Past Photography Talks: The London Archive, 2017-2020

A free monthly photography talks series ran in London for thirteen years, from 2007 until early 2020. This is the archive of its last four years, grouped by year, with the photographers and the subjects they brought to the room.

Thirteen years, and how it ended

The series began in 2007 as an independent gathering of photographers, with no institution behind it and no admission charge. It moved through several homes before settling in 2016 into a monthly slot in a Shoreditch printing studio, on the second Tuesday of the month. The final talks took place in the first months of 2020, and the series stopped when public events did. It has not restarted.

Thirteen years of free monthly talks is a long run for something with no funding model, and the reason it lasted is also the reason it ended: it depended on a venue willing to absorb the cost. That arrangement is common on the independent circuit and it is why these series tend to vanish rather than relocate.

2020: four months

The last complete evenings were in January and February, with Zula Rabikowska and Harriet Fairbairn on identity and community, and Charlie Bibby and Chris J Ratcliffe on news photography. The March evening with Laura Pannack was cancelled, and the series did not return.

2019: the arguments

2019 was the year the programme turned most clearly towards the state of the profession rather than individual projects. The diversity in photojournalism special asked who gets commissioned in British photojournalism and why the answer has stayed so narrow, and it remains the most referenced evening of the series.

Around it ran a full year of paired talks: Monica Alcazar-Duarte and Pierre Alozie, Roland Ramanan and Mark Phillips, Louis Leeson and Antonio Olmos, Andrew Jackson and Faraz Pourreza Jorshari, James Hopkirk and Gabrielle Motola, Alys Tomlinson and Liz Hingley, and Brian David Stevens and Andrew Youngson.

2018: practice and difficulty

The 2018 programme kept returning to subjects that are hard to photograph. The photography and mental health evening with Louis Quail and Daniel Regan dealt with work made inside the photographer's own family and with the consent questions that follow. Emily Garthwaite presented photojournalism from Iraq and the Middle East.

The year also carried Nicola Muirhead and Derek Man, Stefan Rousseau and AJ Heath, Christopher Bethell and Carlotta Cardana, Jeremy Nicholl and Travis Hodges and Rob Pinney, plus an open evening where members of the audience presented their own projects.

2017: the range

2017 shows the programme at its widest. Photographing England looked at the documentary tradition in the country itself. Photoland was a blunt evening about commissions, fees and visibility. A live podcast recording with George Georgiou brought the long-form interview format into the room.

The paired talks that year were Freya Najade and Jenny Lewis, Peter Macdiarmid and Jack Taylor, Kate Stansworth and Mark Aitken, Benjamin Chesterton and Eleanor Macnair, Luke Archer, Stuart Freedman and Martin Usborne, Alex Ingram and Ameena Rojee, Briony Campbell and Natasha Caruana and Peter Dench, Muir Vidler and Dagmar Seeland.

Specials

Outside the monthly run sat a small group of themed evenings: the photo essay as a form, photographing mothers and family, and the supernatural in photography. An earlier piece on photographers' rights in the UK dates from the series' first incarnation and remains the question photographers ask most often.

What the archive shows

Read across four years, two patterns stand out. The subjects got harder: the early programme leans towards individual projects and craft, the later one towards access, representation and whether the work can be paid for. And the paired format did more than fill an evening, because putting two photographers with different approaches to a similar subject in the same room produced the arguments that single talks did not.

Browse the full list by date in the talks archive, or by photographer in the profiles index.