Source
Winter 2005

Public funding has played an important role in photography over the last 30 years. Alexandra Moschovi here examines the history of funding for photography in Britain through the Arts Council. The aspirations of government funding do not always match the aspirations of photography organisations, one illuminating hard case of this mismatch was that of the funding of Ten.8 magazine, Moschovi looks back at the demise of the magazine to find out about the ambitions and expectations of the funders and publishers.

Photography is more often experienced through books than exhibitions yet while we have specialist photography galleries we have no specialist photography libraries. Mark Bolland discovers where all the photography books are to be found.

Maxine Hall’s portraits work through a series of oppositions and tensions. By shifting between closed and opened eyes she makes us conscious of looking and being looked at, of scrutinising and being scrutinised. She sets up a tension between backdrop and figure, by the use of white on white, black on black and floral on floral in which the figure separates from and merges with its surroundings.

Michelle Sank is interested in how the media and popular culture influence the way that young people understand themselves and their place in society. As part of a commission by Belfast Exposed she worked with youth groups in the city and more informally engaged in conversation with young people to discover how they see themselves, how they want to be seen and how they feel they are being represented? Belfast provides an unobtrusive backdrop to the portraits that are a result of this dialogue.

Ben Graville works for a press agency specializing in Criminal and Civil law which involves him in photographing well known occupants of prison vans, entering court from remand prisons, for the national newspapers. The windows of the vans are dark so it is impossible to see the occupants. Sometimes the drivers indicate which side of the van the person is sitting on but beyond this the result of photographing through the windows is unpredictable. Stationed outside court for long periods of time Graville noticed remand prisoners banging on the sides of the vans for attention. Following on from this he made a series of portraits, of these unknown remand prisoners hidden away from the public gaze, caught up in the legal process along with the security guards escorting them in the vans.

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