Photo Oxford Celebrates DIY and Uncommercial Art

The fifth edition of the Photo Oxford festival kicks off with a bit of charming chaos and a deep dive into one of photography's most enduring questions: its relationship with truth. As Roland Barthes once mused, "in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away." This year's festival, spread across 30 venues from colleges to pubs, seems to take that idea to heart, inviting viewers to look beyond the surface.

Art vs Algorithm Exploring AI in Photography

The festival immediately confronts the modern challenge to photographic truth: artificial intelligence. In an outdoor exhibition, Michael Christopher Brown’s 90 Miles uses AI to illustrate the perilous journey of Cuban refugees to Florida. Brown fed the software with eyewitness accounts and historical reports, generating images that, while not 'real,' convey a deeper truth. The resulting pictures are hauntingly surreal, with figures melting like a Francis Bacon painting, stranded in a turbulent sea—a powerful blend of historical fact and digital interpretation.

In a more satirical take, Haley Morris-Cafiero’s What Does An Ideal Employee Look Like? is a hilarious and unsettling face-off with technology. The artist used an AI program that assesses a person's employability based on their appearance. Unsurprisingly biased towards Western features, Morris-Cafiero decided to dupe the machine. Using sticky tape to contort her face into the algorithm's 'ideal' structure, she created a series of absurd corporate-style headshots that expose the sinister reality behind such biased software.

The Search for Emotional Truth

Other artists at the festival turn inward, searching for truth in emotion and personal experience. In a solo exhibition held in a private home, young portraitist Timon Benson presents Voice of Matter, an experimental and sincere attempt to translate feeling into photography. His soft-spoken, watery-eyed pictures and cameraless luminograms show a promising, if still tentative, new voice.

The emotional intensity is amplified at the Old Fire Station, which hosts a tear-jerking show of psychologically charged works. Lydia Goldblatt’s Fugue captures the loneliness, claustrophobia, and bittersweet bliss of early motherhood. Jenny Lewis’s Unbecoming beautifully visualizes the invisible suffering and confinement of living with a hereditary autoimmune condition. And Heather Agyepong’s beguiling triptych of self-portraits uses double exposures to explore Jungian theories of the shadow self. Together, these works powerfully question whether the visual can ever truly be an arbiter of truth.

An Unmissable Archive of Grime and History

However, the festival's most unforgettable show is found in the most unlikely of places: the dank, sticky-floored basement of The Jolly Farmers, a renowned gay pub. Here, 74-year-old photographer Phil Polglaze exhibits his monumental archive of black and white photographs of London public toilets, taken between 1979 and 1996.

These are not just pictures of bogs. Polglaze worked with a criminal defence barrister, using his camera to reconstruct scenes and provide evidence that could prove the innocence of men on trial for gross indecency after being arrested for 'cottaging.' His images were instrumental in demonstrating how police witness accounts were often physically impossible. Beyond their legal context, these photos of stinking urinals and grimy cubicles tell a poignant story of a time when such spaces were vital for a community to connect, even under the constant threat of violation. Polglaze's work reclaims this key part of British cultural history from the shadows, ensuring it cannot be ignored.

In an art world that often feels too slick and sleek, Photo Oxford is a refreshing dose of DIY, disorder, and the delightfully uncommercial.