Storyville
16 May – 8 June 2013
View the works in the show
Whatever leaves a mark tells
a story, and like the face of an old prizefighter, the
streets of every town bear
the knocks and bruises of a million
different tales of the city. Places tell their stories
through use and decay, and in Storyville, British photographer
Barry Cawston has made a project of recording them.
Travelling across the world for his photographic projects,
Barry starts by picking out basic visual patterns. On
one hand are the regular rhythms of architectural design,
ranging from aging colonial townhouses in Cuba to fading
concrete tenement blocks in Brazil, which he uses as
a kind of geometric framework to structure his compositions.
Then on the other hand, he searches out the random ways
that people inhabit and add colour to them: mismatched
licks of paint, rough-strung lines of clothes, broken
windows, totalled cars... Bringing the two together,
what emerges are intimate portraits of the lifeblood
of the built environment.
A collection of windows becomes
a kind of brutal Modernist advent calendar, packed
with urban tales and tragedies.
Mountains of scrap metal combine with topiaried trees
to create half-earth, half-machine landscapes in the
grounds of a Japanese junkyard. Streaking colours run
like paint-splattered rainbows across the face of crumbling
buildings. This is the city as a beautiful idea: efficient,
planned and functional; and then also as the place where
people live – shambolic, eccentric, all over the
shop.
Windows appear as a repetitive
motif: places to look into, intriguing little gaps
in a hard façade,
revealing only a small snapshot of the life that is going
on behind. Likewise, defining a sense of repetition in
the seeming randomness of human behaviour is a consistent
theme, such as in his image of air balloons in Myanmar,
caught floating inadvertently in formation high above
the ancient temples below.
Through his images, Barry
manages to capture something of how people and their
environment interact and influence
each other – how the city becomes infected with
the harebrained unpredictability of people, while these
same people become ever so slightly more regular and
more ordered through their habitat. Storyville shows
how the man-made environment somehow manages to become
organic and palpable, thanks to the lives and stories
that flow through and leave their mark.
For more
information please contact
the gallery.
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