INTERVIEW

The former photojournalist is co-curator of a major new exhibition called The Camera Never Lies: Challenging images through The Incite Project. Niall Hampton finds out more

‘Poison Glen’, Richard Mosse, 2012.

Richard Mosse

Harriet Logan Photographer and curator

Harriet Logan worked as a photojournalist for a variety of publications including The Sunday Times Magazine.

She covered many global conflicts in the 1990s and 2000s, including assignments in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Turning to advertising after having children, Logan became a collector, acquiring many iconic prints of photojournalism.

These have formed the basis of The Incite Project, a collection supporting photographers who seek social and political change.

Instagram: @inciteproject

Showing some of the past century’s iconic documentary photographs, The Camera Never Lies is a new exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich. Running until 20 October, it is one of the strands in a six-part series of programming that considers the question ‘What is Truth’? Co-curated by the award-winning former photojournalist Harriet Logan, The Camera Never Lies explores the impact and influence that photography has had on shaping – and in some cases, distorting – the narrative of major global events. Visitors to the exhibition, hosted in one of the best gallery spaces outside London, initially encounter a ‘main wall’ of 48 photographs that show key moments over the last 100 years. Many of these are familiar to us, captured by Don McCullin, Dorothea Lange, Robert Capa, Kevin Carter, Steve McCurry, Susan Meiselas, Nick Ut, Bruce Davidson and many more. From there, The Camera Never Lies continues: one area explores issues of authorship in modern documentary photography, and another reflects on how artificial intelligence algorithms interpret images. We caught up with Harriet Logan just after the exhibition opened to find out more about it.

The full exhibition title is The Camera Never Lies: Challenging images through The Incite Project. So tell us about the Incite Project and the exhibition.

I covered quite a lot of conflict as a photographer, much of it for The Sunday Times Magazine. I was always influenced by the greats of photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Koudelka and Eugene Richards – any photojournalist is always going to look to the historical greats for inspiration. I stopped being a photojournalist after having children as they didn’t me want to work in conflicts, so I went into advertising.

Despite not wanting to continue as a photographer, I’ve never stopped loving photography and I was lucky enough to be in a situation where I could start collecting. I had no particular ambition, I just started buying prints of the iconic images that made me want to pick up a camera in the first place – the first one was ‘Migrant Mother’ by Dorothea Lange. It built up from there, then it was Capa’s Normandy beach landing, then Koudelka’s ‘The Horse and the Gypsy’, which I absolutely love. I was calling a gallery and asking them to help source prints, and Tristan Lund [co-curator of The Camera Never Lies] happened to pick up the phone. He knew nothing about photojournalism and I knew nothing about art photography but he loved helping to find the prints that I was asking for and, over a couple of years, we built up a relationship. Then he left the gallery to work with me on my collection.