British Journal of Photography July 2012

By comparison to the iPad version, the July paper issue id disappointing.

The them is London, ahead of the Olympics, and the main articles are on on Zed Nelson's Tale of Two Cities, previously reviewed as part of the Bristol Festival of Photography, and on Steven Gill, another photographer from Hackney.

Gill's work seems uncoordinated. One of his main works was burying images of Hackney Wick; "Not knowing what an image would look like once it was dug up introduced an element of chance and surprise which I found appealing" he says. An example is this image:

Stephen Gill: Buried, Nobody, London, 2006. Accessed from http://www.photographyinprint.com/?p=4 2 July 2012

This is lost on me, as are a number of the images on http://www.stephengill.co.uk/portfolio/about. Many of these images would be seen in derisory terms were they not shot by Gill.

Much more taken by the portraits of  hopeful atheletes taken by Paul Floyd Blake, particularly the published images of the disabled swimmer Roise Bancroft:

Floyd Blake P. (2008)  Private collection. Available from http://www.floydphotography.co.uk/ [Accessed 2 July 2012]

A very nice image, beautifully lit and winner of Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2009.

There are more graduates images, including a satirised set by Luke Smith. He wished to take images of heis and other children at parties and events but found some resisitance from other parents and officials. His series of spaces absent of people (and ironically entitled George after his son) he aimed "to get viewers to fill the void, hoping they would identify with the collective sense of loss he was trying to capture in his polemic about the censoring of images of chldhood", but also in Smith's own words, "to deflect this paranoiac way of seeing back onto them....frocing the viewer to recognize their own societal standing".  An ambitious aim and not sure that some of the featured images achieve this.