Source Photographic Review - Web Articles

WEB ARTICLES:
Writers Prize

In 2024 Source ran the fourth edition of its prize for new writing about photography. The winner of the prize was Ann Marie Curran and her submission is published in Source. The runner up submissions from this and previous years are all published here.

Writers Prize: 30 / Jan / 2026
‘This Photo Will Self-Destruct’
by Ciara Rodgers

A click, a whirr and magically an image begins to appear. Not all at once, but gradually, as if the world is revealing itself again. In my visual art practice, Polaroids aren’t nostalgic; they’re a way of paying attention—a way of walking with the city and sometimes, against it. For my relationship to the city is shaped by a gendered experience of space, moving through it with alertness, caution, and a persistent sense of being both visible and out of place. Here I write in my eighth month of pregnancy, trying to remember a time I ever felt more visible and out of place, the awkward hours of adolescence, perhaps? Taking lead from the Situationist idea of the dérive, drifting through city streets, development edges, and derelict corners, I notice textures, ruptures, and absences. Gaps that seem to speak even louder than the structures around them. Along the way, I will collect materials left behind: fragments of plaster, insulation foam, and torn packaging. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 02 / Dec / 2025
‘Looking for Meaning’
by Laramie Shubber

My first memories of Iraq were built through the stories that accompanied our family archive. There were ones that my family told me and ones that I told myself. More than personal photos, I also saw them as historical documents that showed lives that were too often forgotten about in the news about Iraq. You can imagine what some of them look like. Multi generational families laughing together, birthdays and so on. Photos that painted a picture of a joyful life that I always felt was taken from me and that I couldn’t connect to what was happening in the news. And then I happened upon this portrait of my mother as a young woman. Her expression - or apparent lack of - initially unsettled me. I could see a vulnerable aspect in her eyes that I recognise in her today, it’s this detail that begins to hold my gaze and triggers an almost emotional response in me. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 24 / Jan / 2025
‘Photography’s Roots and Flowers’
by Melissa McCarthy

I didn’t expect to end up in a darkened drawer in LA on a botanic detective mission, but looking at art takes you to some strange places. I’d written a book about photography, and to illustrate a section on impermanence and memory, I wanted to use an image of something from the Getty collection. The item is a piece of paper. Specifically, a photogenic drawing negative, made by W.H.F. Talbot in around 1835, catalogue number 85.XM.150.14. This item is an irregular rectangle, some 11x5 cm, and the subject it depicts is a scrap of dark linen damask woven with a lighter figure of tumbling flowers, each with undulating leaves, a cog-like centre. The original linen was the same size; it’s a photogenic drawing made by treating the paper, placing the fabric on it, exposing to light. But it’s a photogenic negative, so the object, the dark linen with light flowers, produced for Talbot an artefact that looks the other way round: a dark, trapezoid background with a ghostly pale field (the fabric) floating on it, fraying away at the edges. Dark flowers blooming. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 21 / Jan / 2025
‘Your Little Scattered Archive’
by Tess Little

It was my mother who found the photograph. She was searching for my writing when she encountered the Amazon listing: 'Vintage photo of Tess Little and Alice Hobbis busy in the sand' For $29.00 (plus $9.99 shipping) you could purchase a photograph of Tess and Alice, aged four or five, digging with plastic spades. The picture was listed as an ‘original collectible’, ‘over forty years old’, though anyone who studied it could recognise the cartoon gloss of the nineties. The era is there in Alice’s 'Little Mermaid' sweater, in the primary colour palette, the crisp contrast of sunlight dimpling sand. The seller, a company called PickYourImage, would post the purchase from Latvia. Elsewhere, they called themselves Icelandic. I had grown up in Norwich and had never visited either country. But not only did this company have my likeness, they had my name too. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 20 / Jan / 2025
‘Shoebox’
by Martin Raymond

This is about the heft of a shoebox filled with photographs printed on paper. The physicality of images. It is also about the stillness of the house of the recently dead. The empty chair with the cushions crushed. The crossword half done, the slippers neatly parked, the TV remote still to hand. We were the executors, with the sad business of emptying the house. The house belonged to my Uncle John, a remarkable man who left school at fourteen for an engineering apprenticeship, did his national service in Germany in 1948, witnessed the Berlin Airlift, married my mother’s sister, moved into sales at GEC, travelled the world, was an active trade unionist and historian of the labour movement, completed his PhD at the age of 79, wrote scholarly articles in his eighties and lived in this same house in Manchester for nearly sixty years. He had no family but left behind his scholarship, a wide network of friends and relatives. And his photographs. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 17 / Jan / 2025
‘Shooting on cameras, shooting with a gun’
by Emma Aars

