Tag: InFocus

Photojournalism Hub x Riverside Studios 28th May

IN FOCUS

28th May 2025, 7:15 pm
Riverside Studios
101 Queen Caroline Street
London W6 9BN

To join: HERE

We are delighted to announce the next IN FOCUS event at Riverside Studios, featuring guest photographers Denise Felkin and Sabes Sugunasabesan, whose powerful work explores identity, memory, and marginalised lives.
Felkin’s In Site documents a hidden Traveller community in East London, revealing an alternative way of living beneath the arches of the city. Sugunasabesan reflects on the legacy of war in Sri Lanka through a diasporic lens, with Kunkumam tracing memory, loss, and land. Together, their work challenges dominant narratives and brings overlooked voices to the fore.

IN FOCUS will be hosted by documentary photographer/ journalist and Photojournalism Hub’s founder and director Cinzia D’Ambrosi alongside photojournalist Sabrina Merolla. The event includes photography presentations, Q&A sessions, and time to socialise and connect.

Denise Felkin is a UK-based editorial and fine art documentary photographer whose work challenges social taboos to promote values of sustainability, inclusivity, and compassion. She aims to amplify marginalised voices and explore themes of identity and social justice. Her photography has been featured in national press, included in numerous awards, and exhibited nationally and internationally.
In Site (1997–2024) reveals an underground lifestyle rooted in Traveller communities. Under three railway arches and beyond a padlocked gate in East London, an alternative lifestyle was documented. Respect, freedom, truth, and beauty are conveyed through an unpretentious perception of the experience and expression of an urban subculture.
Felkin details an enriched cultural existence within a clan that had found a safe place to sustain their creative lives. The community was innovative and packed with independent souls. Embedded are elements of citizenship and domesticity, offering a strong societal message in contrast to industrialisation and capitalism.
In Site was shortlisted for the British Photography Awards, exhibited in the Polarity exhibition at Photojournalism Hub, as well as selected in the Inequality open call at Photo Frome. Her next exhibition will be at Lambeth Courthouse, 7–8 June 2025.
IG @denisefelkinphotographer
www.denisefelkin.com

Sabes Sugunasabesan is a photographic artist living in England. He migrated from Sri Lanka over four decades ago. At the end of the thirty-year long war in May 2009, in Sri Lanka there were 90.000 widows in the north and east of the country. With the deaths on the army side the numbers would be much higher. During the repression of suspected People’s Liberation Front members (JVP) between 1988-90, 60,000 mothers lost their children in the south of the country.
Sabes works on the theme of war, memory and land from a diasporic point of view. It is a view from distance of time and space. Kunkumam builds on his previous work shown under the title of the Last Walk to the Beach (2018). To prepare for Kunkumam he travelled to Sri Lanka during the August-September 2024 and enacted a performance at Mullivaikkal.
IG @sabessuguna

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Consider becoming a member of the Photojournalism Hub. Your support will enable us to continue our work promoting photographic work that expose, raise awareness of social justice issues. To learn more how to become a member and the benefits of joining, follow the link HERE

Photojournalism Hub x Riverside Studios 24th February

IN FOCUS

24th February 2025, 7 pm
Riverside Studios
101 Queen Caroline Street
London W6 9BN

To join: HERE

IN FOCUS brings together two remarkable photographers whose works centre on the themes of community and diaspora, exploring identity, memory, and the cultural landscapes that shape collective experiences.

Myah Asha Jeffers is a Barbadian-British writer, director, photographer and dramaturg. As the previous Literary Associate at the Royal Court Theatre, she was responsible for shaping the works of new and established playwrights. 
Myah’s photographic work has won the Portrait of Britain Prize twice and The Photography Foundation Social Documentary Award. She is the 2024 recipient of the renowned Joan Wakelin Bursary (Royal Photographic Society & The Guardian). 
Her photographs have been featured in publications such as Vogue, The Guardian, The Sunday Times Magazine, ELLE and The Independent amongst others. She has also worked in collaboration with the likes of Tate, Somerset House, ICA, South London Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery.  Myah’s debut short film Bathsheba world premiered at Inside Out (TIFF) and has screened at festivals including New York Shorts, Leeds FF, Norwich FF and Atlanta’s Out on Film, garnering nominations at multiple festivals for Best British Film and Best Director.
Myah’s practice
I am a photographer, writer and director, particularly interested in witnessing and documenting the nuances of daily life within diasporic communities. My practice is conceptually focused on ‘Black Interiority’, where I closely examine themes such as class, cultural identity, queerness, grief, gesture, and truth. Working solely with small & medium format analogue cameras and darkroom-based hand printing processes, the work is particularly concerned with the intersection of “naturalism” and “myth”, through illuminating the magic of rituals, quiet, and connection. With a focus on the (in)tangibility and truth of grief / its relationship with what I call “living abstraction” – where Black folk sculpt or construct versions of themselves as a tool for survival;  I aim to make work that lends itself to abstraction through the experimentation with form, monotone, texture, and structure.
Exclusion Zone.
I’ll be presenting a first preview of my most recent project, Exclusion Zone supported by the Joan Wakelin Bursary and the Visual Studies Workshop Artist Residency. In 1995, a series of seismic Volcanic eruptions rendered two thirds of the island of Montserrat uninhabitable, catalysing a mass exodus. With now only 20% of the island deemed habitable and a current population of just over 4000 people – Montserrat is one of the least populus countries in the world. It also happens to be one of the few remaining British colonies. The uninhabitable 80% of the island is known as the “Exclusion Zone” – a site of buried infrastructure, homes and memories. It is both a graveyard for relics of the past.
This photo series explores the legacy of the natural disaster 30 years on; through the lens of both elders who are nostalgic of what the island was and young people who only know the island for what it is today. 

