LHR: THE FUTURE OF FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY IN LONDON~ FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT MEGAN STEVENSON.
Turning towards the future of fashion photography this week, with an in-no-particular-order list of London photographers building their careers that I think you and Dave, of the Week should know about.
For his MA final project at London College of Communication, STEFAN WEIL presented “To Be King”, a series of photographs depicting people of colour as knights of Arthurian England. The photographs are confidently editorial and unafraid of vulnerability. They were the most memorable work I saw at the graduate showcase and I look forward to see what he does next. @stefanthephotographer
In 2024, MATHUSHAA SAGTHIDAS was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 and was a winner of the British Journal of Photography’s Portrait of Britain. Her series ‘Not Just Brown, Not Just Indian’ highlighted the multiplicity of South Asia through portraits of women. Sagthidas’ high saturation, strong flash photos and dedication to representing diverse groups imbue her images with a welcoming warmth. @mathuxphotos
EMILY WHITE’S sharp, sleek editorial work zings off the page. A recent photograph uploaded to her Instagram of jewelry on a hand, skin and nails painted a metallic rose-gold, speaks to her confidence in creating a simple yet statement image. Her work could belong in the pages of any major fashion publication with its clean, polished finish, and has already been featured on the covers of Easy Tiger, Mixmag and This Is Yung. @emilywhte
THURSTAN REDDING’S Spring/Summer 2026 cover of POP Magazine is a fantastic introduction to this photographer’s work. Lit like a Hollywood film still, Kirsten Owen leans into her chartreuse dress and looks upwards into the spotlight as if willing aliens to abduct her. Angular and atmospheric, Redding creates the perfect conditions for fashion to sing. @thurstanredding
Whether it is giant flowers towering over models, mushrooms blooming from a woman’s mouth, or a fake lamb, deer, or even polar bear posed in the scene, nature is undoubtedly a dominant feature of YANG HAN’S photography. She utilises these stagings and accessories to create a world of female perspectives, without falling into the generalised tropes of women and nature. Featured in this year’s Photo London by Bright Art Gallery, her work straddles fashion and art photography. A favourite of mine is her piece ‘After Persona’ for Vogue Czechoslovakia, November 2025, where an otherworldly, four-armed bride holds a lamb beneath her dark, glittering veil. @yanghanphoto
Texture and materiality come to the fore in the photographs of LUCY COPELAND-TUCKER. Their images are full of sensuous understanding of clothes. Working predominantly in black and white, clothes become sculptural forms in Copeland-Tucker’s hands, with queerness and close-up abstraction as key features of their work. Their editorial series TEAR for F Word Magazine, published in May 2025, feels like an ode to leather, metal, silk and cotton. @lucycopelandtucker
Recent self-portraits inspired by the Scouts’ animal patrol badges show the whimsical, explorative approach of CIARAN INNS. His London College of Communication graduate project ‘Is He Family?’ takes an intergenerational look at queer identity and kinship. Inns’ work has a clarity of vision that doesn’t subtract from the fun at its heart. @ciaraninns
My first introduction to ALIA ROMAGNOLI’S work was through her portraits for Levis X Queer Britain, a series of colourful, community-driven portraits responding to the theme Chosen Family. Her editorial piece on Bombay Mami for Noctis Magazine is a glimpse of cool maximalism, blending lavish styling with carefully composed backdrops and soft illumination. @a8lia
When not playing bass in the band Mouth Ulcers, JAMIE-LEE CULVER is creating an impactful photography portfolio. Their work has been published in Gay Times, Kerrang, Vogue Czechoslovakia and Opal Magazine. A mixture of music and fashion photography, a personal highlight of mine are their stills of Monique Murphy dancing in the rain for Daniel Avery’s ‘Digital Rain’ music video. Soaked to the skin and with sopping wet hair, the punchy movement of Murphy’s dancing, as well as the thundering of the rain, is palpable. @jamieleeculver
Megan Stevenson is an independent researcher, writer and curator based in London. She has an MA in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute.
NOTES FROM THE DRIFT {A MONTHLY COLUMN ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE} BY GREGORY EDDI JONES.
THE DEATH OF THE CAMERA, III
Photography’s Mandates, Knots, and the Generative Fork. While the emergence of generative image systems forces us to consider the future of photography, it also necessitates that we re-examine our past assumptions about the medium. Much of my thinking around the nature of photography is rooted in a simple premise that the history of photography is a history of technology.
