Anahita Avalos, Polly Braden, Tiffany Jones, Johanna Neurath & Ying Tang | On Street Photography: A Woman's Perspective

Anahita Avalos

Photofusion has curated this exhibition in conjunction with the inaugural London Street Photography Festival (7-17 July). The exhibition showcases the work of five female photographers who use the public domain as their inspiration. Each photographer has a unique style and approach, providing a thought provoking view on modern day life across the globe.

The London Street Photography Festival defines street photography as: “un-posed, un-staged photography which captures, explores or questions contemporary society and the relationships between individuals and their surroundings”.More of a method of working than a genre, these photographs represent candid snippets of everyday life, which offer an insight into the world of others as well as that of the photographer.

Anahita Avalos was born in Tehran, and has lived in Mexico and Paris, where she began to take pictures on a regular basis in order to explore her own identity. As a Middle Eastern woman who grew up in Europe with a disabled son, her interest lay in the Mexican way of life with its complex facets. By observing and trying to understand strangers, she says it helped her discover herself. Nick Turpin, of street photography collective in-public, believes she has a natural eye for observation and “captures the beauty and poetry of Mexican street life in an effortless manner”.

Polly Braden

Polly Braden is known for her documentary photography exploring the relationship between everyday life, work, leisure and economics. Searching for small and telling gestures her images are acutely observed portraits and broader assessments of contemporary culture. London Square Mile is a study of life in the City, showing isolated figures against the polished facades of office buildings. As David Campany writes: “in the end a city is not its buildings, it is its people and there is something salutary in the way Londoners fail to live up, or down, to the cosmetic gloss of their surroundings.”

Tiffany Jones

Tiffany Jones identifies herself as an “experiential photographer” as her work is guided by encounters that are personally significant to her. The photographs featured in this show are taken at night, which Jones feels “offers moments of cinematic drama, when a parade of attitude and costume is revealed under colourful electric light”. Her bold and up-close approach to photographing people enjoying a highly charged night out provokes reactions from both subjects and viewers alike.

Joanna Neurath

Johanna Neurath is Design Director at Thames & Hudson publishers and was commissioning editor and designer of the recent book Street Photography Now, by Stephen McLaren and Sophie Howarth. When not making books and working with other photographers images, she takes her own. The work in this exhibition was made in and around Columbia Road flower market. Camera focused in the gutter much of the time, her colourful still lifes find order in disorder or simply celebrate the chaos found during the market day. Her project shows a sometimes very literal way of interpreting street photography.

Ying Tang

Ying Tang was born and raised in China, and has lived in Japan and the US before settling in Germany. The work featured here is from a project called Space, shot in Shanghai from 2007 – 2010. The high contrast black and white images document the lifestyle of people who live in an old fashioned residential alleyway called Nongtang.

Many thanks to Brett Jefferson Stott, Stephen McLaren and Nick Turpin for their support and advice curating the exhibition. The paper in the exhibition is kindly supplied by Canson.