Peter Dench, Muir Vidler and Dagmar Seeland: Photographer Profiles

Peter Dench photographs English life with a comic eye and a reporter's discipline. Muir Vidler makes portraits for magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, often in places where a portrait is difficult to get. The two appeared with Dagmar Seeland at a PhotoForum evening in London on 10 January 2017. This page profiles the work, not the event.

Peter Dench

Dench is a British documentary photographer whose work is built almost entirely out of English habits: drinking, queueing, dressing up, the seaside, the summer social calendar and football. He grew up in Weymouth in Dorset, graduated from the University of Derby in photographic studies in 1995, and has worked as a photojournalist since 1998. He joined Reportage by Getty Images as a represented photographer in January 2012. Those details and the award record below are set out in his Wikipedia entry, which cites the original sources for each item.

England Uncensored, published in 2012, is the work most people mean when they name him. It gathers the drinking and leisure pictures into one edit, and the title signals the approach: no fixing, no flattery. The pictures are grouped as a project on his own site, alongside Alcohol & England, The British Abroad, The English Summer Season, A1: Britain on the Verge, Whitby Goth Festival and Trawlermen. The full index is on peterdench.com.

The humour is doing real work. A comic frame can be cruel or observant, and the difference is mostly in what else the photographer shows, so Dench publishes the sequence rather than the one picture. The joke lands on the national habit instead of the individual, and the pictures keep their value as a record of clothes, pubs and public behaviour at a given date.

His award record is in competition photojournalism rather than art prizes: third prize in the People in the News category of the World Press Photo contest in 2002, and a place in the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass the same year.

He also writes, which is unusual among working photojournalists. His books include The Dench Diary, published by the United Nations of Photography in 2013, and A&E: Alcohol and England, published by Bluecoat in 2014, and he has contributed columns and podcasts to the trade press, including a 2013 podcast for the United Nations of Photography. Writing about the trade, rather than only working in it, is part of how the practice is sustained.

Muir Vidler

Vidler is a photographer based in London and Edinburgh who works mainly in editorial portraiture. His information page lists commissions published in Vogue, the New York Times Magazine, the Sunday Times Magazine, Time, Zeit Magazin, Stern and Monocle, with advertising work for O2, the BBC, ABC News and the National Theatre. The same page states that his photographs are held in collections including the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

His site is organised into two halves, Series and Portraits. The series are labelled by place and subject, among them Libya, Israel, Oman, Istanbul, Cape Town, the Isle of Muck and Glasgow's Grand Ole Opry. Assignments in difficult territory sit next to small British subcultures, handled in the same calm, frontal style. Magazine portraits of that kind are usually made in minutes, so the consistency across such different jobs is the skill on display.

Photographing England for the magazines

All three photographers on that January bill worked in the same market. English social life has been a steady commission subject for British and foreign magazines for decades, which is why one national ritual, the bank holiday beach or the race meeting, recurs across different photographers' archives; the commission tends to go to whoever has a recognisable way of handling it.

Two consequences follow. The comic tradition depends on sequence, because a spread can hold a dozen pictures that qualify each other where a single shared image cannot. And the economics push this work towards books: England Uncensored was funded through the crowdfunding platform Emphas.is in 2012, and the later titles went to small British publishers, which is now the normal route for projects that would once have run across six magazine pages.

Our article on photographing England follows the same tradition through two other photographers, and the speakers index lists the rest of the photographers covered here.

Photo Forum is an independent journal. We are not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group or with theprintspace, the venue that hosted its meetings. None of the photographers named here has written or approved this page, and the biographical details above carry links to where they come from.