In Jeanne: A Melodrama Sulter investigates the presence and eventual absence of Jeanne Duval who is best-known as the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s partner and muse. Sulter wrote: “My ongoing visual fascination with Jeanne Duval began in 1988 with a visceral response to a Nadar photograph captioned Unknown Woman. There she stared at me willing me to give her a name, an identity, a voice. So for over a decade I have been image making with her in mind.” The series Syrcas engages with broader themes that surround the removal of black figures from European histories and those of the genocide of black Europeans during the Holocaust in particular.

Both these bodies of work were made using collage – a technique that is closely associated with feminist artists’ work of the twentieth century. Sulter’s collages are distinct in their use of art-historical source material alongside photographic images and printed ephemera. In Syrcas Sulter juxtaposes old master paintings from the Western cannon alongside African art objects. These are overlaid onto vintage postcards of picturesque, unspecified Alpine landscapes. She wrote 'I felt that the piece should resemble something more like a diary. I’d been to see Anne Frank’s house and liked the diary, but I wanted something more direct, more visual, and, ultimately, more personal. Then I remembered sticking pictures into a scrap-book as a child, and I saw that this was the perfect way of juxtaposing images to present the historical problems surrounding the presence of black people in Germany.'

For Sulter the original collaged work was not the end point of her practise as these small hand-made pieces were then photographed and printed at a larger scale. This gesture, making work that could hang alongside old master paintings, was crucial as Sulter sought to create art that would have a presence within the traditional museums spaces that had previously excluded work by black women artists. Sulter stated: ‘It’s important for me … as a black woman artist, to put black women back in the centre of the frame – both literally within the photographic image, but also within the cultural institutions where our work operates.’

Curated by Katy Barron

ABOUT THE HYMAN COLLECTION

The Hyman Collection is the private collection of Claire and James Hyman. It began in 1996 and consists of over three thousand artworks, from across the world, in all media. In the last fifteen years the collection has focused on international photography from its origins to the present. In particular, the Hyman Collection seeks to support and promote British photography through acquisitions, commissions, loans and philanthropy. The collection includes artists working in photography as well as documentary photographers and holds historic as well as contemporary photographs. It has an equal number of works by male and female artists and seeks, especially, to support the work of contemporary women working with photography.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jo Spence (1934 – 1992) was a British photographer, writer, and photo therapist. A self-described socialist feminist cultural worker, Spence is one of the key figures in British art of the last half century. Her activism is evident from the selected works which emphasise her use of signs and writing within her work to convey her messages. 

Although she began her career in commercial photography she refocused her efforts towards politicised documentary photography in the 1970s, returning to Socialist and Feminist themes throughout her life. She used the self-portrait to document her fight with breast cancer and to subvert the notion of an idealised female form and in projects entitled ‘photo therapy’ in which she employed photography to work through psychological concerns. Spence’s work was to influence a younger generation of female artists and Heather Ayepong references her directly when talking about Too Many Blackamoors. 

The Highest Product of Capitalism (after John Heartfield), made in 1979 is one of Spence’s most celebrated pictures. She is seen standing in front of a shop window holding a sign that reads “I’ll Take (Almost) Any Work.” - a direct reference to a photomontage made in 1932 by the Dada artist John Heartfield. In his work a male figure stands in front of an image of a woman in an opulent wedding dress. He wears a sign declaring “Any work accepted”. Spence subverts Heartfeld’s image of heterosexual norms by placing herself in male clothing, thus reflecting on women’s role within the workplace and her own role as a commercial photographer. A second image made at the same time shows Spence holding a placard, which declares “The Right to Work”. Again, she is referring to Heartfield’s political photomontages but also to the high unemployment at the time in the UK and the newly formed Socialist Workers Party’s Right to Work campaign. 

Spence’s practise continued to evolve as she confronted breast cancer and examined her relationship to her working-class background and her mother’s role in her upbringing. The resulting works, characteristically made with the assistance of a collaborator, are often multi-part and reveal her performative side as she enacts events, roles and traumas from her life. In her 1986 autobiography Putting Myself in the Picture Spence writes that, "Through photo therapy, I was able to explore how I felt about my powerlessness as a patient, my relationship to doctors and nurses, my infantilisation whilst being managed and 'processed' within a state institution, and my memories of my parents." 

The colour prints made around 1987 are a part of her Photo Therapy series although they are also titled Cultural Capital? thus connecting back to the earlier black and white images that refer to Heartfield’s work. Spence also titled these images Middle Class Values Make Me Sick which refers to her on-going questioning of her status and position in society. Her on-going use of hand-written text within the image continues to point the viewer towards her intentions and it is notable that she writes on herself as well as on the walls and on signs. These works make it clear that Spence was wrestling with the idea of Cultural Capital, as coined by Pierre Bourdieu in the 1970s, and questioning her status as an educated working class woman and the shame that she felt about her origins whilst being equally horrified at the thought of being middle class.

Alexis Hunter (1948 – 2014) was a photographer and painter whose work was central to the development of radical feminist art in England in the 1970s. Much of her work challenged the use of women in advertising, often using photo sequences to develop a cinematic narrative to her series. She wrote “I was interested in exploring the fault lines between the feminist concept of Patriarchy and the ways in which the media world viewed men. … I wanted to authenticate a form of art that incorporated feminist theory - images and presentation - that insisted on the female identity of the artist. These photographs produced as narrative sequences were called Approach to Fear, and investigated the value of feminism in conquering conventional female fears, such as technophobia, rape, grief, and objectified male sexual power.”

A Young Polynesian Considers Cultural Imperialism Before She Goes to the Disco is a photographic narrative sequence, the most iconic of Hunter's output. Over a series of twelve closely-cropped vignettes made using the Xerox machine, the artist portrays a young woman trying on jewellery. Using the bright saturated colour of commercial advertising, Hunter seeks to evoke the tropes of consumerism - yet unlike the smiling, self-satisfied models of commercial advertising, the subject is sullen and distrustful. Exploring the intersection between racial and cultural identities, this work is a historical document of the passions and tensions of activist art.

Lucy Lippard, the eminent feminist art writer writes about this work: "In A Young Polynesian Considers Cultural Imperialism Before She Goes to the Disco, … one would not know without an explanatory caption that a white hand was offering a Maori girl some jewelry to go out in, and the girl was throwing it back at the donor. The long title is a shortcut to the content; the form -- the harshly contrasting colour and confrontational closeups - gives a similar clue. But the facts outlined above are not accessible. … As a Colonist who is also a woman artist and an outsider to the dominant value system, Hunter identifies with the Maori woman."

Heather Agyepong is a visual artist and performer. Her work is concerned with mental health and well-being, activism, the diaspora and the archive. She often uses the technique of re-imagination to engage with communities of interest and the self as the central focus within the image. She has explained: 

"I am a visual artist and performer who is based in in London. My work is concerned with mental health and wellbeing, activism, the diaspora and the archive. Through lens-based and performance practices, I aim to cultivate a cathartic experience for myself and the viewer. I use the technique of re-imagination to engage with communities of interest and the self as a central focus within the image."

