Privacy Policy

Photoworks understands the importance of upholding your privacy and safeguarding your personal data. We will use information about you only in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998, General Data Protection Regulations 2018 and other relevant legislation and regulations. Please email any questions or comments to info@photoworks.org.uk. Our postal address is:  Photoworks 28 Kensington St …

Listen: Photoworks Desert Island Pics with Jeremy Deller

Continuing our Desert Island Pics talks series with audio from 2014, Jeremy Deller discussed the eight photographs he’d take with him to a desert island. Loosely following the format of Radio 4′s Desert Island Discs, our regular host, Stephen Bull discussed Jeremy’s selections with him and discover how they reflect his life and career.

Listen: Desert Island Pics with Martin Barnes

Which eight photos would you take with you to a desert island? Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs, Victoria & Albert Museum, reveals his choices to our regular host Stephen Bull and discusses how they reflect his life and career.

Desert Island Pics with Jeremy Deller

Continuing our Desert Island Pics talks series, Jeremy Deller discusses the eight photographs he’d take with him to a desert island. Loosely following the format of Radio 4′s Desert Island Discs, our regular host, Stephen Bull will discuss Jeremy’s selections with him and discover how they reflect his life and career.

Listen: Desert Island Pics with Alison Jackson

Loosely following the format of Desert Island Discs, this talk took place in January at London Art Fair 2014 and saw Alison choose the eight photographs she’d take with her to a desert island. She discussed the thoughts behind her choices with Stephen Bull.

Desert Island Pics with Sean O’Hagan

The Guardian’s photography writer Sean O’Hagan chooses eight photographs to take with him to a virtual desert island. Stephen Bull (Photography Course Leader, University for the Creative Arts), discusses Sean’s choices with him and examines how they reflect his life and career.

Desert Island Pics

As part of Photoworks Desert Island Pics series, we keep an online archive of our events, where we ask interesting people including photographers, writers and curators about their favourite photographs and how they reflect their life and career.

Watch: Desert Island Pics with Peter Fraser

Fresh from a Tate St Ives’ retrospective of his thirty-year career, Peter Fraser discussed his choices with Stephen Bull (Photography Course Leader, University for the Creative Arts) in a format that loosely follows Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.

Policies

Environmental Policy Photoworks is dedicated to enabling participation in photography, the most democratic medium of our contemporary visual culture. We do this by connecting outstanding artists with diverse audiences through an innovative range of projects, events and platforms. Collaboration is central to our work, making us an agile organisation, able to deliver projects at local, …

Returns Policy

Refunds and Returns You have the right to cancel your order within seven days of receiving your items. We will refund cancelled orders in full as soon as we have received your returned items in their original condition. We will not refund postage and packaging costs, or pay for the costs of returning your order. …

Photoworks at Photobook Bristol

We’ll be heading to Photobook Bristol, 6-8 June 2014, showing a selection of our rare and signed publications, and presenting another installment in our Desert Island Pics talks series.

Showcase: Annabel Elgar

‘Noon in the Desert’, the photographic series by Annabel Elgar, examines nuclear weapons test sites from the 1950s, drawing on the test procedures for inspiration.

Thank you

Thank you for being a Photoworks Member The continued support of our Members is very important to us. Your membership will remain active and we will automatically collect payment via PayPal once a year, unless you choose to cancel.   Let’s keep in touch Emails to Photoworks Members We’ll use the email associated with your …

Image Migration

I provided the image in the poster for the 2007 Globale film festival in Berlin. It depicts burning boats, initially built by illegalised migrants hoping to reach the Canary Islands before being destroyed by the Moroccan police once they had captured them.

Showcase: Oded Balilty

Photographer, Oded Balilty shares his series ‘Glass Mountains’ looking at the junkyard of Israel’s only glass container factory in the heart of Israel’s desert.

Showcase: Giulia Parlato

Selected as a Photoworks Award runner up, 2016 LCC photography graduate Giulia Parlato recreates a mythical narrative for her fictional characters to navigate.

Instagram Takeover: Rhiannon Adam

Rhiannon Adam was born in Co. Cork, Ireland in the 80s. She studied Art and Design at Central Saint Martins before embracing Nabokov, banned books and nonsense poetry while studying English at the University of Cambridge. Adams is our next Instagram takeover on our account.

