Photoworks Annual Issue 20

In response to a shifting culture, and changes to the ways photography is produced and shared, we produce Photoworks Annual every year.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the preview of Jerwood Encounters: Family Politics, curated by Photoworks, 5 November at Jerwood Space, London, alongside the first Photoworks Annual.

Francis Galton’s composite photographs combined portraits of individuals drawn from particular groups in an effort to reveal physical similarities they shared. The project was premised on the belief that ‘moral and intellectual faculties’ could be read from a close study of facial features. Ben Burbridge returns to Galton’s composite photographs of families, to consider how the social relations involved in their production and distribution provide a window onto issues around class and identity in Victorian culture.

For Photoworks Annual Issue 20, Susan Bright, curator of Home Truths, explores prescriptive models of motherhood peddled by tabloid media. What are the implications for our understanding of motherhood and can contemporary art provide a critical counterpoint to mainstream representations?