Grob Gallery is pleased to announce our BIG presence at Photo London, 2021, featuring a solo booth of large-format contemporary works by the British photographer Damion Berger, drawn from new and recent series and being shown for the first time, alongside a second booth hung in salon style and curated around themes of flowers and still lives featuring some of last century’s greatest photographers, from Constantin Brancusi, André Kertész, Man Ray, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, William Klein, Nobuyoshi Araki, Andy Warhol and many more.

Damion Berger‘s artistic practice operates between abstraction and conceptualism. Taking an unorthodox approach to traditional photographic process, his work often employs long-exposure and in-camera techniques to make photographic ‘recordings’ that probe the nature and conventions of photography. His Black Powder and Vessel series; photographs of worldly events memorialized with pyrotechnics and all-night-long exposures of yachts drifting around their anchor, are ‘experiments’ in mark-making – quite literally painting with light, and explore the relationship between space, time, and motion. Berger’s methodology flips Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ on its head by making a single photograph over an extended period of many hours, rather than hundredths of a second. Referencing the arc of photography’s technological evolution, the resulting exposures are printed in the negative as a facsimile of the original processed sheet of film.

“The negative, as a fragile intermediary, renders through inverted tones this other-worldly and somewhat magical image… all of this speaks to the alchemy of the analogue process which casts a spell of mystical fascination over me.”

Born in London (1978), he lives and works in New York and France. He holds a B.F.A. from Parsons The New School of Design in New York and formerly worked as an assistant to the influential fashion photographer Helmut Newton. His photographs are in major private and corporate collections worldwide.

The Grob Gallery’s collection of photographs amassed over 5 decades spans all aspects of the medium. With this year’s Photo London we have decided to split this booth into a salon style exhibition with artists such as, Constantin Brancusi, André Kertész, Man Ray, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, William Klein, Nobuyoshi Araki, Andy Warhol and many more. Each wall will have its own theme. From a wall of polaroids to a wall of flowers. The exhibiting works have all had international acclaim through different eras of time. By connecting the subjects of photographers across different periods we see how the range of ideas and the use of light can echo through the ages. A subject as simple as a flower can be viewed with a similar eye across two hundred years, but that separation of time is a fascinating way to perceive the changes and resemblances from one generation of photographers to the next.