Laetitia Negre's experimental and disorientating photography

Most women don’t like what they see in the mirror. Their skin isn’t clear enough, their waists aren’t small enough and their thighs aren’t slim enough; in other words, they don’t look like the slender, bronzed models that appear in the pages of glossy magazines. “From a young age, this kind of imagery taught me to suppress my desires, values, personality, and flaws. It’s an experience common to many women; we are shaped by ideologies of domination and control within contemporary commerce; projecting fantasies onto our bodies that are not our own,” award-winning photographer Eva O’Leary admits. In her latest series Spitting Image, Eva set out to document how women see themselves.


Anyone that knows a pair of identical twins, especially as a child, will have had the wool pulled over their eyes at some point by a cunning T-shirt switch or hairstyle change. But despite being almost genetically identical, monozygotic twins bear just enough differences to be told apart. Their fingerprints, for example, will share the same loops, whorls and ridges but will differ in the minutiae, due to the different positions each twin occupies in the womb.

“I have a passion for making work that addresses injustice,” says photographer Thom Pierce, whose latest project, Postcards from Xolobeni, transformed his portraits of a community threatened by a proposed titanium mine into powerful letters of protest. “I want to take important stories and make them something that can’t ignore be ignored,” Thom continues. “I want to go further and think more broadly to find ways that engage large audiences in a subject that they might not ever know about and then give them a means to engage, participate and join the fight.”

“I was a teenager in the late 1980s and unemployed,” Elaine Constantine tells me first off. “Like most kids my age at that time in the north west of England, my prospects were bleak. I’d been at a bad school and unless you’d been lucky enough to go to a grammar school, you came away at 16 still struggling with the basics.” Renowned for her honest, expressive and observational photography, Elaine is now one of the most well-respected photographers in the fashion industry, a Bafta-nominated film director and has taken part in legendary exhibitions like Tate Britain’s Look at Me and the V&A’s Imperfect Beauty. 


Half-dressed torsos and life-sized leopard-like sculptures, it can be difficult to tell what you’re looking at in Laetitia Negre’s photographs. Her experimental, action-packed images sit at the intersection of performance art, film and photography, inviting the viewer to imagine the snapshot’s preceding and subsequent moments. After working with the likes of Dazed, i-D and collaborating with legendary fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, the French-born, London-based photographer has accumulated an enviable portfolio over the past few years.

For centuries, artists have used images to convey ideas about specific identities. The visual language they have used has shaped and moulded how we perceive gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. Artist Mequitta Ahuja hopes to shine light on the construction of identity in art through her large-scale self-portraits. “I am African-American on my mother’s side and South-Asian on my father’s side. I use my work to unify my mixed heritage. As I got older, concerns about my identity become less pressing and, instead, I find myself reflecting on self-portraiture as being about the artist as a picture-maker. In other words, I increasingly focus on the artist’s self-portrait as a discourse of representation,” Mequitta tells It’s Nice That.

Nicer Tuesdays always spans an eclectic mix of topics, but May’s edition was a veritable smorgasbord of creative inspiration. Taking to the podium at Oval Space, Offshore Studio’s Christoph Miler discussed the “missing voice” of the discourse surrounding the migrant crisis, before Kyle Platts explored character design and animation; then graphic designer Erica Dorn shared the intricate research undertaken for Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs; before Sam Conniff taught us about the Golden Age of Pirates. Here, we pick out just some of the learnings from last night.h3. Independent publishing has the power to impact history

“I am fascinated by the functional principal of simple picture stories,” says German illustrator and art director Sebastian König of his four-pane comics series Strips. “You look at four images, realise the meaning in their context and have that little film-like sequence in your head. Your brain loves to decode such things and then rewards you with that feeling when you get it.” That’s the joy in Sebastian’s work – his grainy illustration are incredibly simple, yet there’s often a touch of quirk that causes you to linger in anticipation of a payoff. Sometimes it comes, but at other times you’re left tantalisingly bemused.

It’s a dark and rainy Wednesday, your inbox is full, you’ve got back-to-back meetings, half your colleagues have just called in sick and, come to think of it, you aren’t feeling too great either – the weekend can’t come soon enough. Being overwhelmed is an experience common to us all and one that inspired Will Hooper’s newly released music video for Idles’ new song Colossus. The film’s protagonist, Joe, perceives each menial task as a crushing challenge, be it trimming a hedge or doing a crossword.

In her nostalgic new series Cuore di Panna, illustrator and artist Olimpia Zagnoli is not only hoping to evoke personal childhood memories, but also paint a picture of late 1980s Italian culture. The series of juicy, pop-colour prints, light installations and videos conjures up a picture of hazy summers spent eating ice cream and drinking soda – the title translates literally as “heart of whipped cream” – with a retro aesthetic filled with the brands that seeped into the artist’s consciousness around that time. Italy was becoming Americanised, or as gallery HVW8 puts it: “Barbie Totally Hair was replacing Sophia Loren,” and Olimpia’s depiction of vivid consumerism instantly transports the viewer back to that atmosphere. Here, she tells us more about the project.

Most women don’t like what they see in the mirror. Their skin isn’t clear enough, their waists aren’t small enough and their thighs aren’t slim enough; in other words, they don’t look like the slender, bronzed models that appear in the pages of glossy magazines. “From a young age, this kind of imagery taught me to suppress my desires, values, personality, and flaws. It’s an experience common to many women; we are shaped by ideologies of domination and control within contemporary commerce; projecting fantasies onto our bodies that are not our own,” award-winning photographer Eva O’Leary admits. In her latest series Spitting Image, Eva set out to document how women see themselves.