Published by Lost Press, Theatre of Space consists of photographs taken during Nigel Grierson’s years at the RCA in London in the early 1980’s; what we’ve now come to refer to as ‘street photographs’. In his brief introduction Grierson says, ‘I became fascinated by the medium and its unique characteristics at the core of which lies a paradox. The act of taking photographs is both documentation and self-expression simultaneously. It seemed to me that through photography and observation, there was the possibility for the two great arcs of life – one of the outer world of reality/documentation and the other of the inner world of fiction and dreams – to come together with a single click of a shutter’.
“This is art, not pure description. Grierson indeed, is a particular kind of witness and his work is as much about the medium as the world. Grierson himself says he employs the straight photographic aesthetic because it proves so often that ‘truth is stranger than fiction’, and it exposes the particular paradoxical nature of photography, that it is reality and fiction at one and the same time – and is the surrealistic medium par excellence, the ideal arena, or at least as good as a dissecting table, in which to combine Lautréamont’s chance meeting of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.
And when we delve further into his approach, the strange, or rather the surrealistic, is only one level of enquiry in his armoury. His work is a mélange of the personal and the impersonal, the real and the unreal, the found and the invented, and the familiar with the strange”.
Gerry Badger
Nigel Grierson is perhaps best known for the album sleeves he photographed and designed for 4AD under the name 23 envelope in partnership with Vaughan Oliver. These have been hailed by the likes of design historian, Catherine McDermott, and founder of Eye Magazine, Rick Poynor, as amongst the most important design of the eighties and early nineties. In 2000, after a career directing music videos and TV commercials in both Europe and America, Grierson gave up commercial work to pursue his own photography full time. A monograph of his work ‘Photographs’, was published by Dewi Lewis in 2014, followed by ‘Passing Through’ and ‘Lightstream’ published by Lost Press in 2020. He has had one man shows in Japan and the USA and his work is in the collection of the V&A Museum.
Nigel Grierson : Theatre of Space Vol 1
Lost Press
Publication date: June 2026
hardback, 136 pages, 65 b/w plates 250mm x 207mm
ISBN: 978-1-9162373-3-9
£49.95
https://www.lostpress.org/
