After fleeing persecution in central Africa in 2005, Kolbassia Haoussou MBE arrived in the UK and was immediately detained in conditions that terrified him. Once I’d arrived in the UK, having fled my home country and escaped torture, I was taken to Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre. The people in charge didn’t tell me where I was going, I was bundled into what looked like a prison van, and we drove for what felt like hours. I soon realised something was very wrong. When we finally got there, it was late at night. I was tired, I was very sick, and I was bleeding. I was frightened ..read more

Photographer Mary Frey crafts a captivating chronicle of late 20th century American life that exists somewhere between reality, metaphor, and myth. Growing up in Yonkers, photographer Mary Frey remembers standing on a hill with a sparkling view of the New York skyline in the distance. The city beckoned with promises untold. As the oldest of six children, Frey understood responsibility from a young age. She studied painting at the Hudson River Museum until happening upon a copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment in the library. “That was it. I wanted to be a photographer,” say ..read more

Emma Garland reflects on what we can learn from this years’ edition of Coachella festival – the canary in the coal mine of US pop culture. Hi, I’m Emma Garland, former Digital Editor of Huck and current writer about town. In this monthly digest I’ll be dealing with some of the biggest cultural issues of the moment – from the flailing state of the creative industries and how they’re being reshaped by technology, to the relationship between art and activism in an age when everything is politics. Let’s have it. Emma Garland Is it just me, or did it feel like Coachella was back this year? And b ..read more

In her new photo book ‘ Renegades, San Francisco: The 1990s’ Chloe Sherman documents queer resistance and joy. In 1990, a then 21-year-old Chloe Sherman stumbled across a photo book that would completely alter her life’s trajectory. She had recently moved to Portland, Oregon from the east coast, but the pictures in Della Grace’s (AKA Del LaGrace Volcano) Love Bites, gave her itchy feet. “Back then, it was harder to experience the world unless you showed up and arrived – maybe I had seen photos of hippies and the Golden Gate Park, [but] there wasn’t Google Images or Instagram,” Sherman recalls ..read more

Emma Garland welcomes the long overdue return of original storytelling - and perhaps the death of the endless sequel and reboot era. Hi, I’m Emma Garland, former Digital Editor of Huck and current writer about town. In this monthly digest I’ll be dealing with some of the biggest cultural issues of the moment – from the flailing state of the creative industries and how they’re being reshaped by technology, to the relationship between art and activism in an age when everything is politics. Let’s have it. Emma Garland Are we approaching a turning point for cultural storytelling? A few signs po ..read more

Hundreds gathered yesterday to call for the BBC and UK Eurovision hopeful Olly Alexander to boycott the singing competition next month. Last night, April 25th, 200 people gathered outside of the BBC in central London calling on the broadcaster and the UK's Eurovision contestant Olly Alexander to boycott this year’s song contest in solidarity with Palestinians. The protest came after the European Broadcasting Union announced Israel would continue to be allowed to participate in the Eurovision song contest despite calls for the country to be barred. Groups in participating countries a ..read more

Joy Gregory’s new photo book takes a comprehensive look at the work of a generation of artists whose recognition is long overdue. In 1984, artist and educator Joy Gregory arrived in London to pursue her Masters in Photography at the Royal College of Art. She was the first Black woman enrolled in the program – a telling fact that echoed across the arts and academia both then and now. Confronted with absence, networks began to form as emerging artists built collectives without any institutional support. In 1986, Gregory met Araba Mercer, and they began collaborating on projects like Polare ..read more

Across the adult industry pioneering intimacy co-ordinators are ushering in a new understanding of consent, collaboration and connection. Over the last few years, sex in film has become the topic du jour online. Some of the discourse – largely about what we see on-screen – has been brain-meltingly insufferable (hello, Poor Things), but other conversations, like those about behind-the-scenes behaviour, have been productive, and have even led to transformative changes in the industry. Most recently, these have been about intimacy coordinators. Before 2017’s MeToo movement, nobody had heard of t ..read more

Photojournalist Gabriele Micalizzi’s new exhibition, ‘A Kind of Beauty’, examines over a decade of conflicts and the overlooked stories of people at the centre of them. In December 2016, photojournalist Gabriele Micalizzi was in Sirte, a city on the northern coast of Libya that had become the centre of a battle between Islamic State (ISIS) insurgents and US-backed government forces. After months of fighting, the ISIS forces were eventually forced out of their last remaining stronghold, and while the dust from relentless shelling, fighting and siege was settling, Micalizzi entered one of the m ..read more

A new Hayward Gallery touring exhibition, ‘After the End of History: British Working Class Photography’ curated by Johny Pitts pulls together the work of two dozen working class photographers across the country. In 1989, as the fall of the Berlin Wall promised a hopeful, connected, new world order, political scientist and economist Francis Fukuyama declared the “End of History”. With Soviet communism all but finished, his argument ran that Western liberal democracy had ultimately won out as the final form of human governance. Yet with one-sided wars currently raging in the Middle East and the ..read more