This broad framing is the entry into the spine of an argument that, since its beginning, the medium has carried a desire to achieve easier, faster, and cheaper means of making and distributing images. And this desire, rather than circumstance, could even be argued as the core mandate of the medium altogether.
Yet preceding the invention of photography, there is another historical mandate I’d like to point to, which is that of achieving the highest possible registers of representational fidelity within the traditions of Western art. In shorter terms: it was a desire for photographic realism in the lineage of painting and drawing that predates the camera by centuries. This is the long arc that runs from Renaissance linear perspective through the Dutch masters, a tradition art historians have read as a centuries-long pursuit of the convincing illusion of the real.
Camera obscura and camera lucida devices brought these two mandates close together, and photography’s invention tied them into a knot. The resulting fusion brought forth a byproduct: indexicality, which has since served the medium as the central identity to which all practical, personal, public, institutional, scientific, and artistic uses are bound. (I argue indexicality is a miraculous byproduct, not the intent, because photography was not invented to be a “truth-telling” system.)
Through the apparatus and its optics, a visual language specific to camera seeing emerged: a language of appearances that encompasses all the signs and visual behaviors that allow us to identify photographs against painting, drawing, and other forms of printmaking.
Since its beginnings, photography’s ontological process of fixing light onto a substrate tied indexicality to a language of appearances. When an image appeared photographic, it was quite reasonably assumed to also carry record in representation. And while this language of appearances would occasionally escape the camera’s domain while venturing into photorealistic painting, drawing, and later in CGI, its escape is now permanent in the emergence of generative image systems having achieved total fluency in this ‘language.’ The consequences of disindexed photographic images are broad, severe, and only just beginning to manifest in public.
As I wrote in Part I of this essay, the domain of the camera is shrinking, giving way to generative tools that prove more efficient in means of visual production. This positions AI image engines as the tools of choice for many use cases the camera once claimed as its own.
In Part II, I introduced the term ‘language of appearances’ as, essentially, a latent ontology of photography that never needed naming until it escaped the monopoly photography once held over it. And with it, the idea of rhetorical fluidity, the newly accessible command over the messaging a generative image asserts.
While the invention of photography knotted together mandates of efficiency and realism in the Western tradition of art, the invention of generative AI pulls apart the knot that once bound photography’s appearances to its indexicality. If indexicality and appearance emerged from the fusion of efficiency and realism, what now emerges from the decoupling of index and appearance?
We now stand before two distinct strands of consequence from this decoupling. On one hand, the credibility crisis derived from the potential to produce disindexed photographic images at scale: A threat to collective trust in the photograph’s role as witness.
On the other hand, the efficiencies of AI engines open the doors for any user to achieve limitless rhetorical command over photography’s language of appearances, bending illusions of the real toward supreme idealizations around personal, political, institutional, and commercial visual claims: a condition I’ll give a name to: the paradise problem.
These two intertwining paths, the credibility crisis and the paradise problem, are hinged by a new phenomenon that generative image tools introduce: rhetorical fluidity, command over photography’s language of appearances without the skill once required to wield it. This capacity runs down both roads, and falls most consequentially to those previously unskilled in camera-speech.
Kodak’s Brownie and Fluency to Fluidity. When the Brownie camera debuted as an affordable consumer camera it marked a significant acceleration event in photography’s technological trajectory. It positioned the camera as a household appliance, rather than an aristocratic luxury, and placed the power of producing images in the hands of the middle class. In photography’s efficiency mandate, the Brownie essentially lowered the cost of access to the dollar that was charged for the camera’s purchase. Pictures required only a push of the button, and Kodak, as it was famously marketed, did the rest.
What did not come with the Brownie, and what remained costly to acquire, was the technical skill and pictorial fluency required for average picture makers to assert control over the rhetoric of the picture. We associate the Brownie with family photographs, and we associate family photographs with amateur photographs—snapshots—precisely because of their casualness: their visual gesturing of “pointing” at the thing to be remembered and cherished, and with little to no degree of authorial assertion in either visual construction or emotional framing.
With new and popular access to picture making, there emerged a demand among consumers for the skills required to achieve higher measures of visual fluency. Kodak sought to meet this demand in 1898 with the publication of Picture Taking and Picture Making, which stated in its introduction that it would “simply endeavor to start the amateur in the right direction.” toward using the camera and that “We hope that it may open the road to photographic success for many ambitious beginners.”
