Swan songs series

Swansongs is a series of 10 contemporary ‘landscape’ photographs depicting the aftermath of the end of industrialisation in the East End of London. As with some previous work, the photographs relate directly to historical paintings, in this case artists from the British Landscape tradition including John Constable and the Pre-Raphaelites. The thematic concerns and formal properties (including bright colour saturation) are recast into contemporary East London but aim to go beyond a literal representation of locations. The intention is to overlay the past onto the present in order to transfigure the latter and to consider some of the harsher realities of contemporary society through a filter of historical referencing. The research included considering the British landscape tradition in terms of recurring compositional arrangements visual tropes and working through concepts of transfiguring these in contemporary terms. Locations in Hackney and its environs with a strong industrial and trading past such as London Fields and Shillingstone Hill were also researched. Considering Eastway, London Fields and Hackney Marshes in the exhibition catalogue at Domus Artium, Salamanca, Martin Herbert writes that at the end of looking at these photographs we are “no longer in Hackney…but riding the ley lines of an eternal Hackney…that is the world” In a 2003 monograph which reproduced 5 photographs from Swansongs together with works from three other series, Michael Bracewell comments that they are “politically enriching in a non-documentative way”. This book went on to win the John Kobal New Book Award. Works from Swansongs have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Domus Artium (2004), Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem (2003) and Graves Art Gallery (2003). They have also been shown in a group exhibition at Fondazione Italiana per la Fotografia in Turin (2003) and toured in ‘Contemporary British Photography’ organised by the American Federation of the Arts (2004)