EXPOSED – Young Female Photographers

Emma Dabiri meets three emerging female artists under 30 who are bringing a fresh new perspective to the world of photography

Part of a wave of young British photographers who’ve grown up in a world of social media and camera phones, their work is smart and subversive – exploring ideas of female identity, sex, beauty, food, community, and consumerism. Appreciated by a hugely receptive audience – both at exhibitions and art fairs but also online, they’ve harnessed the power of instagram to showcase their work to a younger generation of art lovers.

Juno Calypso is a fine artist and photographer with a string of awards and has just been acquired by Manchester Art Gallery. Using herself as the model, she seeks out extraordinary, unnerving locations (Honeymoon hotels, futuristic 1960s bunkers) to explore issues surrounding female identity, beauty and consumerism. We meet her in her blood-splattered studio making work for the Women’s World Cup.

Maisie Cousins has just published her first book Rubbish, Dipping Sauce, Grass, Peonie, Bum – based on the titles of her last three exhibitions. Her blown-up images of food and plant-life are sticky, sweaty and unmistakably erotic. For Maisie, it’s less problematic to objectify something that’s already an object, “nobody’s going to tell me off for making a sexy plastic or a sexy fruit. They’re inanimate”. She likes to create mini fantasy worlds, photographing at a close distance, to tell the most lies she can.

But for Sophie Green, honesty and authenticity is key. A portrait and social documentary photographer who since winning the Magnum Graduate Award has been exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery twice as part of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, and has published two books. From African churches, to stock car racing, and arm wrestlers, her work investigates British identity today and the glue that unites communities and subcultures.

With insights from journalist Charlotte Jansen, collector Nick Sutton, and gallerist Hannah Watson

Produced by Victoria Ferran

Broadcast Date: 18th July 2019