Paulina Korobkiewicz (b. 1993, Suwałki, Poland) is a London-based photographer and visual artist. Her work explores themes of cultural identity, memory, and the transformation of social spaces. Her projects focus on the visual and cultural landscape of her hometown and region as well as that of her current residence in the UK, documenting everyday scenes and environments with a sense of nostalgia and socio-political commentary, drawing from her own experience of migration. Her practice involves community-based research, conducting workshops, and mentoring. In addition to developing long-form personal projects, Paulina continues to undertake commissions and residencies.
She has participated in several group and solo exhibitions internationally. Her work has been featured in a variety of publications, such as Hapax Magazine, Kajet Journal, Contemporary Lynx, Photomonitor, the BJP, and Creative Review. Paulina is a winner of the Camberwell Book Prize, has been shortlisted and nominated for awards including BarTur Photobook Award, Magnum Graduate Photographers Award and Prix Pictet.

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Consider becoming a member of the Photojournalism Hub. Your support will enable us to continue our work promoting photographic work that expose, raise awareness of social justice issues. To learn more how to become a member and the benefits of joining, follow the link HERE

IN FOCUS

IN FOCUS

26th February 2024, 7 pm
Riverside Studios
101 Queen Caroline Street
London W6 9BN

To Join us: HERE

Photojournalism Hub and Riverside Studios are delighted to announce Denise Laura Baker and Etienne Bruce as the featured photographers for ‘In Focus,’ a captivating series of photography events. This series delves deep into the realm of socially engaged documentary photography, using the lens as a powerful tool for engagement and exploration. The event includes presentations, live interactive Q&As and a social.
Etienne Bruce will present us Xenitia, which is an archive, centered on displacement to Greece. It is framed by two motifs: “nostos” (Classical Greek; to return home, homecoming) and “algos” (Classical Greek; pain, grief). Together, these affect-laden words form the root of “nostalgia”. “Xenitia” itself is a Greek term that encompasses the state of being a foreigner, otherness, estrangement, loss, distance, and a profound yearning for home soil. And Dr. Denise Laura Baker will share Deeds, Not Words: motivations and methods of resistance from a photographer’s perspective, currently being shown until April 13th at Gallery 74, Waterside Arts in Sale, Manchester, which explores the myriad ways photography crosses into the realm of activism and the complex relationship between photojournalism and activism.

Denise Laura Baker is a socially engaged photojournalist and documentary photographer and storyteller, focusing on environmental and social issues, climate change, activism, and community. Through these she explores themes of connection, journeys, identity, change and transition. Denise’s photographic and creative work draws on influences from her career as a visual artist, and her previous career as an ethnographic psychologist where she interviewed and collected the stories of the people with whom she worked. In March 2020 she was featured as an emerging female photographer in film  https://analoguewonderland.co.uk/blogs/film-news/female-voices-in-film-denise-laura-baker and in 2021 and 2022 she won PX3 State of the World. She has published numerous photographs in the mainstream press as well as photo essays in magazines such as New Internationalist, Open Democracy and Novara Media. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions as well as solo shows most notably LLAWN Llandudno Arts Weekend in 2019, Galeri Caernarfon, North Wales 2022, Islington Climate Centre 2023, The Black E Gallery in Liverpool as part of The World Transformed 2023 and Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool 2023. Denise’s work is currently being shown until April 13th at Gallery 74, Waterside Arts in Sale, Manchester. 
Denise teaches and mentors, runs community arts workshops, and has received funding through the Arts Council for Wales, Creative Gwynedd, RBKC Creative Grants, The Westway Trust and Imaginary Millions. With Deeds, Not Words (Deeds, Not Words: motivations and methods of resistance from a photographer’s perspective) Denise explores the myriad ways photography crosses into the realm of activism and the complex relationship between photojournalism and activism. In this project she examines protest through the female eye, which has enabled her to connect with her own background in activism as well as others, and her relationship to photography as activism. @deniselaurabaker

Etienne Bruce is an Anglo-French visual artist, editorial photographer and educator currently based in London, UK. Her project-based work is a form of documentation driven by an engagement with the nature of the photographic image, which often includes an element of recording oral histories. A preoccupation with the relationship between form and content has led her to embrace different modes of expression including text, movement, sound, space, sequence and literary forms as portals through which to re-examine documentary image-making practice and embrace its inherent ambiguity. Through her work, Etienne seeks to challenge her perceptions and reinterpret things as she understands them while always striving to engage respectfully and collaboratively with the people and stories that are central to her practice. Etienne is a member of Women Photograph, she is Education & Training Manager at The Photography Foundation, and her book Xenitia was published by Zone6 Press in 2023. @etienne_bruce

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