Agyepong’s series Too Many Blackamoor’s addresses a black presence in British history and combines the language of the nineteenth century carte de visite with contemporary elements such as Peter Fryer’s book Staying Power. The History of Black People in Britain. Agyepong writes that “The work was inspired by a 19th century Carte-de-visite of Lady Sarah Forbes Bonetta. Sarah was the West African adopted goddaughter of Queen Victoria who came to live in England at a young age. The images are based on my own personal experiences as a young black woman, dealing with the macro and micro traumas of racism encountered while travelling around European countries. The format was based around Rosy Martin and Jo Spence's 'Re-enactment Phototherapy'. Too Many Blackamoors aims to challenge the 'strong, independent, black female' narrative that can burden and often entrap black women. With Sarah as my template, the project attempts to illustrate the effects of such perceptual limitations whilst exploring my own internal conflicts of falling short from such mainstream ideals.”

Whilst the series refers visually to nineteenth-century photographs, the title is taken from an open letter by Queen Elizabeth I, written in 1596 in which she instructs mayors and town sheriffs across England regarding “blackamoors… there are already too many here…. therefore those kind of people should be expelled from the land…”. Agyepong reminds the viewer that discrimination against black people in the Diaspora had its origins long before the Victorian era.

Eliza Hatch is a London-based photographer and activist. Since 2017 she has been at work on Cheer Up Luv, an extensive international photojournalism project which documents women and non-binary people who have experienced sexual harassment on any scale in a public setting. A photograph and interview series that twins portraits with the subject's own accounts of facing everyday sexual harassment, Cheer Up Luv combines photography with journalism, activism and social media in order to record what has gone ignored. The project has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, New York, as part of its Projected series. Hatch empowers her portrait subjects by including alongside each work a text with their testimony. The work can be accessed via Instagram and the website, designed as spaces where people can collectively share their stories and in doing so raise awareness: @cheerupluv, www.cheerupluv.com. 

Artist Statement

"Cheer Up Luv is a platform for women and marginalised gender’s voices to be heard, and to take ownership of experiences that were once out of their control. The amount of sexual harassment that’s experienced in public is vast, and the stories unfortunately cover a wide range of things. They range from being flashed at, to being verbally assaulted and even physically abused, all taking place in a public setting. By taking these photographs and publishing these stories, my aims are to combat sexual harassment, reclaim spaces and shed some light on an issue that is rarely spoken about.

Bindi Vora is a British-Indian contemporary photographic artist, curator and lecturer. Her practice utilises various analogue processes, often taking inspiration from her everyday surroundings, which include her personal archive. She is interested in the way materials or ephemera can be reused or recycled to create new narratives but can be traced back to other works, almost like interconnected tissues. Her latest series Mountain of Salt (2020-21) combines found photographs with text to wittily comment on the enormous upheavals of the last 18 months and the inequalities and injustices they have exposed. 

As Vora has explained: “Mountain of Salt (2020-21) comprised of found images, appropriated text and digital shape collages - initially conceptualised as a human response to Covid-19 - focuses on the language used over the last year by politicians, journalists and individuals commentating on the pandemic. The series was further punctuated by pledges of reform, hyper-vigilance, and prolonged moments of stillness. Through this work I am interested in how we might reflect on this experience in our individual and collective ways. This work speaks to the dissemination of language and its effect upon us.”

About the artist

Fran Monks is a portrait artist who specialises in celebrating the under-celebrated. Since the pandemic began in 2020, Monks has been making portraits via video chat. These images have been published by the BBC and PBS and acquired by the Science Museum, London and the National Portrait Gallery. To see more portraits in this series please visit www.franmonks.com

About the Blavatnik

The Blavatnik School of Government undertakes teaching, research and engagement in pursuit of a world better led, served and governed. A number of our alumni as well as one of our faculty members, Thomas Hale, are involved in COP26.

Huge thanks to Professor Benito Müller at Oxford Climate Policy for his support on this project.

Born in Suzhou, China, in 1914 to a well-to-do family Sheung Wai-chun, known as Nancy, moved to Hong Kong in the 1940s. A strong, determined, women, she successfully established her own business in construction and architecture. When Hong Kong’s economy fell into recession she had time on her hands and, after seeing an exhibition of European photography in 1958 she turned to it as an amateur. 

As with her professional career, she took it seriously, studying with local photographers, building her own darkroom and entering competitions and exhibitions. She evolved her own style away from the traditional pictorial aesthetic that was common at the time, to one that was contemporary and more in keeping with the mood of the 1960s and 1970s. Her work emphasises strong lines and patterns, and she frequently centres her camera on female subjects.

Nancy was practicing photography when it was dominated by men. Undeterred, she joined the Royal Photographic Society in 1965 and gained her Fellowship in 1971. She regularly exhibited in the RPS’s exhibitions. She joined the Photographic Society of Hong Kong in 1966 where she quickly made her mark becoming its Vice President in the 1970s. She died while printing in her darkroom in 1979.

This new exhibition, especially curated for Photo Oxford, looks at Nancy’s progression from pictorialism to her later work, documenting through her modern approach Hong Kong’s architecture, buildings and landscape.

It has been curated by photographic historian Dr Michael Pritchard, Director of Programmes at the Royal Photographic Society, and with the support of the Estate of Nancy Sheung.

About the Curator

Dr Michael Pritchard is a photographic historian and the Royal Photographic Society’s Director of Programmes. He edits the British photographic history blog and has broadcast and written extensively on photography and its history.

Confucius Institute at Oxford Brookes - Introduction

A non-profit collaboration, the Confucius Institute at Oxford Brookes University (CIOBU) is the first Confucius Institute in the world co-established by a university and a publishing company in China (Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press). Publishing is the specialist focus of CIOBU, making CIOBU a unique presence among all the Confucius Institutes around the globe. In April 2016, CIOBU officially opened its doors and began working toward promoting Chinese language and culture, as well as offering publishing-related activities. CIOBU commits to aiding co-operation between Chinese and UK publishing whilst encouraging Chinese Language Teaching (CLT) or China-related activities.

While making the portraits, Monks also gathered stories. For most, it is the first time they have taken part in a medical trial. They are ordinary people, driven by a desire to do their bit to help save lives and bring an end to repeated lockdowns.

Monks photographed people in a wide range of situations. The old and young, the high-risk and low-risk, those with and without family support. Without their participation in the trials we would be unable to commence mass vaccination programmes in record time-scales.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Fran Monks is a portrait artist who specialises in celebrating the under-celebrated. She often photographs people who are under-represented in order to draw attention to their achievements.

Since the pandemic began in 2020, Monks has been making portraits via video chat. These images have been published by the BBC, PBS, the Guardian, BBC History Magazine, and the British Medical Journal.

Monks' portraits have been acquired by the Science Museum, London and the National Portrait Gallery. Her work can also be currently seen around Oxford in Balliol College Hall, Keble College Hall and the Ashmolean Museum. 

