The reviews will be held in a public space:

Blackwell Hall, Weston Library

Broad Street, Oxford

OX1 3BG

Photo Oxford Festival has selected a panel of reviewers with a wide range of professional expertise. When making a booking participants will be asked to provide a personal statement and a link to a website or instagram page. Photo Oxford will use this information to carefully allocate two specialists with the most appropriate experience to the requirements of the participant.

Please note, your reviews are not confirmed until you have paid. There are no refunds.
For Further Information: portfolioreviews@photooxford.org

PORTFOLIO REVIEWERS’ BIOGRAPHIES:

Katy Barron

Katy is a photography curator and Senior Director at Michael Hoppen Gallery in London. She is Chair of the Board of Trustees of Photofusion in Brixton and a member of the Maud Sulter Advisory Board. Katy has been focussed on photography for the past 15 years, working with museums, festivals, galleries, collectors and artists in a variety of capacities such as curating exhibitions both in the UK and abroad, advising museums and collectors on acquisitions, running artists’ residencies and prizes and mentoring photography groups as well as writing exhibition catalogues and attending portfolio reviews in the UK and abroad. She studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Magdalen College, Oxford.

Catlin Langford

Catlin Langford is a curator and researcher of photographs. She is currently the inaugural Curatorial Fellow in Photography, supported by The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Catlin has held positions at the Royal College of Art (2021), Guildhall School/Barbican (2021), Royal Collection Trust (2017-2019) and Witt and Conway Libraries (2015-2016). Her research interests include colour photography, women photographers, and vernacular forms of photography, and the intersections between these.  Her first publication Colour Mania (Thames & Hudson/V&A) will be published in 2022. 

Dr Lena Fritsch

Dr. Lena Fritsch is the inaugural Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Previously she worked at Tate Modern and Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Recent publications on photography include Tokyo: Art & Photography (2021), accompanying the current exhibition at the Ashmolean, and Ravens & Red Lipstick: Japanese Photography since 1945 (2018, Thames & Hudson).

Dr Caroline Molloy

Caroline is an artist, academic and writer. She is the programme director of Fine Art, Digital Arts and Photography at University for the Creative Arts in Farnham. She holds an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art, an MA in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths UoL. and recently achieved a practice-led PhD from Birkbeck in the Centre for Photographic History and Theory. Her research interests are focused on the marginalised voice in both gender and post/decolonial colonial contexts. Her work in Women of Walsall is currently on show at the New Art Gallery Walsall (2021) as part of the Living Memory Project and she has recently exhibited her work Untouched Copy and the Book of Backgrounds at the Four Corners, London, as part of the Ph research network exhibition Bridging Boundaries. Recent peer reviewed written publications include (2020) ‘Rethinking the photographic studio as a politicised space’, in Ashley, T., Weedon, A. (eds.)Developing a Sense of Place: Models for the Arts and Urban Planning. London: UCL publishing. In addition to this, she regularly writes for Visual Studies, The Journal of Visual Practice, 1000words magazine and Photomonitor around the relationship between photography and visual culture.

Marta Weiss

Marta Weiss is Senior Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Lead

Curator of the second phase of the V&A Photography Centre (opening 2023). She studied history of art, specialising in photography, at Harvard (BA) and Princeton (MA, PhD) and joined the V&A in 2007 after two years in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her exhibitions include Julia Margaret Cameron (2015); The Camera Exposed (2016); Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience 1950s-1990s (2015); Making It Up: Photographic Fictions (2013); and Light from the Middle East: New Photography (2012). She is the author of four books and numerous essays on topics ranging from Victorian photocollage to Diane Arbus.

Kim Shaw

Kim Shaw is an American photographer and the Executive Director of Photofusion, an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation specialising in photography in Brixton.  In her role as ED, Kim is responsible for the artistic progamming which includes overseeing the gallery programme.  Her interests are in the mechanisms of access in the artworld, and this is fundamental to both her work at Photofusion, and her photographic art practice. 

In 2014, her first solo show, “Paper Ghosts,” was held at Jenny Blyth Fine Art in Oxford. Since then, her work has been shown at Soho Photo Gallery in New York as a part of their international competition, Krappy Kamera, on three occasions.  In 2017, she was named overall winner. In 2018, Kim was nominated for the Royal Photographic Society’s 100Heroines, and in 2019 her work was included in the RPS Heroines’ exhibition (Re)Framing Identity in London and Blackpool. In February 2020, her work was featured in London Art Fair’s curated exhibition “Photo50.”  She has been featured in Huck, Photomonitor, BBC online, Uncertain States and the weekend FT.  In 2021, she was longlisted for the Photoworks Ampersand Fellowship.  Her work in held in the permanent collection of the Kresge Art Museum in East Lansing, Michigan USA.

