New Exit Group Articles

Moments Burned into the Mind and Negative: by Andrew Blowers

“MOVE OUT OF THE FUCKING WAY!” is exactly what I remember the officer shouting at me as I made this photograph. The expression on his ruddy face, the jovial protestor with his thumbs up, all barrelling towards me as I burned the exposure onto the 13th frame of a roll of HP5+.

I didn’t think much of it on that day in October 2019 and simply continued to document the protest that was going on around me. I removed myself from the path of the oncoming arrest-train, only to be shoulder clipped by another officer who went out of his way to make the contact, clearly disliking the presence of photographers in this public space.

What Can it Mean to Truly Collaborate as a Photography Collective? by Simon King

The ability for individual photographers to have any kind of cultural impact feels diminished and diluted when you consider just how many are working towards the goal of producing meaningful work.

Where individuals are limited in the time they can spend, the ground they can cover, and the final result they can output, a group of individuals is able to multiply that effort. When applying themselves to telling the same story, a group of photographers will find themselves much better equipped to do a deep dive into a subject than someone working alone.

Producing BARDO: The Summer of ‘20 with Affinity Publisher: by Simon King

From April to August 2020 I, and a group of three other photographers (David Babaian, Andrew Blowers, Sagar Kharecha), documented the situations we found ourselves facing in what we agreed to be the most surreal summer of our lives so far. We used black and white 35mm film and decided early on that our efforts would ultimately be collated into a zine—a perfect medium for the kind of stories we found ourselves telling.

Until only a few days ago, everything we’ve worked on as a collective since our foundation in 2019 has been pretty much hypothetical. The photography side of things was kind of obvious - we are in a constant state of development and experimentation, but have consistently managed to handle the scenes we encounter in a way that represents our current best efforts. We can make a competent image, but beyond that is essentially everything else. Working towards sequencing those images into a product, and putting that product out there is a real fragility, and over the last few days of launching this website and activating the pre-order system for our debut zine, BARDO, we each felt that vulnerability.

Working the Scene from Four Different Perspectives: Protest Photography

Expressions of civil unrest have provided many opportunities for photographers to capture the energetic, emotional scenes which are the byproduct of demonstrations, protests, riots, and other manifestations. Crowds offer such a dynamic set of possibilities that I’ve even heard some describe protests as being “cheating,” or “too easy – fish in a barrel.”

While it’s certainly easier to find something close and interesting to frame it is not easier to produce actually meaningful work by any standard – if it were then every protest would be accompanied by dozens of powerful, iconic documents. Instead, like any other genre, it requires a huge investment of time and care to produce something that can escape the genre – a true artefact.