While the contents of Picture Taking and Picture Making were largely technical instruction, Kodak went on to push the amateur beyond operation and toward rhetorical fluidity. In 1912, How to Make Good Pictures was the first of thirty-seven editions that were published until 1995; the onset of the consumer digital camera era. The instructional impetus was less how to make pictures and more how to make them “good,” which consequently pointed to the assumed (and mostly correct) deficiency of the amateur in their ability to make pictures through purposeful speech rather than broadly directed capture.
Moreover, in 1913 Kodak introduced its publication, The Kodakery, which was designed to provide amateur photographers tips to make ‘better’ pictures while advertising new photographic products. Purchasers of the Brownie received a free one-year subscription, which functioned as a manual not for how to operate the camera, but to optimize the visual grammars that were native to camera-speech.
The numerous subsequent consumer photography periodicals that appeared throughout the 20th century are testament to widespread demand among enthusiasts and aspiring professionals to achieve fluency in the rhetorical power of images - to learn to control the speech that is asserted photographically, and to learn how technique translated into dialect.
Photography’s history over the last century is very much one of a gradual and global familiarization with photographs, increasing demands for capture, and subsequently, demands for rhetorical control. The photograph could speak, but only in the hands of the fluent could it argue, suggest, or persuade in the singularly and asymmetrically potent ways that a picture can do so.
It follows that generative AI represents a seismic collapse of the technical skill barriers that stood in the way of achieving visual-rhetorical fluency in photography’s language of appearances. With a word, users can transcribe the emotional characteristics they would like images to exert, and generative engines can spit back out a version of a family photograph that is more “tender” looking, a view of a sunset that looks “epic,” or an updated portrait of a grandfather that appears more “dignified” than the original.
Further, “make me a photograph that satirizes the Republican party” produces an effective ideological argument in photographic form. “Add decoration to this home interior” provides real estate listings with higher registers of seduction. “Make my skin look smoother” optimizes personal branding in a world increasingly reliant on idealized appearances.
There is no skill required, only desire and command. This is rhetorical fluidity in practice. Users are no longer required to achieve fluency when the machine can perform it for them. Where Kodak long ago realized a demand for rhetorical control over photographic appearance, generative AI systems now offer unfettered supply.
It’s of little coincidence that to achieve rhetorical capability means to achieve visual expressions of idealism and, further, renditions of paradise. But paradise becomes a problem.
From Publicity to Paradise. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger gave us the term “publicity image” to describe the category of images that provoke desire and envy. His examples largely were commercial images that presented ideals and dreams delivered effectively through the belief impulse that is sparked by photography’s credible appearances.
He also suggested that the rhetorics of publicity images were derived from the classical idealisms that were formulated throughout the tradition of European oil painting and its associations with wealth, privilege, and ‘the good life.’ Such images achieved their authority through representational fidelity in the careful rendering of convincing illusions - stemming from the mandate of painterly realism that preceded photography’s invention.
If commercial color photography extended a tradition formed within Western painting as Berger suggested, we can very well consider generative images as carrying on the applications of the image for the purposes to persuade, evoke desire, and generally perform in those high rhetorical registers.
Berger’s thinking surfaced in a time before smartphones and social media gave way to a culture saturated with images in totality. As he opened his chapter on ‘publicity’, he stated that “all of us see hundreds of publicity images every day of our lives.” Heavy internet users now see thousands by the hour in a digitally mediated world that would have seemed alien to Berger in 1972.
Indeed the digital and smartphone eras have expanded the potential of the image to offer a vision of paradise beyond the commercial, and into the vernacular, social, and local purposes of pictures. Where once the rhetoric of paradise was handed down from society’s religious, corporate, editorial, and political layers, the domain has expanded to the local, social, and transactional. Even before AI, smartphone filters and apps provided simple optimization tools to crop, modify color and contrast, filter - to make raw camera outputs ‘better.’ Before the era of digital optimization, skilled photographers occupied positions as publicists for the objects they photographed.
Now, we are all publicists for the subjects we photograph, and through generative AI mechanisms, this publicity impulse is automated. This is photography’s efficiency mandate in action, coupled with the magnetic pull of idealism that bends personal, commercial, and social uses toward its center.
