Another month and another festival. After the Russians and Chinese it is time for the Irish to celebrate their St. Patrick’s Day. This year it will be celebrated on 16 March and there should be lots of photo opportunities.
Click through to find out more about other exhibitions going on in March.

St. Patrick’s Day
16th March

The annual celebration of St. Patricks Day. There will be a parade leading from Hyde Park Corner to Whitehall and there is a festival going on in Trafalgar & Leceister Square and Covent Garden with performances by Irish artists.

Host Gallery
1 Honduras Street, EC1

Judah Passow: Shattered Dreams - from 25th March
A new exhibition of compelling photography by Judah Passow, one of the UK’s leading photojournalists. In the run up to the 60th anniversary of the declaration of Independence of the State of Israel on May 14th, Shattered Dreams revisits the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Israel, the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, and Lebanon.
Photographed as newspaper and magazine assignments over the past 25 years, Judah’s images are more than a journalistic record of conflict and turmoil. They are the product of a very personal journey of exploration across the emotional landscape of the country in which he was born, and for whose survival he once wore a uniform and fought.
The shattered dreams he explores are those of his generation’s vision of an egalitarian society built on social tolerance and economic achievement. From both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, Judah uses his critical eye and signature black-and-white photography to take us on an empathetic journey to a place where people glorify their past, curse their present, and have difficulty imagining a future.

Proud Galleries – Central
Buckingham Street, WC2

Renaissance Photography - from 5nd until 9th March
Renaissance is the brainchild of Fiona Gifford, a 34 year-old lawyer who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006. Following her recovery, Fiona realized how little she, and her peers, knew about breast cancer.
“I was diagnosed very early by chance at a routine check-up. It would never have occurred to me to self-examine as I didn’t think that it was a concern for people my age. Had it not been for a very thorough doctor, I would have been diagnosed considerably later. I am now very keen to raise awareness in younger people, to ensure that my age group becomes sensitized to the various lifestyle choices which may help prevent them from getting breast cancer.
The idea of a photographic competition originally came from a friend whose mother had died of the disease. As a keen amateur photographer I saw this as the perfect way to raise money for, and awareness, of breast cancer in younger people. The theme of Renaissance expresses my experience of illness. Despite all the negative feelings during the months of treatment there were paradoxically moments of great joy and energy gained from a sudden understanding of how special life, and those around me, were. I hope that this competition will be a celebration of life and love in the face of adversity”.

Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre

Alexander Rodchenko: Revolution In Photography - until 27th April
Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) was one of the great figures of early 20th-century avant-garde art, and also one of its most versatile practitioners. After gaining an international reputation as a painter, sculptor and graphic artist, Rodchenko turned to photography in the early 1920s, convinced that it would become the artistic medium of his era.
Featuring approximately 120 original prints and photomontages, this exhibition traces the development of Rodchenko’s photography over a period of two decades when he created many classic works of Russian and world photography. Pioneering a new vocabulary of bold and unusual camera positions, severe foreshortenings of perspective, and close-up views of surprising details, Rodchenko’s photography balanced formal concerns with an interest in the social and political life of the Soviet Union. Whether making individual portraits, studies of modern architecture and industry, or pictures of mass demonstrations and entertainments, Rodchenko infused his images with a startlingly dynamic point of view that influenced the growth of an experimental aesthetic in European photography of the late 1920s and 1930s.

The Photographers’ Gallery
5 & 8 Great Newport Street, WC2

Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008 - until 6th April
The Photography Prize worth £30,000 is awarded annually to an international photographer who is judged to have made the greatest contribution to photography over the previous year. This year’s finalists are John Davies (UK), Jacob Holdt (Denmark), Esko Männikkö (Finland) and Fazal Sheikh (USA). Founded in 1996, the Photography Prize has become one of the most prestigious international arts awards.
John Davies has been nominated for The British Landscape at the National Media Museum, Bradford, UK. His panoramic black & white photographs, taken between 1979 – 2005, document the changing post-industrial British landscape.
Jacob Holdt has been nominated for his publication Jacob Holdt, United States 1970 – 1975, published by Steidl GwinZegal, Germany. In the early 1970s, Holdt spent five years hitchhiking across the US, living with and documenting the lives of the people he met - from the poorest Southern sharecroppers to some of America’s wealthiest families.
Esko Männikkö has been nominated for his retrospective Cocktails 1990 - 2007 at Millesgarden, Stockholm, Sweden. A portraitist of isolation, Männikkö documents with great humour, warmth and integrity the lives of those who inhabit the periphery.
Fazal Sheikh has been nominated for his publication Ladli, published by Steidl, Germany. Sheikh is an artist-activist who uses photography to create sustained portraits of different communities around the world.