30 Years of Photoworks

An organisation 30 years – and more – in the making, Photoworks has spent three decades supporting artists and individuals creating, curating, engaging with, developing, and thinking about images across the UK and far beyond. Photoworks Annual 32 celebrates this work, including image-makers from the organisation’s past and present, an in-depth history, and insights into …

Photoworks Friends

Photoworks Friends is for anyone who wants to learn and be a part of the contemporary photography sector. We are a globally recognised charity proud to offer an engaging, provocative, and insightful year-round programme. By becoming a Friend your annual contribution will also directly support our programme and fund opportunities for artists. Last year, the scheme …

30 Years of Photoworks

Photoworks Annual 32 An organisation 30 years – and more – in the making, Photoworks has spent three decades supporting artists and individuals creating, curating, engaging with, developing, and thinking about images across the UK and far beyond. Photoworks Annual 32 celebrates this work, including image-makers from the organisation’s past and present, an in-depth history, …

TALK
Launch of Photoworks Annual 32

Diane Smyth, editor of the publication, will be in conversation with participating artists Mohamed Hassan and Johnny Pitts joined by book designers Jane & Jeremy.

Newsletter

Sign up to the newsletter Keep up to date with exhibitions, events, opportunities and our online magazine Photography+, as well as ways to learn more about how to get involved with and support our work. Our Privacy Policy explains how we use your data and how you can opt out. Follow us on Instagram, Twitter …

Hidden Narratives Residency

For this residency, the Royal Geographical Society, in partnership with Photoworks and the Italian Cultural Institute in London are seeking Italian photographers, with an interest in and focus on archives and archive research. In this opportunity, artists are invited to immerse themselves in the historic collections of the Royal Geographical Society and engage with materials …

Terms & Conditions

Photoworks is a registered charity (1053208) and company limited by guarantee (03043169). By using and/or visiting the Photoworks website you agree to these terms and conditions. Disclaimer Photoworks has tried to ensure that the contents and information we provide on our websites and newsletters are accurate at the time of posting. However, we cannot guarantee …

Olivia Arthur The Citizen Hotel, 2016

Giclée print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Pearl From an edition of 100 numbered and signed on the reverse Image size: 14 x 11 inches Paper size: 16 x 13 inches Unframed £150 + p&p (Photoworks Members £120 + p&p) Every purchase from our shop directly supports our programme. By purchasing a Photoworks print, you are …

Interview: Incoming by Richard Mosse

Richard Mosse talks about his latest project, Incoming, which uses a weapons-grade camera to photograph refugees and migrants as they journey across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

England’s New Lenses: Shortlist

England’s New Lenses Untold Heritage, 2020 Untold Heritage is part of England’s New Lenses, a partnership project with English Heritage through Shout Out Loud. Untold Heritage invited 13 – 25 year olds across England to explore their own sense of heritage through photography this summer. Young people were asked to share with us the stories …

Showcase: Marianne Bjørnmyr

Marianne Bjørnmyr series ‘An Authentic Relation’ looks at a diary found on the barren and desolate South-Atlantic island of Ascension in 1726.

Yshao Lin

Hujiang is a remote island close to the border of China; from the beginning of the 20th century many people illegally sailed from Hujiang along the Pacific, looking for opportunities elsewhere and, after 1980, to escape the one-child policy. Many of these migrants were forced to leave behind babies and young children, cared for by …

Showcase: Alexandra Uhart

Alexandra Uhart was awarded the first place Photoworks Prize at the 2015 London College of Communication Photography Degree Show for her project Somewhere Here.

Interview: Gilane Tawadros

In this exclusive interview for Photoworks magazine from Issue 7, Julian Stallabrass talks to Gilane Tawadros about ideas and motivations which shaped the 2006 edition of the Photo Biennial.

Peter Fraser: Oxford University Residency

In the autumn at the age of nineteen, I arrived at Manchester Polytechnic to study photography, having had an unnerving three months previously studying Civil Engineering at Hatfield Polytechnic and discovering that it wasn’t for me.

Adam Curtis: Dystopian Dialectics

‘Today we are people who know better,’ the American artist Sam Green tells us in a recent performance of his Utopia in Four Movements, ‘and that’s both a wonderful and terrible thing.’

EXHIBITION
Photobook as Narrator

In this photobook exhibition Danit Ariel, Photoworks Curator, looks at the form of the photobook as a narrator, or a medium in and of itself.

