This year I was invited to curate a show on Young British Photographers for the Fototage Internationale Festival being held in Herten, Germany in September 2001. I felt that we should take advantage of the opportunity to show the selected photographers here in Hereford as well.

Photography is mainstream art now. In Britain in recent years, Wolfgang Tillmans (a German photographer, who studied in Britain) has won the prestigious Turner Modern Art Prize; the first of the important new Citibank Prizes for Photography was won by Richard Billingham, a young artist who had documented his dysfunctional family in some of the strongest photographic images for years; the John Kobal Photography Portrait award has moved the genre significantly, with prizes for Katrina Lithgow's nude woman, Tom Hunter's woman reading a repossession order, and Richard Sawdon-Smith's image of Simon, an AIDS patient. A whole range of new style and scene magazines, as well as the internet, are demanding new types of image, of the new lifestyles.

The young contemporary British photographers are aware of all this and responding to it with courage and diversity. There are young photographers doing their own thing, achieving real advances in style and content. They are aware of documenting social issues, as well as their own scene, both of which they are addressing in many different genres of photography. The types of photography have changed and the young photographers are setting out there own styles and subjects - its different to what went before, but its definitely vital and inventive and aware.

I tend to be interested in photography that has a strong human message or intelligently deconstructs an aspect of our humanity or culture. So I have made a selection that reflects that: Zed Nelson and David Modell with important documentary work on the American drought in Oklahoma and the British Conservative party; Ewen Spencer on the young British club scene; Katrina Lithgow with her new work on baptism and the transcendental experience; Tom Hunter's wonderful compositions of people living on the edge of society; Stacey Whitaker, representing a vital student community, intelligently re-examining the family album; and finally Rankin, our street-wise bad boy, showing us what we look like up close, in-your-face, when we express one-on-one emotion.

Robert Ashby