A presentation and discussion with four artists – Finley Gilzene, Sunil Gupta, Åsa Johannesson and Marc Vallée. Each will show one of their photographs and discuss the relationship between themselves and the subject in the context of 'power, gaze and desire'. Moderated by Isaac Huxtable.
A selection of zines and books from the artists will be available in the bookshop.
Biographies
Finley Gilzene (b. 2003) is a 21-year-old London based artist/photographer raised in Slough and a current undergraduate student studying photography at LCC. His current practice revolves around the alternative photography method of cyanotypes and exploring the topics of cross culture psychology and theories of acculturation within Britain. Finley’s practice has developed through exploring his Jamaican heritage through research, conversation with family and the creative desire to abstract and pull himself apart to explore his identity intersecting his queerness, blackness and desire to fully know and accept himself through his practice.
Sunil Gupta is a British/Canadian citizen, (b. New Delhi 1953) MA (RCA) PhD (Westminster) who lives in London and has been involved with independent photography as a critical practice for many years focusing on race, migration and queer issues. A retrospective was shown at The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2020/21) and The Image Center, Toronto. He is a Professorial Fellow at UCA, Farnham. His latest book is “We Were Here: Sexuality, Photography, and Cultural Difference, Selected Writings by Sunil Gupta”, Aperture New York 2022. His work is in many private and public collections including; the Tokyo Museum of Photography, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Royal Ontario Museum, Tate, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. His work is represented by Hales Gallery (New York, London), Materià Gallery (Rome), Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto) and Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi).
Isaac Huxtable is a Yorkshire-born, London-based writer and curator. He works across the photographic medium with a central focus on Blackness and realism. Isaac is currently an Assistant Curator in Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art, followed by roles at the British Journal of Photography, the Photographers' Gallery, and the art agency Artiq. His words have featured in the British Journal of Photography, Elephant Magazine, Galerie Peter Sillem, The Photographers' Gallery, and The South London Gallery. He is particularly interested in documentary practices, race, gender, class, and the body.
Åsa Johannesson (b. 1979) is an artist working across photography, installation, and writing. Her practice concerns the relationship between queerness and photographic portraiture. Åsa has exhibited her work internationally, including at Centrum för fotografi (Stockholm), Queer Britain (London), Landskrona Foto (Landskrona), Dyson Gallery (London) and FutureLab (Shanghai). With her writing, Åsa intersects theoretical concepts from feminist and queer theory, new materialism with the logic of studio practice. Her first book, the research monograph, Queer Methodology for Photography, was published by Routledge in February 2024. Her first photography monograph, The Queering of Photography, is forthcoming (2026). Åsa is based in London, UK and her hometown Växjö, Sweden.
Marc Vallée (b.1968) is a documentary photographer based in London. His work focuses on subcultures, including queer youth, sex workers, political dissidents and graffiti writers. In his late teens, he worked on the Marxist newspaper Militant, before studying Fine Art at the Sir John Cass School of Art (MA, 1999). The principal destination for his work is self-published zines and photobooks, notably Number Thirteen (2020), Anti-Skateboarding Devices (2012), and Vandals and the City (2016) – along with the recent series of photobooks: 90s Archive: Volume One, Two and Three (2022-24). Between 2005 and 2012, he chronicled political dissent in Britain and co-authored a sequence of groundbreaking front-page investigations into police surveillance for the Guardian and Financial Times. Recent group exhibitions include those at The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2024), Stills Centre for Photography, Edinburgh (2024), Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol (2022), and a trilogy of solo exhibitions at Berlin’s Retramp Gallery (2024, 2023 and 2022). An exhibition of Marc’s indie queer scene work from the 1990s will be held at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, in 2025.