Convened by artist Elisa Moris Vai & researcher Dr. Justine Feyereisen, this  international and interdisciplinary Conference “Women, Memory & Transmission: Postcolonial Perspectives from the Arts and Literature” will explore what it means for women to transmit memories in postcolonial contexts. What strategies do women develop to tackle postcolonial issues? What are the issues to address and the struggles to lead to be heard and valued as tellers of History? What ethical and political issues does the reception of their works raise? The conference will bring together art-world figures and scholars in the fields of gender studies, memory studies, postcolonial studies, and Global South studies to adequately contribute to show how the Humanities can lead to a better awareness of the key social and political role of women in reinterpretation of colonial History as acts of resistance and empowerment.

The keynote speaker Deborah Willis will be surrounded by artists Ingrid Pollard, Erika Tan, Mohini Chandra, Heather Agyepong, Kama La Mackerel and Jasmine Togo Brisby. 

In collaboration with Photo Oxford Festival 2021, hosted by the Maison Française d’Oxford, and supported by TORCH, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, as part of their cultural programme.

Convenors:

Dr Justine Feyereisen is currently a FWO Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Ghent University (BE) where she is conducting a project in French and Francophone Studies entitled “Reimagining Migration Narratives with Ecopoetical Postcolonial Perspectives in Transatlantic Francophone Literature (Caribbean Archipelago, Metropolitan France and Sub-Saharan Africa, 1999-present)”. She is affiliated with Wolfson College (Oxford) and Maison Française d’Oxford. Since 2016, she is a non-tenured Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the Université libre de Bruxelles, after a FNRS PhD Fellowship at the Université libre de Bruxelles and the Université Grenoble Alpes, and a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research also led her to Wolfson College (University of Oxford) as a Wiener-Anspach Junior Research Fellow (2019-2021). Her research interests and expertise include 20th-21st Literature in French, postcolonial and decolonization literature, utopian fictions and sustainability, international migrations, body and senses, memory and postmemory, spatial studies, gender studies, photography and text intermediality, ecopoetics and ecofeminism. She is President of the Association des lecteurs de J.-M.G. Le Clézio. 

Elisa Moris Vai is a french emerging artist based in Lille (FR) working with lens-based media, who produce research-driven work. Her practice is characterized by the inventive use of performative strategies and the intersection of documentary and fiction. History, memory, and social representations are at the core of her work, with a current focus on french colonisation. She was awarded the Panel’s choice of the Photo Oxford Open Call 2020 and shortlisted for the Open 20 Solo Award of Photofringe festival, Brighton. 

Moris Vai’s work has been shown in venues across Europe (Noorderlicht Festival (NL), Photofringe festival (UK), Ovada Gallery (Oxford, UK), and Les Passerelles art center, Pontaut-Combault (FR)).  Her first solo show, curated by Pelumi Odubanjo, supported by Fluxus Art Projects and Torch as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, will be presented at Maison Française, Oxford, from 15/10 to 15/11 2021. Her profile has been featured in Photomonitor and The Guardian. 

Moris Vai extends her art practice to curating conferences relating to the themes she explores. During the last year, she worked in the UK with Photofringe Festival and Grain Photography Hub.

She has a MA in Performing Arts (Free University of Brussels / Free University of Berlin) and a BA in Photography (EFET School of Photography, Paris).

The soundscape incorporates both lyrics and a poem written by Diggs for the project. When We Gather was originally inspired by the election of the country’s first female vice president and performed during a pandemic by seven artists in separate studios and outdoor spaces in Brooklyn, Houston, Boston and Nashville then woven together by the film director Codie Elaine Oliver [Black Love, OWN]. The film project was produced over an eight week period by San Francisco based gallerist Wendi Norris.

The short film, alongside the documentary of its making, will be available to view on Eventbrite from Oct 20th 12:01am GMT for 48 hours. Unavailable during this timeframe? A second screening will be held from Nov 13th 12:01am GMT for 48 hours to celebrate the closure of Photo Oxford 2021.

This October, Hundred Heroines is proud to host two online conversations to accompany our Women on Women – Relationships, identity and Power exhibition, launched as part of Photo Oxford 2021.

For the first event we welcome photographer Anna Fox – one of the six artists featured in Women on Women – in an illustrated conversation with Robert Taylor photographer and co- curator of Women on Women. The two photographers will talk about Anna Fox’s exhibition Pictures of Linda, exploring the nature of Anna’s collaboration with Linda, contemporary ideas of the muse, and the broader issue of building ongoing creative relationships with particular human subjects. Join us online for a night of culture and conversation.

