Another exciting project I worked on this summer was a collaboration with Dr Luke Dickens at King’s Geography on an essay film about Joan Littlewood’s Fun Palace. The essay film spliced together outtakes and footage from Littlewood’s 1965 film Pleasure with cinematographer Walter Lassally which imagined the Fun Palace for an audience which included the Beatles, the Kray Twins, and Francis Bacon.

The film was shown alongside architectural drawings at Luke’s interactive exhibit at the British Academy Summer Showcase in June. 

Unfortunately we aren’t allowed to host the film online, but you can read all about the project and exhibit here. Luke tweets @urbanmargins

#forcuriousminds #FunPalace #JoanLittlewood #Pleasure

In May this year I was invited to photograph UCL Urban Laboratory’s two-part Cities Imaginaries event. The first was a keynote lecture by Dr Sonjah Stanley Niaah (University of the West Indies), the second a ‘Performance Lab’ of panels, music and poetry at the Bloomsbury Theatre “exploring how performance cultures help shape transnational urban narratives”. Photos here and here.

In June earlier this year, I was invited back to UCL Urban Laboratory to photograph their City, Essay, Film symposium.

“Bringing together filmmakers, researchers, and critics, this one-day symposium considered the interstices of literary, cinematic and urban culture through the lenses of pioneering film essayists and a new generation of artists producing experimental documentary works as polemic and critique on the city.”

Images: here

Further information: www.ucl.ac.uk/urban-lab/node/9519

In May 2018 I was asked to shoot The Bartlett School of Architecture’s one-day symposium exploring climate change and its impact on cities across the globe. The day was packed with range of speakers from multiple disciplines and featured a mix of panel sessions and key note addresses. Some of the images also appear in a write-up of the symposium by Paul Dobraszczyk.

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of capturing another UCL Urban Laboratory event, David Olusoga’s Cities Imaginaries lecture on how Britain’s cities were born with a ‘housing problem’ already hard-wired into them. Here is a link to the gallery.

As part of my PhD I recently co-organised a student-led conference funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership and hosted by the London School of Economics PhD Academy.  A write-up of the conference, co-authored by Sara De Martin of King’s Classics Department, can be found below. An album of my images from the conference are available on the LAHP website.

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In October 2017 I was invited by the UCL urban lab to photograph the ‘Edge’ part of their trio of symposia on three locations in the South of England connected by the HS1 railway. Keynotes by eminent practitioners Jill Magid and Do Ho Suh book-ended the day hosted at London’s leading technology innovation destination Plexal, situated in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The photographs are hosted on UCL urban lab’s Flickr page, here.

Do Ho Suh’s keynote lecture