Marilene Ribeiro
Image Gallery

Marilene’s practice is focused on the environmental and the Human Rights agendas, with a decolonial gaze from the Global South. Her projects are engaged in the political agency of photography and in the role of image-based media in society. Open Fire What is the future of our natural landscapes? What is the future of our …

Growing a second skin during Lockdown

Interview by Nicola Jeffs, Photoworks. Lucia Pizzani (born 1975) is a Venezuelan artist based in London. Her work addresses ideas of gender, body and nature, and incorporates a mixture of photography, performance, installation, sculpture and video. Drawing on references and ideas from the Surrealists and the body art of the 1970s, as well as practices …

Ideas on Talent: Frances F. Denny

U.S based photographer, Frances F. Denny speaks about her series and publication, ‘Let Virtue Be Your Guide’ and latest works, ‘Pink Crush’ as part of our Ideas on Talent series.

Showcase: Giovanna Petrocchi

With this showcase we look at the series ‘Lanzarote’ by Giovanna Petrocchi – a constructed world encouraging reflections on the meaning of landscape.

Retracing the Existent

Oluwatobiloba Ajayi, 24 October 2025 Oluwatobiloba Ajayi was commissioned as a writer-in-residence at Aspex Portsmouth to develop a text in response to Traces of the Non-Existent, the Spring 2025 exhibition at Aspex Portsmouth by multidisciplinary artist Ebun Sodipo. This residency and its outcome are presented as part of the Photoworks Photography Champions programme, and published …

Blog post: Photoworks Summit

  the thing about festivals, the thing about photography, the thing about photobooks, the thing about placemaking, the thing about survival, the thing about care, the thing about exhibitions, the thing about sustainability, the thing about access, the thing about the thing, the thing about ideas, the thing about the climate, the thing about representation, …

About

Photoworks is the UK’s leading development agency dedicated to photography.

Nina Berman: Homeland Insecurities

Specific events mark generations and eras. If you’re an adult American today, you can recall where you were and what you were doing when the jets hit the World Trade Center because it changed your world forever.

Critical Pulse:
The Cultural Sector
After Covid

Critical Pulse invites you to reflect on your position and needs in the current art landscape. Explore your existence in our immediate creative ecosystem by generating text and image-based responses to the selected questions by University of Sussex alumni as part of the Sussex Festival of Ideas. What are the possibilities for the art sector? …

Showcase: Martin Seeds

Recent 2016 University of Brighton MA Photography graduate Martin Seeds looks at the role of the Northern Ireland Assembly using the natural landscape as metaphor for the fragile political landscape.

#1 Europe: Photochat

Leading on from our Open Forum events during Brighton Photo Biennial 2018, we asked artist Nana Varveropoulou back to kick off our Instagram photochats. As part of our issue #1 Europe, photochats are conversations through images. Featuring Nana Varveropoulou and System of Systems (Danae Io, Rebecca Glyn-Blanco and Maria McLintock).

Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship
Artist Announcement

Photoworks is pleased to announce Nicholas J.R. White as the recipient of the 2025 Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship. Now in its third edition, the Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship is a biennial opportunity for mid-career artists to create and exhibit a new body of work. Over the course of the next year, White will develop a new body of work, …

Shipping

Shipping policy and collections  We usually try to ship orders within two working days, either by Royal Mail or by courier (generally Interparcel UPS). Please note that we are a small team and at busy times we may take a little longer to fulfil your order. If you would prefer to collect your order in …

On Carrying

A resource exploring representation, gender roles and stereotypes through the work of Pixy Liao.

Photoworks X University of Sussex

Critical Pulse – UnderExposed 9 November – 8 December 2021 Critical Pulse is a commissioned work by the collective UnderExposed. It is the outcome of a six-month project initiated by the Sussex Festival of Ideas and Photoworks. In June 2021, a panel of curators, directors and arts consultants came together to discuss what lay ahead …

Archive Noise

In the opinion of most observers, the process of political transition in Spain was a model of its kind.

Ideas on Talent: Andrea Grützner

Recent ING Unseen Talent Award winner, Andrea Grützner features on our Ideas on Talent series. We discuss how she came to photography, her approach to spaces and the difference between public and private.

Showcase: Ian Flanders

Ian Flanders’ series ‘By The River’ was selected from our call for entries for our upcoming Annual on ‘Women’.