About the Photographer, Anna Fox 

Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Anna Fox (b. 1961, Alton) is one of the most acclaimed British photographers of the past thirty years.  Inspired by the U.S. ‘New Colourists’ and British documentary tradition, she first gained attention for Work Stations: Office Life in London (1988), a study of office culture in Thatcher’s Britain. Her collaborative projects Country Girls (1996 – 2001) and Pictures of Linda (1983 – 2015) challenge preconceptions about rural life in England, while My Mother’s Cupboards and My Father’s Words (1999) and Cockroach Diary (1996 – 99) expose dysfunctional relationships within the family home.

About the Photographer & Curator, Robert Taylor

For the last 15 of his 30+ year career Robert has specialised in commissioned collections of portraits of women of outstanding achievement in STEM (science, engineering and maths) for the UKRC, and the distinguished women alumni of several Oxford University Colleges including Hertford, Trinity, Harris Manchester, and Lincoln. Robert Taylor came to photography via the British Royal Air Force, the English Bar, and publishing in Nigeria. His work, exhibited and published widely, is held in several permanent collections including the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Royal Society, and several Oxbridge colleges.

Alison Kahn & Avi Zhimo 

In 1935 The Secret Museum of Anthropology was published by the American Anthropology Association in New York. It was privately issued. It contained photographs of naked women and fetish scenes of women nursing animals. The one thing that binds this edition is that all the women were from ethnic minorities and unnamed. Kahn and Zhimo explore the content of this publication producing an AV dialogue piece discussing the agendas of the producers and consumers of this material, and question the their legacies in the 21st century. 

Beatrix Haxby

Beatrix Haxby's practice casts a diverse subject matter into an equally wide net of media. She explore themes and ideas seemingly disparate as surrealism, androgyny, mysticism, New Romanticism, eroticism and athleticism, which she sees form a meaningful lattice of coincidence in the cultural imaginary. She believes that passé abstractions such as beauty, virtuosity, ambition and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity. Taking its name from Barbara Creed’s seminal theory, The Mutinous-Feminine is part gymnastics performance, part examination of the beauty canon; pulling into focus its lack of a muscular female morphology. The frozen, feminine odalisque of art history is set into motion with gymnastics performed in an artist's studio. 

Fiona Yaron-Field

‘Belongings’ refers to the surviving mementos from women who have been trafficked to the U.K. Women who have survived forced sexual exploitation and/or forced labour Fiona asked the women, now in Medaille Trust safe houses, if they had any object that had survived the journey with them, something they had held on to from their country of origin. Some women had nothing, for many it was attached to their bodies and others asked me to photograph what gave them hope today. As each object was offered and its story was told, private meanings unfolded. She slowly recognised a repeating theme – that the object was precious as it held an attachment to ‘another’, someone loved. These mundane objects, overlooked by their captors, enabled the women to hold on to a sense of their ‘self’. A ‘self’ that made them resilient and ultimately gave them the power to escape. While traffickers (and the ‘clients’) intentionally strip women of their worth to control them, the image/object reflects the quiet strength of their spirit, a sign of their extraordinary resistance. 

Karen Toro

According to the Constitution, Ecuador is a secular state, but the individual rights of women are still limited based on religious morality. In Ecuador, a 1938 Penal Code was maintained, which allowed non-punishable abortion if the pregnancy represented a risk to the health or life of a woman and only when it was a case of rape of an "insane or an idiot woman". In this context, statistics show that more than 2000 girls a year become pregnant after rape; that is to say that girls and women pregnant as a result of rape were forced into motherhood and if they had an abortion they were being criminalized. For several years the feminist movement has grown in Ecuador and the petition for the right to abortion is their demand for justice in a secular democracy, considering it as a matter of human rights, public health and above all a matter of basic freedoms for women. Despite the constant harassment of anti-rights groups, called "pro-life", which are financed by the church and led mainly by men, social and women's organizations have filed several lawsuits to reverse this situation. On April 29, 2021 the ruling decriminalizing abortion in cases of rape for any girl or woman was made official. Now the challenge is to enforce and create a legal framework and protocols to ensure access to safe and free abortions, as well as care and support for women and girls who have become pregnant after rape. 

Rosie Barnes

No You’re Not is a portrait project about autistic women. These women have careers/professions, relationships and often families of their own. There is a persistent misconception that autism is rare in girls/women and really only affects boys/men. Years of using classic male autistic characteristics for diagnostic parameters, has meant that countless women have been overlooked and arrive at a diagnosis many years after their male counterparts. Women can present very differently to men and their ability to successfully ‘mask’ to fit in, often subconsciously, can lead to high incidences of mental health issues - avoidable if only the right diagnosis had been given. This group of women are the least likely to be believed to be autistic. The irony is that their struggles are often greater because of their successes, particularly in education and work, meaning they are even less likely to be believed and more likely to be misunderstood. 

