Dafydd Jones

Leave campaigner, Westminster Bridge, London, 15 June 2016

Dafydd Jones made his name as a society and party photographer in the 1980s, mainly for Vanity Fair and Tatler. This image was taken one week before the EU referendum, for his How We Live Now feature in the Oldie.

I’d heard about a flotilla of fishermen demonstrating outside parliament in support of Brexit. I went along and it was quite an eccentric, English-seeming scene with fishing boats with flags. Bob Geldof was there. And there was a luxury party boat with Nigel Farage and other Brexit supporters on it. I was just on the riverbank.

I had all the lenses to photograph boats, jostling in the river, but the best picture was this one of the lady with the sign. I don’t go out with an agenda, but sometimes there’s a bang: “Oh, that’s it!” Everything’s in the right place: it looks like London, you’ve got the wheel and the light and the lady, and the quizzical look from the man standing there. I didn’t speak to her, but I think she looks ambiguous. The dress is a bit long and she just looks like she’s come slightly from another age.

Travelling around, taking pictures, I did start to get a feeling about the way the vote might go. That day outside parliament, Bob Geldof was heckling with an incredibly loud amplifier and it was hectoring and he wasn’t very funny. Whereas the leave campaigners were quite jokey. I’d been at some events where Boris Johnson would give an off-the-cuff speech and I could see how popular he was. I could see almost that he was going to be on the winning side.

Personally, I was annoyed with the government for being given a choice. I think a lot of people are probably now quite angry with the Tories for putting everyone in this situation, because of Tory infighting, where we had to vote one way or the other. I took a lot of photographs at Oxford parties in the 1980s, and I suppose there was a recklessness at Oxford that maybe carried on into politics.

Taking photographs over the years, I think we’ve become unhappier. The other thing it has been hard for me not to notice is the oligarchs. The non-dom thing began happening before the Conservatives’ 14 years, but now they dominate the London social scene. England’s always been divided, but it’s got worse. Tim Lewis

Martin Parr

Food bank, Wolverhampton, 2012

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Internationally renowned for his lurid, brightly coloured, funny and occasionally slyly political photography, the Bristol-based Martin Parr chronicles modern life across Britain and beyond. His recent projects include Malaga Express, a 2023 exhibition and book capturing what the south of Spain looks like today, and Glastonbury festival photography for the Guardian last summer.

This was taken at a Black Country food bank – a can of spam given with love from Jesus Christ. It’s ironic and funny. Its message is self-explanatory.

There’s been a proliferation of food banks over the past 14 years, and it struck me that they’d be a good thing to photograph. This picture came from a church-based organisation, but so many different organisations are doing this work. The people in the Black Country are very friendly, happy for me to be there, although of course the people going to get the food were more nervous.

I’ve photographed in factories, shops, and around outdoor entertainment all across the four boroughs – Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall, the city of Wolverhampton. It’s a very interesting part of the country, quite isolated, despite being so close to Birmingham. People seem to like living there and young people seem to want to stay there. Traditional industry there has obviously declined so much, but the many immigrants who have moved to the area have given it a new energy.

What do I think of the past 14 years of government? Pretty negative thoughts, really. I mean, look at the can of spam having to come from Jesus – it’s bonkers. What more can I say? The messages that come from it, for that having to happen, are open-ended.

Documentary photographs belong to the left. Ask any documentary photographer and they’ll probably say the same. They have an empathy with people. I’ve never met a rightwing documentary photographer. I don’t think they exist.
Jude Rogers

Eddie Otchere

Grenfell Tower, 17 June 2017

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Eddie Otchere is a London-born photographer who has dedicated most of his 30-year career to chronicling Black British culture. He documented the rise of drum’n’bass and hip-hop and is known for his candid portraits of artists including Jay-Z, So Solid Crew and the Wu-Tang Clan. His photographic memoir, Spirit Behind the Lens: The Making of a Hip-Hop Photographer, will be published by Repeater in September.

This photograph was taken the weekend after the fire at Grenfell Tower, which happened just over seven years ago, on 14 June 2017. It was Saturday morning and it seemed like the whole of London had swarmed on that part of the world. People were walking around in shock, no one knowing what to do but wanting to help and to talk to one another about what had happened, as if it was some kind of group therapy. The only other time I’ve seen that happen was when Diana, Princess of Wales, died and the entire nation turned up at High Street Kensington.

Grenfell has been on my mind a lot lately. I can’t think of a bigger symbol of what’s gone wrong over the past 14 years than the burnt-out shell of the tower. It’s a symbol of absolute failure, this monstrous tombstone that sits in our city, a constant reminder of 72 lives lost and no justice. There’s no sense of accountability any more in public life, no sense of responsibility. All these years later you can still go past the tower every day and see it clad in plastic, a building that no one lives in or uses, and no one wants to accept the blame for what happened there. We, the public, pay the bill. We bury the dead.

On the day I took this photograph, I brought black and white film with me because it was just too beautiful a summer’s day. I felt I couldn’t photograph the building and make it look beautiful. It had to be just that, a tombstone. Lisa O’Kelly

Nick Waplington

From the series Hackney Riviera, 2018

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Based between London and New York, Nick Waplington is an award-winning British artist and photographer whose work has been exhibited at Tate Modern and the Venice Biennale. His publications include Living Room, Working Process, and 2019’s Hackney Riviera, which captured apparently idyllic scenes on the banks of the River Lea in east London.

