Jacobs Pro Lounge

Photo-Forum Thursday 8 July 2010

Jacobs Pro Lounge 6pm prompt start until 8pm

At our June Photo-Forum Irina Kalashnikova showed us work from North Korea and Tal Cohen presented his news and current affairs photographs. We cooled off with the long awaited snow slideshow from last winter and had another group slideshow of photographs from the May elections. Thanks to Alex Mcnaughton for production.

On Thursday 8 July we will have Susannah Ireland and Steve Forrest showing their work.

Susannah graduated from the NCTJ photojournalism course in 2005 and spent a year learning the ropes with News Team International in Birmingham covering everything from page 3 to premiership football. Susannah won The Times Young Photographer of the Year in 2007 and moved to London on a six month contract. She now freelances in London working primarily for The Times and The Independent on news and features.

Susannah will show photographs from Afghanistan last August where she covered the elections for The Independent while embedded with the Welsh Guards. We'll also see her ongoing project on rowing and boat clubs in London as well as a look behind the scenes at the Royal Ballet commissioned by The Times but which never saw the light of day.

Steve Forrest originally trained in graphic design/advertising and started his career as an Art Director in one of London's most prestigious advertising agencies, before working his way down to a small crappy ad agency on the Edgware Road. Realising that this career path was going in the wrong direction, he quit, bought a camera and went traveling before enrolling on a press photography course at Stradbrooke College in Sheffield, aged 30.

Following a stint as a staff photographer at a local Oxford paper photographing sunflowers and face-painting he spent six months covering the first Intifada in The Gaza Strip, five years working for the world's maddest boss at Guzelian in Bradford before escaping to Africa to cover the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia. After a year of that Steve came back to London and took over an agency called Insight-Visual. He now runs a small agency called Workers' Photos with his partner Amaya Roman and is also a member of Panos Pictures in London. For the past seven years he has been a regular freelancer for The New York Times and other international newspapers and magazines.

Steve Forrest will show some of his portrait work and photos from two projects: Paranoid Britain and The Westminster Village.

As always we'll raffle prints from the photographers to help fund Photo-Forum. The raffle pays for food in the pub after the show (so please come along to share a plate and a glass!) with donations to good causes when there's any left over. The Photo-Forum raffle is the cheapest ever way to buy a print from one of today's leading photographers, please support it and perhaps win some great work for just a few pounds.
__________________________________
Photo-Forum is run by photographers for photographers as a venue for working photographers from across the spectrum to bring images, ideas, photo stories and work in progress for supportive debate and criticism. It runs monthly on the second Thursday of the month in Central London.

Food, drink and animated conversation in the pub after. It's the Bloomsbury Tavern and there's a map at http://bit.ly/duHgyb

Jacobs Pro Lounge Downstairs at Jacobs 74 New Oxford Street London WC1A 1EU