Jackie is running across a big field in Central Park, heading for a forest. She is no longer a Kennedy, and probably happy her life is no longer regulated by presidential guards and the strictures of the White House. They wouldn't allow her to run as freely as she is doing here, now, in the uncut grass, free from tight Chanel suits and long Givenchy dresses. Jeans and flats makes it easier to run away from the paparazzi photographer Ron Galella’s stalking lens. Ron Galella’s world is full of celebrities. His proximity to the stars makes him a kind of star himself, being the paparazzo behind many of the most iconic celebrity images of the last century. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 29 / Nov / 2023
‘The Carte de Visite Widow’
by Annette Richardson

On July 5th 1861, a young woman visited the fashionable London studio of French photographer Camille Silvy to have her portrait taken (Fig.1). Silvy was meticulous in keeping records of clients but on this occasion he initially made a mistake as to his sitter’s identity: recording her instead as the sister who accompanied her, then having to score through his flowing script and write the correct name. What is significant about this incident is not Silvy’s mistake – he had many sittings in a day – but how he identified the woman from her image. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 29 / Nov / 2023
‘Beyond Romanticism’
by Sarah-Jane Field

My relationship with the machine began the moment I did. I slid out of my mother's body with relative ease but was hurriedly popped into an incubator because I was too cold. I survived. And that was the start of our connection. Soon afterwards, my mother and I were carried by the machine through the sky to meet my father waiting in Southern Africa. But not before the machine suspended little moments of us in London, surrounded by geriatric ladies in floral dresses. And there I am again, suspended in time in Cape Town, wearing a feather boa behind some drums. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 29 / Nov / 2023
‘Losing Your Head’
by Sarah Crozier

Earlier this year, Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum held an exhibition, Documentary Genealogies. Photography 1848-1917, that compared the rise of socialism and the development of photography. Among the many portraits of different social classes and “types”, one photograph stood out. A figure, whose head is out of the frame, stands naked but for some white stockings and a black shoe on the right leg, which is raised on a step. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 28 / Nov / 2023
‘Hold On’
by Neva Elliott

Our relationship was meant to be casual, an intermittent distraction. The first photograph I took of him was less than a month after we met. That night I dreamt of drowning. In the morning, I photographed his hand lying on his chest, Christ-like, corpse-like, too beautiful to be real or alive. We continued to see each other, more often than planned. I kept photographing him – in his flat, my house, hotel rooms, holiday apartments, forests, the back of my car. Naked, laying bare his human fragility. This is what we do we’d joke, sex and photography. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 28 / Nov / 2023
‘What Remains’
by Liam Etheridge

The last photo of my mum was taken shortly after she was. The photo is of our hands holding, and it is shut away in a folder where I can’t see it. This is because when I once glimpsed the picture by accident, it put me in a bad mood for days. Nevertheless, I couldn’t simply delete it – it seemed disrespectful somehow, like flushing her ashes down the toilet. So I am stuck with it, tucked away somewhere in the digital recesses of my old laptop. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 25 / Jul / 2023
‘What’s in a Title?’
by Francesca Butterfield

The 1962 Italian film 'Mondo Cane' is not suitable for all audiences. It is filled to the brim with taboos—some harmless, some not—such as nudity, polyandry, animal cruelty, cross dressing, and violence. Written and directed by Paolo Cavara, Franco Prosperi, and Gualtiero Jacopetti, the film has a runtime of 108 minutes and is comprised of thirty-six Technicolor vignettes shot around the world. Despite being denounced as low-brow exploitation and 'shockumentary', 'Mondo Cane’s' box office success is a testament to the power of the masses.(1) It was used internationally as the model for a throng of successive films that featured graphic content under the guise of factuality. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 24 / Jul / 2023
‘Mandy O'Neill's Photograph of Diane’
by Oana Sânziana Marian