As a child, Chloe Dewe Mathews crossed the River Thames every day on her way to school. She recalls watching the muddy water as it rushed beneath her, pulling great lumps of detritus as it went. In adulthood, after years photographing overseas, she returned to her native river, spending five years exploring its meandering path, from puddling source to great estuary mouth. The resulting series, Thames Log, looks beyond the river’s well-documented landscape to examine the human relationship with this famous watercourse and the ritualistic behaviour it inspires today.

The project focuses on lives that overlap regularly with the river but often go unnoticed— ship spotters cataloguing vessels as they sail through Tilbury, mudlarks sifting the city sludge in pursuit of Roman and Saxon treasure. Far upstream, beyond the tidal ebb and flow, we see a coracle mission, a pagan water ritual and a boat burning ceremony in Oxford. The project not only records happenings along the length of the river but also the exact GPS coordinates, dates, tides, and weather of each event.

The Thames is seen here as a place of exercise, relaxation and reflection, where people watch wildlife from grassy banks and city bridges. For some, it acts as a surrogate, conjuring faraway places and rivers elsewhere – the Volga, the Congo and the Ganges. For others, the Thames represents a point of departure into a new life, as human ashes are scattered into the water, floating downstream towards the open sea.

About the Artist

Chloe Dewe Mathews is an artist, photographer, and filmmaker. Her work is internationally recognised, exhibiting at Tate Modern, Irish Museum of Modern Art and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden; as well as being published widely in newspapers and magazines such as the Guardian, New Yorker, Financial Times and Le Monde. She is the recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, and her work is held in public collections such as the British Council Art Collection, the National Galleries of Scotland and the Irish State Art Collection. Four monographs have been published on her work: Shot at Dawn (Ivorypress, 2014), Caspian: the Elements (Aperture / Peabody Press, 2018), In Search of Frankenstein (Kodoji Press, 2018) and Thames Log (Loose Joints / Martin Parr Foundation, 2021).

‘Catherine, Kiambé, Surya’ is a body of work by French emerging artist Elisa Moris Vai. Her reading of La Quarantaine (1995) and Révolutions (2003), two novels by Nobel Prize-winning writer JMG Le Clézio, set in Mauritius, led to her attachment to three female characters: Catherine, who comes from a French colonial family; Kiambé, a formerly enslaved woman who escaped; and Surya, the grand-daughter of an Indian indentured labourer.

Moris Vai’s work considers the ways in which their lives relate to those of the women who built Mauritius. She went to Mauritius to follow their paths, shooting with an analogue-based, medium-format camera.

Curated by British curator Pelumi Odubanjo, this exhibition is the first solo show of the artist and will propose an immersive design, allowing the viewers to step into the story and imagine a visual storyboard of the lives of the women, revolutionaries and activists who built Mauritius to this present day. 

A text written by Dr Feyereisen, Senior Postdoc Fellow in Postcolonial and French studies (University of Ghent) will accompany the images.

Located at the Maison Française d’Oxford and supported by Fluxus Art Projects and TORCH as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, this exhibition is the result of a vivid French and British cooperation.

About the Artist

Elisa Moris Vai (1988) is a French emerging artist based in Lille (FR) who, working with lens-based media, produces research-driven work,. Her practice is characterized by the inventive use of performative strategies and the intersection of documentary and fiction. History, identity, and social representations are at the core of her work, with a current focus on French colonisation. Moris Vai was awarded the Panel’s choice of the Photo Oxford Open Call 2020 and was shortlisted for the Open 20 Solo Award of Photofringe festival, Brighton.

Her work has been shown in venues across Europe (Noorderlicht festival (NL), Photofringe festival (UK), Ovada Gallery (Oxford, UK) and Les Passerelles art center, Pontaut-Combault (FR)). Her profile has been featured recently in Photomonitor and The Guardian. 

Moris Vai extends her art practice to curating conferences relating to the themes she explores. In 2020-2021 she worked in the UK with Photofringe Festival and Grain Photography Hub.

She has an MA in Performing Arts (Free University of Brussels / Free University of Berlin) and a BA in Photography (EFET School of Photography, Paris). 

About the Curator

Pelumi Odubanjo is a London-based multidisciplinary artist, curator, writer, and researcher. Interested in contemporary vernaculars around image-making, her work is informed by a decolonial black feminist epistemology. Pelumi works with artists, archives, and cultural artefacts to create and explore dialogues across a global African diaspora and unravel historical and contemporary links between the intersectionality of women, migration, and identity as means to disentangle our understandings of archival practice. Pelumi is co-founder of Contakt Collective, a collective of Goldsmith’s University of London postgraduate researchers examining the intersections of power, care, spatiality, & visual culture. Pelumi holds a BA from Newcastle University in Fine Art and Art History, and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from the Visual Cultures Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her writing on contemporary photography, art, and culture has appeared on Magnum Photos, Artillery Magazine, Photoworks UK, and Photo Fringe among others. Her most recent projects include curating and producing for the Tate Exchange at Tate Modern, working as a curator at the Black Cultural Archives, and curating for Brighton Photo Fringe.

Outdoor exhibition locations:

72 Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6HP

Headington Road (Opp Oxford Polytechnic), Oxford OX3 7TS

25-27 Iffley Road, Oxford OX4 1EB

D3 New Road (opp Castle), Oxford OX1 1NF

New Road, Castle Mound, Oxford OX1 1AY

London Road o/s 58 at Latimer Road, Oxford OX3 7PB

About the Exhibition and Talks

As part of the Photo Oxford festival, Hundred Heroines is proud to present Women on Women: Relationships, Identity and Power - Explored Through Photography, a bold collection of work by six contemporary photographers. Images by Anna Fox, Hannah Reyes Morales, Lola Flash, Margaret Courtney-Clarke, María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Zanele Muholi will be located on digital bus stops around Oxford, placing the work of these innovative artists at the heart of everyday life in the city.

In anticipation of the showcase, curator Robert Taylor has expressed excitement at the ‘opportunity to celebrate women in their power, creativity and capacity to love, both as photographers and as their subjects.’ Importantly, the event will highlight the ‘essential, productive relationships between women’ typically neglected by mainstream media, championing intersectionality and amplifying the perspectives of ‘women we tend to see less of because of their age, marginalised social status, race, sexuality or inconvenient attitudes to mainstream values.’ 

Conversation is central to the programme. Two peer-to-peer talks will take place to complement the programme - one between Robert and Anna Fox, concerning her seminal collaboration Pictures of Linda, and another between groundbreaking documentary photographers Paola Paredes and Lola Flash, both renowned for their empathetic exploration of LGBTI+ experience. Taking place online on 23rd October (5PM) and 6th November (5PM) respectively, the talks are a rare opportunity to hear from these global artists simultaneously.

Encompassing themes such as women’s empowerment, mental health, and LGBTQI+ identity, the work offers insightful commentary on vital social issues, while pairing expertly crafted aesthetics with strong conceptual foundations. The exhibition marks a significant attempt to increase the inclusivity of the photographic canon, exemplifying Hundred Heroines’ ongoing mission. 

