Picture Purrfect

As every photojournalist knows the hardest thing in creating candid imagery is getting access. Koudelka’s Gypsies and other such photo stories are years in the making and taking. But when all else fails there’s always cats. There they are sitting around obligingly just waiting to be immortalized by the great photographers of the age. I …

The Girl and the Pussycat

Never work with children and animals is a dictate that’s been roundly ignored by photographer Andy Prokh. He took a series of images featuring his daughter and her much loved pet cat that I recently came across. There seems to be a trend for this type of thing in photography recently. I’ve seen a series …

Fifty Shades of Sexy

For along time I’ve felt that the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ has been lacking a certain something. And at last it has been revealed to me what that something is; the dulcet tones of Gilbert Gottfried reading this magnum opus of soft porn. Now that is sexy, as I’m sure you’ll agree when you watch …

Wipeout Wonders

I love surfing photography and I love underwater photography. So when I saw Lucia Griggi’s underwater shots of surfers I was in seventh heaven. A passionate surfer as well as photographer she has a great connection with her subjects and with the sea, giving you the sense of both the surfers grace and the awesome …

Young Blood

The photo series ‘Young Blood’ by Erika Larsen, about the next generation of American hunters, shows the importance of keeping an open mind when choosing a subject to do a photo essay on. Many might have tried to judge the children in these images but Larsen chooses to try and understand instead. The result is …

Overgrown and Growing on Me

I have to say that having blown hot and cold on moody crooner James Blake I’m now very definitely warming to his off-kilter and atmospheric style. On the previous album I felt it to be so abstract as to be almost not there. I’d play the whole album without really registering anything but his cover …

The Place Beyond the Pines

Families. Can’t live with them can’t shoot them. Some drive you to storm from the dining table screaming ‘I hate you! I hate you!” because you can’t get your ears pierced. Other families have rather more serious difficulties. ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’ centers on the later kind. It’s a gripping multi-generational tragedy that deals …

The Silence of Dogs in Cars

Dogs trapped in cars; a subject that would send many screaming for the reinstatement of hanging. Photographer Martin Usborne has taken a different view. He has trapped dozens of dogs in cars quite deliberately in order to get this quite poignant series of images, ‘The Silence of Dogs in Cars’ The resigned looks and sad …

Coney Island Baby

To live in New York in 1940’s is to have been in the right place at the right time. To be holding camera made it even righter. Just take the example of Coney Island native, Harold Feinstein. He started taking photographs at the tender age of 15 in 1946. At 17 he joined the legendary …

The Downward Spiral

Having spent many nights gripped by series like The Killing (the Scandinavian version) and The Bridge (another Danish export) I was delighted to find a new European crime series to keep me up at nights Engrenages, otherwise known by its English title ‘Spiral’, is a French detective series currently available to stream on Netflix (which …