White Cube Hoxton Square
48 Hoxton Square, N1

Mario Garcia Torres - until 29th March
Garcia Torres is known for work with a playful – and sometimes nostalgic – take on the history of Conceptual art, unlocking many of its forgotten narratives to bring forth new ideas and meanings. Through his interventions, slide projections, films and installations, Garcia Torres rethinks the history of contemporary art in a personal way to create what has been called an ‘aesthetics of information’. The exhibition features two works: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger, a slide installation, and My Westphalia Days, a 16mm film.
What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger combines text and photographs to create a kind of visual essay about Martin Kippenberger’s attempts to establish a modern art museum on the Greek island of Syros. The form is characteristic of the artist: acting as a cultural archaeologist, he digs up a piece of the recent past to create a discursive portrait – half travel log, half proposal – of one of the more quixotic episodes in the history of contemporary art.

Hoopers Gallery
15 Clerkenwell Close, EC1

David Bate: Bungled Memories - until 7th March
Bungled Memories is a series of still-life colour photographs by David Bate. Each picture shows domestic objects, accidentally broken (by him) and photographed in his own kitchen. Taking his cue from Freud’s book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Bate’s photographs show ‘accidental breakages’ as a way of thinking about the notion of an accident. Are these breakages ‘Freudian slips’, where other thoughts have insisted on their place in memory too? While we may never finally know, the pictures show the intrigue involved in minor accidents. No longer serving any utilitarian purpose, these broken domestic objects provide the material for something else,
mnemonic scenes, vehicles for memory of other events. By elevating the domestic space of the kitchen to a place where questions can be asked about what is involved in an accident, what emerges are ‘bungled memories’. The photographs both conceal and reveal hidden
intentions involved in the broken objects, of which we may ourselves not be explicitly aware, yet enable other trains of thought to occur too. If ‘home is where the heart is’, then these domestic accidents reveal how far everyday objects are invested with personal feelings. These beautiful pictures create enigmatic scenes infused with displaced memories.

National Portrait Gallery
St. Martin’s Place, WC2

Vanity Fair Portraits - until 26th May
Throughout its history Vanity Fair has helped define the public persona of some of the most influential individuals from the worlds of music, sport, fashion, business, literature politics, theatre, cinema, and the arts. Vanity Fair Portraits brings together portraits of cultural icons from the magazine’s vintage and modern periods with sitters ranging from Claude Monet, Amelia Earhart and Jesse Owens to David Hockney, Arthur Miller and Madonna, displayed with legendary Hollywood actors from Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo to Demi Moore and Tom Cruise.
This is a unique opportunity to see 95 years of iconic imagery by some of the most renowned photographers of the twentieth century, including Baron De Meyer, Edward Steichen, Man Ray and Cecil Beaton, as well as portraits by celebrated contemporary photographers such as Annie Leibovitz, Mario Testino, Helmut Newton and Herb Ritts.

Shutting Up Shop - until 4th May
In 1972, photographer John Londei started taking pictures of small independent shops the length and breadth of Britain. Often family-run businesses, well-established in their local communities, Londei strove to capture the timeworn presence of these already anachronistic businesses ­ the butchers and bakers, button makers, cobblers, fishmongers and chemists of our high streets. Over a fifteen-year period, he photographed 60 shops. In 2004, when he retraced his steps and revisited the shops he’d photographed, he found that only seven of the 60 were still in business. His subsequent book of the series, Shutting Up Shop is a fitting tribute to Britain’s independent retailers.

Born 1947: Camera Press at 60 - until 20th April
The UK’s largest independent photographic agency celebrates sixty years with the unveiling of newly commissioned portraits by leading photographers of famous personalities all born in 1947 ­ including Sir Salman Rushdie by Bryan Adams; Ronnie Wood by Sean Cook; and Tessa Jowell by Lord Snowdon.
This display marks the sixtieth anniversary of independent photographic agency, Camera Press, founded by Tom Blau in 1947. In addition to presenting to the public for the first time a group of newly commissioned portraits of notable Britons celebrating sixty this year, Born 1947 ­ Camera Press at 60 also includes a selection of photographs by Tom Blau of subjects from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

Atlas Gallery
49 Dorset Street, W1

George Rodger: African Portraits - from 6th March
A founding member of Magnum Photos, in 1947, George Rodger made his name during the Blitz in London; and through his work documenting Monty’s Desert Rats’ struggle against the Axis armies in Africa, for Life magazine, in 1941. His enduring passion remained Africa, where he returned in 1947, embarking on a two-year long, overland journey from Cape Town to Cairo, with the intention of photographing the wild-life, and, also, wanting to explore something of Man’s inseparable relationship with nature. He visited Nigeria, Uganda, and Lamberene in Gabon, photographing, from the high hills of Basutoland to the remote Nuba villages of Kordofan in Southern Sudan, the little known, day-to-day existence of the tribal peoples in this part of South and East Africa. Rodger gained unprecedented access to the Nuba tribe and the Masai warriors in Kenya; first publishing his extraordinary pictures in National Geographic in 1951. Africa remained a major preoccupation for Rodger for the rest of his life. He died in 1995.

