Steven Barritt is an artist, photographer and Lecturer based in London who’s work has been shown in The National Portrait Gallery and The Photographers Gallery, The Moscow Museum of Modern Art, as well as selected group shows and solo exhibitions. His work encompasses portraiture, landscape and constructed narrative, exploring recurring themes of human relationships with the environment and inter personal relationships. His work shows a constant questioning of the reality of the photograph as it presents itself on the surface - photography is capable of representing the physical world with such veracity yet it reveals only an interpreted reality. This is exemplified in his constant attraction to man-made or altered landscapes and the manipulation of our environment, the manipulation of a sitter to extract a portrait that both reveals yet obscures meaning, or constructing entire alternate realities and personas exploring the darker reality of the human condition. He works almost exclusively with traditional analogue photographic techniques to produce his work, finding an irony in the perceived purity of meaning of analogue processes that seeming preclude the use of manipulation.
Website:www.stevenbarritt.com
Blog: www.stevenbarritt.com/blog
Qualitfications
MA Photography (distinction) - Middlsex University 2010
BA Hons Photography (1st Class) - Middlsex University 2009
Thematic interests include: portraiture; landscape; constructed imagery; the relationship between photography and art; reality & representation in photography; the history of portraiture and the representation of the individual; the relationship between mankind and the environment in landscape photography; the generation of meaning through constructed imagery. Technical specialities include: colour darkroom printing; large format photography; studio lighting; film photography;digital post-production; digital printing; digital capture; colour theory; colour management & workflow.
Representation and reality in photography and how meaning is generated through constructed imagery and its relationship with reality. Self-representation and the exploration of personality and psyche through portraiture and self portraiture. Narrative and the construction of meaning in photography, and its interrelationships with art, cinema, drama and literature. Philosophical, psychological and anthropological approaches to understanding narrative and its relationship to morality, ethics and behaviour i.e. Jungian notions of the collective unconscious, story telling, mythology and religion. Ideas of inherited seeing and the development of visual language and the role of technology in mediating our experience of the visual world, particularly in relation to social networking and facial recognition technologies, and the ethical and psychological consequences of digital narcissism.
