GALLERY / EXCAVATING UTOPIA

As part of the Lightbox project, Photographer John Darwell mentors a group of photographers from across the UK producing a project entitled ‘Excavating Utopia’. Excavating Utopia is a collaborative project based on the life of an ordinary street …Park Road …but this Park Road is all over the country depending on where the participants are working and becomes an imaginary street populated by imaginary residents that have the same pressures and joys as ‘real’ people. When the work is completed it will bring together all the threads from all the Park Roads into a coherent project that reflects on the nature of life in the UK at this time of stress and change. The work also questions the validity of photography in terms of ’Is seeing believing?’ and that all photography by it’s very nature is a subjective truth (untruth?) but in this case any semblance of supposed truth is removed from the work in that what the viewer with unwittingly see is a total fabrication of places, people, histories and events. The group’s membership covers a range of interests and backgrounds from photojournalists, community artists, fine artists and people who describe themselves simply as photographers.

ALBUMS