THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

An exhibition of images by photographer STEPHEN PRICE

Stephen Price has been a photographer since the age of ten, when, in those days before instant gratification, he saved his pocket money for over a year to buy his first 110-format camera.

Since then, life has taken him on a hairpin path through the creative industries, from newspaper journalism to radio and television production, into writing books and lecturing. However, all that was purely to pay the bills. His first and enduring love is photography and this is reflected in an exhibition that covers a forty-year timespan, with portraits dating from the 1970s onwards.

We may live in a digital age, but Stephen still largely works with film cameras, mainly because he has never overcome that childhood thrill of getting prints back from the developer, but also because he likes the ‘retro’ feel that film gives; more grain, deeper blacks and a subtle quality to the captured light.

He only works with natural light, because it never occurred to him to buy a flashgun when he was a teenager and he has not learned how to use artificial lighting since. The exhibition title, The Beautiful People, is a play on the notion of fashion glamour. “I have never tried for that glossy, magazine look,” he maintains, “rather for something more uncertain and atmospheric. I never ask my subjects to pose, they just do whatever they want when I point a camera at them. My best shots have been semi-accidental, captured moments when the subject ignored the camera altogether. People are more beautiful when they aren`t trying to be.”