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Matt Stuart is one of the founding members of In-Public, the intercontinental collective
of street photographers.
http://www.in-public.com/
Some of the best of his five years obsessive, attritional work will be shown for the first time in
the 'London Stories' exhibition.
His humorous, inventive and playful work makes connections in the drab London streets that often seem impossible.
Though openly inspired by the greats of this tradition, Matt has made London his own with his personal style. Inspired by the limitless possibilities found in the human tide, he helps prove the original modernist, humanist project to be ever relevant.
Over viewing, his images reveal their happenstance complexities, always making their point from what he finds.
In 2005 Matt has featured in the Top 30 under 30' edition of the American magazine PDN and the prestigious Photographers International.
Matt's personal website is www.mattstuart.com/
“Hampstead Heath is a space at once apart from and contained by London. It is as much a part of the city’s planned evolution as any square or office block, and yet it simultaneously embodies the antithesis of the urban
environment.
Among the city’s parks it is unique for its nurture of genuine
wilderness. It carries some of England’s oldest trees, its most ancient green spaces as its link to a time before modern London.
The people who frequent the Heath unconsciously extend this heritage in their actions: In their use of it as a place of retreat from the everyday, from formality, as a place of liaison with unspeaking nature, with something raw and inherent.
The Heath becomes mysterious, tinged with strangeness,
a place where feelings escape, sometimes unbidden, where the voices of humans merge with those of birds, animals, with those of the woods.
My work here explores Hampstead Heath as London’s dream space, as part of it’s subconscious.”
Andy is the youngest member of the selected group, yet certainly not any less established. Hotshoe magazine’s September 2004 issue featured him as one of the rising stars in the British documentary field.
He has proven himself over the past few years covering most notably the terrible plight of children in Northern Uganda and a cover story for The Times Saturday magazine on the questionable excavations in Vietnam to search for tiny fragments of US troops.
For the Independent on Saturday magazine Andy also illustrated the investigations in Kenya into the systematic rapes that went on during the colonial era.
In the last year Andy has recently worked extensively on features for GQ, Times Traveler and Eight magazines, covering the aftermath of the French riots, tourism in Israel and Christian theme parks in the U.S.
To see more visit www.andysewell.com
Diana was born and raised
in Germany, then lived in Switzerland and has resided in London for the last three years. She is most renowned for her dangerously sexy fashion and portraiture she did for the likes of The Face, British Elle and Arena.
Aside from this, her new book published by Damiani shows a different side - a looser personal and inquisitive record of friends and family, an autobiographical journey.
It is this side of her work that has put her firmly on the map. In February 2006 The British Journal of photography featured her portraiture on their front cover with a four-page interview.
This work can take its place
in a tradition of candid autobiographical observation, but it's also straining to mess with its coded politeness and order.
In this way her work is constantly asking most contemporary questions about power and pleasure through photography. She provides
a brave perversion of these typically male points of view.
London Stories will feature all new unseen work, shot in her adopted home city.
Her most recent solo show opened in Bologna on the 24th
of May
Since ceasing to be Tom Stoddart's full time assistant
in 2001/2, Leonie has gained notoriety for her work through
a number of channels.
She featured in the American
magazine PDN's '30 best under 30' edition alongside Matt Stuart. and won the Tom Webster prize in 2003.
Projects on the world of pheasant-shooting, free-
spirited lives in Provence and tourism in Israel have been completed recently. The latter won her the Jerwood prize in 2005.
Leonie was also highly commended in the Observer Hodge award in 2004 for
the work that she will hang for the first time properly in this show.Entitled 'The labours of Hercules' it deals with the eccentric life of a second hand car dealer off the Holloway Rd into his seventh decade.
With his younger pals forming
a dysfunctional family of sorts, the story is both poignant and funny in turn. The project looks at with the microcosm of his life
until his death later that year, when the story reaches its natural end.
Leonie's work has featured in The Sunday Times, Newsweek, The Guardian and The Independent. She is to be working on a project in association with Fabrica on the subject of 'Families'
She holds a degree from LCP
in photojournalism and has been selected for the prestigious 'Joop Master class' 2007.
Robin's project for London Stories 'The boy with his thumb in the dyke' is principally conducted through sorties
with the Hackney police Force
at night.
This work records the harsh realities on the streets of east London, but also belongs in tone to London's gothic tradition.
The built fabric of the east end provides a stage that recalls it's mythic past. Those wishing their own legendary status here now, take their place perhaps unknowingly in a historic rhythm.
Yet the kind of contemporary mal-nourishment shown here is deeper and harder to define than the Dickensian equivalent.
Importantly, through the spectrum of the urban throng and the particular darkness, appearances are rightly constantly deceiving.
Robin's work on global rock
and roll culture can be seen at PYMCA and Everynightimages
His work has been featured in NME and The Observer Music Monthly amongst others.
He has a Masters degree from the University of Westminster.
I am in love's wrong place, which is its dazzling place: 'The darkest place, according to a Chinese proverb, is always underneath the lamp.” (Reik)
Roland Barthes, A Lovers Discourse
These images represent part of a large and ongoing body of work documenting people in the UK who use their bodies in a sexual way to make a living.
From prostitution, the porn industry and strip clubs, 'No Love Lost' is a visual journey that invokes and captures a sense of unfulfilled lives and spiritually vacant environments.
People seem stuck in one place that is the loneliness of their own psyches. In the modern age sex is surrounded by taboos, and everywhere we transgress these in our desperation to overcome an agonising sense of separation from other people.
With this work the 'adult' industry acts as an ambiguous conduit to reveal an equally ambiguous contemporary Britain.
The scenes selected here for London Stories happened within its orbital.
Michael Grieve is a photographer who's projects concern issues
of ethics and morality.
He works for a variety of publications as a portrait and features photographer including Liberation, Le Monde 2,
The Independent Magazine, Observer Magazine, The Times, Independent on Sunday, Tank, Toro etc. The book, No Love Lost, is to be published in 2007.
He has a Masters in Photographic Studies from Westminster University
These pictures were originally taken for a book titled Left London, a photographic study
of dereliction and abandonment in the capital.
Eckersley, an architectural photographer, was requested by Artist Alex Shields to document these forgotten spaces forming a powerful collaborative project.
“Never has vanity publishing led to such a splendid publication”, wrote Sarah Kent in Time Out.
Though this project clearly lies in a romantic tradition of depiction of ‘ruins’, its journey avoids tracing mere sentimentality.
Seen through the prism of decaying modern London these are not the remnants of a lost civilisation but our own.
These photographs chronicle adventure and discovery too. The contained idea of breaking away from the predictability of our lives in these secret places is as powerfully seductive as ever.
London Stories is the first exhibition of a selection of prints from the series.
As well as running Stucco Press, (founded to publish Left London), Eckersley works as an interiors photographer and continues projects photographing London’s structures.
He studied photography at LCP and St Martin’s.