On Our Radar

As we launched Flash Forward Flash Back, we also kept a keen eye out for exciting photo projects, publications, exhibitions, discussions, and events. The following inspired and amazed us, since we feel they help move the field forward.

San Francisco photographer Laura Morton (winner 2016) has received the 2018 Canon Female Photojournalist Award. After documenting the budding tech industry and startup culture in California, a project entitled Wild West Tech and made possible by the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund, she plans on focusing her lens on the economic divide in the Bay Area that can be observed between Palo Alto and East Palo Alto. “One street, University Avenue, runs through the heart of both communities,” she explains “I will be using the street as a microcosm, documenting the stories of the individuals who live and work along it, to illustrate the stark economic divide between these two communities.”

September 7, 2018

Alongside the exhibition of Roger Ballen’s work There Is No Light Outside, curated by Jonathan Hobin (winner 2012) now the Creative and Executive Director of the School of Photographic Arts: Ottawa,  a panel with art historian and curator, Patrick Lynn Rivers, social scientist, Charles Reeve, and, artist, Jennifer Dickson, moderated by scholar, curator and activist Dr. Monica Patterson will be taking place on September 14th. The four critical thinkers will discuss the “issues and concepts” brought forward by the South African photographer’s controversial “exploration of the shadowy depths of human consciousness.”

September 7, 2018

Jess T. Dugan (winner 2015) spent the past 5 years making portraits of older transgender people. The resulting book To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Adults is out now. In FF/FB inaugural roundtable, A Rainbow of Nuances: Reporting LGBTQ+ Stories, she explains “One of the reasons I wanted to start photographing older trans folks was that I heard from a young trans man who had found one of my images of an older man whom he assumed was trans, but he wasn’t, which in some ways is irrelevant to the story. He wrote this very moving paragraph about how he had never seen an older trans man and had no road map for what he would look like as he got older.”

September 7, 2018

Guillaume Simoneau (winner 2008 and 2010), released his second opus, Experimental Lake. The images are as uncanny as the subject matter is intriguing; an area in Northern Ontario where 58 lakes act as laboratories.

June 20, 2018
Photo by Brian Adamns, from Natives Photograph

Earlier this spring, the database Natives Photograph, which seeks to elevate the work of Indigenous visual storyteller by making it easier for photo editor, curators and art directors to find and hire photographers from those communities was launched. It joins a growing list of such directory, including Women Photograph, and Diversify Photo that aim to create a more inclusive and diverse photo industry.

June 20, 2018
Photo by Ina Jang

Ina Jang’s (winner 2011) series Utopia, was on view at the James Foley Gallery in New York and featured in the New Yorker. Cutting out images of women from Japanese and Korean magazines akin to Playboy and photographing only their contours, she created a series that demonstrates how the poses favoured by these publications are meant to make the models appear passive and inviting, attributes that then translate into how men believe women ought to behave. A sharp commentary in the age of the #MeToo movement.

June 20, 2018