Roland Ramanan and Mark Phillips: Photographer Profiles

Roland Ramanan has photographed one square in Hackney for more than a decade. Mark Phillips photographs people who mend things. Neither project was commissioned, both run on years rather than days, and both were presented at a London talk on 10 September 2019.

Roland Ramanan

Ramanan is a London photographer who came to the medium through street photography. The project that defines his work began at Gillett Square in Dalston and ran for more than a decade, which is long enough for the photographs to become a record of change rather than a description of a place.

Gillett Square and Dominoes

Gillett Square is a small public space in Dalston, east London. It was derelict for years before being turned into an urban regeneration experiment in the 1990s, and it is used by skateboarders, parents and children, domino players, DJs and a group of people, many of them street drinkers and drug users, for whom the square functions as a base. Ramanan photographed there for over a decade and was admitted into the homes and lives of a number of residents.

The resulting book, Dominoes, was published by Dewi Lewis in 2024. The publisher's page gives the specification as 150 pages with 104 duotone plates, with texts by Richard Yeboa and Ramanan and a poem by Ian McMillan, and describes the book as a mosaic of the lives that move in and around that corner of the East End. His own site at rolandramanan.com describes the work as an attempt to amplify rarely heard voices and to address urban problems that most people prefer not to look at, and names the participants closest to him, Nina, Paul and Bianca, as the heart of the book.

What distinguishes the work is not the subject, to which British documentary photography returns often, but the duration. Over a decade in one square means photographing the same people as they change, and it means the photographer becomes part of what he photographs. That is the reason the book carries a text by one of the people in it rather than only an essay about them.

Mark Phillips

Phillips came to documentary photography from a background in engineering and research, and divides his time between working with start-ups and long-term documentary projects. That combination is unusual, and it shows in how the work is framed.

His continuing project is Unbroken, about repair and reuse and the people who do it. The premise is stated plainly on unbroken.solutions: things that are mended last longer, consume fewer resources and create less waste, and there is an international community of repairers and fixers sharing the skills that make that possible. A Photo Fringe listing describes him as a Buckinghamshire-based photographer working on stories about the environment and sustainability, and describes the series as taking a solutions approach in order to shed light on sharers, repairers and activists. His wider portfolio is at markaphillips.co.uk.

The project began with a trip to Cuba, documenting what he has called the never-ending life of Cuban things, and has since taken in repair cultures in Scandinavia, Germany and professional repairers in the UK. An exhibition drawn from the work, Repair is Essential, was co-produced with Alex Horn of West Central London Fixers and shown at The Tabernacle in London, as described on the Restart Project's podcast page.

Solutions reporting and the long project

Phillips's framing is worth naming because it is a specific tradition rather than a tone of voice. Solutions journalism reports on responses to a problem with the same rigour normally applied to the problem itself, on the argument that an audience shown only harm learns helplessness. Applied to photography, it changes who is in the frame: the subject of Unbroken is not a landfill but a person with a soldering iron.

Both projects share an economic reality: neither was paid for by a commission. Long-term documentary work in Britain is typically self-funded, then supported late in its life by a prize, a festival slot or a publisher, which is why a decade of photographs becomes visible only when a book appears. Schemes such as the Jerwood/Photoworks Awards, open to UK-based artists between one and ten years into their practice with no fee and no educational requirement, close part of that gap. Networks such as London Independent Photography and platforms such as Photo Fringe do the rest, by giving unfinished work somewhere to be seen while it is still being made.

Other long-project photographers are listed on the speakers index, with the full archive at events. Related pages include Louis Leeson and Antonio Olmos and Laura Pannack, all of whom work over years rather than assignments. For venues and formats, see photography talks in London and the location page.