Stephen Hughes

Stephen Hughes is an up and coming photographer whos achieveing widespread acclaim for his first major project looking at peripheral, marginal zones and strange disconnected gaps of our social landscape. Produced over the last five years across Europe. 

The images are strangly haunting, and are somehow uneasy. 'In Hughes' photographs, as in David Lynch's films, the banal constantly hovers on the dream's uncertain boundary, or perhaps conversely, the unconscious has its own bright presence in the real world.' (David Chandler, catalogue essay)

His images, while not obviously creepy give of such a feel as to stur that emotion in the audience. Buildings as apparitions, gleaming white apartment blocks stranded by the shore, lone figures drifting and daydreaming across the barren edges of newly built cities. With wit and precision, Hughes photographs geographic and social hinterlands. Often its difficult to tell what is going on in these images. They almost appear like a limbo between worlds

The empty buildings  are shot at early morning when the light is just so and i think this adds to the air in the images. Often with simple structure to the images they somehow manage to give the impression of more, via less. a simple empty building surrounded by trees or an apartment block on the shore bearly distinguishable from the sky. 

I really like these images but im finding it hard to distinguish what it is about the images to what i like.  the images are very clean cut, very formal in a sence with a mixture of differentiation and similaritys. The skys are almost always blown out with this mass of whiteness and there is never any human interaction with the buildings. its always very suggestive of an appocolypic world where there are only buildings.Think i am legend without the crazy mutant people.