Luke Archer, Stuart Freedman and Martin Usborne: Photographer Profiles

Three photographers, three long projects, and in each case a book rather than a magazine feature as the end point. Luke Archer photographs history and heritage, including the descendants of a Victorian studio's sitters. Stuart Freedman documents eating places that hold a culture together, in Delhi and in east London. Martin Usborne photographs dogs, and co-founded a publishing house. They shared a London photography talk in April 2017, and this page introduces the work.

Luke Archer

Luke Archer is a photographer based in Brighton. His own biography states a particular interest in history and heritage, and records that he founded and edited Loupe, a contemporary photography magazine that ran for 13 issues. He has been a guest speaker and visiting lecturer at The Photographers' Gallery and at several universities, and alongside his own work he is studio manager for the photographer Alun Callender.

His best documented project, Inheritance, began with a camera. Writing on 15 September 2014, It's Nice That reported that Archer found a Thornton Pickard Royal Ruby, most probably dating from the late 1880s, in his mother's shed among equipment from his grandfather's studio, and that the camera had originally belonged to Alexander Bassano, a Victorian society photographer whose portrait of Lord Kitchener was adapted into the recruitment poster reading Your Country Needs You. Archer used that camera to photograph hereditary peers, the descendants of the kind of sitter Bassano had photographed. Of around 50 peers invited, 26 sat for him, either at the House of Lords or in their own homes. He told the magazine that two of his portraits from the project are in the National Portrait Gallery collection, which also holds the Bassano studio archive.

The current work on his site continues the same interest in objects outliving their purpose. Sussex Sweeps documents the remaining windmills of Sussex, largely decommissioned, which he describes as monuments marking an initial departure from renewable energy towards fossil fuels.

Stuart Freedman

Stuart Freedman is a photographer and writer who works between London and New Delhi. His publisher records that he is a member of Panos Pictures and has covered stories from Albania to Zambia over more than two decades, with work published in Life, Geo, Time, Der Spiegel, Newsweek, The Sunday Times Magazine, Paris Match, Smithsonian and Condé Nast Traveller.

Two books sit at the centre of his personal work, and they are a pair. The Palaces of Memory (Dewi Lewis, 2015) photographs the Indian Coffee Houses, a co-operatively run network of cafés across the subcontinent that have served for decades as political and artistic salons as well as ordinary eating places. Freedman visited more than thirty of the most significant of them. The publisher's description makes the connection to his own background explicit, describing the coffee houses as a familiar but distant echo of the long disappeared greasy-spoon cafés of the London of his own youth. The book runs to 224 pages with 125 colour plates and carries an essay by Freedman and a contribution from the novelist Amit Chaudhuri.

The companion volume turns to the cafés themselves. The Englishman and the Eel, also published by Dewi Lewis, photographs the eel, pie and mash shops of east London, where Freedman grew up in the 1970s. The publisher describes the shops as often elaborately tiled, once selling live eels in metal trays facing the street, and now few in number. It makes a point of what the book is not, stating that it offers no rosy, music-hall caricature of the Cockney but an affectionate and serious look at what that culture has become. The book has 224 pages with 80 colour plates and an essay by the writer Michael Collins.

Martin Usborne

Martin Usborne is a photographer and writer living in Hackney. He is also, as his publisher's own book listings state, the co-founder and creative director of Hoxton Mini Press.

His photographic work is mostly about animals and the human feelings projected onto them. Where Hunting Dogs Rest (Kehrer, 2015) photographs rescued Spanish hunting dogs and sets them against the places where such dogs are typically abandoned, including roadsides, ravines, rivers, the edges of towns and empty car parks. The publisher notes the estimate that up to 100,000 hunting dogs are abandoned or killed across Spain each winter at the end of the hare-coursing season, when they are no longer needed, perform badly or are too old. The portraits were made at rescue centres in Andalucía, and they deliberately reference the tone of Velázquez, who painted in the same region at a time when these dogs were held in high regard. The book carries texts by Usborne and Max Houghton, and it has been exhibited at Galerie Photo 12 in Paris in 2015 and at Fotografiska in Stockholm between October 2021 and February 2022. It followed his earlier Kehrer book The Silence of Dogs in Cars, published in 2012.

The publishing strand of his work began with a single subject. I've Lived in East London for 86 ½ Years is a portrait of Joseph Markovitch, and it became the first title in the East London Photo Stories series. Hoxton Mini Press was founded in 2013 and has published the east London work of other photographers covered on this site, including Freya Najade and Jenny Lewis.

Why these projects arrive as books

All three photographers here reached their audience through independent photobook publishers rather than magazines, and the reasons are structural. A project photographed over several years cannot be commissioned in the ordinary way, because no picture desk will commit a budget to work with no delivery date. A short-run book can carry a sequence of fifty or more photographs in the order the photographer intended, which a double-page spread cannot. The trade-off is money, since independent photobooks are rarely profitable for the photographer, and the income has to come from commissions, teaching, studio work or a publishing business run alongside the pictures.

Our article on commissions, fees and visibility sets out what the professional bodies have documented about those earnings. Other photographers are listed in the speakers index, and the full set of pages is in the archive of past talks.

This site is an independent journal. It is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group, and it does not organise events.