Barry Cawston’s photographic work with landscape, cityscape, industrial sites and interiors is deeply rooted in the history of western art and reminds of modernists such as Edward Weston and contemporary figures such as Andreas Gursky or Xenia Nikolskaya. His work demonstrates the art of photography as expressive medium for undermining our expectation of the visual media in a subtle manner:
Our first associations regarding the architecture in decay and our collective memory and nostalgia for places of such beauty are carefully interrogated and confounded in a play with shape, pattern, colour and texture. The spaces the viewer is confronted with hold a poetic and associative charge that interlinks with a visceral impact. The appearance and properties of the everyday seem altered and de-contextualised. This leaves room to notions of latency and ambivalence but also speaks of the rightful existence of places out of time and change.
Cawston started to work as a freelancer from the mid-1990s and also collaborated with Al Deane under the pseudonym of Boris Baggs. He is a steady winner of numerous prestigious awards: in 2006 he won The Exeter Contemporary Open Award, in 2008 Royal Academy Photographic Open Award and for the last three years in a row he has been a National Open Art Finalist.
His work has been published in ART magazine, The Independent Newspaper, British Journal of Photography, Radical Philosophy Magazine, National Geographic and Art of England and he has exhibited widely internationally. Besides working on his own Fine Arts he also has worked on Commission photographing diverse examples of English Heritage’s listed buildings including churches, swimming pools and cinemas as well as a conservation project in the Amazon.