About the Photographers

Photographer, Anna Fox 

Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Anna Fox (b. 1961, Alton) is one of the most acclaimed British photographers of the past thirty years. 

Inspired by the U.S. ‘New Colourists’ and British documentary tradition, she first gained attention for Work Stations: Office Life in London (1988), a study of office culture in Thatcher’s Britain. Her collaborative projects Country Girls (1996 – 2001) and Pictures of Linda (1983 – 2015) challenge preconceptions about rural life in England, while My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words (1999) and Cockroach Diary (1996 – 99) expose dysfunctional relationships within the family home.

Anna’s solo shows have been seen at the Photographer’s Gallery, London, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, among others. She was shortlisted for the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize in 2010, and is currently working on the research project Fast Forward: Women in Photography, for which she has been awarded a Leverhulme International Networks Grant.

Photographer, Hannah Reyes Morales

Hannah Reyes Morales (b.1990, Manila) is a Filipina documentary photographer and visual storyteller. Dedicated to revealing the gentleness and love within difficult, often violent, situations, Hannah sensitively honours the experiences of the people she portrays. 

Stories of resilience and community are recurrent themes within Hannah’s work. Her challenging series Season of Darkness bears witness to the consequences of the Philippine government’s ‘war on drugs’, highlighting the humanity of the victims, their loved ones, and wider communities. Her current, ongoing project, Roots from Ashes, gives voice to the survivors of a brutal act of violence in a small town north of Manila during World War II.

Hannah is a National Geographic grantee and received the 2020 International Center of Photography (ICP) Infinity Award for Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism. Publications featuring her work include The Washington Post, The New York Times, National Geographic, Al Jazeera and The Photographers’ Guide to Inclusive Photography x Authority Collective.

Photographer, Lola Flash

Working at the forefront of genderqueer visual politics for more than three decades, Lola Flash (b. 1959, New Jersey) has spent her career challenging the stereotypes surrounding gender, race, and sexuality. Her art and activism are profoundly connected, fuelling her commitment to preserving the legacy of LGBTQ+ communities and communities of colour worldwide.  

Lola’s practice is firmly rooted in social justice advocacy and celebrates sexual, racial and cultural difference. In series such as Surmise and Salt, she uses portraiture to challenge stereotypes and interrogate the definition of social norms, offering new ways of seeing which defy misrepresentation. 

In 2011 Lola was awarded an Art Matters grant, allowing her to undertake work in Brazil and London. Most recently, she was Artist-in-Residence at Alice Yard in Trinidad. Lola’s work is included in important public collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), as well as featuring in publications such as Posing Beauty, edited by Deb Willis, which is currently being exhibited across the USA.

Photographer, Margaret Courtney-Clarke 

Margaret Courtney-Clarke (b. 1949, Swakopmund) is a prolific documentary photographer. After studying art and photography in South Africa, she spent the next four decades working as a photographer in Italy, the USA and across Africa.

In 1979, Margaret became persona non grata under the Apartheid laws and renounced her South African citizenship – later returning to South West Africa and asserting her Namibian birthright under the protection of the UN. Throughout her career, Margaret has pursued personal projects in Africa documenting feminine identity. Her dedicated publications include Cry Sadness into the Coming Rain (2018); the acclaimed trilogy on the Art of African Women: Ndebele (2002), African Canvas (1990) and Imazighen (1996), and collaborations with Maya Angelou.

Margaret is a highly acclaimed photographer, with nominations and awards including Deutscher Fotobuchpreis (2018), Germany; the 2018 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award (long listed); and a 2015 Henri Cartier-Bresson (HBC) nomination for her series On Borrowed Time. More than two hundred exhibitions of her photography have been held globally.

Artist, María Magdalena Campos-Pons

María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959, La Vega) is a multidisciplinary artist whose polyglot heritage profoundly influences her practice. Combining diverse media including photography, performance, painting, sculpture, film, and video, her autobiographical work investigates history, memory, gender, and religion, examining their impact upon identity formation.

Through deeply poetic and haunting imagery, Magda evokes stories of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, indigo and sugar plantations, Catholic and Santeria religious practices, and revolutionary uprisings. Often using herself and her Afro-Cuban relatives as subjects, she creates historical narratives that illuminate the spirit of people and places, past and present, and renders universal relevance from personal history and persona.

Magda has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the National Gallery of Canada, among other distinguished institutions. She has participated in the Venice Biennale (twice), the Dakar Biennale, and the Johannesburg Biennial, to name a few, and has presented over thirty solo performances commissioned by institutions including the Guggenheim Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Artist, Zanele Muholi

Zanele Muholi (b. 1972, Umlazi) is a visual activist and photographic artist whose documentation of Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people in South Africa is a visual archive for those who are marginalised. Their work represents the diversity of experiences and perspectives within the community, ensuring their identities are never erased.

While Zanele’s self-portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) explores their own life, the work also explores significant events within South African political history. For example, Thulani II, Parktown (2015) acknowledges the miners killed by police in the 2012 Marikana massacre. Zanele’s activism extends beyond photography; in 2002, they co-founded the Forum of Empowerment of Women, a feminist advocacy organisation for Black lesbians. In 2009, they founded Inkanyiso, a forum for queer visual activist media.

A highly acclaimed photographer, Zanele was shortlisted for the 2015 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for their publication Faces and Phases 2006-14. Zanele is also an educator; they created Photo XP, a mobile school of photography, and are an Honorary Professor at the University of the Arts/Hochschule für Künste Bremen.

Never before-seen images capture the fiery beginnings of the UK women’s liberation movement in a new exhibition of work by activist photographer Sally Fraser. 

On a snowy International Women’s Day in 1971, 4,000 people marched through central London. Inspired by the founding Women's Liberation Conference held in Oxford the previous year, this was the first-ever national demonstration for equal rights and pay for women.

The early history of this movement is celebrated in a fascinating exhibition of photographs by Sally Fraser, who both documented and participated in the protests. Images of Liberation: Sally Fraser’s photography of women’s protest runs as part of Photo Oxford 2021.  It will be shown at the site of Ruskin (now Exeter) College, where the founding conference took place in February 1970.

Sally Fraser’s images capture the genesis of second wave feminism in Britain, at a landmark conference in Oxford and on the capital’s streets, a half-century ago.  The conference attendees include, among others, leading feminist thinkers and activists Sally Alexander, Sue Crockford, Anna Davin, Annie Freud, Selma James, Juliet Mitchell, Sheila Rowbotham, Michelene Wandor and Audrey Wise, later MP for Coventry South West.  The conference creche, run by fathers, shows a youthful Stuart Hall holding a baby.  Busts of ‘great men’ in the Oxford Union are humorously covered by scarves, paper bags and banana skins.  This subversive creativity is further seen on the Women’s March, where women are dressed for a satirical beauty pageant, and a crucified shop dummy is held aloft, draped with articles of women’s oppression.  

The exhibition provides an invaluable record of a key moment in 20th century British radical social history, the launch pad of what Sheila Rowbotham envisaged as 'an entirely new kind of politics'.

