Neutral Exposure

If you don’t know the name Glen E Friedman, you’ll almost certainly know his work, and if you don’t know the work you’ve not had your eyes open for the last 40 years. Glen is responsible for some of the most iconic imagery of the skateboarding, punk and hip hop scenes, and someone I've been a big fan of for a long time.

I first encountered Glen’s work when I picked up Keep Your Eyes Open off my brother’s bookshelf when I was about 15 - a collection of Glen’s work with the band Fugazi. At this stage I was shooting live music around Leeds and Bradford, and in keeping with the title of the book had my eyes opened by the intimacy and energy within the work, and the relationship that was there between photographer and band.

As someone who has been pretty well interviewed in the past, I didn’t want to ask Glen too much that he’d been asked already, and I think the result is a great chat. Hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did!

Yang Wang Preston is a landscape photographer based in West Yorkshire. Yan’s professional photography career started relatively recently, having previously worked in medicine, and this change in direction coincided with her moving from China to West Yorkshire. We chat about how her projects have found a balance between the artistic and academic worlds, particularly her projects Mother River and Forest which are both beautiful aesthetic works, while also being close cultural research studies of the changing Chinese natural and urban landscapes. It was great to hear also what Yan is working on at the moment to unpack her own sense of home in the post-industrial Northern English landscape she now calls home.