Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow Five stars From Greenham Common to Palestine, Jenny Matthews has long been on the frontline of international protest against warfare. As a founder member in the 1980s of all-woman photographic agency, Format Photographers, and in everything that followed, Matthews’ images have brought to life the women caught in the crossfire of numerous conflicts and atrocities across more than forty years. Two decades on from her book, Women and War (2003), this solo show brings together several bodies of work that immortalise and honour her subjects using the most tender of means to keep them in the frame. This is as clear in the series of twenty-three quilts lined with images from Matthews’ archive, as much as it is with the thirty-five portraits that use embroidery to mask the faces of Afghan women in Facial Derecognition (2021). It is there too in Torn Apart, an up to the minute series drawn from the crisis in Sudan, and a new series of images from Gaza. In
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.