Allan Grainger

Allan Grainger is a photographic artist whose work considers notions of place, culture, identity and belonging within the urban landscape.His pictures are taken with great technical precision, over a period of time and from a position that relates to a human scale, that is to say, an eye-level vantage point. This allows the relationship of those seen in, and those beholding thepicture to be democratically engaged with one another. Individuals and groups in the urban space are clearly observed, and the resultant tableaux draw on, to some extent, the narratives and  visual language of history painting. Allan Grainger was commissioned by the Lowry Hotel to produce ten large-scale works taken in Manchester. His intention was to make tableaux that captured the rhythms and atmosphere of the city, and its historical past, that would form a kind of visual dialogue with its contemporary self. Each observation of an urban space took place in a familiar and celebrated area of Manchester. The pictures are informed in this collection by the people that move through the space, and thereby give identity to the space by means of a collective visual narrative, making the particular photographed area a significant place. The finished tableaux are temporal studies; they place people by separating them from ‘real’ time and reconstructing them in a kind of ‘electronic montage reenactment of a public performance’ that exists within the imaginary realm of the photograph. In a sense therefore these tableaux are about memory and the imagination that borders on the social-political. The results are reveries on the enclaves of this northern metropolis. This series was a commission for the Lowry Hotel in the summer of 2015.  If you would like to commission Allan to make site specific work please email gallery@lucy-bell.com. Limited editions of his work are also available through the gallery.