About the Artist, Sally Fraser

In the late 1960s Chandan Fraser - then known as Sally Fraser - studied photography at the London College of Printing and became an activist in the city's increasingly politicised scene. She captured images of the emerging movements of which she was part: the huge anti-Vietnam war protests and influential student activism at Hornsey College of Art in 1968.  She joined the Tufnell Park women's group and headed to Oxford in 1970 to photograph the inaugural national women's liberation movement conference.  A year later, she went on the first International Women's Day march through central London.  Some of her images appeared in pioneering journals, notably Black Dwarf and Spare Rib, others featured in the mainstream press, distributed through the Report agency.  Shortly after, Chandan Fraser gave up photography. 'I wanted not to be continuously in the observer position. I wanted to be part of it.' She took up her camera again for last year's gathering in Oxford to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first women's liberation conference. Chandan has never had an exhibition of her work nor a publication reflecting its scope and strength. She lives in France.

Four Corners

Images of Liberation: Sally Fraser’s photography of women’s protest is a Four Corners exhibition, produced in collaboration with Chandan Fraser and Andrew Whitehead. Four Corners is a centre for film and photographic arts, based in East London for nearly 50 years. Our exhibitions explore hidden radical histories of community action and protest, and share stories from the margins that might not otherwise be told.

The ten women priests featured in Dearly Beloved were chosen to represent the wide variety of ministry in the Diocese of Southwark, which embraces south London suburban parishes, prisons, hospitals, and leafy Surrey villages.  They were also chosen to reflect a broad range of backgrounds, circumstances and experiences.  Jim made the work over the course of 9 months in 2018 and 2019, exploring and documenting each of these women’s distinctive ministries through a combination of photographs and interviews.

The exhibition is presented in the Brome chapel in The University Church of St Mary the Virgin.  The exhibition comprises some 32 black and white prints and accompanying text.  Around half of the exhibited prints were not featured in the original Here Am I exhibition and so this new curation, coupled with Vanessa’s use of narrative from the women’s testimonials within the body of the exhibition, makes this a fresh and revealing presentation of ministry.

The exhibition poses questions of not only how we perceive each other, but also highlights some of the challenges and struggles these remarkable women face as they each bring something they firmly believe to be of the greatest importance to their respective communities, their ministry.

Exhibition visitors will also be able to buy the exhibition catalogue that accompanied the original Here Am I exhibition.

About Jim Grover

Jim is an award-winning self-taught British documentary photographer.  His passion is to use images to tell stories that celebrate daily life, communities and traditions, unsung heroes…and to make the unseen seen.  Most of his work is created over the course of many months.

His work has been exhibited in solo shows and covered by national media.  Recent exhibited work includes ‘Of things not seen’ (2016); ‘48 Hours on Clapham High Street’ (2017); ‘Windrush: Portrait of a Generation’ (2018); ‘Here Am I’ (2019); and ‘Covid Tales from Tom’s Bench’ (2020).  He is currently working on two major exhibitions planned for 2022.

Jim teaches documentary photography at the Leica Akademie.

www.jimgroverphotography.com

About Vanessa Winship

Vanessa is an award-winning British photographer who works on long term projects of portrait, landscape, reportage and documentary photography.  These personal projects have been in Britain, Western and Eastern Europe and the USA.  She now shares her time between photography and teaching.  

In 2018 the Barbican Art Gallery in London staged a major solo exhibition of her work, following a major solo exhibition at the Fundacian Mapfre gallery in Madrid.  Her work has also been exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in London and prominently at Rencontres d'Arles in France.  In 2019 Tate Britain acquired a collection of her work.  This October Vanessa will present a new body of work, inspired by her time on the West Coast of Cumbria, as part of the West Coast Photo Festival in Cumbria.

Her books have been widely acclaimed and include Schwarzes Meer (2007), Sweet Nothings (2008), She Dances on Jackson (2013), Vanessa Winship (2016), And Time Folds (2018), and Sete (2019).

Winship has won several prestigious awards: the HCB award from the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation (being the first woman to do so); an Honorary Fellowship at the Royal Photographic Society; and 'Photographer of the Year' at the Sony World Photography Awards.

She is a member of Agence Vu photography agency. 

www.vanessawinship.com

Three large scale digital composites place crowds of people (including the artist) in the same place as the two women, each with a different narrative.  Original photographs sit alongside them, some of which have been disrupted through embroidery and collage, emphasising characters through portraiture.

The process of making the digital pieces was intricate. Search engines were used to find and appropriate contemporary images taken where Milly and Lily had visited. Screenshots, digitally edited and seamlessly blended together were made to look painterly. Props photographed at home were placed in front of people’s faces, in their hands, at their feet - symbolisms of mystery and disguise. (In real time we were all having to adjust to face coverings and everything represented by that.) Some of the masks were made from newspaper cuttings from 2020, and although randomly chosen, words such as ‘pausing’, ’quarantine’ and ‘virus’ are easily visible. The paper itself represents fragility, communication and knowledge.

The project involved research conducted from home during the UK’s first lockdown.  Maps of the regions were examined and re-drawn so that the women’s footsteps could be retraced. Primary and secondary characters in the century old photo album were researched, although it proved almost impossible to trace them effectively.  Vintage postcards sent from Lyme Regis in Dorset and Bouley Bay, Jersey were purchased, with messages on their backs (smooth flight, very few people are here yet, would you like a pair of black elephants, tomorrow will be a rest day), providing inspiration (and the title) for the work.

From a stormy coastline to surrealism, from umbrellas to a zebra, from paddle-boarding to roses on the beach, from 1929 to 2021, this work is all at once a time capsule, a social commentary, and a fictional tale. The large scale and smaller sized images invite the audience to look from different perspectives - in the same way that any good story should.

About the Artist:

Teresa Williams is a visual artist who makes multi-layered stories with photography at their core. With an MA in Photography from Falmouth University (2019) and an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society (ARPS), she has been selected to exhibit both in the UK and internationally.

Her work, often playful, explores and reimagines the ordinary. She intervenes with the image, layering to weave threads that are literal and metaphoric.  She works with both digital and physical methods of image making.

Interested in the stories behind found photographs, Teresa investigates, reimagines, and places them into contemporary settings; repurposing photographs giving her creative freedom to reconnect narratives fractured by the passing of time. In this way she blurs boundaries between fact and fiction.

‘Hub’, a series of digital composites, was made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Northamptonshire Music and Performing Arts Trust. It was shown at the Derngate Theatre, with one of the images selected for inclusion at the #EveryDayDoraMaar UNIQLO Tates Lates display at Tate Modern in January 2020.

‘Topple’ and ‘Erosion’ (both 2020) were selected for RevoltReviveRekindle online exhibition and postcards book in collaboration with NN Contemporary Art, June 2021; and Impressions, Hub, & other selected works are exhibited at Boughton House, Kettering during August 2021.

