This page has links to my various photographic projects. They link to Flickr pages, which also carry explanations about the projects. All the photographs found online are held under a Creative Commons licence, so feel free to use them as you like (if you credit them to me):
Entangled in the Forest of Brexit
A silent slideshow, commissioned by the Mardin Biennial in 2018, and since shown at the Thessaloniki PhotoBiennale in 2019. Here is a brief explanation of the work:
Epping Forest, once a royal hunting ground, known for its ancient oaks (symbols of England) lies on the outskirts of London. Now given over to the public, divided by roads and hemmed in by private property, it is a suburban woodland. Brexit—the vote to leave the European Union—sharply divided remainer London from the neighbouring county of Essex, which voted strongly to leave.
The border between the two runs through the forest, sometimes following tracks and streams, and sometimes straying into dense thickets. I followed it as best I could using map and compass, on a meandering and doubtless erratic path, looking for signs of social disaffection on the hinge of English county and global city.
Gargantua
Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture was my first book, published with Verso in 1996. It was illustrated with photographs I had taken. Here are all those published along with others that were associated with the project but did not make it into the book. It contains chapters on amateur photography, graffiti, computer games, car culture, shopping, as well as reflections on the urban landscape in various cities.
Actually Existing Sculpture
The sculptures that people buy for themselves often convey an array of sentiments long banished from contemporary art: they strive to be heroic or cute, to mark the exuberance of youth or the companionship of maturity, to be funny or affable, to be an object of veneration or of bathos. For many viewers, these sculptures may fail in their apparent task but for the millions who buy and house them, despite their off-the-peg character, they speak of ideals and emotions that exceed the commercial.
Anatomy of Photography
A long-term project, marrying a fictionalised series of diary entries about photography with sequences of pictures. Extracts were published in Photoworks magazine in their Spring-Summer 2005 edition. I am hoping to make this into a book eventually.
Here is an interview with Alexandra Moschovi about the project.
Further Up in the Air
In 2003, I took part in an artists’ residency project called FURTHER Up in the Air curated by Leo Fitzmaurice and Neville Gabie. It involved 18 artists/writers working in response to the last tower block on the estate in North Liverpool. Run over a two year period, the project had three phases of artists resident in the building. My project was to follow the shadow of the one remaining tower block around the area that was being redeveloped at its base with new low-rise housing.
Thrown Down/ Trash
A digital slide show made for the group exhibition, Ephemerality at Hotshoe Gallery, London. The pictures show the fate of commodities and commodified desires, from the passing urge for a fag or a sweet to the remnants of products which may have been the subject of lengthier attachments—toys, computers, even cars. While in advertisements, commodities tend to be isolated, primped and lit to pristine effect and set against slogans and brands that promise fulfilment, cast onto the ground those same objects are brought into inadvertent but telling conjunctions with each other and their discarded logos.
Protest
Julian Stallabrass 