Maciej Dakowicz: "Cardiff After Dark" - Third Floor Gallery

Maciej Dakowicz: "Cardiff After Dark" is at the Third Floor Gallery, Cardiff, 14 October - 2 December.

Polish born Maciej Dakowicz has been photographing night life on the streets of Cardiff since 2005 - a book of his pictures has just been published by Thames & Hudson. 

The pictures present a wide-eyed, occasionally jaw-dropping, portrait of the contemporary weekend pursuit of love, liquor and laughs – with the seemingly inevitable accompaniment of violence, vomit and oblivion. And, as Sean O’Hagan points out, litter ‘so much litter’. Extraordinary pictures.

Read an article by Sean O’Hagan, and an interview with Eric Kim. See Dakowicz’s website and Flickr site.

FORMAT 11: International Photography Festival - "Right Here, Right Now"

FORMAT 11 International Photography Festival in Derby will run from 4th March to 3rd April. The theme is Right Here, Right Now: Exposures from the Public Realm - that is, street photography, or photography in public places.

Alessandro Marchi
An exhibition, Right Here, Right Now in the Quad Gallery will survey contemporary street photography featuring more than 20 photographers, including, Brian Griffin, Joel Meyerowitz, Zhao Liang and Raghu Rai.
Take to the Streets - Magnum will be a large scale outdoor exhibition in Derby Marketplace featuring the work of 7 Magnum photographers: Constantine Manos, Richard Kalvar, Raymond Depardon, Chris Steele-Perkins, Bruno Barbey, Trent Parke and Alex Webb.
A number of exhibitions will be taking place at Derby Museum and Art Gallerty, including Bruce Gilden: Head On and Mehraneh Atashi: Tehran’s Self-Portraits. A little further afield, Raghu Rai: Invocation to India is showing at New Art Exchange, Nottingham until 20th April.

Mehraneh Atashi

Raghu Rai

Events include a conference on 4th March at Quad, which will address the topics: Beyond Street Photography and From the Decisive to the Indecisive. Speakers include Sophie Howarth, Nick Turpin, Michael Wolf (see also, below, and short video of him talking about his Google Street View work), Bruce Gilden, Geoff Dyer and others.

For full details of these events and many more go to the Format Festival website.

Bruce Gilden

See feature by Sean O'Hagan

Street Photography NOW

Coinciding with the publication of Street Photography Now, by Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren (soon to be available in Pittville Learning Centre), and in association with the Photographers Gallery, a year long project for street photographers to "record the world we live in" is launched today (1st October).


Olivier Laurent writing in The British Journal of Photography explains how it will work:

Each week, one of the 52 photographers featured in the book will issue instructions for street photographers around the world to follow. "These detailed instructions will act as a call to arms to photographers to look afresh at their immediate surroundings and to literally take to the streets," say the organisers. " All photographers will be encouraged to comment and respond to the images posted to the Flickr page."

Once the instructions have been issues, photographers will have six days to respond and upload one photograph to the Street Photography Now Project gallery on Flickr. At the end of the 52 weeks, "the photographer felt to have made the most outstanding contribution over the year will be awarded £1000 of Thames & Hudson books and have their work displayed on The Photographers’ Gallery digital Wall for All at the Gallery’s newly redeveloped space."

The first instructions (see above) have been issued by Magnum photographer Bruce Gilden.

For full details about how to take part see Street Photography Now Project.