Metropole

May 18, 2023

Once the Metropole or mother city at the heart of a vast global empire, London is now the dominion to a new world power. Subject to the flows of global finance and whims of markets, the city has become little more than an investment opportunity for multinational developers and overseas investors. Metropole records the brutally disorientating effects of this by documenting these legions of new corporate and residential blocks as they are constructed and occupied.

Recent Stories

A Rural Lifeline
Joanne Coates is a photographic storyteller from a working-class background. Based between Yorkshire and Scotland, she depicts everyday stories with a documentary approach. Apart from this, Coates has also done work in the commercial sector with clients including the BBC, Vice, Financial Times, The Guardian, and more. Coronavirus: A Rural Lifeline in North Yorkshire shows how rural communities, away from the hub of the big city, managed to cope with isolation when social distancing became the n
Joanne Coats
Hope, Despair and Miracles
Roxana Allison is a Mexican-British photographer whose work has a predominantly socially-driven focus and explores the themes of belonging, identity and place. She has extensive experience working with young people and underrepresented communities spanning over 15 years and strives to achieve social justice through her photography. Longsight is an inner-city
Roxana Alison
Kibera
Edwin Ndeke’s body of work focuses on Kibera — one of the largest urban settlements in the world which is situated on the periphery of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital with a population of approximately 2.5 million. Poverty, disease and crime are not uncommon when discussing Kenya and Africa in
Edwin Ndeke
London '82
Sunil Gupta enrolled at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London in the early 1980s. Having access to colour negative printing at the college, the young photographer began to roam the streets of the Big Smoke searching for the epicentres of queer life — Earl’s Court, King’s Road,
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The 2nd day. What it means to be there
Oleksandr Khomenko [https://www.facebook.com/oleksandr.khomenko] is a Kyiv-based photographer who shows life in Ukraine as it is in independent media like hromadske.ua [https://en.hromadske.ua/] and Ukrainer [https://ukrainer.net/en/]. For the second day, people with emergency bags and pets have been staying at the Kyiv subway stations. The entrance is free. Many people have found shelter at the ‘Politekhnichnyi Instytut’ metro station — the hall is full. They are sitting on their suitcases,
Oleksandr Khomenko
End of Olympics
The biggest sports event on the planet turns into a mixture of political and public health disputes, yet not covered enough by the established media
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Birdman
The project attempts to record the slow death of a culture — Pigeon racing as a typically British sport — that has changed beyond recognition since its inception. The photographs are extraordinarily rich and full of detail — the birds bind them together, they are the common denominator, but there is so much more in the images than just the pigeons. I
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The place inside the head of False Creek
Amy Romer uses photography to gain understanding of the place that she decided to make her home by choice rather than birth. 5 years ago she moved to Canada and for her project The Place Inside the Head of False Creek she gives us the story of Sen̓áḵw.
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Missed Care
The referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU was one of the most divisive moments in modern history — back in 2016 and ever since then, the country felt more polarised than ever before with a clearly growing sense of “us” and “them”. People were either unable to or would refuse to see some of the good points that the other side was making. The Remain side was branded “Project Fear” as they were providing predictions of what would happen. Some of these didn’t happen, but others, unfortunately,
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The Steel Plant Mothers
Wilfully ignoring the pleas of the local and national population, the Ilva plant, Europe’s largest steel plant, is portrayed as prioritising profit over people's lives.
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mnngful Originals

mnngful Members

Edward Thompson
UK
,

Documentary photographer focused on various subjects over the years covering environmental issues, socio-political movements, subcultures, everyday life and the consequences of war. He had a life-changing experience with an early apprenticeship with the Russian photographer Sergey Chilikov, whom he met at the Arles Photography Festival in 2001. That summer Ed stayed with Sergey in Paris and learnt the value of shooting everyday life, eating fried fat and drinking red wine. Sergeys friend Gueorgui Pinkhassov told him how photographing the everyday can allow you to touch at something great. And it did.

jose artur macedo
PT
,
Ponte de Sor

Self-taught photographer, based in Ponte de Sor (PT)

Melanie King
UK
,
Ramsgate

Multi-Disciplinary Artist. Co-Director of super/collider, Lumen Studios and founder of the London Alternative Photography Collective. Melanie is Lecturer In Photography at Canterbury Christ Church University, and a practice-based PhD Candidate at the Royal College of Art. She is represented by the Land Art Agency. To purchase original prints, you can visit the Land Art Agency and Argentea Gallery websites. Books are available via the website store, and monthly limited edition postcards are available on Patreon.

Jim Mortram
UK
,

Social Documentary Photographer and the creator of these photo stories: Small Town Inertia.

Fiona Neil
UK
,
Moreton In Marsh

When receiving an old fashioned Canon camera at 16 I realised the power of showing people different perspectives of the world, documenting them with photography. I am passionate and dedicated about producing emotional, resourceful content that can educate and document the world for people.