Over the last eighteen months Teresa has made a collection of collage images inspired by current global situations, as well as more personal photographs ‘straight out of the camera’. She has also participated in online workshops as well as leading some in book making. She is a core member of The Visual Art Collective (an international postal collaboration with other artists).

The following extract is from a short text that the artist, Caroline Seymour, has written to accompany the exhibition:

"You’re in the ante-room to the operating theatre, lying on the trolley, prepared for the operation. The anaesthetist is standing by your side, talking to you gently, humorously, according to your disposition and inclination, easing you into oblivion. They are the last person you see or hear before you disappear to yourself (‘go to sleep’ is the euphemism used, but, of course, you’re far beyond sleep, in an iatrogenic coma, and although your body is cut open then stitched up, you will not wake until they judge it safe for you to do so) and the first person you see on your return to consciousness. In the meantime, in a timeless time, the show has gone on without you noticing it. Despite your centrality to it you are fundamentally absent from this performance, while being worked on by not just the surgeon but a whole team: the registrar (assistant surgeon), a handful of specialist theatre nurses, maybe a medical student or two, and watched over throughout by the anaesthetist, your guardian angel."

These photographs show what happens during the operation. You will see many images of hands, surgical instruments, the inside of a body. A pool of light falls on the part of the patient's body being worked on, the hands move within it, creating an endlessly beautiful and fascinating dynamic, white-gloved against the surrounding darkness like the hands of a mime artist. Surgery itself means 'hand-work' from its origin in Ancient Greek. It’s all about the hands: performing the surgery, handling the body and tissue removed from it, passing the instruments then sorting them afterwards.

The high contrast silver gelatin prints convey something of the intensity of their subject.

About the Artist

Caroline Seymour processes her films and makes prints in her darkroom in Oxford. She also works within the field of medical education at Oxford and Cambridge Medical Schools. She studied History of Art at the Courtauld Institute and Chelsea Art School. She is currently trying to finish writing a novel.

Three students currently studying on the BA (HONS) Photography Degree at Oxford Brookes University have come together to present three separate bodies of work documenting women dealing with parenting, representation, and adolescence. The work created responds to module briefs set within the course but explores personal connections with chosen narratives and encourages an engagement with universal issues of change and resilience.  

The work of all three photographers adopts an immersive approach to photographic documentation and a collaborative storytelling response to the creation of visual narratives. A connective thread can be clearly seen within the photographers work that identifies the challenges that women face when dealing with adulthood and societal expectations of being a woman. 

Sophie Jeffrey’s images, created in the North-East of England, within a student house, are raw and honest in their depiction of a friend dealing with issues of mental wellbeing.  

Laura Skog’s work documents the transition from childhood of her partner’s sister in Switzerland. Her images are confident yet fragile, filled with a sense of anticipation and promise.

Lydia Wakefield’s documentation of her brother’s wife and their new-born child living near Stroud, Gloucestershire, provide an insight into the reality of living as a young family under Covid.

About the artists

Sophie Jeffrey grew up in a small East Midlands town and is currently a third-year student on the course, who embraces a traditional documentary approach. She works with both the still and moving image to document issues of alienation, representation, and identity. https://sophie-jeffrey.com

Third year student Laura Skog was born in Uruguay and raised in Uruguay, Miami, Vienna and Switzerland. Her father is Swedish, and her mother is Swiss. Her work embraces a European aesthetic and identifies the relationship between contemporary fashion and beauty photography, contemporary art practice and narrative documentation.

Lydia Wakefield lives in South Gloucestershire and is a second-year student whose work focuses on her passion for sport and building narratives within areas of personal interest. Her work evidences a sophisticated understanding of composition and a willingness to explore technique-based solutions to photographic image creation.

Senior Lecturer and Subject Coordinator for Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Dr Grant Scott, is a working photographer, writer, film maker and founder/curator of www.unitednationsofphotography.com. Each week he presents the 'A Photographic Life' podcast.

Water Lily is a photographic series featuring Kazuo Ohno (1906-2010) who was a celebrated pioneer of Butoh, an avant-garde form of dance theatre which is often described as the ‘Dance of Darkness’. The series was photographed in the 1990s when Kazuo Ohno was in his late 80’s. He is dressed as a maiden in a set that appears to represent a kind of purgatory. Keiko captures the dancer’s physical expressions and gentle movements as they contrast in unexpected ways with his striking appearance.

The title 'Water Lily’ is taken from one of Kazuo Ohno’s performance pieces, 'Water Lilies’, which was inspired by Claude Monet’s famous series of paintings. 

Keiko was born and raised in Japan and moved to England to study Visual Communication. After graduation, she spent many hours in the darkroom working as a fine art and archival B&W printer. During this time, her early fascination with the body as a subject for photography developed to include the capture of human movement and portraiture. Her collaborations with dancers and dance organisations launched her career as a photographer and graphic designer. 

Keiko lives and works in Oxford. She is a recipient of the Patrick Litchfield Award from the BIPP (British Institute of Professional Photography) and is a past winner of the Professional Photographer Magazine Portrait Competition.

The exhibition consists of 15 B&W silver gelatine prints on fibre-based papers.

The photography of Carla van de Puttelaar allows the eye to touch the skin on many levels. Through her lens, she makes the viewer aware of its sensitivity and sensuality, examining it in detail, at the same time fully aware of the importance of the shapes that the skin envelopes. Those shapes are outlined and accentuated by a black background, a key feature of Carla’s work. The female body has long been her main subject, and since late 2015 she has regularly worked with two or three models at the same time, exploring new types of compositions. In the last decade, she has successfully begun to examine the skin and texture of flowers, particularly those on the brink of fading, as well as the barks of trees. In those subjects, she has discovered a similar fascinating sensitivity and sensuality as in her female models. Natural light is one of Carla van de Puttelaar’s most important tools and assets. She allows it to play on and around her subjects and then catches it at its most seductive appearance and from that moment on, it is captured for posterity.

Carla van de Puttelaar graduated from the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 1996. Since then, she has won several prizes. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, entered various collections internationally, and has been published in a series of seven monographs. In 2016 Carla van de Puttelaar created The Rembrandt Series in collaboration with the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam, which also organized an exhibition of this series in the spring of 2016, alongside their exhibition on Rembrandt’s Nudes. Led by her keen interest in portraiture, she created in 2017 a new and timely series devoted to prominent and promising women in the art world, Artfully Dressed: Women in the Art World with biographical information and interviews (www.womenintheartworld.com). The concept of this project is to shine a light on the many talented women in this field - to showcase their accomplishments, intelligence, power, and beauty. To date, this important, ongoing series includes around 500 international women from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, nationalities, ages, and professions. In 2020, the Musée national d’histoire et d’art in Luxembourg staged a first retrospective exhibition of Carla’s work, accompanied by a lavish catalogue. In addition to being a renowned photographer, Carla has earned a PhD in art history (2017). Her seminal book on Scottish Portraiture 1644-1714 will be published in the autumn of 2021.

