Photojournalism Hub x Riverside Studios

We’re delighted to welcome Maria Tomas Rodriguez and Ollie G. Monk to the 38th edition of the Photojournalism Nights. 

Photojournalism Nights invites contemporary photojournalists and documentary photographers to share their powerful, committed photography and engage audiences to social justice and human rights. It invites interactive Q&A’s , and an opportunity for people to connect and network with photojournalists and likeminded audiences. Our guest speakers of this last edition of the year 2023 use traditional journalistic methodologies in their work documenting migration and the human stories of hope and death as well as delving on the impact of corporations and their increasing power shadowing accountability.

Maria Tomas- Rodriguez is a Senior Lecturer of Control Systems Engineering and Mechatronics at The City University of London, United Kingdom. Since 2016 I have combined her academic profession with documentary photography projects mostly within the field of social inequalities and human rights. She has received photography training through courses and seminars at the Westminster College, The Photographer’s Gallery and Royal Photographic Society, United Kingdom.

She won the British Photography Award in documentary category in 2019, she also has won the second prize at the International Photography Awards in Editorial/sports category and she has also been finalist at the Travel photography of the year in 2020. Her work has been published both in UK and Spanish media.

@photomtr

Ollie G. Monk is a photojournalist using local stories to paint a bigger picture of the contemporary issues facing Britain. Using traditional journalistic methods such as investigation, interviews and (arguably obsessive) research, he builds narratives that encourage the viewer to look for nuance and significance in the smallest of stories, putting an emphasis on the local in an increasingly global media landscape. We do not need to stray far to find stories worth telling.

Based in south-west London, he is in the final stages of a postgraduate degree at the London College of Communication while also working towards teaching documentary practice, mentoring both at King’s College London and the London College of Communication. For the last year, he has been working on two major projects. Comms Failure is an investigation into the difficulty of keeping companies like Thames Water accountable to the public they serve, and was exhibited in Copeland Gallery, Peckham this year. 

Meanwhile Protest Pen, an ongoing project, is the story of a photographer’s journey into the Truth Seeker or Truther movement told over the course of five zines. Known as conspiracy theorists to some, the beliefs they share are often based on the most tenuous or tangential of evidence, relying on one’s own internal logic and anecdote — you must only cast doubt on the status quo for a theory to become worthy of discussion. Excerpts of informal interviews with Truthers build an overall narrative; however, when paired with portraits and documentary images of the group in their own space, the viewer is forced to confront them not as stereotypes and slogans, but as people, no longer hidden behind brash, choreographed online personas. Social isolation, family tragedies, and mental illness: the community is not simply a fringe political group, but a refuge for those who, like so many of us, have felt lost and scared in a broken world that seems just too complicated to fix.

@olliegmonk