This was June 2018, and it was a very hot summer. It was during the World Cup, and England got to the semi-finals, so everything was frenetic. I live in Hackney Wick, and the place where the picture was taken is a five-minute cycle ride from my house. My older son discovered it – because it had been so dry, the River Lea had got low and had slowed right down. Word spread locally and suddenly there were crowds of people there every day. It was a time when Brexit was still in the balance, and I wanted to celebrate the diversity, togetherness and resilience of the community in which I live.

I didn’t really see at the time that the pictures had anything to do with pollution, but I later found out that the water was pretty contaminated: it’s just downstream from a number of warehouses and businesses in Tottenham, and there’s rat urine in the water. The next year the council tried to stop people swimming there. I ended up getting a septic foot from a cut, but I still went back in for a while longer that summer. I certainly wouldn’t go back in now.

I think a lot of people who have got sick from swimming in seas and rivers weren’t aware until it happened to them. It’s outrageous, the amount of money that has been taken out of the system – tens of billions of pounds in dividends for the owners of the water companies. They’ve been telling people that after Brexit we should take holidays in Britain, and now they’ve covered all the beaches in shit and no one can swim in the water.

I don’t know why people aren’t marching in the streets about this. I follow Feargal Sharkey and his campaign [to protect England’s rivers and streams] on X, and he’s an amazing character. I’m hoping that Keir Starmer and the Labour party will bring back the idea of public service. Hopefully the waterways will be renationalised, and any profits will be used to put right the mess. Kathryn Bromwich

Katherine Anne Rose

Aven and Reed, home life during lockdown with three children and no childcare

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Katherine Anne Rose is an editorial photographer based in Glasgow. Her portraiture and work documenting the city’s changing community regularly appear in the Observer and the Guardian.

My twins were born just before the Covid lockdowns began and so they had to spend much of their early lives indoors. This picture captures one of their favourite places in our house during that time, which is a large window looking out on to the street. They were about 18 months old and became obsessed with climbing up there and watching the world as it went by, waving to people and getting excited when our neighbour took out his motorbike.

I don’t usually photograph my family as the subjects for my work but I’m glad I documented this moment because it encapsulates what became such a beautiful time to spend with them at that age, even while the world outside was so threatening. It felt like us in our safe haven, when otherwise the experience of raising children under a Tory government can feel unsupported and scary.

I was 11 when Labour won their 1997 landslide and that felt like a real moment of hope and idealism. Now, though, there is such a sense of hopelessness and cynicism I feel from our politicians. I have photographed many politicians over the course of my career and when they have been alone I have experienced them as relatively normal people, but there is something about when they are in a group – suddenly it feels as if they have less humanity and less consideration for the rest of us.

For those of us looking after children, it seems like we’re just expected to stoically cope on our own without many structures in place to help. I feel afraid for my children’s future when all they have known is this government and a political landscape that feels lacking in humanity. On top of that, they are also faced with the very real dangers of global heating. It’s not an easy thing to talk about but all we can do is try to look after one another and keep striving for a better future. Ammar Kalia

Liz Johnson Artur

Windrush Square, Brixton, 2022

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Born in Bulgaria to a Ghanaian father and Russian mother, Liz Johnson Artur moved to London in her early 20s and for decades has documented Black life from across the African diaspora in her ongoing project Black Balloon Archive (1991). She was shortlisted for the Aimia Ago prize in 2017 and in 2019 had her first UK solo show at the South London Gallery.

Every year since the Windrush scandal was exposed, I’ve attended a demonstration at Windrush Square in Brixton. Everyone has been affected badly by the Tory government over the past 14 years but the Black community that I document in my work has been particularly targeted and Windrush is a perfect example. It’s a huge story that is still causing people to be detained or deported and yet it somehow only ends up on the third page of the paper.

This image was taken at the Windrush demonstration in 2021. It’s not a typical image for me, since I usually like to see people’s faces, but I noticed this quiet man in the crowd who was wearing a shirt with Enough Is Enough written on it and that phrase summed up the feeling of spending the day hearing the stories of people directly affected by Windrush and this Tory government. Since I only shoot on film, I choose my images very carefully, and this frame carries a certain symbolism – he was so much taller than me, it gives him a commanding presence, despite being otherwise unassuming.

I have a German passport and came to the UK in 1991. My work is about connecting with people on a one-to-one level and through it I’ve really noticed how the Tories have managed to break this country down. From Windrush to Brexit, their politics have subjugated people and made those of us with different nationalities feel unwelcome. On a personal level, it has sometimes made me question whether I can even be here. Enough really is enough. AK

Laura Pannack

Celia and Chris, from the series Separation, 2018

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Laura Pannack is a photographic artist best known for her portraiture and social documentary work. Born in Kingston, Surrey, her work has been shown at the National Portrait Gallery and Somerset House and she has won a number of prizes including the John Kobal and the Julia Margaret Cameron awards. She is London-based, but says: “I always have my toothbrush packed and ready to travel at any time.”

Soon after the 2016 referendum, the British Journal of Photography asked me to work on a project with the theme of Brexit. They gave me carte blanche: I could do anything I wanted as long as it encapsulated the idea of Brexit.

My work is always built around emotion, and so I began to think about love and about how connections could be lost through Brexit. With the BJP team I researched couples whose lives and families had been affected by Brexit. We did callouts on Twitter and found that a lot of couples were either having to separate or facing the prospect of doing so in the future. I then said, well, I have a visual idea for that: I’ve been playing around with separating people using fabric and paper, why don’t we do that?