It bears noting that Berger left reportage outside the publicity frame, filing the news photograph elsewhere as the image of witness and agony. Yet reportage belongs to paradise too, though its paradise lives in how the event is formally constructed and dramatized for commercial appeal.
Like Berger’s publicity, reportage also borrows from the visual conventions of oil painting, most often where historical events are recorded beneath the high sheen of the symbolic. It surrounds the event with associations while borrowing the credibility of the indexical “was” to assert the picture as testimony. Where publicity evokes desire through visions of what-could-be, reportage forms an account of what Barthes called the “that-has-been,” but when varnished in theatre, becomes an idealized memorial of the has-been.
Consider a thought experiment: if the New York Times, and all institutional reportage authorities, limited photographers solely to disposable cameras, the reportage role as witness would carry the same indexical authority, perhaps even more, in the absence of competitive authorial assertion. In the emergence of citizen journalism, we feel closer to the event and to the role of the witness, because such reports are formed in the same vernacular language of appearances as the common picture maker.
The snapshot vernacular asserts believability without idealism. Its credibility comes from a dialect of the authentic and an absence of rhetorical intent, where institutional reportage earns belief by custody and certification, a credibility that then licenses theatre. Two sources of belief: the vernacular looks unauthored, the institution certifies the witness and can dress it in commercial appeal.
What the concern is in all of this is that generative tools can now offer users fluency in both of these image modes at once. The snapshot’s unauthored look and professional reportage’s craft-varnished authority can each be summoned on command, with no event behind either.
Both modes of report, the one that earns belief by looking unauthored and the one that confers it through craft and institutional credibility, become pure appearance severed from any real ‘was.’ This is the credibility crisis.
Looking Ahead. The decoupling of photography’s indexicality and appearance in generative image systems creates a fork of two related but distinct social and cultural consequences that we are just now beginning to reckon with. One is the paradise problem. The other is the credibility crisis. Each hinges on the newly emergent rhetorical fluidity that puts the power of visual rhetoric, often intertwined with the appearance of indexical credibility, into the hands of any user of AI image tools.
As this essay series maps photography’s tectonic and topographical shifts and introduces the concerns of paradise and credibility and the rhetorical forces behind them, Part IV will look afield to consider and speculate on the longer term social and cultural consequences of these conditions.
What happens when our image cultures are fully cloaked in visual simulations of the ideal? And what threats do our social fabrics face when the credibility of photography’s testimonial authority is weakened, or even dissolved? These are the concerns that require urgent interrogation.
Gregory Eddi Jones is an artist, writer, and publisher. His photographic work has been published in the British Journal of Photography, Dear Dave, magazine and Foam Magazine, and he has contributed writing to Afterimage, Paper Journal, and Unseen Magazine.
THE LIST. (OF THOSE YOU SHOULD KNOW)
THIS WEEK’S RECKONING OF THOSE WHO ARE ON OUR MIND: A GLOBAL GATHERING OF THE INFLUENTIAL, THE CLEVER, THE SILENT, THE TRULY ORIGINAL, THE TENACIOUS.
PORTFOLIO OF THE WEEK: SAM GULLIVER.
“At its core, what photography is all about for me is using the camera as a machine for putting myself in interesting situations. It makes me meet people I wouldn’t otherwise meet, go places I wouldn’t otherwise go, and see things I wouldn’t otherwise see.
I treat the pictures that come out of these encounters as a kind of proof — proof, to myself and to anyone willing to look, that the world is strange, full of variety, and infinitely analyzable. I think we’ve lost that collective feeling in a lot of ways. The world can feel flat now, like there’s nothing left to discover. These pictures are an attempt to push back against that feeling, both the personal version of it and the wider, societal one.
Maybe if I compile enough proof, we can all start to see the world as the magical place it actually is — and from there, maybe even imagine it differently. That might be wishful thinking. But it’s the thinking that keeps me pointing the camera at things.”
Sam Gulliver is a graduate student in the MFA department at the Yale School of Art. A volume of his work, entitled “Three Rings” was published by Subjectively Objective last year.
REVIEW: CARRIE SCHNEIDER AT THE DAVID PETER FRANCIS GALLERY, NEW YORK.
BY DANIELLE EZZO
The elevator doors open, and I step into the darkened room of the David Peter Francis gallery. A single ceiling-height screen divides the room. I can’t see anything besides the illuminated scrim and the projector behind it. Is this all? I ask the gallerist, who sits just out of my view. Yeah, he says, gesturing for me to take the empty chair next to the projector.
