Should you be in London before July 22 this first show of work in the UK from the ‘Majority World Photo Agency‘ featuring “17 emerging photographers from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East” at the Guardian Gallery is worth a visit, although I can’t see any mention of it on their web site. You can read more about it on Shahidul Alam’s blog, and on Friday I went to King’s Place to see it.
The gallery is the space on the ground floor of the Guardian’s offices there, and the first time I went to see a show I walked in and went straight up the escalator and missed it; some of the displays there have seemed rather minimal! This occupies most of the two walls that aren’t glass, with a little on the space under the stairway.
Shadi Ghadirian talks about the problems of being a photographer in Iran
I met one of the photographers, Shadi Ghadirian, back in 2005 when we were both showing work at the festival in Bielsko-Biala so I’m not too convinced that she is still an “emerging photographer” but perhaps that is a meaningless category in any case. You can see more of her work on her web site. I have only a vague feeling of seeing the names of someof the other photographers involved before although several like her have an impressive record of publications and exhibitions, and some have won various awards, so I have probably seen more of their work – here’s the full list:
A M Ahad, Bangladesh, Aaron Sosa, Panama/Venezuela, Adolphus Opara, Nigeria, Andrés Lofiego, Argentina, Andrew Esiebo, Nigeria, Daniel Patiño Flor, Ecuador, Dominic Sansoni, Sri Lanka, Fabrice Monteiro, Benin, Farzana Hossen, Bangladesh, Kishor Sharma, Nepal, Màrio Macilau, Mozambique, M Anisul Hoque, Bangladesh, Neo Ntsoma, South Africa, Samar Hazboun, Palestine, Shadi Ghadirian, Iran, Shankar Sarkar, India, Tammy David, Philippines.
In the gallery you can pick up another free newsprint publication with an introduction by Alam, who is the Chairman, Co-founder and majority shareholder of Majority World, as well as his rather better-known enterprises based in Bangladesh. Some of the images, particularly one by Lofiego, don’t reproduce too well in newsprint, and look rather better on the web. The publication, which includes a few pictures by other photographers including Alam himself, only gives the address of the Majority World website, which doesn’t as yet appear to have completed the page about its photographers.
Ghadirian’s work is the only staged image in the show, with almost all of the rest falling at least broadly within the photojournalistic. Most photographers are represented by only one or two images, although the accompanying texts do help to put these into some kind of perspective I would have liked to have seen more pictures, perhaps even as a series of small images actually on the wall. There was a display screen in the centre of the show, but unfortunately all it was displaying was error messages that someone had removed the disk it needed.
The only photographer to be shown in any depth was Kishor Sharma, with a set of black and white images, ‘Living in the Mist – The Last Nomads of Nepal‘. You can find work by most of the other photographers without much difficulty on the web, for example Adolphus Opara and Andrew Esiebo, both from Nigeria.
