Photography Talks Archive: Profiles and Themes

Every profile and article on this site that grew out of a London photography talk, listed by date. These are reading pages about the photographers and the subjects discussed. There is nothing to book here.

What this archive is

Between 2017 and 2020 a free monthly talks series ran in Shoreditch, with two or three photographers presenting work each evening, plus occasional themed specials on a single subject. The series ended in early 2020 and has not resumed.

We have used its programme as the spine of this archive, because it is an unusually complete record of who was presenting documentary work in London across those years, and because the themed evenings mapped the arguments the field was having with itself. Each page takes one evening as a starting point and becomes either a profile of the photographers who presented, or an article on the subject that was discussed.

We did not run those talks and we are not connected to the group that did. These are new pages about the work, written from published sources.

The shape of a documentary photography talk

The form is consistent enough to describe. A photographer shows a sequence of images from one project, usually projected, and talks over them for thirty to forty minutes. The useful part is rarely the images themselves, which you could see online. It is the commentary: how access was negotiated, what was tried and abandoned, how long the thing took, what it cost, and how the final edit was arrived at from a much larger body of material.

Questions follow, and on the independent circuit they tend to be practical rather than theoretical, because the room is mostly other photographers. How did you fund it. Did the subjects see the edit. What did you do when they said no.

Paired evenings, with two photographers on the same bill, work differently again. The pairing is usually thematic, and the contrast between two approaches to a similar subject does more work than either talk would alone.

Themed evenings

A handful of evenings in the series dropped the two-photographer format for a single subject with several voices. Those produced the broadest discussions, and they are the pages on this site that read as articles rather than profiles.

The subjects are a fair summary of what the field was arguing about in the late 2010s: diversity in British photojournalism and who gets commissioned, photography and mental health and how to photograph illness in your own family, the state of the industry and whether the economics still work, the photo essay as a form, and photographing mothers and family.

How to use these pages

If you are looking for a specific photographer, the profiles index is the faster route. If you want to read by period, the archive by year groups the same pages across 2017 to 2020 and gives a better sense of how the programme changed. If you want to attend something rather than read about it, our guide to photography talks in London covers what currently exists and how to find it.

Each profile links out to the photographer's own site. That is where the work lives at full size and in the sequence its maker intended, and it is always worth following.

A note on dates

Dates on these pages record when a talk took place, and are kept because they anchor the work in a moment. They are not a schedule. At least one of the evenings listed here, in March 2020, was cancelled before it happened, and the page covers the photographer's work rather than an event that did not occur.