Monica Alcazar-Duarte and Pierre Alozie: Photographer Profiles

Monica Alcazar-Duarte and Pierre Alozie work at the two far ends of what a photographer can be in Britain. One builds gallery installations in which photographs, film and augmented reality argue about colonial history and search algorithms. The other has spent decades covering breaking news and conflict as a freelance. They were billed together for a London talk on 12 November 2019.

Monica Alcazar-Duarte

Alcazar-Duarte is a Mexican-born multidisciplinary artist living and working in the UK. In an interview published by Autograph she describes growing up in Mexico City and Chihuahua, studying filmmaking in Mexico, and having lived in Britain for 23 years. She also describes the starting point of her recent work: a DNA test showing her ancestry to be predominantly indigenous, which sent her into her own family history and into questions of reclamation. She uses the Nahuatl concept of nepantla, the state of being in between, to describe how she works, and she appears in her own pictures as a way of countering erasure.

Projects

• The New Colonists. The first chapter of a longer body of work about space colonisation, published as a photobook by The Photographers' Gallery in London with Bemojake. The installation version includes an augmented reality layer that works as a portal into a second narrative sitting behind the prints.
• Second Nature. An ongoing series about how search algorithms reproduce racial and gender stereotypes, combining collected online searches with interviews recorded in everyday settings in Mexico about experiences of racial inequality. The Victoria and Albert Museum acquired six photographs from the series in 2024.
• Digital Clouds Don't Carry Rain. Made between 2021 and 2024 and shown as her first UK solo exhibition at Autograph in London from 16 February to 1 June 2024, curated by Bindi Vora. The Autograph interview above describes the show's subjects as indigenous knowledge, colonial legacy and ecological urgency, with copper in the work pointing both to Mexico's history of copper extraction and to present-day extractivism.
• T'aabal chukChuuk / Embers. A 2024 installation of 3D-printed flowers coated in copper.

She has also written about her practice for Photoworks, and was interviewed as a 2019 Chromaluxe and Lucie Foundation artist by the Lucie Foundation. Her portfolio site at monicaalcazarduarte.com is currently password-protected, so the Autograph, Photoworks and V&A pages are the better route to the work.

Pierre Alozie

Alozie is a London-based freelance photographer working in breaking news, conflict, editorial and portraiture. His profile on the photographers' network Blink gives 1986 as the start of his career, records early work in Berlin covering the fall of the Wall and the events that followed across Eastern Europe, names the Bosnian civil war as a returning subject, and lists him as a coordinator of the Frontline Freelance Register.

That last detail places him in a specific part of the trade. The Frontline Freelance Register describes itself as representing freelance journalists exposed to risk while gathering news. It exists because the people who now cover most conflicts are not staff, and therefore have no employer providing insurance, hostile environment training, body armour or aftercare. A register run by freelances themselves is an attempt to supply collectively what used to come with a job.

The scale of that shift is documented. The State of News Photography 2018, a University of Stirling survey of 5,202 photographers for World Press Photo, found the share of respondents working full-time fell from 74 per cent in 2015 to 59 per cent in 2018, and that 38 per cent described their financial position as difficult or very difficult. The survey covered photographers who had entered the World Press Photo contest, so it describes entrants rather than the whole profession.

Two economies in one room

Putting an installation artist and a news freelance on the same bill is not a mismatch; it shows how differently photography is paid for in Britain depending on where the work ends up. Alcazar-Duarte's projects are funded by commissions, residencies and acquisitions, and the institutions named above, Autograph, Photoworks and the V&A, are the ones that make that possible. Alozie's kind of work is paid per assignment, with the photographer carrying the costs and the risks.

They also impose different timescales. Second Nature has been accumulating since 2017; Digital Clouds Don't Carry Rain took three years. Breaking news is the opposite: value decays within hours, and the photographer who was already there wins. Neither is a superior form of attention, but the funding, the training and the professional organisations are almost entirely separate.

More photographers are listed on the speakers index, with the archive of talk pages at events. Related pages here include Zula Rabikowska and Harriet Fairbairn on identity and belonging, Louis Leeson and Antonio Olmos on newspaper and human rights work, and the article on diversity in British photojournalism. For formats and venues, see photography talks in London.