Yara Richter

A no-budget poetry short film composed of spoken word, video, and performance, “Tired of Trees?” depicts a young, black mother’s experience of the first COVID-19 lockdown in a German suburb. The film chronicles her ambivalent experience, as the severity of the global pandemic contrasts with the serenity of a sheltered, rural spring. Using a visually and thematically fragmented style, Yara depicts a specific emotional state during lockdown, and proposes the pandemic, the struggle for social justice, and the climate crisis as interconnected socio-political issues. By sharing intimate images of domesticity, the film reflects on how everyday actions within isolation have become acts of public importance. As spatial constriction gives room to inward expansion, questions about outward identity and political participation remain present. These multi-layered internal contemplations are contrasted with Yara’s excursions into a local forest, which turn into acts of connection. Despite suggested notions of hope and perspective, viewers are left with the question of whether and how insight turns into personal and political action.

About the Artist, Maga Esberg

Maga Esberg is a visual artist, tutor and curator based in the UK. She set up HATCHED as a creative platform to share work addressing women’s issues and experiences that range from ‘The personal is political' to Human Rights. HATCHED has been exhibiting as part of the Oxford International Women festival since 2016  at the North Wall gallery, the Jam Factory, Common Ground working space and Freud in Oxford. 

Hundred Heroines is excited to present an in-conversation event between American photographer, Lola Flash and Ecuadorian photographer, Paola Paredes.

About Lola Flash

A lifelong advocate of gender, sexual and racial equity, a member of the Kamoinge Collective and a board member of Queer Art, Lola Flash is renowned for her artistic achievement and the socio-political importance of her work. Her activism and art are profoundly connected, and the stories she highlights from Black and LGBTQI+ communities worldwide spans over three decades.

Lola’s attention to overlooked narratives is evident in her series, salt, a vibrant collection of portraits of women over 70 years old who are making - or have made - striking contributions to society. Featured in the Hundred Heroines Photo Oxford exhibition, Women on Women, Relationships, Identity and Power – Explored Through Photography, salt combats the invisibility that some older women experience, critiquing the deeply rooted cultural and social biases that remove older women from the public sphere.

About Paola Paredes

Paola Paredes, who will be joining Lola, makes work which illuminates the experiences of members of the queer community in Ecuador. Her first two major photographic works, Unveiled and Until You Change present audiences with an intimate challenge to prejudicial attitudes towards homosexuality. She blends traditional documentary photography, staged imagery, and self-portraiture to explore issues facing the LGBTQIA+ community, creating awareness and inviting conversations about sexuality, family, and personal freedom in Latin America.

The conversation will be moderated by Historian Haley Drolet. Haley currently lives in Oxford, England with her Dalmatian (and Hundred Heroines’ mascot) Annie. She completed a MA in Classics from King’s College London and now works as a Research Assistant in the History Faculty at the University of Oxford.

Bringing these photographers together, the conversation promises invaluable insights into their artistic praxis, and important discussions about the wider implications of their work.

Somerville College, Oxford, was named in honour of Mary Somerville (1780–1872), renowned for her contributions to nineteenth century science. 

This talk revisits Somerville’s chemical ray experiments, conducted four years before the announcement of Photogenic Drawing and Daguerreotype photography, looking at them within the context of photographic chemistry.  Although she remains largely absent from photographic history, her experiments, involving transmission of light through coloured glass onto paper coated with silver chloride, were documented in contemporary publications including editions of her pioneering account of scientific advancements, On the Connexions of the Physical Sciences.

This talk highlights her documentation of these experiments, from 1840 to the revised 1858 edition, published in her 78th year. Somerville’s correspondence with Sir John Herschel and Michael Faraday is also discussed.

Somerville introduced the nineteenth century reader to photographic principles as its evolution ran parallel with her publications. Photography was a perfect fit for her unique combination of scientific curiosity, practical experimentation into the properties of light and desire to communicate to a wide readership. 

In conclusion, Mary Somerville deserves greater recognition for her contribution to pre-photographic chemistry and promotion of photography through her highly successful scientific publications.

About Rose Teanby:

Rose Teanby is a PhD candidate at the Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, researching early women photographers 1839-1861. She is also an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society. Rose has spoken on various aspects of photographic history at the National Portrait Gallery, De Montfort University, Birmingham University, Newcastle upon Tyne Literary and Philosophical Society and New York Public Library.

At last year’s Photo Oxford Festival she presented an online talk “The First Women of Photography” and contributed a blog “Searching for Hidden Early Women Photographers”.