Issue 51 - Contents

Guided by Mark Sealy’s artistic direction, the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg brings together 279 international artists across 11 exhibitions throughout the city, centred on the theme Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other. Drawing on the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, bell hooks and others, the festival reimagines photography as an ethical encounter, inviting viewers to consider alterity, difference and the possibility of a shared future. Visiting the Deichtorhallen, Tim Clark notes the boldness of this approach, observing how love in art and exhibition-making risks smoothing over structural inequalities, yet done right, might prompt us to consider what photography can help us become, rather than simply what it can depict. 

Co-published by Thames & Hudson and V&A, Fiona Rogers’ Cut Out is a 240-page dive into photo collage, photomontage and assemblage, framing the cut as both a technique and a way of thinking. From Lorna Simpson’s cosmic reworking of the pin-up and Helen Chadwick’s visceral blue photocopies to the Surrealist experiments of Claude Cahun and Dora Maar, Rogers traces how artists have pulled photography apart to make it speak in new ways. Anneka French reads Cut Out as a wide-ranging account of feminist image-making, arguing that Rogers connects practices shaped by race, colonialism, climate, and digital technology to a broader challenge to photography’s claims of authority, visibility and possession.

At Fotografiska Berlin, Phillip Toledano’s Edward Trevor: Never Seen the Light appeared to offer a photographic miracle: a lost family archive, a dead father, a box of negatives, and New York in the 1930s and 40s. But Edward Trevor was no forgotten street photographer; the archive was fiction, the images AI-generated. Taking that bait-and-switch as a serious critical provocation rather than a clever gimmick, Mark Durden asks what Toledano's synthetic street scenes actually reveal about authorship, memory, beauty, deception, and the so called ‘post-photographic’ age. What they expose, he suggests, is not the richness of artificial imagination, but a frictionless, overdetermined street photography by numbers. 

Sara Cwynar’s Baby Blue Benzo transforms The Approach into a restless theatre of image capitalism, pairing a 21-minute film with photographs installed in the annexe. Linking the Mercedes-Benz 300SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé and benzodiazepines through archival collage, performance and consumer spectacle, the exhibition examines how images convert value, anxiety and desire into cultural products. Beginning with her own disorienting encounter at the gallery, Gem Fletcher traces the film’s references, rhythms and sonic intensity, positioning Cwynar’s work as both a warning and a form of subliminal education.

Forged over seven years living and volunteering in Ukraine, Wet Ground by British-Iranian artist Aria Shahrokhshahi cuts straight through and beyond the frontlines of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Published by Loose Joints, Shahrokhshahi’s introspective black and white photographs reveal the continuities of everyday life, vibrant subcultures and the ever-shifting identities of those weathering relentless violence and precarious futures. In conversation with Nathan Leigh Taylor, he reflects on his time as a humanitarian volunteer, surviving a missile strike and the challenge of expressing experiences beyond the familiar language of war photography.

The late Martin Parr spent 50 years photographing the rituals of leisure, excess and consumption. A new retrospective at Jeu de Paume, following Parr’s passing last year, reveals a photographer whose corrosive humour and saturated colour made him both chronicler and critic of late capitalism. In his review, Mark Durden writes about Martin Parr’s abrasive approach, the laughable absurdities of our collective behaviour and the fleeting instances in which the comic mask slips.

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Curating & Repair

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Features

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