LDN2

This is a second, updated, and completely reformatted edition of Antony Cairns’ original, handmade book LDN from 2010. In this new edition, the large format and fine 170gsm Claro paper draw the viewer into a late-night expedition across a mysterious city of tilted landscapes that flicker past like reflections in the windows of a moving train or car.

This is a London whose inhabitants are only hinted at, a London of glaring subterranean lights and inhospitable buildings of indecipherable purpose. The images form an architectural frieze that is tantalisingly familiar yet hard to pinpoint for those who know the city, with an edge that will be recognised by anyone who has experienced the latent tension that permeates the streets in the hours before dawn.

Antony Cairns (b.1980) has used the city and urban development as an ostensible subject and engages deeply with the history of the photographic medium, experimenting printing methods and the aesthetics of abstraction. He has evolved a unique and distinctive oeuvre that reanimates historical processes and repurposes old technologies in new and unexpected ways, always through a keen focus on urban topographies and unrelenting built-up environments that visually recall the dystopian worlds of science-fiction.