Newcastle University

“Mark Neville has re-imagined what documentary photography could be, should be. Instead of the bland ‘deconstructions’ that pass so lazily as ‘critical’ in contemporary art, he makes extraordinary pictures and finds extraordinary ways to get them back to those he has photographed.”  - David Campany, Director of Programs at ICP, New York

 

British artist Mark Neville works at the intersection of art and documentary, investigating the social function of photography. He makes lens-based works which have been realised and disseminated in a large array of contexts, as both still and moving image pieces, slideshows, films, and giveaway books. His work has consistently looked to subvert the traditional role of social documentary practice. Often working with closely-knit communities, in a collaborative process intended to be of direct, practical benefit to the subject, his photographic projects to date have frequently made the towns he portrays the primary audience for the work.

 

Neville has also had major solo shows at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, the Foundling Museum, QUAD in Derby, Multimedia Art Museum of Moscow, and the Imperial War Museum, London, and participated in group shows at Jeu de Paume, Paris, Tate Britain, and Haus Der Kunst, Munich. Fancy Pictures, the monograph published by Steidl, was the first commercially available book about his work, and was nominated for both Time Magazine’s and the Aperture Foundation’s Photo Book of the Year 2017. His last book, Parade, a multilayered portrait of the farming community in Brittany, France, was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2020. He is currently working on a new book project about Ukraine which will be published later this year by Steidl. Stop Tanks With Books will employ his activist strategy of a targeted book dissemination, and try to make a direct impact upon the war in Ukraine.