All images © Tara Laure Claire Sood Tara Laure Claire Sood is fascinated by South India’s retro portrait studios, reimagining them with fresh Bollywood and fashion tropes Tara Laure Claire Sood has long been intrigued by portrait studios, recognising their importance in Indian photographic history and as sites of self-fashioning for families, couples, colleagues and models eager to project a certain image. Her project The Studio pays homage to these spaces while also exploring two personal threads. First, there is Sood’s experience shooting fashion editorials and working with stylists and mod ..read more

Robert Zhao Renhui in the forest around Gillman Barracks, Singapore, 2023. Portrait and work images all courtesy the artist Ahead of his show at the Venice Biennale, Renhui discusses anthropocentrism – and how his work addresses this thorny, colonially influenced issue Getting to grips with Robert Zhao Renhui’s art can be tricky. His work shapeshifts, a series of ecological inquiries you can read, watch, hang on a wall, and sometimes step inside. His installations – a terrace house converted into an imagined natural history society, for example – can leave you wondering where the science ends ..read more

All images © Alice Zoo Known for his portrait and landscape work, Kander has a meditative approach in his London studio – and a profoundly subjective take on making images Nadav Kander’s Kentish Town studio is bright, with windows on two sides of a large room, its walls made of pale, exposed brick. The feeling is airy and spacious, the surfaces clear. Around the edges, every bit of storage is used to its maximum, the inbuilt shelves dense with boxes of prints, the windowsills adorned with curiosities and ephemera – figurines, souvenirs, a tiny row of books, miniature prints on easels. A tall ..read more

Claudia Andujar, Collective house near the Catholic mission on the Catrimani River, Roraima state, 1976 Established in 2013, Kyotographie is now one of the biggest photofestivals in Asia. This spring it returns for its 12th edition with exhibitions themed around ‘Source’ French photographer Lucille Reyboz and Japanese lighting artist Yusuke Nakanishi met in 2011 at a party in Tokyo, where they bonded over Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan, a book about Japanese ghost stories they were both reading. Becoming partners in life and work, they created a series of images inspired by the supernatural narrati ..read more

All images © Akin James At a time of division and demonisation, the London artist draws on his own heritage to embrace the city’s diversity Born and raised in north London, Akin James recently graduated from the London College of Communication’s BA in photojournalism and documentary photography. His final project, titled New Britain, featured people who, like him, grew up with a diasporic inheritance. Shooting friends with close ties to various countries, his aim was to create an archive for the future; a picture of what the UK looks like now. James’ sitters are photographed in front of a whi ..read more

Pamona (Alice Liddell) by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1872. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1963. In a new exhibition the National Portrait Gallery, the of works by Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman are brought together across time and space Between 1866 and 1868, Julia Margaret Cameron made a portrait of Mary Pinnock as Daphne, the nymph who was transformed into a tree to escape the clutches of Apollo. In 1980, Francesca Woodman made a series of images of herself amongst trees, or partially wrapped in tree bark. They are untitled, but hung beside C ..read more

All images © Carlos Saavedra Carlos Saavedra’s combination of archival, documentary and staged images respond to a fatal eruption which could’ve been anticipated On 13 November 1985, the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Tolima, Colombia, erupted. Enormous mudflows, landslides and debris hurtled down its slopes, picking up speed and engulfing Armero. More than 20,000 of the town’s 29,000 inhabitants were killed. Nearby casualties brought the overall death toll to 23,000, making the incident one of the worst natural disasters in Colombian history. Just how avoidable the scale of this disaster was is ..read more

© Ana Norman Bermúdez Ana Norman Bermúdez incorporates Hmong embroidery into her portraits of the women, a collaboration championed by asylum NGOs Eight years ago, a woman belonging to Vietnam’s Hmong population fled the country for Thailand after her family was attacked. She now resides in Bangkok, but still faces challenges in her adopted home. “It has been very difficult for me because I struggle to find enough work to support my six children,” the woman says. “Even when I find a job, the pay is very low because I do not have Thai nationality.” Her testimony accompanies her portrait in Sil ..read more

Eddie Otchere, MC GQ, Elvis Meade, Stoke Newington, Hackney, 1995, Courtesy the artist A new travelling exhibition explores what it means to be a working-class photographer documenting the working-class experience in post-Thatcher Britain In summer 1989, political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote: “What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government ..read more

All images © Phoebe Somerfield From Sheffield to Peckham via Japan, the artist is tireless in his search for life in all its complexity. His next journey is to the heart of ‘future nostalgia’. We catch up with him at his London studio When Johny Pitts left school, he worked at Debenhams in Sheffield’s Meadowhall shopping centre, stacking and occasionally selling crockery. It was not long before he was sacked for breaking too many plates. Embarrassed to tell his mother, he pretended he still had the job, leaving the house on shift days and wandering aimlessly through the city. He would venture ..read more