120 Project Slovenian portraits

I was asked in 2011 if I would be interested in working on a series of portraits documenting participants in the Slovenian Ministry of Culture’s Artist in Residence London programme. I was looking for a new subject for portraiture, so gladly accepted the offer. 120 was the natural choice and decided to use the Mamiya 6 I had just bought. Each month a new artist was in London and I presumed I would work on the project for perhaps two years, resulting in 24 portraits. I met and photographed a fascinating variety of painters, poets, musicians, writers and lmmakers, however it soon became a three and then a four-year project and

nally called a halt at 52 portraits as by then an exhibition in Slovenia was scheduled. All the portraits were shot on the streets of Shoreditch, East London, where the residency is based, partly for convenience, but also to give a sense of location and uni cation to the work.

Left: Theatre costume designer Alan Hranitelj turned up for the shoot immaculately dressed in a threepiece suit on the hottest day of the year. As with all the portraits in my series on Slovenian artists, a suitable location was found on the streets of Shoreditch, either by myself or suggested by the sitter Alan Hranitelj, London. Mamiya 6, Ilford FP4 Plus