We ended up using latex, which was a nightmare to handle but visually very effective. We had all of the couples come into the studio and asked them to kind of get into poses that they felt were very personal to them and their relationship, and then we slid latex between them so that it divided them. I photographed it on analogue and it was a really fun shoot but also very emotional. The woman in this shot is Celia, who had come here from Spain to study fashion and met her English partner Chris in London. After the vote she now faced an uncertain future with no real job prospects and possibly having to return to Spain.

The work was published in BJP, but it took on a new meaning a couple of years later when Covid hit. As the pandemic separated people in a similar, painful way, it became the first thing that everyone thought of when they looked at the work. LO’K

Antonio Olmos

Murder #38, Negus McClean, Edmonton, 10 April 2011

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Born in Mexico, Antonio Olmos is a photojournalist and portrait photographer who is based in London and has worked for the Guardian and Observer for nearly 30 years. His work has covered refugee crises, the environment, human rights issues and conflict, and in 2013, his book The Landscape of Murder documented every murder site in London in 2011 and 2012.

In 2011, I began this personal project. I wasn’t interested in dead bodies but in the places where murders happen. This was in Edmonton, where a 15-year-old had died the day before. My idea was to photograph everything for this project in landscape, asking permission from the people in the scenes.

I saw these kids, convinced myself to go and ask them, and they all said yes. They were really nice, gentle, didn’t give me any hassle. I went across the street, set up my tripod very quickly. I was there 10 minutes, if that.

You can’t process things when you’re in the moment, but when I got home and looked at the picture, I stared at it for a long time. If I’d been a younger photographer, I may not have recognised what was in it, but I’m getting older now – I’ve worked in conflict zones; I realise what makes a powerful image. There were so many layers of meaning: the site of the murder being such an ordinary place, the many people of colour, the kids staring at their phones. That was new then. The phone seemed to be everything to them, offering them a place of protection and distraction.

This picture was meant to be part of a project, published later, but I took it to the Guardian picture desk, and it was printed a few days later on a double-page spread in the Eyewitness section. It was talked about, and I was interviewed on the radio. The picture got more coverage than the murder itself, which had 100 words in the local newspaper. If this was about the death of a white kid from a leafy Tory town, there would have been outrage.

Tabloid media and society have taught us to be afraid of young people and it’s got so much worse in the past 14 years. Knife crime has risen under Tory rule and austerity has cut everything for teenagers – education, youth centres, so much support.

And these very people who are meant to be a threat are usually out there protesting for better things. Nine years after I took this picture, I photographed the Black Lives Matter protests, which were inhabited by kids of all colours. Seeing them all lined up against walls, I realised I was trying to make this picture again there too, a picture that influenced me a lot, a picture that happened so fast. JR

Niall McDiarmid

Arthur and Avis, Milton Keynes, May 2024

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A Scottish photographer based in south London, Niall McDiarmid began his career as a junior reporter before switching to photojournalism. His work ever since has documented the diverse people and landscapes of Britain. His books include Breakfast, Shore, Southwestern, Town to Town and Via Vauxhall.

Around 2010 to 2011, I started travelling across the UK, trying to build up a kind of portrait of Britain. It wasn’t planned this way, but that project began at the start of the last government. I went as far as Thurso in the north, and then all the way down to Cornwall. It never ceases to amaze me how many interesting and diverse people we have here.

This was only taken a few weeks ago, on a visit to Milton Keynes. This is Arthur and Avis. They were sweet, a little shy but also very funny. They told me they were in their 62nd year of marriage, which touched me, as my parents have been married for the same time. It was only when I got home that I noticed that they had held hands for the photo.

Arthur moved to the UK from the Caribbean in 1957. Avis moved here only a little later. I moved from rural Scotland to south London 35 years ago, so I consider myself quite a long-term resident, but I’m nowhere as established as many of the Windrush families who came here. We have a couple on our street in their 90s. They’re such lovely, genuine people.

But we forget what an incredibly hard time the Windrush generation had coming here, moving away from their families to a completely different continent. They went through incredible discrimination, financial hardship, and worked the hardest jobs too – as cleaners, in the NHS, on the underground, on the buses. At the same time, they brought so much vibrancy and colour to our communities, pioneering the multiculturalism we see today.

What happened under this past government with the Windrush scandal was unforgivable, politics gone terribly wrong, a stain on the country. Let’s hope it never happens again. To me, the Windrush generation, if we look at a nation as a whole, they’re the best of us. We need to celebrate them more but we don’t. We should. JR

Mark Power

The Black Country, Dudley, 2011

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An English teacher, TV actor, fish farm attendant and mural painter before he became a photographer in 1983, Mark Power has worked and exhibited internationally for four decades. His books include The Shipping Forecast, 26 Different Endings and two volumes of Good Morning America, documenting work in the US in the 2010s.

When I took this picture in Dudley, in the early 2010s, we were in a recession. I’d had a commission in the Black Country from an organisation called Multistory – I’d done some research and found out that the businesses that did well under that kind of austerity were beauty and war, so I was up there photographing beauty salons. Beauty salons and gentlemen’s clubs were everywhere.

