Chris Dorley-Brown

(C) Chris Dorley-Brown, 2001

Chris Dorley-Brown trained as a photographer in the Red Saunders studio in the early eighties before setting up in east London. Since 1993 he has been collaborating with artists, filmmakers, performers and writers on a variety of projects that explore the potential of creative intervention in mainstream contexts such as architecture, cinema, internet, public collections and radio.

The work on show is from 'Revisits 1987-2001', one of several projects that reinterpret and re-read personal archives of pictures he has been collecting in the last 15 years. His pictures engage on a number of levels; starting from a basic comparative one, at which we search for the differences, we are then led on to consider the processes that have led to these changes. There is no such thing as a simple or innocent photograph, although it is sometimes a part of the art of the photographer to convince us of the opposite. These pictures embody the choices that led him to adopt a particular viewpoint on each of the blocks he photographed.

In the earlier pictures of each pair, Dorley-Brown was clearly concerned with picture making in his choice of viewpoint and time, but for the later work in each pair, his options were in part pre-determined.

This is work that is firmly in a social context. The buildings shown are part of an environment designed for people to live in and also reflect the uses they made of it. The differences over the years reflect the changes in what is considered appropriate and changes in our use of public and private spaces.

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more - the photograpers
Paul Baldesare   Jim Barron   Chris Dorley-Brown   Peter Marshall  
Paul Mattsson     Derek Ridgers      Mike Seaborne      Paul Trevor

Cities of Walls,
      Cities of People

Other shows:

Housing & Homelessness
Cities in Watercolour
City Markets
The City Beautiful
City Journeys
Zen and the art of cities
Cities of Walls, Cities of People