Lecture Room 105
30 Years of Photoworks
Diane Smyth, editor of the publication, will be in conversation with participating artists Mohamed Hassan and Johnny Pitts joined by book designers Jane & Jeremy.
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 its critical initiatives with schools and communities. It also takes a trip through photography’s archives with the Desert Island Pics, and cutting-edge thinkers on where the next 30 years will take image-making. 30 Years of Photoworks is edited by Diane Smyth and designed by Jane & Jeremy.
Diane Smyth is the editor of BJP, returning for a second stint on staff in 2023, after 15 years on the team until 2019. She also edits the Photoworks Annual, and has written for The Guardian, FT Weekend Magazine, Aperture, FOAM, and Apollo, plus catalogues and monographs. Diane lectures in photography history and theory at the London College of Communications, and has curated exhibitions for The Photographers Gallery and Lianzhou Foto Festival.
Jane & Jeremy, the designers of Photoworks Annual 32 : 30 Years of Photoworks, established in 2006 they are an independent publisher and design studio located in Brighton, the UK. The work with new & upcoming creatives as well as established artists to produce limited edition books with an emphasis on creating a crafted and considered object that reflects the individual artist in the parameters of the bookform.
Johnny Pitts is a photographer, writer, and broadcaster. The founder of the online journal Afropean.com and author of Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, Pitts spent more than a decade documenting the Black experience in Europe, amassing an archive of over 100,000 images. In 2021, Pitts won the inaugural
Mohamed Hassan is a Welsh Egyptian artist whose photographic practice focuses on identity and belonging. His work examines lived experiences of people marginalised through structural inequalities and draws on personal autobiographical elements. Hassan holds a First Class Honours degree in Photography and is pursuing an MA in Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales. He has exhibited widely across Wales, the UK and internationally.
