Craig Easton: Open Eye Gallery / Talk at Huddersfield University

As part of a duo of events, organised by the Photography department at the University of Huddersfield, students were invited to visit a private screening of Craig Easton’s exhibition at Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery as well as have chance to hear the photographer speak at the University, giving an outline of their successful career in photography and talking about their most notable works, namely ‘Bank Top’, ‘Thatcher’s Children’ and ‘Sixteen’.

The photographer, reacting in opposition to a glut of media reports positioning Blackburn as some kind of epicentre of racial tensions, embarked a project to represent the area of Bank Top in a more realistic/sympathetic perspective.  The artist draws attention to the political and economic root of the ethnic diversity in these parts of Northern England, acknowledging that the communities left behind are descended from the once invited workerforce who filled the factory floors from the farthest reaches of the British empire to help rebuild after post-war decline. Blackburn's textile industrial heritage is featured in this exhibition included via a large format landscape vista of the red brick mills. 

Upstairs, the exhibition looks at Easton's initial and revisited project "Thatchers Children".  Which addresses the plight of poverty in the Thatcher Years, and then looks at the children themselves decades later, observing that the condition of the subjects in social hierarchy hasn’t changed too much, still tethered intrinsically to the mast of the politics of the past millennium.

Craig Easton’s work, through attending his exhibition at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool and also through his talk at the University of Huddersfield that followed, represented an interesting potential for working both to produce engaging, socially informed, political projects dear to his heart while also exhibiting successfully in a fine art setting, managing to facilitate much of this personal work by completing commercial projects; for institutions such as the National Health Service, for example. Here is seen a photographer who has managed to make work that is professionally and financially rewarding as a vehicle to do projects that satisfy his artistic ambitions as well, so often more challenging to find an audience.