In conversation with Rene Matić

What responsibility does a photographer have towards the people they show? And are images fundamentally objectifying? Rene Matić is a London-based artist and writer whose practice spans photography, film, and sculpture, converging in a meeting place they describe as ‘rude(ness)’, or an evidencing and honouring of the in-between. Photoworks assistant curator Danit Ariel met with …

Setting the Record Straight

How Vernacular Photography Both Confronts and Repairs Gaps in Archives By Laura Havlin, 12 December 2025 Post War Manchester © Shirley Anne Fyffe / British Culture Archive Photographic archives serve as collective memories, showcasing what the world, a place, or an event was like. But like memory itself, they can be deceiving. There can be …

From Mineral to Pixel

A resource inviting students to engage critically with the technologies behind digital image making. Introduction Images surround our daily lives, but what’s involved in getting these images in front of our eyes, the technology that brings photography to our screens? Do you always need a camera, a human even, to create an image? What are …

Sara Hodges, on the Fragmentation of Averageness

Carolina Semprucci, 06 December 2024 General outrage regarding Meta’s small print enabling AI training from public posts on Instagram and Facebook has recently reignited debate about the lack of transparency surrounding data collection. Although Meta confirmed that re-sharing the viral post objecting to the training was never a valid opt-out method, the ease with which …

Queer History Now: The Story So Far

Queer History Now is an LGBTQ+ youth group dedicated to responding to queer histories through heritage and creative skills. The collective has brought together young people with different interests and backgrounds who have developed a shared ethos for encountering, producing and challenging queer history.  The group built a visual language using a broad range of …

Laia Abril

Written by Fiona Rogers Throughout her career, Catalonian photographer Laia Abril has been visualising the unimaginable and creating one of the most important records of our time; a photographic history of misogyny and its ongoing impact on the lives of women and girls. In her powerful three-part exploration entitled A History of Misogyny, Abril interrogates …

Adjoa Armah: saman archive

Saman archive started as a collection of negatives taken by professional photographers in Ghana but, says founder Adjoa Armah, the project is much more than a picture library. Taking in many other aspects of Ghanaian culture, it also encompasses her diasporic relationship with the country, and how we think of and create archives. Photography+ writer in residence …

Photoworks X at Peckham 24, May 2019

Dance is a universal language of expression. We dance alone, in the privacy of our own homes; we dance together, in pairs and in groups, forming communities based on shared likes and experiences. Photoworks X at Peckham 24 explored the intersection between dance, music and movement through contemporary photography, performance and video, celebrating how these …

New Writing: Answering the Question: What Makes a Good Photograph?

This is a question that resounds throughout the history of photography. When Robert Frank first published The Americans, one of the touchstones of modern photography, it was greeted with dismay and derision by many critics including the photographer and editor of Aperture magazine, Minor White, who damned it as , “Utterly misleading! A degradation of a nation!”

Inside Casa Susanna

Photographs taken in secret by cross-dressers in the 1950s and 60 are now being widely published and shown: curator and editor Isabelle Bonnet has pondered the ethics for and against showing their images, finds Diane Smyth. © Art Gallery of Ontario Andrea Susan (attributed to), Photo shoot with Lili, Wilma, and friends, Casa Susanna (detail), …

Tee Corinne: Kaleidoscopic Erotica

Images by Tee Corinne Text by Charlotte Flint In the spring of 1978, American photographer Tee Corinne began working on her remarkable photobook, Yantras of Womanlove: Diagrams of Energy. Following a profound heartbreak, Corinne described how she ‘began to have waking dreams about this book. It became like a lover for me through one of …

Face (Re)Cognition

Faces are funny things. They are inordinately plastic and expressive, constantly changing according to our health, attitudes and moods—brightening and darkening, lifting and drooping, opening and closing—and always, inexorably in the process of ageing, whatever makeup or makeover manoeuvres we try to pull off.

Laia Abril, A History of Misogony, Chapter two: On Rape and Institutional Failure

In partnership with the V&A’s Parasol Foundation Women in Photography Project, we are excited to announce the first UK exhibition of Laia Abril’s, A History of Misogyny, Chapter two: On Rape and Institutional Failure, at the Copeland Gallery in Peckham, London. A visual history of misogyny spanning over 2000 years—focusing on the pervasion of rape in societies around the …

Showcase: Rebecca Soliman

Selected as one of the ten showcases from the Annual submission entry ‘Women’, Rebecca Soliman explores what it is to be a member from the territory of Bedouin, Egypt; focussing on what it means to be a Bedouin woman in a land full of crime and violence.

