Unfortunately DonStevie cannot be with us now, although we are hoping to get him towards the end of the season. Instead I am grateful for Dan Wilton who has agreed to come at short notice.
Dan’s photos have been described as lighting up with a vibrant humanity, illuminating the lives of the people of our planet. He originally trained as an environmental biologist before he stumbled across the black-and-white darkroom in university, His career has always been shaped by his personal projects over the years,”
Dan is best known for his intimate portraits, having shot world-famous musicians and recording artists from Stormzy to James Blake over the years. In 2015, he travelled to Los Angeles’ Runyon Canyon with writer Josh Jones to photograph and interview the characters they found there, turning the result into a book.
Dan’s latest project ‘The Very Fire They Sit Beside’ began in 2019, pre-pandemic, when he travelled across nine European countries – Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Spain, and the UK. A combination of landscapes and portraiture, the images shift between vast views across sprawling German coalfields, to depictions of everyday life in the UK and Portugal set against the backdrop of power plants, to sensitive portraits of Greek miners showing the impacts of the industry on a human-scale. Together, they illustrate the bitter irony that those who are affected by the environmental instability and illness wrought by the industry remain the most economically reliant upon it.
