Christopher Bethell and Carlotta Cardana: Photographer Profiles

Christopher Bethell and Carlotta Cardana both build long personal projects around people and places they have a direct connection to, and both earn their living in editorial photography alongside that work. Bethell traced a family story across the United States for the series that made his name. Cardana works between London portraiture and a continuing collaboration with a Lakota writer in the American West.

Christopher Bethell

Christopher Bethell is a British photographer who graduated from the MA in photojournalism and documentary photography at London College of Communication in 2015. The University of the Arts London alumni profile records that his first editorial break came from VICE, with later commissions from The Guardian and The Telegraph, and that he has also worked as a picture editor at BuzzFeed.

His best known project is The Duke of Earl, made by travelling across the United States in the footsteps of an American grandfather he never met. The same UAL profile records that the work won the under 30s gold award at the Royal Photographic Society's International Photography Exhibition 161 and was shown at FORMAT festival in 2017. The title comes from the Gene Chandler song his grandfather is said to have used while courting his grandmother, and the series moves between the real country of his family history and the imagined America of his own childhood.

His portfolio site lists the projects that have followed, including Blue Velvet, described there as a work in progress, along with Battle Royal, British Conventions, Crufts, Scream For Me, Home Coming, Panic Buyers Welcome, Love Me Tender and The Contest. The run of titles gives a clear sense of the territory: organised enthusiasm, British subcultures and events where people gather to be seen doing something they care about.

That is a distinct tradition within British documentary work. Photographing conventions, shows and competitions puts the photographer among people who have already chosen how to present themselves, which removes much of the awkwardness of candid street work and shifts the interest onto costume, ritual and hierarchy.

Carlotta Cardana

Carlotta Cardana is an Italian photographer based in London, working in editorial portrait and travel photography. Her own site presents the commissioned portrait work alongside a projects section that lists Modern Couples, The Red Road Project, Kabukicho Nights, The Fourth Freedom and The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Mechanics.

The couples series, published and exhibited as Mod Couples, is a personal project about couples who belong to the mod scene, the British subculture that began in London in the late 1950s. Cardana photographed couples who chose their own clothes and their own locations, which makes the work a record of self presentation rather than of observation. Her description of the series stresses that the fashion, the music and the scooters provide the framework rather than the subject, and that what interests her is the world the couples have built for themselves.

Her longest running work is The Red Road Project, made with the writer Danielle SeeWalker, who is Lakota and a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of North Dakota. A World Photography Organisation piece from 29 October 2016 records how the collaboration began, in a conversation about ceremonies for SeeWalker's relatives, and sets out its aim: to show the richness of Native American culture and life in the twenty first century rather than only its hardships, highlighting tribal members who are rising above them. The same piece notes that Cardana was named discovery of the year at the Lucie Awards in 2013, that she was shortlisted at the Sony World Photography Awards in 2014, and that The Red Road Project was a winner of The Fence in 2016, an outdoor photography installation shown across several American cities.

The project has continued since. Its own website organises the material by theme rather than by trip, covering the boarding school era, language, connection to land, reservation life, urban Native communities, activism and the seventh generation, together with work on specific communities including Isle de Jean Charles and the Winnemem Wintu.

Why the collaboration model matters

The Red Road Project is a working example of something documentary photography has argued about for decades: who holds the authority to tell a story. A photographer from Milan and London working alone on Native American life in the United States would face an obvious problem of standing. A photographer working in a long partnership with a writer from the community, where the writer's relationships open the introductions and the text carries the account, is a different proposition.

Several features recur in projects built this way.

• Two authors, two media. Photographs and written testimony are produced in parallel rather than one illustrating the other.
• Return visits. Work built over many years allows subjects to see earlier results before agreeing to more.
• Distribution that fits the subject. Outdoor installations, dedicated project sites and touring exhibitions reach audiences that a photobook alone would not.
• A stated purpose. Both Cardana and SeeWalker have described the aim of the work in public, which gives viewers a standard to judge it against.

Other profiles of documentary photographers are indexed on our speakers page, and the archive of talk pages is listed under events and previous talks. For a related pair of practices, see Travis Hodges and Rob Pinney.

This page takes its address from a London photography talk listed for 10 April 2018. This site is an independent journal, is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group or with theprintspace, and does not organise events.