I think I have not yet made my best work.”
Top tip: “Learn as many skills as you can outside of photography, have deep research interests, and have your own drum beat – ignore the naysayers.”

Photography provided by Christie’s

Singer Elton John has always been an obsessive collector of everything from sleek Bentleys to Versace shirts. So when the superstar decided to sell 900 pieces from his former Atlanta home, Christie’s in New York City held a February auction extravaganza, offering glitzy preview nights and eight separate auctions, both live and online. Bidders from 60 countries snapped up art, fine jewelry, even custom-made platform boots in the star-studded sales, which brought in $20.5 million, more than double the early estimates.

Amid all the hoopla, there was one category of items that quietly captured the attention of astute buyers around the globe: photography. Somewhere along the line, Elton John has become a connoisseur — so much so that he has assembled one of the world’s largest private collections, totaling some 7,000 images. “When Elton John bought his Atlanta residence in the 1990s, it was a period of much change and transition for him,” Elizabeth Seigel, head of Christie’s Private and Iconic Collections, New York, exclusively tells us. “He had just gotten sober and seeing the world through clean-and-sober eyes gave him new perspectives on ways of approaching and seeing different mediums and art forms.”

The famed Rocketman certainly knows a thing or two about being in front of the camera, given his stratospheric rise to stardom. But over time, that awareness morphed into a passion for photography as an art form. Soon he was purchasing an average of 1.5 pieces a week. “He began buying from various Atlanta-based dealers and galleries, then threw himself into the scholarship and understanding of the category,” Seigel explains. “He read, studied and bought voraciously, ultimately building his reputation as an important collector.”

For this sale, 350 photographs were up for auction, all plucked from the dazzling gallery walls the musician had set up in his Atlanta residence. There he displayed hundreds of images at a time, featuring artists who pushed both technical and creative boundaries. But always grounding his collection: the singer’s appreciation for iconic fashion photography. “One prime example of that,” says Seigel, “is John’s print of Avedon’s ‘Dovima with Elephants,’ 1955, which is a rarely seen alternative image from the famous photo shoot that produced what is perhaps Avedon’s most celebrated image.” She adds, “John’s is the original engraver’s print photograph used for reproduction in the Harper’s Bazaar issue where the images first appeared.” Amid brisk bidding, the image sold for $151,200.

Fashion aside, the EGOT recipient is just as drawn to the dynamism of photographers from the 1980s, like Robert Mapplethorpe, whose “Calla Lily,” 1988, sold for $157,500, almost three times the low estimate. History most definitely plays a part in John’s inventory of photography, with several museum-quality works from social documentarians like Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand. Rounding things out were pieces by famed artists like the technically brilliant and temporal works of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose arresting image “Polar Bear,” 1976, sold for $69,300, four times more than anticipated.

Elton John’s once-in-a-lifetime photographic collection brilliantly captures the medium’s greatest hits. Which is why this spring, more than 300 of his images will be unveiled at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where Fragile Beauty will make history as the institution’s largest photography exhibition to date. Proving once again that this savvy collector with the exacting eye knows how to hit the high notes.

Read this article as it appears in the magazine.

Photography by Dafydd Jones

Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald famously noted, “the rich are different than you and me.” And evidently, their pooches are, too. In one of the more memorable shots from photographer Dafydd Jones’ new book, New York: High Life, Low Life, two tiny pups held aloft by philanthropist Brooke Astor and archeologist Iris Love are caught on camera fighting over a plate of canapes at the restaurant Barbetta. The hilarious scene offers an unfiltered glimpse into a period of time in New York City when feeding certain well-heeled doggos canapes on a silver platter seemed more funny than obnoxious.

The decade turned out to be the swan song for Manhattan’s high society, the term used to define the most powerful and privileged folks in town, a latter-day version of the coterie tagged “The 400” in HBO’s The Gilded Age. Distinguished by their wealth, galas and neighboring addresses (everyone lived between Park and Fifth Avenues on the Upper East Side), these best-dressed A-listers were influencers long before there was social media, regularly appearing in the popular gossip columns of Liz Smith, Cindy Adams and Suzy (Aileen Mehle) as well as the weekly party pages of The New York Times, Women’s Wear Daily and The New York Observer. And no one captured their glamour, antics, excesses and guiltlessly indulgent ways better than Jones.

