Disphotic

Goodbye Disphotic

Published March 6, 2017

The time has come for me to order full stop to Disphotic’s engines and leave it to drift down into the internet’s abyssal depths, to rest with the countless other abandoned hulks. In plainer speak, I’m giving up regularly writing this blog, and there are three main reasons why. Disphotic called for a very particular type of writing, a sort of didactic, short form which isn’t the only type of prose I want to explore and experiment with (and writing has always for me been something of an experiment, however evidenced that might be in the rather stymied final form…

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Conflicting Interests: A Follow Up

Conflicting Interests: A Follow Up

Published April 14, 2018

I wanted to write a short update to my previous piece about conflicts of interest and transparency in the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize. After a rather drawn out back and forth with The Photographers Gallery they have provided me with the guidelines used by the jury and chair. You can read them in their entirety here, but I just want to focus here on the bits that relate to what I actually talked about in my piece: transparency and conflicts of interest. Before launching into that I think it’s worth mentioning that the gallery maintain the line that there…

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Conflicting Interests: The Deutsche Börse Foundation Prize 2018

Conflicting Interests: The Deutsche Börse Foundation Prize 2018

Published April 7, 2018

When I gave up writing this blog, I thought that the four years and three hundred odd posts would have made it pretty clear where I stand critically, and ethically. I thought that editors would either understand and respect these things when they asked me to write for them, or they simply wouldn’t ask. Some recent experiences suggest otherwise, and so a review originally intended for one place now needs to find an alternative home. That place, after considering all the other options, can only be Disphotic, briefly returned from the dead. I promise I will not make resurrection a…

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How to be a Thorn in Photography’s Side

How to be a Thorn in Photography’s Side

Published February 28, 2017

This feels a bit strange, but I am for the first time publishing a retroactive post, one coming on the heels of a piece where I declare an end to writing this blog. In the wake of my decision to stop writing Disphotic last week quite a few people commented on the blog’s demise by remarking how urgently the photography world needs critical voices. I fully agree, but those voices need to belong to someone, and I feel I have more than said my bit. While I didn’t mention it in my piece last week another reason for abandoning Disphotic…

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The Shadows of Doubt: Art, Distance and Truth

The Shadows of Doubt: Art, Distance and Truth

Published December 12, 2016

Journalism has traditionally rested on certain core truths which are often taken to be self-evident and beyond question. The Hungarian photojournalist Robert Capa’s often quoted dictum that ‘if your photographs are not good enough, you aren’t close enough’[1] would seem to encapsulate a particularly important one, the axiom of proximity. This idea that a journalist should seek a certain closeness to the story, that is to say a spatial rather than emotional closeness, has long been regarded as one of the most important routes to insight and revelation, as well as being central to the journalist’s role as witness to…

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Why Teach Photography?

Why Teach Photography?

Published December 5, 2016

These days about half my working week is occupied with teaching and with its accompanying activities; preparation, marking, tutorials, admin, standing in line for coffee. The amount of time I’ve spent occupied with this, and the fact I’ll be undertaking a post-graduate teaching qualification this year, has led me to think more and more about what it actually means to teach. Having been surrounded by teachers for much of my life, at home, at school, at university and then in college, it has always seemed such an everyday activity that it didn’t seem to warrant consideration. Teaching seemed entirely natural,…

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The Empire of the Drone: Dinh Q. Lê’s The Colony

The Empire of the Drone: Dinh Q. Lê’s The Colony

Published November 28, 2016

– I feel a pressure to always write in the moment, certainly with reviewing to talk about something while it’s still happening, still accessible, as if to give people a chance to test my the sum of my words out for themselves. Real life frequently often gets in the way and that’s not always to the bad. The slower burn can be rewarding, spending a few weeks mulling something over, pulling it this way and that in the confines of my own head, in the end resulting in a reading which is perhaps less literal, indeed perhaps rather oblique, but…

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Highlights and Trends: Paris Photo 2016

Highlights and Trends: Paris Photo 2016

Published November 14, 2016

Like all contemporary art fairs, Paris Photo is a photography business and be in no doubt about the proper order of those two words. It was notable that even outside the event one had to run a gauntlet of ticket touts offering illict entrance to the fair. It wasn’t vastly different inside, where there are certainly some touts active only wearing suits and displaying more discrimination about their clientele. It was interesting to arrive in Paris just a few days after a session with my MA students discussing the transition of documentary to the gallery. One of the questions we…

An Exhibition and Book Making Resource

Published October 31, 2016

It might seem to rather fly in the face of what image making is now, but more often than not photography still ends up finally as a physical thing, whether as a book, an exhibition or something else. When this happens the extent to which the idea in a photographers head is realised in physical form is heavily dependent on the quality and variety of the firms that provide the paper, print the pages, bind the books, make the prints, mount them, and so forth. Both because I want to help support the companies that make it possible for us…

Post-Truth Documentary: Adam Curtis’s HyperNormalisation

Published October 24, 2016

It’s increasingly popular to speak of our world as ‘post-truth’ an idea lent credence by politicians from Vladimir Putin to Boris Johnson who seem able to be able to spin fantastic lies and almost entirely get away with it. History tells us that leaders have always told lies, indeed that it is an almost inseparable part of the job, but there seems to be a sense that this occurs to an unprecedented extent today, and that no one is immune from it, with even the apparently unimpeachable Jeremy Corbyn standing accused of it during the fracas dubbed ‘Traingate’. The accessibility…

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