Elena Kalyuzhnaya
RU
,
St. Petersburg

Documentary photographer based in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. Student of Academy of documentary photography “Fotografika” in Saint-Petersburg. Originally from a small town in the south of Russia, Elena appreciates the authenticity of the rural area and its traditions. The human place in society, PTSD emotions, and life in post-war and problematic regions are the main topics of her work. Elena’s work was published in Dodho Magazine, Takie Dela, Republic, and Regnum publishing. Elena is a silver prizer of Budapest international Contest 2020 in the student category. Also, her work was a part of the Ariano Film festival.

Shervine Nafissi
CH
,
Lausanne

Self-taught photographer with a passion for sports and politics. Based in Lausanne (CH). Swiss of Iranian origin. In his thirties. Young father. Also Doctor in law.

Ashima Yadava
US
,
San Franscisco

Photographer based in San Franscisco, California Born in New Delhi, India, Ashima now lives in San Francisco, California. She works in digital and analog methods including medium, and 4x5 large format. With the camera as her conduit, Ashima believes in art as a means to social activism and reform. Her work is rooted in documentary practice with a keen focus on issues of gender equality, race, and social justice. Like If Hands Could Speak, which deals with domestic violence in the South Asian community in the Bay Area.

Lewis Bush
UK
,

Photographer, educator and curator working across media and platforms to visualise the activities of powerful organisations, practices, and technologies. Since 2012 his practice has explored issues ranging from the aggressive redevelopment of London, to the systemic inequalities of the art world. Recent works include Shadows of the State, which examines the democratic deficit of intelligence gathering, and Wv.B which examines the dark histories of space exploration. He is currently working on a long-term project about computer vision which runs in parallel with an ESRC funded PhD at the London School of Economics. He is also course leader of the MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography (online) course at London College of Communication.

Isaac Kirby
UK
,
London

London based-photographer and copywriter originally from the Australian town of Snake Valley.

Pengkuei Ben Huang
CA
,
Toronto

Documentarty photographer based in Toronto, Canada. His early interest in history and geopolitics inspired him to undertake international politics studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California in the US. Upon discovering photography as his passion, he relocated to San Francisco and earned his BFA at Academy of Art University. He was selected as one of the finalists for The Scotiabank Prize in 2007 at Magnum Workshop Toronto under the mentorship of the renowned photographer Larry Towell. Since then he has taken an interest in utilizing photography as a medium to form a visual narrative that explores the relationship between humans and their surrounding environments.

Verity Adriana
UK
,

Visual artist who uses light, installation and photography to investigate the phenomenology of the metaphysical and existential. She has been a practicing and exhibiting artist for over a decade. Adriana was born in Hull, UK, and grew up around the world wherever her mother found work, including Spain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Adriana returned to Hull independently at the age of 14 to see herself through her final years at school and went onto establish herself in the regional arts community.

Onur Tatar
TR
,
Çanakkale

Photographer based in Turkey, was born in 1984 in Canakkale. In 2008, he graduated from the Department of Photography of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Dokuz Eylul University (DEU) and with a Master of Arts degree at the DEU Institute of Fine Arts Department of Photography in 2021. Onur completed his PhD in Ege University Social Sciences Institute Radio Television and Film Department in which his thesis Hypertext and the Changing Aesthetics in Photographic Art. He works as an associate professor at the Adnan Menderes University Radio and Television Department, teaches photography and aesthetics. His artistic works have been exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions.

Nathalie Bertrams
GR
,
Athens

I am a freelance photojournalist and National Geographic Explorer reporting on environmental conflicts, human rights and social justice. My work is published in The Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Al Jazeera, BBC, De Groene Amsterdammer and NRC. I also make TV documentaries for Arte.

Cheryl Newman
UK
,
London

Artist and independent curator of photography living in London. She recently completed and MA in Photography Arts at the University of Westminster (Distinction) Her personal practice explores her history though archive and family images and the environment of memory For the past three years she has been working with the Gaia Foundation to commission and curate We Feed the World, a photographic global adventure documenting the lives of family and peasant farmers for an exhibition which premiered at the Barge house Gallery, London, in Autumn 2018. She curated 209 Women, one of the highest profile exhibitions of 2018 in which all the female MP’s in the UK Parliament were photographed by women photographers to celebrate 100 years of suffrage and which moved to Open Eye Gallery Liverpool in February 2019 and is now part of the Parliamentary Art collection. For more than fifteen years she was the Photography Director of the award-winning Telegraph Magazine where she raised the profile of the magazine and commissioned intelligent and inventive photography worldwide.

Stories worth seeing

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Thanks to passionate storytellers, we learn about matters that otherwise stay neglected. Stories that matter, but have not been covered enough are captured and told by passion-driven photographers and journalists.

They create because they care about the world they live in and tell us about matters beyond our eyesight.Their work is often driven by pure enthusiasm, fuelled by own beliefs and dreams for a better world. That's why such independent work is worth special attention.

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