Nigel Shafran & Nikki Igol

Join us for a conversation between Nigel Shafran and Library 180 founder Nikki Igol! Copies of Workbooks and The Well, both published by Loose Joints, will be available for purchase.

***

Workbooks is an extensive book that gathers together a creative lifetime of collecting, imagining, sketching and recording by British artist Nigel Shafran from 1984-2024. Below, writer David Chandler reflects on Shafran's Workbooks:

Books have been the principal means through which Nigel Shafran’s photographic work has become known. He understands the gift of their materiality and he has invested heavily in how his books look and in how they are made. But Shafran’s investment in bookmaking is also integral to the way he builds his ideas and projects. It is ingrained in a process that sees his photographs, soon after they are made, printed, edited and stuck into the pages of bound volumes that are part workbook, part diary, part aide-memoire.

These working documents are informal books, but, partly in preparation for decisions that will later define the actual publications, they are carefully assembled and richly embellished. Each is filled with drawings, notes and bits of everyday ephemera as well as photographs, and each has a particular aesthetic, with an easy feeling for material craft as well as visual simplicity and clarity that is characteristic of Shafran’s intuitive organizing principles and his entire working process.

***

In the world of fashion, "The well" is industry terminology for the main image section of a magazine. For influential British photographer Nigel Shafran, this space has served as a place for unexpected creativity, subversive critique and wry commentary.

Shafran’s relationship with the world of commercial photography begins in the mid-1980s as a teenager, continuing through to the iconic magazine years of i-D and The Face, and into a recent resurgence in his idiosyncratic, unpretentious approach to the fashion shoot within the pages of Vogue and more. Only recently did Shafran — who is known for his delicate, personal approach of weaving together converging photographic narratives — begin to understand his continuous engagement with the commercial world as a project in itself. The Well is a space to critique and reflect the worlds of fashion from the inside, bringing his trademark simplicity and capacity to disarm the viewer into this charged, complicated world.

This landmark publication, edited and designed by Linda van Deursen, chronicles Shafran’s commercial and un-commercial approach to photography, with interviews and reflections between Shafran and his peers threaded throughout.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom