Format was an agency set up in 1983 to represent women photographers, with the aim of documenting the world from a different perspective. [1] [2] The agency operated for two decades, and its end, in 2003, was marked by an exhibition. [3] In 2010, the National Portrait Gallery, London, showed a range of work by Format photographers. [4] [5]
The idea of an all-women photo agency was the conception of Maggie Murray and Val Wilmer, [6] [7] [8] [9] and Format's membership over the years also included Jackie Chapman, Anita Corbin, Sue Darlow, Melanie Friend, Sheila Gray, Paula Glassman, Judy Harrison, Pam Isherwood, Roshini Kempadoo, Jenny Mathews, Joanne O'Brien, Raissa Page, Brenda Prince, Ulrike Preuss, Mirium Reik, Karen Robinson, Paula Solloway, Mo Wilson and Lisa Woollett. [3] [10]
Anna Fox is a British documentary photographer, known for a "combative, highly charged use of flash and colour". In 2019 she was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society.
Autograph ABP, previously known as the Association of Black Photographers, is a British-based international, non-profit-making, photographic arts agency.
Christopher David Killip was a Manx photographer who worked at Harvard University from 1991 to 2017, as a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. Killip is known for his black and white images of people and places especially of Tyneside during the 1980s.
Valerie Sybil Wilmer is a British photographer and writer specialising in jazz, gospel, blues, and British African-Caribbean music and culture. Her notable books include Jazz People (1970) and As Serious As Your Life (1977), both first published by Allison and Busby. Wilmer's autobiography, Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This: My Life in the Jazz World, was published in 1989.
Christopher Horace Steele-Perkins is a British photographer and member of Magnum Photos, best known for his depictions of Africa, Afghanistan, England, Northern Ireland, and Japan.
Deborah Willis is a contemporary African-American artist, photographer, curator of photography, photographic historian, author, and educator. Among her awards and honors, she is a 2000 MacArthur Fellow. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts of New York University. In 2024, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Dorothy Bohm was a German-born British photographer based in London, known for her portraiture, street photography, early adoption of colour, and photography of London and Paris; she is considered one of the doyennes of British photography.
Rotimi Fani-Kayode, born Oluwarotimi Adebiyi Wahab Fani-Kayode, was a Nigerian photographer who at the age of 11 moved with his family to England, fleeing from the Biafran War. A seminal figure in British contemporary art, Fani-Kayode explored the tensions created by sexuality, race and culture through stylised portraits and compositions. He created the bulk of his work between 1982 and 1989, the year he died from AIDS-related complications.
Derek Ridgers is a British photographer known for his photography of music, film and club/street culture. He has photographed people including James Brown, the Spice Girls, Clint Eastwood and Johnny Depp, as well as politicians, gangsters, artists, writers, fashion designers and sports people. Ridgers has also photographed British social scenes such as skinhead, fetish, club, punk and New Romantic.
Daniel Meadows is an English photographer turned maker of digital stories, and a teacher of photography turned teacher of participatory media.
The participation of women in photography goes back to the very origins of the process. Several of the earliest women photographers, most of whom were from Britain or France, were married to male pioneers or had close relationships with their families. It was above all in northern Europe that women first entered the business of photography, opening studios in Denmark, France, Germany, and Sweden from the 1840s, while it was in Britain that women from well-to-do families developed photography as an art in the late 1850s. Not until the 1890s, did the first studios run by women open in New York City.
Ken Grant is a photographer who since the 1980s has concentrated on working class life in the Liverpool area. He is a lecturer in the MFA photography course at the University of Ulster.
Paul Reas is a British social documentary photographer and university lecturer. He is best known for photographing consumerism in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s.
Val Williams is a British curator and author who has become an authority on British photography. She is the Professor of the History and Culture of Photography at the London College of Communication, part of the University of the Arts London, and was formerly the Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the Hasselblad Center.
Photoworks is a UK development agency dedicated to photography, based in Brighton, England and founded in 1995. It commissions and publishes new photography and writing on photography; publishes the Photoworks Annual, a journal on photography and visual culture, tours Photoworks Presents, a live talks and events programme, and produces the Brighton Photo Biennial, the UK's largest international photography festival Brighton Photo Biennial,. It fosters new talent through the organisation of the Jerwood/Photoworks Awards in collaboration with the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
Roshini Kempadoo is a British photographer, media artist, and academic. For more than 20 years she has been a lecturer and researcher in photography, digital media production, and cultural studies in a variety of educational institutions, and is currently a professor in Photography and Visual Culture at the University of Westminster.
Bronwyn Kidd is an Australian photographer known for fashion and portraiture who formerly resided in London 1992-2004, and now lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Ten.8 was a British photography magazine founded in 1979 and published quarterly in Birmingham, England, throughout the 1980s, folding in 1992.
Rhonda Wilson MBE was a women's activist, photographer, writer, editor, and educator in British contemporary photography, best known for her initiation of the Rhubarb-Rhubarb International Festival of the Image.
Claudette May Holmes is a British photographer. Her work, which uses elements of montage and hand-colouring, has challenged stereotypical representations of Black British people.