I don’t know Diane, but when I catch her gaze at eye level (as the photographer Mandy O’Neill captured her), there’s a complicated pain I haven’t felt since I was a teenager. But first, the photograph: Diane, a young woman of 17-18, standing, wearing a school uniform – white button-down shirt, navy-blue tie with thin diagonal stripes of maroon, yellow and green – against a featureless light blue background. There’s something retro, and institutional, about it: the pastel backdrop of school portraits in the 80’s and 90’s, when I was coming up. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 21 / Jul / 2023
‘Smile Though Your Heart is Aching’
by Xaver Könneker

Before Carole's smile became an object of study to be forensically examined in a mortuary, she lay dead in her English council estate apartment for over two years. Her body was slowly withering away in front of the flickering lights of a television that was left running the whole time. It was an automated payment system that, on behalf of benefit agencies, transferred half of her rent every month to the Metropolitan Housing Trust, leading officials to believe that she was still alive . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 21 / Jul / 2023
‘The Body of Ulrike Meinhof’
by Chris Milton

Victors displayed the heads of the vanquished upon pikes, held aloft for yokel delectation and warning. This photo of Ulrike Meinhof, taken shortly after her suicide in the Stannheim prison mortuary in 1976 for police archives, leaked to the press by a police photographer to 'Stern' magazine, was intended to signal a victory and serve as deterrent to the public. But on its own terms, it fails. How could it not make the viewer question just what could have pushed this famously fervent, iron-willed woman to the point of self-murder? What they did to her? Whether it was indeed suicide and not murder? It is an image that sabotages itself through its very squalor. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 20 / Jul / 2023
‘Bad Photography’
by Jimi Cullen

The Scottish poet William McGonagall died in 1902, but is celebrated to this day, with dinners and events held in his memory well into the 21st century. Yet by every formal standard, McGonagall was a terrible poet. His work doesn’t scan, with lines of wildly varying rhythm and length, and he sacrificed imagery, metaphor, and meaning in service of painfully simple rhymes. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 07 / Sep / 2022
‘The Shabbiness of Beauty’
by Odette England

I dismember the book page by page. Isn't taking a photograph a sort of dismembering of the world? Consider subbing dismemberment for another word. Word is in world. There is no L in Moyra or Davey or Peter or Hujar or The Shabbiness of Beauty or Vanishing. Rather, lots of love, lonesomeness, lust, looking, and light. I tape the pages to my walls. Regret ensues. My daughter wants to know about the chickens. She grills me with questions. Whatever, she sniffs at the elephants, waves, babies, and the penis. What's for dinner? We rhumba for a week or so these pages and me. I stroke their edges, smile. I whisper to the high heels I love you. None of us says that often enough, much less mean it. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 16 / Jul / 2022
‘A Sinister Memoriam’
by Harvey Dimond

A photograph from Christina Sharpe’s book 'In the Wake: On Blackness and Being' has been branded on my memory ever since I first saw it two years ago. Reproduced as a black and white image in Sharpe’s book, the photograph shows a young Black girl, maybe around 10 years old, in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. She had been pulled, miraculously, from the rubble of a building more than two weeks after the disaster, by which time most hopes of finding people alive would have abated. She is shown lying down, staring directly into the lens; stuck on her forehead is a piece of adhesive material with Ship written on it, in black marker pen. The material has been stuck on her head, branded almost, by US Army soldiers, as they wait to evacuate her from Port-au-Prince to an unknown destination. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 15 / Jul / 2022
‘Black Cats’
by Morwenna Kearsley

Pluto is often described as God of the Dead or Lord of the Underworld and I would add Photographer to that list. For what is a photograph if not a death? Down in the deep, dark shadows of his subterranean city, I imagine him printing photographs. Negative to positive, light to dark. Perhaps he uses the summer time, when Proserpina departs the Underworld, to really get to grips with the darkroom backlog. In his 1843 story 'The Black Cat', Edgar Allan Poe’s mercurial narrator names his pet cat Pluto. This brutal malefactor confesses to a pattern of abuse and violence meted out not only to Pluto but his wife also; a response to their consistent love and care and fear. Writing at a time when photography was still in its infancy, Poe plays on the prophetic image-apparition as central to superstitious beliefs and dreadful outcomes. In one scene, an image of the murdered Pluto appears on a scorched wall after fire consumes the narrator’s house. The white, negative image of the black cat communicates to observers the brutal manner of its death. In another scene, a replacement black cat’s tuft of white chest hair slowly begins to form a prophetic image of gallows. Poe tells us, through the use of black and white images that the positive photograph is bound to its negative in perpetuity, like a crime to its punishment. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 14 / Apr / 2022
‘The Only Photograph of Mr Pencil’
by Sinéad Corcoran