About the Artist:

Carla van de Puttelaar (1967, Zaandam, The Netherlands) lives and works in Amsterdam. In 1996, she graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. In the same year she was awarded the Esther Kroon Prize, and in 2002 she won the Prix de Rome Basic Prize. Her photographic work has gained worldwide recognition, and she has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries around the world. In 2020 she had four solo shows including a retrospective show entitled: Brushed by Light, Musée national d’histoire et d’art in Luxembourg and a solo show at The Fox Talbot Museum, National Trust, Lacock. Her work has appeared in many publications including seven monographs. Carla works for internationally acclaimed magazines and publishers such as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Random House. Her work is present in many international public and private collections. Carla has taught Photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and in 2017 earned a PhD in art history. Carla has been a Jury member for various art contests, such as the World Press Photo Contest and the Dutch Portrait Award. In 2019 five portraits from the Women in the Art World series were acquired by The National Portrait Gallery in London through a generous grant from the Bern Schwartz Family Foundation.

Photographers have had a long lasting fascination with both the spaces and objects of academia. British photography pioneer, William Henry Fox Talbot, at the medium’s very inception, focused his lens squarely on the University of Oxford making several trips to the city between 1843 and 1846. It was with an image of the Queens College, Oxford that he chose to open his seminal book, The Pencil of Nature (1844), later including in it an image showing a collection of books on a shelf titled, A Scene in A Library, which further secured this relationship. Exploring the role of women and photography at this time reveals that the first photographically illustrated book was made by a woman, British photographer Anna Atkins who published Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in 1843. 

Photography and the Book, is an exhibition that explores the work of 6 contemporary female photographers whose practices continue to make connections between photography and the book. Mari Mahr and Joanna Vestey will show work that will be supported by books and a screen presentation showing Chloe Dewe Mathews series, ‘In Search of Frankenstein’, Candida Höfer’s Libraries work, Dayanita Singh’s, Museum of Chance, along with Tomoko Yoneda’s, Between Visible and Invisible.

The book has a rich history in Oxford, which can be traced back to the earliest days of printing, two years after William Caxton set up the first printing press in England the first book was printed in the city in 1478. Oxford has more than 100 libraries and has provided the setting for over 500 books.

This exhibition presents a series of nine silkscreen prints by artist Khadija Saye (1992-2017) exploring her fascination with the ‘migration of traditional Gambian spiritual practices’ that formed a part of her childhood experience growing up in London with Gambian parents.

In the images, Saye uses ritual objects, such as amulets, beads and horns, to explore her connection to these spiritual practices as a member of the African diaspora, as well as how ‘trauma is experienced in the black experience’.

The series also explores what Saye calls ‘the deep-rooted urge to find solace in a higher power’ in differing cultures. Saye herself was of mixed religious heritage, both Christian and Muslim.

Tragically, Saye and her mother Mary Ajaoi Augustus Mendy were killed in the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017. Later that year, Saye’s photographs were exhibited in the Diaspora Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, and she was widely regarded as an artist of great talent and promise.

The prints exhibited here were produced from scans of the artist’s original tintype photographs. Tintypes are an early form of photograph, popular from the 1860s, created by exposing a negative image onto a metal surface coated with emulsion with a dark background so as to appear positive.

Khadija Saye was an inspirational artist whose social and political awareness led her to support issues of social justice and educational opportunity. The Pitt Rivers Museum has acquired this set of prints as a permanent tribute to the artist and her values, and exhibits them here to bring them into conversation with many displays in the Museum that relate to the themes she explored.

The North Wall's ArtsLab programme exists to create opportunities for early-career artists and this year, for the first time, is supporting visual artists. A group of thirteen talented local female photographers have been working together to develop ideas and new work, facilitated by artist Philippa James.

This exhibition uses the number '14' as its catalyst and is curated by the group to include one final work by each artist. The artists are: Alice Oliver, Charlotte Foster Lill, Claire Francis, Elina Medley, Flavia Catena, Francesca Provenzano, Laura Boffin, Leah Gordon, Mariasanta Tedesco, Nell Derby, Philippa James, Sarah Attwood, Sian Gourlay and Wendy Aldiss. More works by each artist can be seen in an online exhibition for the duration of Photo Oxford Festival 2021 (15 Oct – 15 Nov 2021).

Philippa James is a portrait photographer based in Oxford, UK. Her interests and work explore women and feminism, the underrepresented, and her local community. Her major body of work, 100 Women Of Oxford, exhibited at The North Wall during Photo Oxford Festival 2020. She is currently a Propeller Artist at The North Wall Art Centre. She has exhibited at Arts at The Old Fire Station, The Gallery at The North Wall, Ark-T Art Centre, Tap Social Movement (International Women's Day) and The Jam Factory Arts Centre.

The Propeller programme provides practical support for the development of exciting new work that begins its life in Oxfordshire. We support brilliant companies and artists in the region who deserve to have their work seen by a wider audience: thenorthwall.com/artslab

The exhibition, curated by Megan Ringrose, focuses on the work of contemporary photographic artists who are increasingly inspired by the pioneering historical processes and physicality of photography. These artists strip back photography to its absolute fundamental elements: material, light, and process. They explore the ‘thingness’ of photography.

Supported by Arts Council England.The exhibition brings together artists who are interested in the fundamentals of photography especially with regards to historical methods and thinking about photography within a fine art context. They explore the materiality of the photograph through experimentation with analogue photographic techniques in particular. They are mindful of material redundancy and the need to reconnect to old processes to create new contemporary works.

Photography has traditionally been a medium of faithful representation. This exhibition explores the movement within photography from representation to abstraction. We view an image and its subject and then analyse the surface and its objectivity. This analysis or awareness of surface/material forces the viewer to consume photography at a slower pace perhaps to question the definition of photography. The artists in this exhibition are all pushing the boundaries of photography the medium. They ask ‘What is a photograph in the 21st Century’

‘Contemporary art photography has become less about applying a pre-existing, fully functioning visual technology and more concerned with active choices in every step of the process. This is tied to an enhanced appreciation of the materiality and objecthood of the medium that reaches back to the early nineteenth century roots of photography.’

Cotton .C (2014) The Photograph as Contemporary Art .London: Thames and Hudson.

There are four artist led workshops (Cyanotype, Anthotype, Chemigrams and Phytography) planned throughout October - November to deliver learning experiences that will be directly related to the work exhibited. Please visit our Events Page to find out more.

