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Terry O’Neill, a British photographer, is renowned for his images of stars such as Audrey Hepburn and Frank Sinatra. His work, recognisable for its candid informality, has appeared in magazines such as Life, Vogue, and Rolling Stone, and his access to high-profile subjects led him to become one of the most published photographers of the 1960s and '70s.

Now 71, O’Neill made his name when London was a swinging, creative and altogether chummier place. Evenings at Soho’s Ad Lib Club, a popular haunt for actors, models, musicians and photographers, brought him close to his subjects, and he became friends with the likes of Richard Burton, Michael Caine and David Bowie. His photographs reveal the conflicts, contradictions, desires and dreams that lurked beneath groomed surfaces. He amassed a vast collection of negatives over the years, but as with many photographers of the time, archiving and cataloguing went by the wayside.

Thanks to Getty Images, O'Neill's archive has been properly assessed, and over 40 previously unseen photographs have just gone on show at the Chris Beetles gallery in central London. They are a revelation. O’Neill has an eye for the moment when his subjects are comfortable enough to give something away. The relaxed feel of these images is a world away from those we see of celebrities today, either airbrushed to perfection or snapped on the run.  read more »

Don McCullin spent a lifetime chronicling the brutality of war. His photographs, now on view in a career retrospective at the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, are dark, bleak and arresting. Many capture people at their most primal, cowering like hunted animals or gasping with despair. Some subjects are muted by their certain doom, such as the starving children he photographed in Biafra, who wait patiently for death. McCullin's soldiers tend to be villains, but some look like shellshocked boys.

These pictures "live in my soul", McCullin admits in an interview with The Economist. He has made it his job to give a voice to the voiceless; to capture the furrowed brows and dirty fingernails of history's victims. The result is hard to look at, startling and gut-wrenching. "There's not a great deal of room for joy," he concedes with sad self-awareness.

His work is also remarkable, a product of courage and heart. He narrates the images of this slideshow with The Economist:

"Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin", is on view at the Imperial War Museum North, Manchester, until June 13th

Simon Croft took his camera backstage with the Lviv ballet. The result–our latest photo essay–is mesmerising, with colours like antique jewels in a dusty velvet case.

As Julie Kavanagh wrote, he captures "the lumpishness of swans on dry land alongside flashes of kingfisher-wing transcendence. Like ballet itself, the pictures combine earthbound reality with a glimpse of heaven."

Devotees of communism evoke a grim picture of stern and ascetic men and women in sparsely furnished rooms, free of bourgeois luxuries. And then there is the glamorous Tina Modotti, an Italian photographer and political revolutionary. An exhibition of 35 of her photographs now on at New York's Throckmorton Fine Art gallery, "Tina Modotti: Under the Mexican Sky", recalls the life and talent of this rare seductress.

Modotti was 16 when she left Italy for California, where she began her transformation from factory worker to bohemian ingénue. In Los Angeles, she met and modelled for Edward Weston, a pioneer of photography, who soon became her lover and mentor. He left his wife to be with Modotti, and in the early 1920s they ventured to Mexico, a country then brimming with artistic and political excitement.

Still reeling from a decade-long revolution, Mexico's politics were volatile. Painters and muralists such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros had joined with a host of radicalised expatriates to help lead the struggle for political and social reform. Modotti embraced this fusion of art and politics, and collaborated with the muralists in creating work with political intent. But Weston had little time for art in the service of politics. He rejected what he described as “too much sentimentality over the proletariat. Too much deification of the Indian.”

Taken between 1923 and 1930, Modotti’s sepia-tinted portraits of Mexican workers and expatriate revolutionaries are indeed romantic—beautiful, sturdy and idealistic. Yet we get the sense that her subjects aren't merely symbols—vacant and projection-ready—but real people. These photographs feel intimate and real.  read more »

“Who Shot Rock & Roll?”, asks a show at the Brooklyn Museum. It’s not a bad question. You’d have to be something of a specialist to have heard of most of the photographers on display in this "Photographic History, 1955 to the Present". Yes, there’s a rather nice snap by Linda McCartney of her husband’s eyes in a rear-view mirror. But unlike most museum portraits, these are mainly pictures of people we know made by people we don’t.
 
The show suffers little for that. It includes some iconic shots, many of which became album covers: the nude girls climbing a rockpile that got Led Zeppelin’s "Houses of the Holy" banned in Oklahoma and Spain; Paul Simonon of the Clash swinging his bass down towards the floor like a man furiously splitting logs–the image of rock rage that would front "London Calling".
 
But it is actually the lesser-known pictures that make "Who Shot Rock" worth the trip. Elvis Presley, so young he looks like he would have trouble growing a beard, nonchalantly lunches with a friend at a diner shortly before astronomical fame would make such a scene impossible. A long-haired Michael Stipe of REM grins for the camera from ear to ear–something he doesn’t seem to do much anymore–as he eats with bandmates at a barbecue joint. Bob Dylan, tribune of the people, looks vacant and unconcerned in his car as the faces of fans press desperately against the glass outside.  
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1989 marked the end of the cold war, and much attention has been paid to the 20th anniversary of velvet revolutions and walls coming down. But what about the days and lives spent behind that wall?

