With Thanks to Arts Council England we are pleased to announce an exciting series of Photographer's Talks as part of our 2020 online programme. 

The talks are free and will take place online via Zoom, an email with the link to join the Zoom meeting will be sent out to attendees prior to the talks taking place.

“Mark Neville has re-imagined what documentary photography could be, should be. Instead of the bland ‘deconstructions’ that pass so lazily as ‘critical’ in contemporary art, he makes extraordinary pictures and finds extraordinary ways to get them back to those he has photographed.” - David Campany

British artist Mark Neville works at the intersection of art and documentary, investigating the social function of photography. He makes lens-based works which have been realised and disseminated in a large array of contexts, as both still and moving image pieces, slideshows, films, and giveaway books. His work has consistently looked to subvert the traditional role of social documentary practice. Often working with closely knit communities, in a collaborative process intended to be of direct, practical benefit to the subject, his photographic projects to date have frequently made the towns he portrays the primary audience for the work.

In The Port Glasgow Book Project, 2004, for example, Neville made a coffee table book of his own social documentary images of the working class town, delivered exclusively to each of the eight thousand houses in the Port by the local boys football team. The book is not available anywhere else, commercially, by mail order, or otherwise. Neville's concept was to undermine the framework of exploitation inherent in the way these types of images are normally disseminated.

In 2012 The New York Times Magazine commissioned Neville to make the critically acclaimed photo essay Here is London, which examined wealth inequality in the capital, and which they subsequently nominated for The Pulitzer Prize. This was quickly followed by a major commission from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, America, which also looked at social inequalities. These two bodies of work were combined in the internationally touring show London/Pittsburgh which was exhibited at the Multimedia Art Museum Moscow in 2017.

In 2011 Neville spent three months working on the front line in Helmand, Afghanistan, with the British Army, as an official war artist. This experience resulted in The Battle Against Stigma Book Project, the aim of which is to challenge the stigma of mental health problems in the military. Neville’s book combines written testimonies about PTSD and adjustment disorder from serving and ex-serving soldiers with the photographs he took of troops in Helmand, as a means to give some insight into the issue of adjustment disorder which he suffered on his return from the war zone. Throughout 2015 Neville personally disseminated 1,000 copies free to prison libraries, homeless shelters, and veteran mental health charities, in order to encourage more troops to come forward and seek treatment for adjustment disorder.

Neville's work exists in different forms in many public and private collections, including those of the Arts Council of England, Kunstmuseum Bern, National Galleries of Scotland, and the Scottish Parliament. He has had major solo shows at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, the Foundling Museum, QUAD in Derby, MAMM, and the Imperial War Museum, London, and participated in group shows at Jeu de Paume, Paris, Tate Britain, and Haus Der Kunst, Munich. Fancy Pictures, the monograph published by Steidl, was the first commercially available book about his work, and was nominated for both Time Magazine’s and the Aperture Foundation’s Photo Book of the Year 2017. His latest book, Parade, a multilayered portrait of the farming community in Brittany, France, is nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2020.

Neville is currently working on a new book project about Ukraine which will be published later this year by Steidl. Stop Tanks With Books will employ his activist strategy of a targeted book dissemination, and try to make a direct impact upon the war in Ukraine. He will distribute two thousand copies free to policy makers, opinion makers, members of parliament both in Ukraine and Russia, and members of the international community and its media, as well as those involved directly in the Minsk Agreements. He means to re-ignite awareness and concern about the war, galvanise the peace talks, and attempt to halt the daily bombing and casualties in Eastern Ukraine which have been going on for five years now.

www.markneville.com