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]
Jo Spence was a British photographer, a writer, cultural worker, and a photo therapist. She began her career in the field of commercial photography but soon started her own agency which specialised in family portraits, and wedding photos. In the 1970s, she refocused her work towards documentary photography, adopting a politicized approach to her art form, with socialist and feminist themes revisited throughout her career. Self-portraits about her own fight with breast cancer, depicting various stages of her breast cancer to subvert the notion of an idealized female form, inspired projects in 'photo therapy', a means of using the medium to work on psychological health.
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.
Peter "Lauchmonen" Kempadoo was a writer and broadcaster from Guyana. He also worked as a development worker in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. He moved in 1953 to the UK, where he built a career in print journalism as well as radio and television broadcasting, and published two novels, Guiana Boy in 1960 — the first novel by a Guyanese of Indian descent — and Old Thom's Harvest in 1965, before returning to Guyana in 1970. He died in London, aged 92.
Autograph ABP, previously known as the Association of Black Photographers, is a British-based international, non-profit-making, photographic arts agency.
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.
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.
The Hackney Flashers were a collective of broadly socialist-feminist women who produced notable agitprop exhibitions in the 1970s and early 1980s. Working in the United Kingdom during second wave feminism (1960s–1980s), the Hackney Flashers are an example of collectives prevalent in the latter half of the 20th century that worked to raise consciousness of social or political issues relevant to the times. This group's original aim was to make visible the invisible and document women's work in the home and outside of it, helping to make the case for childcare and show the complex social and economic issues of women and childcare.
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.
Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) is a defunct organisation in London that commissions new research into photography and culture, curates and produces exhibitions and publications, organises seminars, study days, symposia and conferences, and supervises PhD students. It is a part of University of the Arts London (UAL), is based at UAL's London College of Communication at Elephant & Castle and was designated by UAL in 2003. PARC was shut down after twenty years of operating in 2023.
Ruth Maddison is an Australian photographer. She started photography in the 1970s and continues to make contributions to the Australian visual arts community.
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.
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.