ZA :

In a recent story that you wrote for The Guardian about Wolfgang Tillmans’ show at the Pompidou Centre, you made an interesting observation. You write “Some prints are framed, some clipped up, some stuck to the wall, each suggesting questions about how photography isolates what it shows.” I was wondering if you could elaborate on this idea of how a form determines the reading of an image?

DS :

This is a bit of an iceberg, because that comment is part of a whole wider narrative I've been thinking about over the last few years - what is the ideology that's embedded in the medium of photography? There is a great essay by author and curator Ariella Azoulay in the book Capitalism and the Camera: Essays on Photography and Extraction, in which she prompts us to imagine that photography didn’t begin with the invention of the camera, but in 1492. In some way, photography is linked with an imperial way of seeing the world. There are different ways to use photography, but essentially it does remove things from the world, and put them within the edges of the frame and behind a surface. In that sense, I feel that photography isolates and displays. About two-three years ago, I made an annual for Photoworks called ‘The Thing’, looking at the idea that the camera objectifies, and thingifies, and how photographers push back against that. I was also interested in other technologies of display, such as shop windows, and vitrines in museums, which were all developed at the start of industrial capitalism. It seems to me that they are linked with photography somehow, and play a part in forming an ideology.

ZA :

I was once advised by a mentor that the most important aspect about writing - was reading. As an editor of one of the most celebrated magazines on photography, I was wondering what your take was on this statement, and if you could talk about the importance of “reading” an image?

DS :

For me personally, I definitely agree. I have always been a big reader, ever since I was a child. It helps give me a perspective that’s beyond my own immediate circumstances. For example, I enjoy science fiction and books from the counterculture in the USA during the 60s. It’s about understanding other ways of thinking, particularly other ways of thinking about capitalism. But I don't know if I would necessarily think that's true for everyone. I teach at the London College of Communications, and from my interactions with students, as well as with other photographers, I’ve heard about problems at school, or dyslexia and how reading isn’t easy for them. It’s one of the reasons they’ve chosen photography, because it’s another language to think and speak about the world. As for the relationship between text and images, it’s another interesting problem, because it seems to me that words are quite different to individual photographs. You can use words to conceptualise and generalise, but images are specific to a scene. To me that seems like a really key difference. But of course, both of them allow you the space to think, and I definitely recommend that people ‘think’ about things. I’m also wondering what is the way of seeing that we're being trained in, because we see more and more photographs. I'm interested in the ways of thinking that we are being educated in that aren’t the same as reading. There is a really interesting book called Omen published by Editorial RM, for example, that reexamines images from the Farm Security Administration’s photographic archive (1935-1944) by cropping them and zooming in on details that are otherwise less apparent. Those details are making an impression on us that we aren’t conscious of. These are aspects of photography that I’m intrigued by at the moment.

ZA :

In the recent past, photography as an artform doesn’t stand in isolation of the image alone. There has been a rise in the combination of video, cut-outs, writing, collage, drawing, and painting to enhance or elaborate its narrative. Does this excite you as a concept? And does this phenomenon make you contemplate the infinite nature of the image?

DS :

It's really interesting to see how photography has expanded. I’ve been working in photography for 25 years, and during that time, more people are taking photos because now everyone has a camera. It’s dazzling to see the number of photographs on my phone and around me every single day. I think it’s also impacted the way that people are installing photography. For example, I recently went to the opening of Felicity Hammond's new exhibition at The Photographer's Gallery, and the floors and walls were covered in images, and there was also a large mirror as part of the installation. We were completely surrounded by photography. Photography is making its way into the wider art world, and it’s something that photographers are thinking about. Having said that, Wolfgang Tillmans is the only photographer who has ever won the Turner Prize for art, and that was in 2000. But I’m also very interested in how photography is now installed in the everyday. There's a shop called Sports Direct on Oxford Street in London, which is the busiest shopping street, it has videos and images in a total environment in which you don’t know what’s real, and what’s an image. To me, that is both fascinating and dangerous. If there is a certain ideology within photography, then what are we immersing ourselves in? My son is really into VR, and we’ve tried a whole range of different environments. But is that immersion? We’re in a world, but still quite removed because our other senses, smell, taste, or touch, aren’t involved. I think we also need to think about this desire, or this idea that we're being immersed in images because ultimately, we're still distanced.

ZA :

Do you remember the first photograph that invoked something in you to put into words?

DS :

That's a great question, and also a tricky one. I didn’t grow up in a family where we went to galleries, so my main way to experience photographs as a child was through the media. We used to get The Guardian and The Observer delivered to our home, and that was my association with printed images. I remember seeing a photograph in The Observer from the Gulf War by Kenneth Jarecke when I was about 14/15 years old, showing an Iraqi soldier completely charred. The photograph was quite controversial, and since it was a representation of the ‘other side’, it ran counter to the way that The Gulf War was being presented in the media in the UK at the time. I didn’t know about this controversy at the time, but I do remember that this image made a big impression on me. We also had a style magazine in the UK known as The Face, which I thought was amazing when I was a teen. Since I lived in a small town I didn’t have access to photo books, but I ripped out the pages from this magazine and completely covered my bedroom with photographs. It really gave me the feeling that I could work in culture, that it was exciting and vibrant, and that there was a place for me in it. Then I suppose, as I got older, one of my friends had a poster by German photography duo Bernd and Hilla Becher, and that was my first exposure to a more conceptual style of photography. So I think these would be the three kinds of images that influenced me initially – a press photograph, style images, and one from the art world, which I saw via a mass medium. These images made me see that photography isn’t something that you might do at birthdays and Christmas, that it could be used in so many other ways.

ZA :

BJP has recently announced the list for ‘Ones To Watch,’ 2025. Could you touch upon the selection process, and what has been the most exciting aspect about discovery over the years?

DS :

It’s great fun, and of course we rely on a large network of nominators around the world to help us put it together. We try to represent different regions and different approaches to photography, although I'd say that everything we feature is ‘something’ about the world. Since I am interested in how photography as a medium is an expression of a particular Western way of looking, I find insights from artists who come from different cultural histories very interesting. For example, Tianyu Wang is an emerging artist from China - she is a digital native, who grew up with photography and therefore finds the camera almost an extension of her body. But, on the other hand, since she comes from China, she has grown up with a different art history. For example, she mentioned that there is a scattered perspective in traditional Chinese painting, which is very different to the fixed view established in the West during the Renaissance. It's also always very interesting to see work by artists from outside the establishment in the West. For example, Maen Hammad's images of Palestine show a different way of seeing this region to the one often portrayed in Western newspapers. Discover more about Diane Smyth’s practice here