Stephen Hughes | Photographs

© Stephen Hughes

© Stephen Hughes

Stephen Hughes is gaining widespread acclaim for his first major solo photography exhibition, in which he introduces an outstanding body of work dedicated to the peripheral, marginal zones and strange disconnected gaps of our social landscape. Produced over the last five years across Europe, these strangely haunting images sit as uneasily as they make us feel, between genres.

'In Hughes' photographs, as in David Lynch's films, the banal constantly hovers on the dream's uncertain boundary, or perhaps conversely, the unconscious has its own bright presence in the real world.' (David Chandler, catalogue essay)

Buildings as apparitions, gleaming white apartment blocks stranded by the shore, lone figures drifting and daydreaming across the barren edges of newly built cities. With wit and precision, Hughes photographs geographic and social hinterlands, in part a comment on the peculiarly western phenomenon of the suburban, but especially on regions neither urban nor sub-urban. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish what's going on in these images - to guess what country Hughes is in or define exactly what people are doing, caught as they are in inexplicable acts. The photographs are sited in a limbo between worlds and are somehow adrift from reality - shorelines, building sites, juxtapositions where urban meets rural, where buildings are homogeneous and landscape anaesthetised. Half empty hotels and tower blocks are captured in the numinous light of early morning, their etiolated colours taking texture with them.

Stephen Hughes Photographs is organised by the De La War Pavilion in collaboration with Photoworks. A 48 page colour catalogue, Stephen Hughes Photographs, with an introductory essay by David Chandler, accompanies the exhibition.