I saw this teddy bear one day while driving. It was quite a large teddy bear, maybe three or four feet tall, sitting next to the roadside, on this stick. It was on a building site in this post-industrial landscape, the kind of site where huge anonymous buildings have been constructed in recent years, without character, to house stuff to be carted off all over the country. I remember parking up and taking a photo of it very quickly. It was the kind of site I didn’t want to hang around.

I don’t know why the teddy bear was there, of course, but I guess it could have been to brighten up the space a little bit. But it’s cute and not cute – there’s a kind of violence to it in the way it’s mounted. I don’t want to overthink it – it’s not a homeless person in a cardboard box, but a teddy bear on a stick. But there’s something lonely about that bear in that landscape. It’s sad and melancholic.

I did another public commission in Stoke-on-Trent the following year, and working in those small post-industrial societies, I felt I was beginning to understand the magnitude of what was happening to the country. I’d been living in this bubble in Brighton, where it took a long time before there were boarded-up shops, but there are now.

After Brexit, I was so fed up with this country that I couldn’t make work about this place any more. I turned my back on it artistically and started working in the US. I’m slightly disappointed in myself about that. Now I’m starting things afresh over here, but I wouldn’t say I’m over the Brexit thing. We’re kind of stuck with it, but we also seem to have fallen into this kind of attitude where we almost expect something to go wrong. That’s desperately sad. It didn’t used to be like that. JR

Craig Easton

From the series Thatcher’s Children, 22 December 2018

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Craig Easton is a documentary photographer who was photographer of the year at the Sony world photography awards in 2021. This image is from his monograph Thatcher’s Children, which tracked a family – the Williamses from Blackpool – from a one-off shoot in 1992 and then reconnecting again from 2016 to 2022.

When I originally got back in touch with the Williams family in 2016, it wasn’t really to make new work at all. It was just that those original pictures had meant a lot to me and had caused quite a stir at the time. And I’d always thought: “What happened to those kids?”

I wasn’t too surprised to find that, sadly, they were pretty much in the same boat. The biggest single difference was that, although they were really struggling with the same issues as their parents in 1992, they were all in working households. And the effect on the kids didn’t seem to make any difference. So it puts a lie to that mantra that you work your way out of poverty. That’s really what that series is all about: once you’re trapped, you’re trapped.

The boy in this photograph is one of the children of the original people who I was working with. I used to spend a lot of time with the family and I’d play with the kids and roll around on the floor. Sometimes, I’d just go for a cup of tea and I wouldn’t take pictures at all. So this was not a “dive in for a couple of weeks and make a story about social deprivation”. This was a long-term look at societal problems.

Over the past 14 years, I think there’s been a constant move to the right. And the biggest thing for me has been Brexit: we had a European referendum to sort out a squabble in the Tory party that’s been going on for 50, 60 years. It feels like the whole country is a political football being kicked between the two wings of the Tory party, who are tearing themselves apart – and I’m sick of it.

The photographs in this series are not party political. The title of the book is Thatcher’s Children, but you see very clearly that it’s John Major and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and New Labour and Keir Starmer who are Thatcher’s children. It’s not the Williams family. Thatcherism and neoliberalism have become such a consensus in politics; the left-behind, forgotten families are just the victims of it. TL

Suki Dhanda

Elaf and Yaseen with daughter Noor, 26 January 2018

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Suki Dhanda grew up in Slough, Berkshire, and studied at Arts University Plymouth, where she received an honorary fellowship. Her work focuses on marginalised identity, from teenage subcultures to Indian cab drivers in the aftermath of 9/11. Her portraits feature regularly in the Guardian and Observer.

In 2017, I was commissioned by Arts University Plymouth to create a new body of work about the city. At the time, Brexit had just happened and I was feeling very bitter about it, so I set out to capture images that would show Plymouth’s diversity and what it’s become since I studied there. I wanted to celebrate all the different people, even if the majority in the city voted to leave.

In Plymouth, no matter where you’re from, everyone wants to spend the day on the beach. That’s where I met Yaseen and Elaf, both lecturers from Iraq who’d received government sponsorship to study in the UK. They were lovely, so open and relaxed. Yaseen was studying a PhD in computer science and Elaf was doing a master’s in electrical engineering.

People can be so blinkered when they see a family who doesn’t look and dress like them, and make assumptions about why they’re here. The Tories have played into that. Of course, I understand the animosity from people who can’t afford to send their kids to university. Most students from the UK graduate burdened with debt and don’t have the freedom to study abroad. We have really closed ourselves in.

Yaseen and Elaf were an educated young couple with jobs back home that they were really committed to. That was the condition of their sponsorship – to go back and use their knowledge to teach people in Iraq. They stayed in Plymouth for four years and built some kind of home with their children, but they always knew they would return. I think people in this country need to be educated to understand that not everyone’s here to take their jobs.

At the end of the day, everyone wants a sense of belonging and to feel at home, but what makes a home is people. I think things would be different if people could meet families like Yaseen and Elaf’s in their own environment, rather than relying on platforms like Facebook to get their news. Orla Foster

In 1928, a pair of French doctors, André and Gaston Durville, established the first naturist club in Paris on an island in the Seine. Nudity seemed a logical step in their medical practice, which pioneered therapies based on massage and vegetarianism, physical exercise and hypnosis. Their methods were in part a reaction to the bodily traumas of the first world war and subsequent Spanish flu epidemic. In 1930, with a growing interest in the psychological and health benefits of naturism across Europe, the brothers created a resort they called Héliopolis, on the Île du Levant, off the coast of Hyères on the French riviera. A photographer, Pierre Audebert was commissioned to produce a series of photo stories for the brothers’ magazine, Naturisme.

