Westminster Photoforum- Jenny Matthews

Matthews is a documentary photographer and filmmaker who works on issues of dispossession and human rights, with a particular emphasis on the lives of women and girls. In 1983, she was a founding member of Format, the UK's first women's photographic agency. She has worked all over the world for NGOs and on editorial assignments, covering momentous historical events, including the guerrilla war and the Independence of Eritrea, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the genocide in Rwanda. Since 2020, she has been working with her archive, printing on material and adding embroidery, enabling commentary on current conflicts in areas that are impossible for her to visit, notably Afghanistan, Sudan and Gaza. Her book Women and War, chronicling 20 years of women worldwide affected by conflict, was published in 2003. She is working on a second volume entitled Stories of Love and War as well as documenting her community in Hackney, East London.