AOP Gallery
81 Leonard Street, EC2

24 2008 - from 3th until 8th March
An exhibition chronicling the first 24 hours of the New Year goes on display at the Association of Photographers’ gallery on March 3 2008. Running for six days 24-2008 brings together 24 images from 24 international photographers to capture the end of one year and the beginning of the next. What a difference a day made…
Born in 2004, 24 began as a study project for 24 students at St. Martin’s School of Art. Now established as a regular event in the London Arts calendar and in it’s fifth year, the project continues to grow and evolve echoing the personal, professional and artistic development of the participants and their lives.

Michael Hoppen Gallery
3 Jubilee Place, SW3

Tod Papageorge: Passing Through Eden - from 7th March
The first UK solo exhibition of work by Tod Papageorge. Taken between 1969 and 1991, these black and white photographs capture the primeval character of Central Park, the human tragedy and comedy in this particular vision of Eden.
During the 1970s, when Papageorge began to work on this series, Central Park was portrayed as a dangerous place not to be visited after dark. These photographs depict a different view showing innocence, beauty, ugliness, isolation, chaos and humour - the whole scope of human life on view within the park. Papageorge parallels this series with the first four books of Genesis, pulling the disparate images together by presenting the park as a public Eden, his elegy to a lost Elysium. This projected narrative lends the photographs structure and gravity: the audience can recognise Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel in various guises acting out their elemental roles in our commonplace world.
Initially, Papageorge’s project was driven less by a fascination with Central Park than by the desire to utilise a particular camera (a 6 x 9 cm Fujica) that was too cumbersome for the city’s streets. He found within the park an intense and palpable realm of bodies, action and objects. Daily photographic excursions alongside Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz on the streets of New York had honed his abilities to both anticipate and capture great photographic moments within the disorder of the park.

Mirella Ricciardi - until 5th April
Mirella Ricciardi’s African pictures have the integrity of spontaneous, intuitive documents made with the deep love of someone who knew and understood their subject. There is nothing voyeuristic here, no sense of exploitation of the exotic, rather a sense of Mirella’s tender, familial engagement, and her considerable respect for the inherent nobility of what was before her lens.
The small selection of portraits made in 1968 and now on exhibition – printed in platinum in a powerful large format – represents just one facet of a wide-ranging reportage that was published nearly forty years ago as a book, aptly titled Vanishing Africa. The photographer had close connections with Kenya and a privileged access to the peoples of the Turkana and Masai tribes. She recognised the vulnerability of the land, the people and the animals suspended together in a state of grace that was magical, but doomed. Mirella knew she must fulfil her unique opportunity to make a record of this fugitive moment and she did so with energy and passion. By the turn of the millennium her book seemed long forgotten and her pictures were too little known. Four decades on from their making, and with our painful awareness of the obliteration of the way of life that they depict, these images take on an extra layer of poignancy as elegies for a lost Eden and as fine metaphors for all that we are in danger of destroying on our planet.

Photofusion
17a Electric Lane, SW9

In Camera: Jonathan Knowles - until 5th April
Jonathan Knowles is the photographer behind many of the images which have become ubiquitous in British society: the O2 bubbles and the oranges on Sainsbury’s lorries, stores and carrier bags. Recent high profile advertising campaigns have run around the world. In the UK, we have seen advertisements for Plymouth Gin, Nike, Smokefree England, Guinness and Weetabix alongside album sleeves for the Ministry of Sound.
Knowles’ still lives all have a very graphic quality. From the extreme of a white egg on a white background to the sumptuous abundance of his golden scarf, simplicity is at the core of his work. There is nothing that is superfluous to the message in any of his pictures – even crumbs next to a half eaten cake are carefully placed in a ‘random’ way. In each image, the totality is an object which is sculpted by his light, and the way they come together creates a still and permanent beauty.
His liquid work takes this a stage further, this time presenting as permanent what the eye itself can never retain. Whilst unable to control each event in its minutest detail, meticulous planning means that he captures an instant of time never to be repeated; a fraction of a second earlier or later with his shutter and the result would undoubtedly be different.
The images in this exhibition are a combination of Knowles’ serene and sumptuous still lives, together with some images of more explosive moments captured in a way that bring equal tranquility in the absence of the brutal noise that undoubtedly accompanies their creation.

Victoria & Albert Museum
Cromwell Road, SW7

Curtis Moffat: Experimental Photography and Designs, 1923-1935 - until 13th April
Curtis Moffat created dynamic abstract photographs, innovative colour still lives and some of the most glamorous society portraits of the early 20th century. He was also a pivotal figure in Modernist interior design. Moffat’s archive, containing over 1,000 photographic prints and negatives as well as press cuttings, scrap books and ephemera, was generously donated to the V&A in 2007 by Penelope Smail. The donation is celebrated by featuring some of its highlights in this display. It also acts as a starting point to study Moffat’s pioneering but hitherto little-known work in more depth.

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