Source
Winter 2003

One role necessary for the production of this magazine is getting copies of pictures to illustrate reviews. While some galleries and publishers are very helpful it is also common for organisations to refuse to supply pictures claiming they do not have permission or a fee will have to be charged. This is indicative of a broader trend that emphasises the publicity value of images rather than the value of public criticism. Ronan Deazley looks at the law regarding the availability of images for review and in particular how this can be constrained by contracts produced to restrict the ‘fair usage’ of pictures.

Meanwhile businesses and newspapers are busily generating photographs that they want anyone to publish, thereby generating free publicity for their products or services. Colin Graham describes the desperation of the photographers attempting to give this banal self-publicity integrity and a certain style. He asks how this form of news-come-advertising fits with our idea of photojournalism.

Chris Shaw has been working as a night porter in hotels for the last ten years. His images reveal the coming and goings of guests and staff at these establishments as well as the intervening details from his own life. The temporary guests in Stephen Gunning’s photographs are resident in an apartment block in Berlin. The images show the occupants asleep surrounded by the ephemera of their various artistic pursuits.

Chino Otsuka returns to an apartment block in the suburbs of Tokyo. She reoccupies the now deserted flat that she spent her childhood in by staging a series of self portraits. A similar intimacy is achieved in Ruth Fuller’s photographs of her family. However in this case it includes the day to day tensions and unspoken feelings of family life.

Becky Beasley’s work takes us on a journey through a twilight world. These images suggest partially remembered details of a city that fail to reveal its full identity. The series goes on to present a curious selection of objects sifted from the reservoir of the everyday.

Source is a quarterly photography magazine, available in print and as a digital edition, published in Belfast, Northern Ireland. They publish emerging photographic work and engage with the latest in contemporary photography through news, thoughtful features and reviews of the latest exhibitions and books from Ireland and the UK. Their website brings together an archive of writing and pictures from the magazine alongside current features.¹