First gaining notoriety as the photographer for London’s Tatler, Jones was brought stateside by the editor Graydon Carter, initially serving as staff photographer for him at The Observer. When Carter took the helm at Vanity Fair, he brought Jones with him. “Most social-scene photographers would band people together for posed shots,” recalls Carter, who founded the digital weekly Air Mail in 2019, “but Jones has the ability to fade into the background and capture people in an unguarded way, giving us a greater sense of the energy at each event.” As Carter writes in his foreword to the book, “He would have made a great spy.”

“As a group, this crowd liked being photographed and enjoyed living in their own special world,” says Jones. “Many of them wouldn’t know how to get to Brooklyn Heights. But they loved showing off their access.” Included in this rarefied Rolodex were a sprinkling of “old-money” doyennes like Astor and Judy Peabody. Interestingly, however, the majority of the women Jones shot wafting through the annual Met Gala or seated prominently at haute couture shows — including Pat Buckley, Nan Kempner, Betsy Bloomingdale, Gayfryd Steinberg, Blaine Trump, Evelyn Lauder, Anne Bass and Carolyne Roehm — did not hail from patrician ancestry. According to Carter, their ascension through the ranks of society was “contingent solely on income, regardless of how their husbands had acquired that income.”

Just as Auntie Mame saw money as like manure — it wasn’t any good unless “you spread it around” — these women spent lavishly on their wardrobes, their homes and especially their parties. But the photos often obscure the fact that there was more than just a display of wealth going on. Unlike the insular high-society clique depicted in Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, Jones’ subjects were on a constant mission to raise money. “The enormous philanthropy displayed by these women has been unappreciated,” says Blaine Trump, long regarded as the godmother of the AIDs-related charity, God’s Love We Deliver. Kempner raised millions for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Peabody dared her friends — and everyone who wasn’t gay — to take on caring for AIDS victims through her tireless work with Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Mrs. Bloomingdale’s nickname was “Good Queen Betts.” Bass helped make the New York City Ballet financially solvent. Lauder almost single handedly raised awareness about breast cancer. And long before Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour transformed the Met Gala into the East Coast Oscars, Buckley made sure the annual event was a must-attend soiree for anyone who was anyone in New York City. “If you were an architect, lawyer, novelist, politician, author or restaurateur in town who mattered, you were there,” claims veteran journalist William Norwich. “Now it’s about stars in costumes on a staircase, though I can’t deny the money raised.”

Given the degree to which these socialites supported clothing designers, it’s no surprise that they were deeply embedded in the fashion world. Bill Blass, Geoffrey Beene and Oscar de la Renta frequently dined with them at Mortimer’s, the Lexington Avenue restaurant that served as their unofficial clubhouse. Out-of-towners like Valentino, Gianni Versace and Karl Lagerfeld were feted with dinner parties or entertained as coveted weekend guests. A new breed of supermodel like Naomi Campbell, Carla Bruni and Claudia Schiffer added sex appeal to their tables. Jones’s book captures them all.

So, why did this hallowed echelon lose its luster? The September 11 attack on the World Trade Center not only eviscerated the city’s celebratory air for years: it made ostentation appear tone-deaf. The crisis didn’t just flatten the hierarchy, Norwich notes. It also sent wealth out of New York. The Hamptons, Palm Beach, Aspen and Dallas all witnessed a swift migration of moneyed New Yorkers in the wake of the attacks. And, with the rise of celebrity magazines like InStyle, the culture increasingly valued star power over financial privilege.

Today social media can turn anyone into an icon, no social register or prodigious checkbook required. Surveying the Met Ball’s current roster (Wintour’s co-hosts this year included Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, designer Jonathan Anderson and Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok), Jones says, “It’s a new iteration of [power and social standing]. Some might say my book chronicles the last gasp of high society. I like to think of it as ‘the last hurrah.’  Because, let’s face it: these people really did know how to have a good time.”

Read this article as it appears in the magazine.