The Durville brothers promoted Héliopolis as a kind of paradise, and attempted to placate scandalised churchy opinion by separating nudity from sex, emphasising instead a sort of confident athleticism. Héliopolis would, they declared, be “a simple rustic city where air- and sunlight-lovers return to the quiet of a beautiful nature, and rest from the artificial civilisation of modern cities”. Audebert was required to idealise those ambitions. His images therefore dwelt on the relaxed liberation of visitors to the island, depicting sun worshippers alone on beaches or often, as here, in the wholesome pursuit of climbing trees. Audebert made many series of pictures on the island over 20 years. An exhibition exploring naturism, including Audebert’s work, features in this year’s Arles festival.

Héliopolis, and the Île du Levant more widely, is still a thriving naturist resort, though the numbers of visitors have declined since the 1960s, when 60,000 would come each summer; nudity remains obligatory on its beaches, and there are a number of restaurants and bars that expect customers to be au naturel, though a thong – what the French call “le minimum” – is now required in the streets around the island’s harbour.

• Naturist Paradises is at Mucem, Marseille, 3 July–9 December. The Arles photography festival runs 1 July–29 September

Taureans are alert, outgoing, and adaptable. Generally speaking, they are curious and love learning new things. Through photography, they may capture the different events and people they encounter. Their communicative nature allows them to connect with subjects and use their photos to tell compelling stories.

Showing now in her hometown of New York, the first major retrospective in the United States showcasing the work of the late photographer Vivian Maier. This article discusses the extraordinary story of one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century and how her work was only discovered after her death.

Vivian Maier was an American street photographer who was posthumously recognized for her exceptional work. Born on February 1, 1926, in New York City, Maier spent much of her childhood in France before returning to the United States, where she worked as a nanny for various families in Chicago for about four decades. Despite her lifelong passion for photography, Maier’s work remained unknown during her lifetime.

Maier’s photography primarily consists of candid street scenes in Chicago and New York during the 1950s and 1960s. Her keen eye for composition, light, and the human condition has been widely praised, drawing comparisons to renowned street photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Diane Arbus. Maier’s work captures a broad spectrum of society, often focusing on marginalized communities, and offers a compelling, unfiltered glimpse into mid-20th-century urban life. Maier’s job as a caretaker allowed her to continue pursuing photography while feeding her interest in capturing childhood through her lens.

Maier’s self-portraits mark milestones in her body of work as she experiments with a variety of visual devices and typologies to signify her presence in the image, such as playing with shadows and projected silhouettes, reflections, and image within an image.

Maier took photos for herself alone and had a fierce desire for privacy; combined with a lack of stability in her career and finances, this prevented her from developing her own film. She placed undeveloped, unprinted work in storage with her other belongings in the early 2000s when she moved between living in a small studio apartment and being unhoused. Due to unpaid rental fees, the negatives were auctioned off by the storage company in 2007, and a large portion were purchased by John Maloof. Maloof, a filmmaker and photographer himself, became the first person to bring Maier’s work into the public eye and began to promote it widely just after her passing in 2009. Since then, Maier’s work has gained global acclaim and is now featured in a major exhibition at Fotografiska Museum in New York.

Unseen Work will run from May 31 through September 29, 2024 at Fotografiska, New York and features approximately 230 works from the early 1950s to the late 1990s, including vintage and modern prints, color, black and white, super 8 films, and audio recordings, offering a complete vision of the artist’s rich archive, which serves as a fascinating testimony to post-war America and the facade of the American dream. “Fotografiska is proud to be the first museum in Vivian Maier’s hometown of New York to present a large-scale exhibition of her work,” says Sophie Wright, Executive Director of Fotografiska. “The story of the discovery of her extraordinary archive transcends photography, and her talent has captivated audiences worldwide. We’re grateful to be able to share her work for existing fans to enjoy while giving new audiences a chance to discover her.”

Unseen Work will shed new light on Maier’s extensive body of work and focus on the major themes that defined her creative output. In street scenes and sidewalk chronicles, portraits and self-portraits, as well as gestures, fragmentation and repetition, color photography, cinetism, and film, Maier took a humanist approach to photography that resulted in meticulous documentation of the major socio-political changes of the period. Many of Maier’s images and portraits observe in detail the working-class neighborhoods in New York and Chicago that she explored from many angles. “Vivian Maier captures the often challenging realities of American life in the late 20th century with great empathy and nuance,” says Anne Morin, director of diChroma photography and the show’s curator. “This is a homecoming, and we are thrilled to collaborate with Fotografiska to bring Vivian’s work back to New York, a city that informed and inspired some of her best work.” With a focus on people on the margins of society who weren’t usually photographed and of whom images were rarely published, Maier’s austere portraits were taken on city streets the moment before the subject realized they were being photographed and provide a truly candid view into the times.

Practicing photography was one of the only ways Vivian Maier could make sense of the world and express herself freely. Maier’s work reveals how distant the American Dream is for most Americans, portraying through photography and film the everyday challenges they face that prevent them from economic mobility – debilitating poverty, long hours of labor, depression – some of which she experienced herself before receiving financial support later in life from the children she once nannied.

