LDN
Antony Cairns
Archive Of Modern Conflict
English
Edited by James Welch
Softcover
First edition of 100 copies
96 Pages
250 x 340 mm
2010
ISBN 9780957049024
The photographs for Antony Cairns’ LDN were taken in London between 2008 and 2010 as black and white reversal transparencies. They show the city in twilight, a shadowy place of subway silence reminiscent of the world of Eraserhead. It is the vision of a city unsuccessfully trying to throw light into the dark corners where people might hide, creating an atmosphere of tension.
The images, printed onto tracing paper, allow for occasional splashes of illumination, as hidden patches of spray paint burn through from the page behind. The photographs are both specific – with the exact location and subject divulged in an index – and general, in some instances being little more than a collection of geometric lines.(Source: https://archiveofmodernconflict.com/ldn/)
About the Artist
Antony Cairns (b. London, 1980) takes photographs at night, using the available light cast by buildings in urban centers like London, Tokyo and Los Angeles. In many cases the structures that he chooses are still under construction, little more than the skeletons of the office buildings and luxury apartments of that they are destined to become. His work is resolutely non-topographic, in the conventional sense in which photography has been used to record spaces, structures and architectural styles. There is more, however, to Cairns’ work than simply his distinctive approach to picturing the urban environment. His is a practice that accepts and embraces the photographic medium in its sophisticated entirety: from the effect use of light on analogue film, through a range of experimental darkroom processes, to an innovative and highly specialised understanding of the supports available to the photographic image in the twenty-first century.
https://www.antony-cairns.co.uk/
(Source: https://www.antony-cairns.co.uk/bio)
About the Publisher
The Archive of Modern Conflict is an organisation dedicated to the collection and preservation of vernacular photographs, objects, artefacts, curiosities, and ephemera. Founded in 1991, the archive began as a collection of photographs relating to war and conflict but has since expanded its remit to become the vast and thematically diverse repository it is today. They have produced and published over thirty books, often collaborating with photographers and artists such as Stephen Gill, Cristina de Middel, Thomas Mailaender, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, and Don McCullin.
https://archiveofmodernconflict.com/
(Source: https://archiveofmodernconflict.com/about-us/)