Featured Artists:

Neil Ayling

John A Blythe

Sylvie Bonnot

Ellen Carey

Alice Cazenave

Karel Doing

Nettie Edwards

Hannah Fletcher

Anna Luk

Rita Rodner

Megan Ringrose (Curator/Artist)

Kateryna Snizhko

For more information visit www.fabricofphotography.com

Sarah Angelina Acland, Helen Messinger Murdoch and Etheldreda Janet Laing are united in their production of autochromes, the first commercially available and accessible colour photography process, released in Britain in 1907. Acland, Murdoch and Laing overcame the difficulties of the process, which included long exposures, to produce photographs that capture their surroundings in colour, including travels abroad, and provide an insight into their understandings of the world. Selected autochromes by Acland, Murdoch and Laing will be reproduced in windows throughout Oxford, guiding visitors to sites associated with the Photo Oxford Festival, including the Weston Library, as they learn more about the photographers’ lives. The trail features autochromes from the collections of the V&A, Museum of Science History and National Science and Media Museum and draws on the Bodleian Libraries’ collection. The trail map will be accessible online, and will also be available in print at multiple locations throughout Oxford. Please refer to the Photo Oxford website for more information: 

About the curator

Catlin Langford is the inaugural Curatorial Fellow in Photography, supported by The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). She is currently researching the V&A’s significant collection of autochromes which will form the basis of an upcoming publication with the V&A/Thames & Hudson. She has held positions at the Royal College of Art, Guildhall School, Royal Collection, Witt and Conway Libraries and the National Trust of South Australia. She completed her MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2016, focusing on the curation of vernacular photographs.

Multiple venues, check website for details:

• Weston Library, Broad Street, OX1 3BG 

• Blackwell’s Art & Poster Shop, 27 Broad St, Oxforad OX1 3BS

• Oxford Playhouse,11-12 Beaumont St, Oxford OX1 2LW

• Cohen Quad, Exeter College (formerly Ruskin College), Walton Street, OX1 2HG

• Arts at the Old Fire Station, 40 George Street, OX1 2AQ  - entrance also on Gloucester Green

• Old Bank Hotel, 92-94 High St, Oxford OX1 4BJ

• Sanders of Oxford, 104 High St, Oxford OX1 4BW

• Oxford Covered Market (entrances on High St & Market St), OX1 3DZ

Dr Xa Sturgis, Director of the Ashmolean, says: ‘ With its tumultuous history and extraordinarily rich artistic output, Tokyo is one the most exciting cultural hotspots on the globe. In showcasing this exceptional range of artworks from the 17th century right up to pieces made in 2021, and precious works on loan from Japan, the exhibition promises to be a thrilling and unusual insight into Tokyo, one of the most interesting cities in the world.’

CREDITS:

The exhibition is curated by:

Dr Lena Fritsch, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Ashmolean Museum
Dr Clare Pollard, Curator of Japanese Art, Ashmolean Museum
The exhibition is made possible thanks to:
Lead support from The Shikanai Foundation
Principal support from The Ishibashi Foundation and additional support from The Tokyo Exhibition Circle

Publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, £25 available at the Ashmolean or online

HATCHED is a creative platform promoting and sharing work addressing women’s issues and experiences that range from ‘The personal is political' to Human Rights. HATCHED was set up in 2016 by Maga Esberg and has been part of the Oxford International Women's Festival since then.

2020-2021 has brought challenges to all; the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit, and the pressure of climate change on the environment. However, a girl born in late 2021 will automatically join the ranks of the 4 billion females worldwide whose daily reality is shaped by gender inequality in one form or another. 

The Women Creating Landscapes exhibition at OVADA  brings together the practices of local and international lens-based artists. Collectively these artists voice the multiple aspects of gender inequalities: reproductive rights, gender-based violence, and trafficking. This work is shown alongside artists whose attention is closer to home: a tender look at motherhood, an exploration of complex family experiences.  Personal and global they share an intimate female gaze. 

The artists in HATCHED2021 aim to be part of the ongoing dialogue on equality, to communicate their concerns, and to make a positive difference. These works don't stand alone; they are part of a bigger movement of women globally intent on being heard and seen. 

Agnese Mūrniece’s video 'Bivouac' is inspired by childhood memories and social movements in Latvia. Alice Brookes’s video ‘Three weeks in Lockdown’, 2020 was inspired by Suzanne Lacy's project, Three Weeks in May 1977. Alison Kahn and Avi Zhimo explore ‘The Secret Museum of Anthropology’ published in 1935. Beatrix Haxby’s video ‘The Mutinous-Feminine’ is part gymnastics performance, part examination of beauty.  Fiona Yaron-Field’s series ‘Belongings’ explores the surviving mementos from trafficked women. Gaby Venus’s triptych ‘Cathy, can you hear me?’ looks at absence, homelessness, and family dynamics. Jenny Wylie looks at the ubiquitous work of Margaret Calvert. Karen Toro’s ‘It is law’ looks at women's rights and freedom in Ecuador. Maga Esberg’s series ‘Barbe bleu’ looks at the impact of patriarchy from an oblique angle. Marcia Michael’s ‘Before Memory Returns’ is a series of self-portraits reflecting varying emotions heightened at night, in solace. Miranda Gavin uses photography, text, and film to create work that embraces experimentation, often focusing on themes of love, abuse,  and betrayal. Mita Vaghela’s practice centers on questioning her social heritage and the value of the female in Hindu culture. Nia Walling’s exploration is seated in the politics of ecofeminism and menstrual reclamation. Rosie Barnes’s ‘No You’re Not’ is a portrait project about autistic women. Sarah Lawton’s film portrays a journey into motherhood from an extremely high-risk pregnancy, throughout NICU and beyond. Susan Andrews considers her relationship with her mother and the strange collection of objects that have travelled through time to connect them. Yara Richter’s no-budget poetry short film 'Tired of Trees?' depicts a young, black mother’s experience of the first COVID-19 lockdown in a German suburb.

About the Curator

Maga Esberg is a visual artist, tutor and curator based in the UK. She set up HATCHED as a creative platform to share work addressing women’s issues and experiences that range from ‘The personal is political' to Human Rights. HATCHED has been exhibiting as part of the Oxford International Women festival since 2016  at the North Wall gallery, the Jam Factory, Common Ground working space and Freud in Oxford. 

Looking Forward have spent 11 weeks exploring photography in their weekly sessions with artist and teacher Elina Medley. Looking Forward is an inclusion group run at Pegasus Theatre for young women using a variety of art forms to help participants build confidence, self-esteem and an ability to positively interact with their peers. The group meet in a drama studio and for the project we made creative and imaginative use of the open space, lights, black out curtains and mirrors. The young people have looked at, and responded creatively to a range of photographic images in order to consider framing, composition and meaning. They have experimented with photographic skills and explored concepts such as the fundamental elements of light and time needed to make a photograph. They then moved on to consider how they can represent, reveal or conceal themselves and each other to make a photographic image, learning that the camera has a different way of seeing and can illuminate and show us something new and unexpected. They worked with enthusiasm, empathy and a great sense of fun to produce this final series of playful, collaboratively made and performative ‘light painting’ portraits. 

After an initial period of exploration and discussion, d’Overbroecks A level photography students have focused on gender representation in media, taking the idea of ‘pose’ as a formal element of photography and exploring its role in gender stereotyping. Drawing from fashion, and advertising imagery, the students have played with lighting and colour to accentuate subtle but powerful subtexts in media representation. 

Elina Medley is an Oxford based artist and teacher working with photography and film. Her work is included in the Photo Oxford exhibition ArtsLab: Fourteen, showing at The North Wall.

With thanks to The Art Society Oxford, Oxford City Council Culture Fund, Oxford University Community Fund, Pegasus Theatre and d’Overbrock’s