Fotografiska is the contemporary museum for photography, art, and culture. Founded in Stockholm in 2010 and led globally by its Chairman Yoram Roth, Fotografiska is a destination to discover world-class photography, eclectic programming, elevated dining, and surprising new perspectives. Guided by a mission to inspire a more conscious world through the power of photography, art, and culture, Fotografiska produces dynamic and unparalleled rotating exhibitions, spanning various genres in inclusive environments. With a dedicated international community and locations in Stockholm, New York City, Tallinn, Berlin, and Shanghai, Fotografiska is the premier global gathering place for photography and culture.

Unseen Work will run at Fotografiska New York until September 29, 2024.

All images © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY. via Fotografiska

Yet another card reader to review this week, with promises that this delivers faster-than-ever transfer speeds. Today I’m testing the Dockcase DPR81F smart hub and card reader, and get this, it’s got a screen attached.

History

Dockcase has a previous history of producing great value products at reasonable prices, so I was keen to test the newest iteration of a card reader and dock all-in-one that’s made in a handy carry-everywhere size.

The Product and Build Quality

Sent in a relatively plain design but Apple-style premium packaging, it comes only with a 40 Gbps/100 W patch USB-C cable in black. I would have liked to have seen a quick start guide included or maybe a QR code where I could be directed to one online, but nothing was included. This feels like a premium product partly due to the weight and the metal build quality rather than cheap plastic, but I would have liked to have seen a quick start guide with it included or maybe a link to other products they do, and they have missed a trick not including one here. With a shiny touchscreen, you don’t want it getting scratched in a bag, so this would be a must for inclusion with the finalized product. In black, this looks sleek.

This has an 8-in-one slot operation with a touchscreen information/swipe replacement for a standard analog key, which is responsive and works well.

The slots included are as follows

• HDMI (4K 120Hz Display)
• UHS-II
• CFexpress Type A
• CFexpress Type B
• USB-A
• USB-C 
• USB-C (100 W Power)
• MicroSD Transflash (TF)

This is impressive simply because I can carry around one small dock rather than two or three separate card readers (normally I’ll have an HDMI to USB-C connector plus CFexpress and a standard card reader in my bag).

Features

The beauty of this device is that it has all of these ports in one unit. I love that idea and will certainly be using this out in the field more. The one thing I did notice when connecting the USB-C charger and HDMI was that it got hot. Not massively, but about 45-50 degrees, which I’m informed is within standard operating tolerances. The underside has a ridged aluminum surface which helps disperse the heat, but it’s just my personal opinion here and caused no real issues. The transfer speeds were fast but not as fast as some of the other standalone card readers I have, the tests of which are all to follow.

All tests were conducted using Lexar memory cards, specifically a Lexar 128 GB Professional CFexpress Type B Card GOLD Series, a Lexar 128 GB Professional 2000x UHS-II SDXC Memory Card and a 3.6 GHz 8-core Intel i9 iMac 2019 with 64 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD on OS Sonoma 14.5. I used the Blackmagic Design Speed Test App, which can be downloaded for free from the App Store or Blackmagic’s website. I also used the same (included) cable in all the tests to minimize cable faults or differing speeds due to different cable lengths, speeds, or quality.

The first speed test was done using the Lexar 128GB Professional CFexpress Type B Card GOLD Series card since this is the one I use and keep in my Canon R5. I was keen to see how the dock compares to my regular SanDisk card reader (a SanDisk Extreme Pro), which only reads CFexpress Type B and has no other ports on it.

The Dockcase unit was first tested. See results below.

The speeds that the Dockcase produced were slightly (but not significantly) lower but not enough for me to consider leaving it at home.

Below are the test results for the SanDisk Extreme Pro card reader.

As you can see, it is not significantly different, but enough that if you were buying this for transfer speeds alone you might consider a single faster standalone unit. The same was not the truth when testing with the Lexar 128GB Professional 2000x UHS-II SDXC Memory Card against the Lexar LRW500U Card Reader, which produced speeds slightly faster.

The above was the Dockcase; below are the real-time results from the Lexar LRW500U Card Reader.

The Lexar card reader was slightly slower on average, and given the circumstances, I realize that a product is more than just read-write speeds. It’s good to look at all these factors when making an informed choice and buying a new product.

Summary

What I Liked 

Would I buy one of these? Yes, I would, and I’m recommending it because it’s a single-designed sleek unit with all the card ports and connectors you’re going to need for the foreseeable future, so I don’t find myself having to carry lots of dongles and additional card readers around. It’s got a great look, and it’s authentically heavy enough to feel like a quality build too.

What Could Be Improved

Well, it’s one of the fastest card readers out there on the market, and I’d like to see a carry case or a bag included with it to stop the screen from being scratched in a laptop bag or even it scratching other devices. I wouldn’t even have minded if it was available as a separate purchase. The ability to change color themes on the device (maybe a matrix-style green or mono theme or a blue, green, or orange theme) might be nice but not essential to the workings of it. They need a quick start guide or a link to one in the case or even a QR code on the inside of the box. It feels incomplete without one.

You can find Dockcase and all the information about it and other products here. When their crowdfunding campain ends, you’ll be able to find it along with other products on Amazon here.

When Michael Magill moved to Wyoming in 2015, one of the first things he learned about was Steamboat, the iconic rodeo bronc that very few cowboys could ever ride whose spirit was indelibly captured by the famous bucking horse logo first developed by the University of Wyoming and later by the state of Wyoming.

The trademarked visage is literally everywhere. It’s on every license plate. It graces keychains and T-shirts. It’s on coffee mugs and stickers and all manner of other creations — including a special bucking horse Christmas decoration in Cheyenne.

