EDITORIAL:
Issue 119 — Autumn 2025
Issue 119 — Autumn 2025
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BONDS
Israa Alrrayah and her family escaped from the war in Sudan. She has subsequently become a photographer and writes about the meaning of family photographs for people who have lost them. These photographs represent a continuity for people whose lives have been disrupted. The pictures are a physical connection with an inaccessible present (home in Sudan) and past (cultural heritage). With family members dispersed to different countries these photographs are an ongoing link and bond between separated people.
Objects can be charged with the presence of absent loved ones. Things may have an intimate connection to someone’s life through be ing worn or held or used: their shoes, their lipstick. Morwenna Kearsely writes about photographs of these objects and how these inanimate portraits can capture the connections between people.
Visible Repairs by Ada Marino, has two starting points, her father’s letters to her mother which detailed his migrant journey from Italy to South Wales, and images of Italian migrants in Ffotogallery’s archives. The work developed around ideas of reclaiming identity and embracing self-discovery. Ada Marino’s other work, Virgins on the Cross, unpicks the romantic myths of motherhood. Harriet Riches introduces the work and notes "the recurring imagery of domestic containment and constraint hinting at the concomitant security and stranglehold of the bonds of familial love".
Alan Wilkinson’s work starts with the breakdown in 2020 of his relationship with his son Cody, and an ongoing discussion of how to overcome the influence of the toxic hyper-masculine relationship that he had with his father. This new work is "creating a new discussion around masculinity and how it affects those males on the cusp of 'manhood'". The work combines portraits of Cody and his friends, objects that he made for his father and landscape images of his old childhood haunts.
Audrey Blue works with self-portraits and photographs of close friends, or passers-by whom she has subsequently got to know. Her approach in earlier images relied on restaging memories of anxiety-fuelled dreams. Photographs of her partner were made as "she was beautiful" but the artist was also conscious of "creating a queer history of our relationship which is sort of a political relationship just be cause we happen to be a same sex couple". Rosamund Taylor writes about the work and a tension that runs through the photographs – "the hazards of youth, and the opposite: the wild joy of laughing with friends".
— The Editors