In the mid- to late-1980s David Hlynsky ended up travelling to the eastern bloc. What began as a brief jaunt to publicise an exhibition of his photographs ended up becoming a longstanding project–one that resulted in thousands of photos. In years spent chronicling the mundanities of daily life under communism, Hlynsky was most mesmerised by the shop windows, which offered the greatest contrast between east and west, capitalist and communist. Here were spare displays, drab colours and a disregard for acquisitiveness unlike anything he had seen before.

In recent years Hlynsky’s images have been exhibited in art galleries in Prague and Berlin. Some reacted with nostalgia or a renewed sense of relief at the end of that era. Younger viewers saw mainly communist kitsch, an impossibly quaint sense of the recent past, so remote as to seem almost imaginary. Many have seen and responded to Hlynsky’s shop-window photos via his website. This is how I came to know of them, after a music blog linked to his arresting photograph of a restaurant window in Yugoslavia, in which a small set table for two sits patiently beneath streamlined decals of a knife, fork and plate.  read more »

Jeff Wall has been credited with validating photography as contemporary art. For his large-format works (he calls them “prose poems”, borrowing the term from Charles Baudelaire), he routinely employs actors to help realise his vision. Roles range from deceased soldiers who converse in the afterlife ("Dead Troops Talk") to weekend warriors who preen outside a nightclub ("Outside a Nightclub"). Wall then digitally manipulates the images and presents them as back-lit phototransparencies, so that the photographs glow. These arch, staged tableaux have a dreamy effect, odd and cinematic.

Phaidon just released a definitive account of Wall’s work to date— "Jeff Wall: Complete Edition", a 280-page monograph that includes Wall’s own writings as an art historian and theorist. In the days before the book's release, we struck up an e-mail correspondence with the Vancouver-based conceptual artist. While he was content to leave some answers at "Yes" or "No" (including an inquiry into his decision to not carry a camera), he also succinctly held forth on such topics as the tiresomeness of film, the trouble with historical references and how art can teach us about survival.  read more »

Vienna’s 1934 February uprising was a turning point for 21-year-old Wolfgang Suschitzky. When troops loyal to Austria’s fascist chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, turned their artillery on the housing estates occupied by left-wing opponents, Suschitzky knew it was time to leave. Arriving in London in 1935 he took a job as a cameraman for Strand Films, where he soon earned renown as a cinematographer and photographer.

Now 68 of Suschitzky’s acclaimed black-and-white photographs are on show at London’s Chambers Gallery. As a photographer, Suschitzky is best known for his portrayal of London in the 1930s and 40s. His series of pictures taken on Charing Cross Road provides an evocative social history of the area. A photograph from 1935 of a milkman pushing a hand-cart in a cold, driving downpour, his breath clouding in front of him, the road slick with rain and reflection, captures the hardship of many people’s lives at the time (pictured above). In contrast is a shot of a bowler-hatted gent with time on his hands, standing outside Foyles bookshop, immersed in reading (pictured below).  read more »

When dealing with intractable and often tragic problems, it can be difficult to focus. AIDS is an epidemic that kills 2m people annually. In sub-Saharan Africa, where the disease is most rampant, 1.9m people are infected each year. Between 31m and 36m people around the world live with HIV. These numbers are enormous and abstract, depressing and disempowering. Why think about it at all?

World AIDS Day on December 1st is a forced spotlight–a deadline for all of those official reports and announcements and lectures of what we've done and what we still must do. The day (and the weeks leading up to it) brought some good news: according to a new report from the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS, the number of new infections each year has gone down by 17% since 2001 (the year the UN began devoting itself in earnest to fighting HIV/AIDS). Antiretroviral drugs have also helped to lower the death rate and curb the spread of the virus. Good news, yes, but also a bit like spitting into a well.  read more »

Nathalie Daoust, a Canadian photographer, has long been itinerant. In the late 1990s she spent several months in New York crafting a collection of images from the artist-themed Carlton Arms Hotel, which were later turned into a book, "New York Hotel Story". Daoust has since travelled from the Swiss Alps to Brazil to Japan in search of evocative imagery. Her work ventures into the fascinating territory of sex, memory and gender stereotyping, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy.

Daoust’s latest project, "Hide & Sex", continues in this vein. She spent several months living in the Alpha In, one of Japan's biggest S&M “love hotels”, and photographed nearly 40 women in their private rooms, surrounded by their specialist equipment and dressed in the regalia that defines their trade. The result is a series of images that underline Daoust’s passion for the surreal and the sensual, and also shine a light into the darker shadows of femininity, fantasy and human sexuality in general.  read more »