‘This was taken in Qaanaaq, one of the world’s most northern cities. It gets 24-hour sun during the summer months. I went because my name originates there’

In the summer of 2023, I was living in Qaanaaq, Greenland, one of the most northern cities in the world. It’s a tundra: there are no plants, it barely rains and, in the summer months, there are 24 hours of sun. During the night, the weather is calmer and more colourful – by day, it’s hardcore and very bright. This was taken just before midnight. I could hear kids playing tag outside, then they got tired and lay down. I went out and asked if I could take a photo. We have a lot of nostalgia in our culture in Greenland, and this photograph captures that feeling: it is the middle of summer, but it has the look of spring. Greenland in spring is unlike any other place. Since the sun is not visible in the winter, when spring comes it brings life back. That time of total darkness is very spiritual.

The whole town knew I was taking photographs, but the fact that they’re now going be on show at the Danish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale isn’t so interesting to them – it’s too far away. My work has always been about Greenland’s history, traditions and everyday life, such as hunting. I was given permission to take photos with the hunters, but it was difficult to shoot where they work because the ice was melting.

Continue reading...

The Guardian’s picture editors select some of the most powerful photos from around the world

Continue reading...

When Mikko Takkunen relocated to the Chinese city from New York he felt the urge to capture its vanishing essence

Continue reading...

Justine Kurland’s images capture her unique life raising a child on the road – and offer up a joyous escape from the traditional family photo album

Continue reading...

He only published one book – and it was hardly noticed. Now his portraits of drag queens, poets and artists are seen as vital documents of a vanished world. As they go on show, the photographer’s favourite subjects recall his genius

‘He made me wear white,” says Fran Lebowitz , down the phone from New York. The writer is talking about the day her close friend, the photographer Peter Hujar, shot her for Portraits in Life and Death, the only book he ever made. “Peter was very specific. It was in my apartment which was the size of, I don’t know, a book. And the light was a big thing – as it was with all photographers, back when they were actually photographers.”

This week, the picture of a 24-year-old Lebowitz smoking a cigarette, slightly slumped, in a white shirt and tight white trousers on the arm of a settee, goes on show at the Venice biennale, alongside the 40 other pictures from Portraits in Life and Death. Twenty-nine of them depict artists, writers and performers Hujar knew and admired from the downtown scene of 1970s New York – many of them reclining in a state of reverie that seems completely un-posed. There’s the writer Susan Sontag , supine on a bed with a pensive expression; the drag artist and underground film star Divine off duty and resting on some cushions; nightclub dancer TC, topless and drowsily seductive; poet and dance critic Edwin Denby with his eyes meditatively closed, his wrinkles mirroring the rumpled duvet behind him.

Continue reading...

A recent Guardian news story on the Russian use of poison gas in Ukraine featured an arresting photograph that spoke to me of the anonymity of war

This photograph of a gas mask on a tree beside a track in Kreminna in Ukraine’s Luhansk oblast stopped me in my tracks.

The original caption in the Guardian reads “tree” but it looks like the remains of a tree, more like a planted post. Has the rest of it – the parts that make it a tree – been damaged by war? Whatever the explanation there is a hint, in the mottled pattern of the bark, of a giraffe’s neck, that vulnerable loneliness of the vertical amid the overwhelmingly horizontal. By a careful choice of angle the photographer has also imparted an animating slinkiness, a slightly feminine torsion, to the immobile wood. That might be why it’s reminiscent of one of Peter Mitchell’s wonderful photographs of scarecrows in Yorkshire . The one I have in mind is a rare example of what is obviously a woman plying this exposed and elemental trade, glamorously kitted out for a night – she is framed by darkness – on a nonexistent town. Lifelike and haunted, she looks like a ghost of her former self.

Continue reading...

A new collection of wildlife photography aims to help understand why people have photographed animals at different points in history and what it means in the present. Huw Lewis-Jones explores the animal in photography through the work of more than 100 photographers in Why We Photograph Animals , supporting the images with thematic essays to provide historical context

• Photography on display at the Cheltenham science festival 4-9 June 2024

Continue reading...

It has gone from the sidelines of American sport to become a competitive global phenomenon that might one day make the Olympics. We meet the international teams bringing the cheer

When photographer Christian Sinibaldi first visited world champion cheerleaders London’s Unity Allstars Black , in January 2020, he had no expectations. In fact, he admits , he had “a few stigmas associated with cheerleaders”. What he learned that day surprised him. “I loved the energy, the connection between people,” he says. It kickstarted a fascination that would take him around the world to capture a sport on the cusp of global popularity, a project that took him from the markets of Ho Chi Minh City to the tunnels of Lagos stadium.

Cheerleading has long been associated with high school movies and glittery sideline entertainment, but it has a rich history – one that has fascinated me since I cheered at high school in the 90s. My master’s thesis was an ethnography of cheerleading, following a squad throughout a season. For my doctoral dissertation, I wrote a cultural history of the sport. Cheerleading began in the US in the late 19th century, growing out of the civil war and finding a place among the sidelines of elite all-male higher education institutions. There were almost no women cheerleaders until men went to war in the 40s. In the latter half of the 20th century it was feminised and sexualised, before evolving into a competitive athletic endeavour of its own as a result of second wave feminism. It has since been further democratised and radicalised – there are squads of all ages and genders, advocating for all manner of social justice causes.

Main image: junior members of Kazakhstan’s Cheer Republic team perform in Independence Square in the capital city, Astana, in front of the Hazrat Sultan mosque. Above: members of Athens’ Amazons cheerleading team practise in the seaside suburb of Vouliagmeni

Continue reading...

The photographer was in Nepal when she happened upon a wedding ceremony and a once-in-a-lifetime image

Joyful, dancing wedding guests were following a ceremonial procession and car through the streets of Bhaktapur, Nepal, when Callie Eh happened upon them. The Malaysian photographer was in the country for a photography workshop.

“I try to attend them every year or so,” says Eh, who now lives in Switzerland. “I can improve on existing skills and learn new ones, meet other photographers and exchange ideas.”

Continue reading...