In the latest issue of British Journal of Photography, we ruminate on the portrait. We consider the fraught history of portrait photography through the work of Sasha Huber, whose image graces this issue’s cover. The original images of Jack and Drana were taken in 1850, commissioned by Louis Agassiz. These photographs, along with portraits of five other people from their community, came to be recognised as the first-known photographs of enslaved individuals. Huber, a Swiss-Haitian artist, has used metal staples to adorn the images in attire inspired by the clothing worn by well-known abolitionists at the time. This act of redressing seeks to heal colonial wounds. The work is currently on show at Autograph in London; more on that story inside the issue.
Also featured are new works from Kalpesh Lathigra, Eva O’Leary, Aneesa Dawoojee, Jialin Yan, Genesis Báez and Anne Vetter. The late William Klein is remembered by the words of David Campany. And Brett Rogers, the departing director of The Photographers’ Gallery, London, is our Any Answers.
Elsewhere, we visit the bubble-wrapped studio of Neo Matloga in Amsterdam, and find out about the censorship and resource challenges faced by the photography community in Vietnam. We are on location in Rio with photographer Igor Furtado. And, in our Intelligence section, curator Brian Piper unpacks the under-represented history of Black American studio photography, plus there’s our pick of the best books to look out for this winter.
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178 pgs, 28 × 21 cm, Softover, 2022,