The more Magill learned about Steamboat, the more taken the well-known rodeo photographer became with the idea of one day capturing a modern-day shot that would evoke the whole Steamboat legend.

“It’s the most iconic thing,” Magill said. “So, every time we’d look through photos, I’d check the ones that were close. But there was never one that was exactly right.”

Magill, who lives in Cheyenne, has taken literally thousands of bucking bronc photos since beginning to take rodeo photos in 2021 at Tom Horn Days in Bosler, Wyoming.

None of them ever quite passed muster. Until that is, June 15, at Chugwater Roundup’s Bracket Bronc Riding. There Magill believes he finally captured a horse in mid buck that matched the state’s iconic symbol.

“I kind of set myself up for the entire bronc riding with the bluffs in the background,” Magill said. “I always like it to look like an old-time watercolor, almost like what you’d see on a dime novel back in the old West.”

Magill takes his photos inside the outdoor arena, so he can get the best shots, one that puts the viewer right where the action is.

Getting The Money Shot

The backdrop is one of the few factors Magill can control when it comes to photographing cowboys on a bucker.

“The horse is going to do what the horse is going to do,” Magill said. “This could have gone the other way or there’s 100 other things that could have happened.”

Everything happens in the mere blink of an eye. Bronc riding is furious, and it is fast — way faster than human reaction times.

“By the time your brain sees something and recognizes it and you push a button, it’s already gone,” Magill said.

So Magill uses a rig set to take multiple shots at the push of a single button.

Every time he pushes that button, he’s hoping one of the 25 in the set will be the one: A money shot that either looks just like Steamboat and the bucking horse logo or just a really good shot someone would want to put on their wall.

But he’s learned over the years never to let his hopes get too high, and to just focus on getting as many shots out of each ride as possible.

Still, when he saw Teyvian “Doc” Frye riding a big paint stallion named Medicine Feathers, he couldn’t help but feel just a little bit excited. That’s because Frye had taken off his hat and he was waving it around as he fought to stay on top of the horse.

“I don’t know if there was another cowboy who took his hat off during the ride other than Doc,” Magill said.

Later, looking through the photographs, Doc’s arm was off to one side in a lot of the shots.

But finally, there was one with his hand overhead.

And not just that. The horse’s body was arched with the hooves pointing in and the tail held high — just like the bucking horse logo.

“I don’t think the shot could be more perfect,” Magill said.

The Hurricane Horse

But it’s not just the image that’s perfect, Magill said. It’s all the circumstances surrounding the photograph too.

For one thing, Chugwater is where Steamboat was born 128 years ago in 1896. Magill believes the horse was probably foaled a mile or so away from the arena where the Chugwater Roundup was held.

Steamboat was born on the Frank Foss ranch in 1896. He roamed the range wild and free until 1899, when the Swan Land and Cattle Company bought the jet black colt for its Two Bar Ranch.

They let him run another year before bringing him in for castration. The angry stallion threw his head down so hard during that it broke his nose. The cowboy who was there when the injury occurred, Jimmy Danks, thought the horse sounded like a steamboat afterward, when he was ridden. So that’s what Danks named him.

Danks would soon learn that Steamboat was a bucker, and one who grew craftier as time went by.

Eventually, the horse was purchased by C.B. Irwin for rodeo stock and fought his way to the top echelon of all rodeo horses everywhere, earning the title Worst Bucking Horse in the World in 1907 and 1908.

Newspapers at the turn of the 20th century described Steamboat as half hurricane and half horse. Few cowboys could outlast his unique bucking style in those days when there was no 8-second rule. Cowboys rode their horses to a complete standstill, or until they were thrown.

Steamboat would kick his front feet one way and his back legs another, all the while twisting his body around in the air. A cowboy might think he had it all in hand until, that is, Steamboat suddenly stopped, landing with board-stiff legs. Think of it like a jackhammer to the backside. Few cowboys could hold on after that.

The few who did make it past the dead-still drop often relaxed, thinking Steamboat was now standing still. But the horse wasn’t done quite yet. He’d just taken a breather for the next go-round.

That never-quit style and stamina made Steamboat the enduring Wyoming icon that he is today.

The Legend Of The Lazy 20

The bluffs where Chugwater’s rodeo is held are largely unchanged from what Steamboat would have beheld as a young horse on the range.

But here’s a connection that Magill knew nothing about before taking the photo.

The owner of Medicine Feathers, the horse in Magill’s iconic lookalike shot, is owned by Rand Selle, who also happens to own the brand that historians say would have marked Steamboat after he was born.

That brand is the Lazy 20, a numeral 20 lying on its side.

“That brand was first registered in 1921 with the Wyoming livestock board,” Magill said. “But Frank had been using it before that. The board itself didn’t exist until 1919.”

The brand has since been handed down through the generations, to people who will be good stewards of the brand, honoring and preserving the iconic history that goes with it.

Magill said Selle is thinking about branding Medicine Feathers with the Lazy 20, as he’s done with a lot of his colts.

Another connection is that the Chugwater Roundup contestants included lots of cowboys whose real-life day job is breaking colts.

“This is what they do for a living,” Magill said. “And over the weekends they go rodeo to try to make some money that way.”

That’s very similar to who was riding Steamboat in the day when he was known as the world’s worst bucker. His riders were all real cowboys, who made a living working on the range, and who did rodeo to make a little extra money, as well as test their skills against their peers.

