Brian David Stevens and Andrew Youngson: Photographer Profiles

Brian David Stevens and Andrew Youngson both make work about memory and the places where it settles, though they come at it from different directions. Stevens is a London photographer with two decades of portrait and landscape series and a long shelf of small-edition books. Youngson is an artist whose photography deals with landscape under the shadow of conflict. They shared a London talk programme on 12 February 2019.

Brian David Stevens

Brian David Stevens is a British photographer, born in 1970 and based in London, who works on commissions alongside a steady run of self-initiated projects. His Wikipedia entry records his projects, publications and the public collections holding his prints.

They That Are Left

From 2002 to 2012 Stevens photographed veterans at close range immediately after the Remembrance Sunday ceremony at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. Cap badges, medals and insignia were removed from view, the background was blocked out with black cloth, and the captions carried no names. The Arts Desk, publishing the work on 11 November 2012, described the result as faces only, stripped of regiment, rank and branch of service.

Removing the identifying detail is the project. A medal ribbon tells a viewer which war to think about and closes the picture down. Without it, the viewer has to look at the face rather than read the uniform.

Carnival, Grenfell and the coast

Stevens photographed the Notting Hill Carnival sound systems in 2004 and again in 2016, working early in the morning before the crowds arrived, so the rigs appear as built objects rather than as part of a party. In 2017 he photographed the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire daily for a month, and a selection was first shown as an outdoor exhibition in Colwyn Bay in October that year. He has also spent twelve months on the stretch of the South Downs between Beachy Head and Birling Gap, a place widely associated with suicide.

Books and collections

Much of the work has reached print through small independent publishers rather than trade houses. Brighter Later appeared from Tartaruga in 2015 in an edition of 500, with an essay by Melissa Harrison. Beachy Head followed from Another Place in 2017 and Doggerland from the same publisher in 2018, both in editions of 200. A longer list of zines runs through Café Royal Books and Hamburger Eyes. His Wikipedia entry records three prints held by the National Galleries of Scotland and one by the National Portrait Gallery in London, as of April 2020.

Andrew Youngson

Andrew Youngson is a London-based artist. Photofusion describes his work as exploring the relationship between landscape and memory under the shadow of conflict, and records that he took a BA in Fine Art, interned at Magnum Photos and has worked as a freelance photographer since 2006, later completing an MA in Drawing at University of the Arts London.

His project Lost Light was selected by the gallerist Julie Gavin for SELECT/16, one of four projects chosen from Photofusion's SALON/15 open submission. Each selected artist received a bursary and professional mentoring to develop and exhibit the work. The resulting exhibition ran at Photofusion in Brixton from 4 November to 1 December 2016.

Small editions and the open call

Together these two careers illustrate the two realistic routes a self-initiated British photography project has into public view.

• The small-edition book. Runs of 150 to 500 copies from publishers such as Café Royal Books, Another Place and Tartaruga cost a fraction of a trade print run, and they put a finished object in the world without a commissioning editor.
• The open call with mentoring attached. A bursary of a few thousand pounds matters less than the mentoring and the exhibition slot that come with it.

Neither route depends on the press. Stevens photographed the Cenotaph every November for eleven years without a commission to do so, and the work existed as a body long before it was exhibited. That is the ordinary condition of documentary photography in Britain.

Further profiles of photographers working on memory, landscape and the British coastline are in our speakers index and the events archive. The previous talks archive lists the London programmes between 2017 and 2020 by year.

This site is an independent journal. It is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group, with its venue, or with the photographers written about here. Information on this page comes from the published sources linked above.