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Bringing together a selection of the artist’s evocative photographic works, the exhibition highlights Thorne-Thomsen’s distinctive ability to merge staged imagery, landscape, and symbolism into hauntingly poetic visual narratives.

Known for her imaginative and meticulously constructed compositions, Thorne-Thomsen created photographs that blur the boundaries between reality and dream. The artist often staged photographic images within natural environments before re-photographing them, producing seamless surreal scenes charged with mystery and emotional depth. Through this layered process, familiar landscapes become psychologically resonant spaces populated by fragmented figures, symbolic gestures, and enigmatic references that allude to mythology, memory, and collective history.

Thorne-Thomsen’s photographs invite viewers into contemplative worlds where narrative remains intentionally open-ended and interpretation unfolds through atmosphere rather than direct explanation. Her works seem to function as visual traces of dreams or subconscious states, offering insight into the complexities of perception, identity, and human emotion. Through their quiet intensity and carefully orchestrated ambiguity, the photographs continue to reveal the enduring power of staged imagery as a means of exploring inner psychological landscapes.

I create visual metaphors for experiential states through images from multiple sources, using photography to create the unity of a visual field that is the illusion of reality. Some see this effect as a contradiction of the medium’s ability to create a sense of actuality; in fact, it is this very contradiction that excites me. As an artist I explore internal and meditative states of mind arising from the fabric of my personal experience. I use images that attract me and arrange them and photograph them through a pinhole aperture. This sometimes playful approach allows me to create imaginary realms that suggest, rather than describe, paradoxical states. While my images derive from personal choices they aim at evoking universal experiences. My working process changes with the needs of the work.  (Ruth Thorne-Thomsen)

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Estabrook is clearly interested in unresolvable contrasts and paradoxes. While virtually all of his enigmatic photographs appear cool and calculated, his Victorian-style aesthetic gives them a sentimental warmth. Indeed, the artist’s experimental bravado is tempered by this patina of yesteryear, which mischievously quotes the past to comment on the present.

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Forever & Never (Artsuite), Dan Estabrook’s excellent new book, looks like the relic of an arcane religion or, perhaps, a magician’s memoir in pictures. Typically, Estabrook’s images are difficult to pin down to a time and a place. Although they are dated from 1992 to 2024, they appear to have been found—unearthed, discovered—rather than newly made. In large part, that’s due to the antique processes Estabrook uses; his pictures are callotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes, or salt, albumen, gum bichromate, and platinum palladium prints, often finished with watercolor, gouache, or pencil. “It has never been my interest simply to revisit or revive the processes of the nineteenth century,” he points out at the start. “My past didn’t actually exist in the past. It is a reinvention of a time that never was. I want you to be fully aware that you’re looking at a fake relic, in order to see that history itself is artificial.”

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Rarely do I find an artist’s monograph achieves something greater than a well-edited selection of images and a contextual essay. Dan Estabrook’s Forever & Ever does exactly that. It presents his work from the past three decades as almost a sculptural object that reminds us of the expressive potential of the book form...

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Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, a photographer who made witty and surreal tableaux that she captured with a pinhole camera — “environmental collages,” she called them — evoking and transfiguring the romantic travel photography of the 19th century, died on Oct. 27 at a hospice facility in Philadelphia. She was 82.

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Roger Mayne was truly a magnificent, poetic artist. His subjects, though never appearing “posed,” confront the spectator in vivid and completely natural un/reality.⁴ Spirits who still inhabit London’s deliquescent urban spaces.

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This exhibition, curated by Jane Alison in close collaboration with Mayne’s daughter, Katkin Tremayne, features over 60 vintage photographs, some never exhibited before. While the two bodies of work, street and family, have a different tenor, they are united by Mayne’s radical empathy with his youthful subjects and his desire to create photographic images that enjoy a lasting impact, produced with great sensitivity and artistic integrity. With Mayne’s post-war subjects now in their more senior years, and today’s younger generation facing a myriad crises, Mayne’s deliberations on growing up, childhood, adolescence and family feel especially poignant and timely.

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This is an absorbing show. Do not miss it.

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Roger Mayne’s genuine curiosity about people shines through in his photographs of kids playing on the streets of 1950s and 60s Britain and intimate shots of his family.

The documentary images of photographer Roger Mayne (1929-2014) are the subject of the first ever exhibition of photography to take place in the main galleries of the Courtauld. Focusing on his unique way of capturing the youth of the day in the 1950s and 60s, the exhibition brings together his well-known photographs of Southam Street in west London, and others of that ilk, alongside some very special family photographs of his children growing up. With such a personal angle, it is crucial that the guest curator, Jane Alison, has worked closely with Mayne’s daughter, Katkin Tremayne, over several years to bring this passion project to fruition.

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In its 92-year history, the Courtauld Gallery in London has never acquired or exhibited photography – until now. Its inaugural exhibition is Roger Mayne: Youth, devoted to some 60 works by the self-taught British photographer best known for his documents of working-class children on the poor and battered streets of postwar London.

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