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Ken Grant is a photographer who since the 1980s has concentrated on working class life in the Liverpool area.[1] He is a lecturer in the MFA photography course at the University of Ulster.
Ken Grant is a photographer who since the 1980s has concentrated on working class life in the Liverpool area.[1] He is a lecturer in the MFA photography course at the University of Ulster.
Born in Liverpool in 1967,[2][3] Grant worked as a carpenter in Liverpool after finishing school,[4][5] even then taking photographs.[6] He later studied at the West Surrey College of Art and Design,[3] studying under Martin Parr and Paul Graham.[4]
Grant tends to work slowly, returning again and again to the same places and becoming a familiar sight to the people who gather there.[6]
The Close Season was published by Dewi Lewis over a decade after Grant had first met Lewis; the photographs in No Pain Whatsoever (whose title derives from a story by Richard Yates) were taken over a span of more than two decades.[6]
Writing in The Observer, Sean O'Hagan has described the No Pain Whatsoever series[n 1] as "from the same great British tradition as the work of Chris Killip and Graham Smith . . . a record of a time when working-class traditions were under threat from Thatcherism."[2][n 2]
Writing in The Independent, Brian Viner said "The photographs . . . show Grant's wonderfully keen eye for the humdrum realities of everyday working-class – or more accurately, unemployed – existence in the 1980s and beyond . . . It is the instinct of the social documentarian, and Grant deserves to rank alongside the better-known Martin Parr as one of the best."[5] Diane Smyth, writing in the British Journal of Photography about Grant's book Flock said "Grant avoids making easy statements in favour of simple observation. Even so, by recording these everyday working lives, he's made a series that matters."[4]
As influences and inspirations, Grant has cited Raymond Carver, Fred Voss, Terence Davies, Christer Strömholm, Bruce Davidson, and Gil Scott-Heron.[6]
Grant was the course leader of the BA (Hons) Documentary Photography course at the University of Wales, Newport[4][7] between 1998 and 2013,[8] when he became a lecturer in the MFA Photography course at the University of Ulster.[9][10]
