STEVE HOLLINGSHEAD

I suppose you could blame/thank Steve Jobs for all this: before 1993, a darkroom (in which deadline-facing Graphic Designers could use clunky great machines to enlarge/reduce/duplicate chunks of text and half-tone images for desperate last-minute amendments) was an essential element of most design studios. Almost overnight, thanks to the arrival of the Apple Macintosh, this ‘room’ became redundant. also thanks to the Apple Mac, a number of my clients realised they’d save lots of money by doing the work themselves, so I became (partially) redundant as well.

The upside was, with a lot more time at my disposal, I could indulge my increasing interest in street photography & utilise this now vacant space to start processing and printing my own b/w photographs – something not undertaken since art college days over a decade earlier.

The first Grand Projet idea came following a slideshow presentation of hundreds of local images as part of a Totally London Bankside Weekend event in Autumn 2003. Why not go one step further, with an attempt to celebrate London’s unmatched cultural variety in a single display presented as a ‘wall’ of images? Why not indeed.

So, The London Wall Project was born. Launched in Summer 2004 as a 300-image presentation at the recently opened TeaSpace Gallery in Shoreditch. It then spent a month at City Hall before transferring to Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospital for a six-month display. A second phase (now 400, larger images) came to the Spitz Gallery in Spitalfields in 2006 and again transferred to City Hall before moving to Chelsea & Westminster Hospital for a few months. A third manifestation, Event: London’s Rituals, Festivities and Eccentricities became the closing exhibition at the much-missed Spitz venue late 2007, accompanied by a limited edition publication of the same name.

1001 Days in London could be seen as a logical successor to the London Wall Project, only now with several more years’ experience and a couple of extra thousand films on the shelves for material. So far, this project has had three physical manifestations in the Southwark/Southbank area with the digital/blog version currently resting at just over half completion. a further, final update is in the pipeline,
it’s just that I’ve been a bit distracted with other things lately …

And so we come to these current distractions: London In Common and the London Archive Projects – interlinked undertakings resulting from a thorough(ish) lockdown-inspired reappraisal of an archive now consisting over 150,000 London photographs. The former presents the city in terms of its tribes, cultures and social events, the latter taking a more lateral approach, focusing on recurring themes and abstract ideas that emerged during the long process of reappraisal.

In 2024 a short documentary was made about me and the 1001 Days in London project by the wonderful Eamonn and Min of Minamon Films, which you can enjoy here.