Mr Pencil survived the War by turning sideways. Every movement of his comrades looked like the worst case of having a fleshy body that Mr Pencil had ever seen. They heaved and dragged themselves up and down the mountainsides. Blinded by their own sweat and slowed by their own feet that rejected their duty to move, move, move, hide, hide, hide. They staggered under the weight of their own selves and when they fell, he – like a sliver, a ripple, a faint glint against the sky – watched the shrapnel and the bullets press into the thickness of them. Since childhood, Mr Pencil was always looking at the sky: the chance of rain, the chance of wind, the chance of a sudden summer storm. His mother said he was of a delicate constitution, a nervous disposition, running inside at any sign of danger. In fair weather, however, he was the finest scout in all of Western Macedonia. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 15 / Mar / 2022
‘Things To Do With Photographs’
by Blaine O'Donnell

Individually, featherlight. Together, they are a weight in our house, the box casting shadows as the sun passes over the apples. I know they are there, always, waiting in the crate, as we move in and out of rooms, seasons. I come home for a week when the trees are in blossom and the rain batters the petals down into the earth. Some of the albums have shifted. Has my mother been in here looking? Her life is another life entirely. I draw a diagram of our overlapping lives. When everyone is elsewhere, I go back to the box of past happenings, the kaleidoscopic, overlapping mound of the camera's glances. A surfeit of existence has been gathered here, skimmed from the swim of things. I can not stop looking. I look at eyes looking into the future. I look at the family features appearing in faces. A gamut of facets. I look for their frst appearance, their most recent iteration. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 15 / Feb / 2022
‘Shaking Out of Polaroid Nostalgia’
by Robert Lewis

During the last week of the 2020-21 school year, one of my middle school students asked to take a picture with his friends. The student, a seventh grader in my English Language Learners class, was a bit of a handful; he didn’t really ask, he told. 'We’re going to take a picture,' he said. But just as I was ready to verbally pounce, I saw him slip his hand into his knapsack and pull out a modern, instant camera. I melted. He unbuttoned the black case of his black Fujifilm Instamax Mini 11 and looked at me. I nodded. 'Great choice,' I said. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 22 / Mar / 2021
‘Through a Kitchen Window’
by Julie Dawn Dennis

At home I am, in normal circumstances, liberated by limitation, free to be myself inside my own room. Through my window I can be both seen and hidden. With soft curtains closed, I redact the outside world; with them open, I may gaze across the outside, and (if I choose to) photograph what I see. Looking through the viewfinder it is as though I am present in both places at once. Both the window and the camera complicate my interior and exterior worlds. If the human eye is window to one’s soul, is a camera an extension to this ‘soul-window’? You look into my eye to read me, to know me. I want to share with you an image of what my eye sees so that you may read me further and know me deeper. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 22 / Feb / 2021
‘Looking at My Parents’
by Julia Tanner

“This is the last time you’ll see me in my twenties,” I said to my father in the car. He turned around and stretched his face into a smile with dancing eyes. My father is a quiet man, and rarely makes eye contact. His affection is as genuine as it is awkwardly expressed: he makes a caricature of himself in order to show it. His father was a photographer whose photographs rarely contained people. Those that did normally held faces turned away. When I think of portraits in photography - posed, the smiling gaze looking out - I think of the brief moments of eye contact between myself and my father before we hug goodbye. These are the rare times I look directly at him looking directly at me. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Writers Prize: 25 / Jan / 2021
‘Making Space to Speak From’
by Mads Holm

Riot police surround the entire group of protestors. Anonymous black shapes appear like shadows on the walls of the red brick houses on both sides of the street. Their gloved hands clutch the truncheons. I look to both sides. Like plucking flowers from a bouquet of black roses the riot police begin pulling out protestors from the crowd. One after another grabbed, forced to the ground, handcuffed and dragged down the side streets. Fleeting moments of crisscross eye contact spread an anxious energy. Heartbeats felt in finger tips. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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