Carrie Schneider’s FLW is one of three sibling works, including her installation at this year’s Venice Biennale and the recent Independent Fair booth. Each references the same source material, an eight-second sequence pulled from Chris Marker’s 1962 film “La Jetée”. This is all I know for now. I’ve intentionally come to Schneider’s work blind. I watch what appears to be a stop-motion montage of analog film stills with a black-and-white portrait of a woman at its center. The frame around the portrait flickers through graphic compositions, emblematic of analog chemical processes. A set of fingers creep in from the lower edge of the frame, hold the portrait down. They dance in color along its edges momentarily until the screen goes black before looping once more.
It happens subtly at first—did the woman blink, or had I? Against my inclination, I keep my eyes open longer to confirm my suspicions. Then, again. Another blink. Perfectly timed to my own bodily rhythms. Only after the film takes three full cycles do I notice the woman’s face also drifts, chin slowly turning downward in slumber.
At the Venice Biennale, “First Living Woman” is a one-kilometer-long chromogenic photograph, the largest ever, stacked across three steel tiers to the ceiling of the Arsenale, each frame of Hélène Châtelain, the actress centered in each of the works, exposed onto a continuous roll of paper with a room-sized camera Schneider constructed herself. Here, though, in this Chinatown space, the photograph has been rephotographed onto Super16mm film.
In the original film, the moment is described as “an extraordinary epiphany” by Time Out in the 2014 review when Châtelain’s face animates because it’s the only sequence in the entirety of the film constructed almost exclusively of optically printed photographs playing out as a photomontage. Marker leads into it with dissolves between frames rather than the hard cuts that deceive the viewer’s eye and leave me wondering whether what I’m seeing is actually in motion or serialized still images.
Chromogenic paper, as what is presented at the Independent Fair and the Biennale, is the standard of the analog index. Light leaves its trace on scrolls of emulsion through optical projection, which reads as the photographic act in its most classical sense. But the light hitting Schneider’s paper is the light of a screen showing a JPEG sequence whose relationship to Châtelain’s 1961 face is already mediated by codec, by compression, and the distribution networks that put pirated stills within proximity of any artist’s phone. The photographic index is doing two things at once. It is a material record, but also a cultural one.
This is the premise the installation presses on, and it’s sharper than the prevailing critical line on Schneider’s work, which tends to celebrate her as a worker of material elasticity and execution at a colossal scale. Chris Marker’s photo-roman already troubled this binary by making cinema out of stills, and by treating the still as the ground of cinematic time rather than its absence. Schneider takes Marker’s trouble and adds recursion. The 16mm projection in the gallery is, technically, film of a photograph of a film of a phone of a film.
It bears mentioning that Hèléne Châtelain was 26 when she made “La Jetée,” and it remained her only role of note as an actress. Her work as a filmmaker, translator, and writer is worth lingering on, too, because it clarifies why Schneider settled on this footage in particular. Châtelain spent decades on the other side of the camera: as a collaborator of radical playwright Armand Gatti, her documentaries on Soviet dissidents, translations from Russian, and, most pointedly, her work on the 1975 prison film “Les Prisons Aussi”, made for Michel Foucault’s Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons. That she is the face Schneider chose to resurrect, an actress whose own creative life was largely spent giving image to the effaced, is notable.
Koyo Kouoh, the Swiss-Cameroonian curator who was the first African woman invited to lead the Venice Biennale, died suddenly last May, aged 58, and her team carried out her project posthumously. The exhibition is, as Wallpaper noted, “perhaps unavoidably, steeped in mourning.” Schneider is among the 81 artists who withdrew from the Biennale competition in solidarity with the jury Kouoh had selected, following protests over the inclusion of Russia and Israel. This happened in the weeks immediately before FLW opened. Given Châtelain’s lifelong political documentary work and the landscape Schneider is now operating in, FLW reads as an extension of that politics: a commentary not only on the divide between analog and digital, but on a sociopolitical one. Even the title of this installation, FLW, is shorthand for “First Living Woman”, pointing to various forms of collapse over time.
Danielle Ezzo is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is the author of “If Not Here, The Where?” published by Silent Face Projects in 2023, and is on the faculty of ICP.