It is the first day of Photo Oxford’s fifth edition but the first venue I arrive at, Maison Française, is closed. Is this what Roland Barthes meant when he wrote that “in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away”?
There is at least an exhibition outside – one of the 30 shows in the city’s community spaces, churches, colleges and pubs that are part of the festival this year. Michael Christopher Brown’s 90 Miles refers to the distance between Havana and Florida, a perilous stretch of ocean crossed by many Cubans fleeing the country on DIY boats – a record number between 2022 and 2023. Brown uses AI the way draftsmen created illustrations for newspapers before photography. He has collected eye witness accounts, news stories and historical reportage of Cuba’s history from Castro to today, and used them as prompts for the software. In one image, the figures positioned on and around a classically Cuban vintage car, strangely stranded in a turbulent ocean, have warped faces and limbs that melt and drip like a Francis Bacon painting. These aren’t real images – but they are truthful.
Truth is the theme of the festival, a perennial issue hanging over photography; the unresolved relationship between the reality of a picture and the truth it bears.
Another host venue is locked – I’m told to wander down someone’s garden path and ring the bell. Inside a private home is a solo exhibition by Timon Benson, a young portraitist of Instagram-fame. Voice of Matter represents a more experimental approach to portraiture that is still new – and still feels tentative. Benson’s desire is to translate feeling into photography, and his pictures are soft-spoken, watery-eyed. In his pursuit of a more truthful image, Benson has also abandoned the camera completely to create luminograms, exposing paper directly to light. It doesn’t quite hold together yet but the sentiments are sincere.
Emotions amp up at Old Fire Station, with psychologically charged, rage-and-pain-fuelled works by Lydia Goldblatt, Jenny Lewis and Heather Agyepong. Goldblatt’s Fugue is a series of vignettes and poems about early motherhood, its loneliness and claustrophobia, combustible anger and bittersweet bliss, all intensified by sleeplessness and by being a body who is depended on.
Lewis’s Unbecoming, meanwhile, describes in images interminable and invisible suffering – the artist has a hereditary autoimmune condition. Small, domestic, interior pictures of her bathroom and bedroom, bathed in a supernatural light, evoke the stifling confinement and discomfort of being physically restrained. Some are mounted on aluminium – reminiscent of the sharp, clinical coldness of surgical tools. It’s beautifully done. These are dovetailed with a…
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