With so many significant things coming together in one photo, there’s no doubt in McGill’s mind that the photo was divinely inspired to help carry on the legacy and spirit of Steamboat.

“I think the picture was taken at 1/1250 of a second, so for it to be that iconic, I mean the time just had to be there. And I don’t think things like that just happen.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.

Portable monitors are becoming very common, especially because many more creative professionals adapt an on-the-go lifestyle. However, this feature-packed monitor might be perfect for photographers and other digital visual creatives.

Portable monitors are helpful in many ways, not just to photographers but to anyone who uses tablets and laptops for productivity. Carrying around an extra screen can allow you to do more things at once and improve the ergonomics of handling multiple apps and/or files while working. There’s a very long list of portable monitors available in the market that come in many different shapes and sizes, however not all of them offer top-notch resolution, color accuracy, and functionality in just one device. The ASUS ProArt PA169CDV combines the top-tier functionalities of two very helpful tools for photographers and digital artists.

The ProArt PA169CDV

The PA169CDV is a 15.6” IPS panel with a 16:9 aspect ratio housed in a thin bezel and encased in a slim, glossy surface with an anti-reflective and moisture-resistant coating. This has a functional screen size of 13.6 x 7.7 inches (345.6 x 194.4mm) with a maximum resolution of 3840 x 2160 (4K) at a refresh rate of 60Hz. This 15.6” 4K screen has a peak brightness of 400 nits however, running at such brightness requires the use of the supplied power adapter. When powered by USB-C from the computer, it can only go up to 180 nits.

As far as portable monitors are concerned, the above-mentioned specifications are pretty common. However, one of the things that make this portable monitor stand out is that it is capable of displaying 10-bit colors with 100% of the SRGB and Rec709 color spaces. It has a maximum contrast ratio of 1200:1 and is VESA-certified DisplayHDR400. The PA169CDV is both Calman-verified and Pantone-validated and comes with an individual panel color accuracy factory report that shows the specific peak color accuracy rating when properly calibrated.

These monitors generally have a standard of Delta E <2 but can achieve even better accuracy depending on lighting conditions and individual calibration in the actual lighting environment where they are to be used. The specific one tested for this article had a maximum rating of 0.53, which is way better than what the specifications say.

More Than Just a Display

In addition to being a slim monitor that works with just a single USB-C cable and can be significantly color accurate if properly calibrated before use, the ProArt PA169CDV also functions as a 15.6-inch pen display. Equipped with Wacom’s EMR tech, this portable monitor works with a battery-free pen with 4096 different pressure levels and comfortable working angles of up to 40 degrees to any side. This pen also comes with a customizable button, a customizable digital eraser on the distal end, and replaceable tips.

The 13.6 x 7.7 inches of the display is also the same functional area for use with the pen or as a touch screen. Typically, screens that are both touch and pen-compatible tend to be glitchy. However, in my experience, the detection of the pen swiftly triggers palm/touch rejection to ensure that no unintended inputs are made, especially when drawing or retouching.

To complement the functions of the pen display, on the left side of the panel is a modified version of the ProArt dial that was first introduced in the ProArt Studiobook laptops a couple of years back. This customizable dial allows you to switch through pre-selected functions such as exposure, contrast, saturation, brush size, opacity, and any available function on a wide range of apps that have linear adjustments. While the dial has a huge ergonomic impact since everything is within reach on and around the display, there are no programmable buttons or hotkeys that could exponentially make it easier to switch between tools in Photoshop and other applications.

Control Panel Functions

As a functional secondary touch display, pretty much like how the secondary screens on ASUS’ laptops are, the PA169CDV is also compatible with the ASUS control panel, which is a customizable virtual editing console that is compatible with select applications, mainly those within the Adobe ecosystem. This turns the screen into a panel with knobs and dials assigned to certain functions depending on the app being used. For example, for Adobe Lightroom, each of the dials can be assigned for the sliders on the develop module, which gives a unique and potentially more efficient user experience.

Application

With all the features and capabilities factored in, the PA169CDV can do a lot of what photographers and other related creative fields might require on the go. It can go from as simple as extending a desktop for better productivity, multi-tasking such as working on one screen while consuming content on the other, using it as a secondary monitor for shooting photos or video content, all the way to using it as a more intensive editing tool through the touch functions and as a pen display.

Dozens of manufacturers have come out with various portable display options that come in different shapes and sizes. However, not many of them offer the resolution and color performance of monitors from the ProArt line. At the same time, brands like Wacom, Huion, and Xencelabs make very capable pen tablets and pen displays but what makes this particular one stand out is having all of the functions and the top-tier specifications along with the innovative features all in one device.

There are definitely a number of ways this can be made even better, such as by adding hotkeys or a separate editing shortcut panel. Costs aside, it would also be great to have an OLED variant with an even wider color gamut, brighter output, and even higher contrast. In addition, it might also be beneficial for this to have either a built-in battery or a detachable portable power source that would keep it portable and balanced even when being used in situations outside of the typical editing desk.

Those improvement points aside, this color-accurate portable monitor and pen display already is a remarkable product that combines the functionalities of tools that many digital visual creatives use separately.

What I Liked:

• Portable 4K display with good color capabilities
• 10-point touch
• Seamless use with battery-free pen

What Can Be Improved:

• Programmable buttons on the side
• Built-in battery or portable power source