Instagram Takeover: Anouk Kruithof

Anouk Kruithof’s work has been included in group exhibitions at renowned institutions such as FOAM, the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and this week, she will take over our platform to share her work.

Felicity Hammond

Hidden Gems, 2022 Felicity Hammond’s large-scale collage transports us to futuristic fiery orange scenery. It is reminiscent of apocalyptic images, a run-down construction site in an unknown future. No organic materials can be found; everything needs to be covered. The extracts of blue and orange cleaning products and the silver minerals reinforce the impression that …

Massimiliano Corteselli

“And thus, in me one sees the law of counter-penalty,” writes Massimiliano Cortesellli in the introduction to Contrapasso. The phrase comes from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, which starts with the author taking a journey through hell with the Roman poet Virgil, meeting the deceased. These people are being punished according to their sins, …

From My Skull

What do Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Alexander von Humboldt, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, Gertrude Stein, Upton Sinclair, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot have in common?

Heads in a Box

By Iain Boal On September 11, 2001 Gary Schroen had just enrolled in the CIA’s ‘retirement transition program’. One week later, the former station chief in Kabul and Islamabad was on a plane to Afghanistan, leading a six-man assassination team in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and his general staff.

Zoe Childerley: Beneath the Waves, 2018-2019

Vast environmental panoramas have been a part of Zoe Childerley’s practice for some time, cataloguing people and their landscapes from the Mojave desert to the Scottish borders. She has travelled far afield, immersing herself with rural communities to create bodies of photographic work made, often using mixed media, over periods of time. For  Beneath the …

Dignified Deaths, Abject Acts

A review of Mandy Barker’s STILL (FFS) Written by Ricardo Reverón Blanco. ‘Dignified,’ ‘harrowing,’ and ‘inquisitive’ are the words that come to mind when encountering Mandy Barker’s newest body of work, STILL (FFS). Joining scientists on Lord Howe Island—600 kilometres off the coast of New South Wales in the Tasman Sea—in April 2019, Barker began …

Nadia Huggins on Freedom, the Ocean, and Re-Presenting the Caribbean

Want to hear more from Nadia Huggins? Watch below an interview between Editor Nisha Eswaran and artist Nadia Huggins where she shares insights into her practice, motivations and much more:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4EYDHxs_54   Nadia Huggins was born in Trinidad and Tobago and grew up in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where she is currently based. A …

Interview: Nadav Kander

Nadav Kander discusses his latest series ‘Dark Line – The Thames Estuary’ showing at Flowers Gallery, London, December 2017.

Shiraz Bayjoo: Searching for Libertalia

By Shoair Mavlian, Photoworks. Combining photography, painting, video and installation Shiraz Bayjoo’s work is multi layered, providing the viewer with a window into complex past histories. His research-based practice often evolves from deep investigations into the legaceys of empire and colonialism. Having made context specific works about his native Mauritius, a space of Afro-Asian hybridity, …

New Writing: Seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary

I have always been fascinated by the work of Diane Arbus. Following several visits to the groundbreaking show Revelations at the V&A, the UK’s first comprehensive survey of her life and work, Arbus’s original approach to photography confirmed for me that the power of her vision remains embedded in her photos.

Hudda Khaireh

Black looks? Capturing the (de)colonial in the everyday Hudda Khaireh Public monuments function as technologies of memorialising, mnemonic devices that commemorate national narratives. Increasingly, they have also been sites of intense scrutiny, as the histories these monuments commemorate the bodies they venerate – generally white male military and merchant figures – have been criticised for …

Kill Heroes

Rui Lan in Conversation with Diane Smyth, 06 December 2024 DS: How did you get into photography and film? RL: For my BA I moved to Beijing and studied finance, but after I graduated I went to an exhibition by Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe and found myself caught by his work. Previously, I didn’t know …

Photoworks X Premio Luigi Ghirri: Forest Residency

Dalby Forest Residency, Forestry England Photoworks and Giovane Fotografia Italiana | Premio Luigi Ghirri (Young Italian Photography | Luigi Ghirri Award) are delighted to announce our selection of Camilla Marrese and Alessandro Truffa as the photographers who will undertake a one-week artists’ residency at Forestry England Dalby Forest, North Yorkshire. Alessandro Truffa (Cuorgnè, Turin, 1996) …

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