Portraits from a place of darkness
In 2012 The Building Centre became the stage for a body of work that set out to celebrate Britain’s leading architects and engineers but, over the course of the three months of principal photography, unfolded into something altogether more personal.
Commissioned by Icopal, accompanied by commentary from Isabel Allen, the series brought forty-five of the UK’s most influential practitioners before my camera. Yet it is impossible to speak of these portraits without also speaking of grief, because grief shaped every image.
You see at the start of photography my father died.
Parry and Allford had sat for the trial images, the work was approved on Tuesday. On following Thursday, concerned for his failing health, I made my father take a solitary ambulance ride to hospital where, that night, he died.
Ten weeks later my mother passed.
In the middle of these losses came the final closure of my marriage, a decree absolute, that neat legal full stop.
My studio became not only a place of work but a crucible of mourning. I chose to continue, to photograph through the darkness rather than step away from it. And so the grief that weighed on me became a driving force of expression, a source of depth that I could neither suppress nor disguise.
The images, starkly lit in the manner of Irving Penn, are less about flattery than revelation. Hard light carries little mercy: it maps the surface, exposes the edges, makes visible what softer treatment would conceal. In this case, the darkness behind that light came from within as much as without. The grief I carried pressed itself into the tonal range of the photographs. The shadows are heavy, the highlights feel brittle, the atmosphere charged with an intensity that was impossible to fabricate.
Grief is often silent, but it sharpens perception. It makes you attentive to gestures, to pauses, to the weight of another’s presence. Each sitter brought compassion and patience into the room. There was care in their willingness to be seen, empathy in their recognition of the silence that hung between exposures. They became not only subjects but companions in a process where photography was as much about endurance as representation.
These portraits are therefore not neutral records of Britain’s architectural elite.
Contentious at the time, they split opinion. Many recoiled, I don’t blame them, these are not a comfortable or comforting set of images. They are images made at a time when life itself was unraveling, when each frame became both a tribute and an act of survival. The darkness of the pictures is not an aesthetic choice but the shadow of loss itself, falling across every face, every surface, every gesture. Out of that shadow comes a kind of truth: that creativity is not separate from suffering, that depth of feeling can give clarity to vision, and that even in grief, perhaps especially in grief, one can find the courage to continue looking, and to continue making.
