Fergus Heron: Phoenix Place

Fergus Heron's photography featured in the exhibition Phoenix Place depicts the immediate vicinity of the Phoenix Art Space building in Brighton. The exhibited work comprises six colour photographs made with a view camera, realised as colour prints mounted and framed. The work utilises analogue processes to emphasise photography as analogy. It builds upon Heron's earlier research picturing urban environments, including Albion Street 2017, showing and returning the view from the window of his studio in Phoenix Art Space. This project situates photography and its referent in close proximity and is partly inspired by art historian Nikolaus Pevsner's perambulation including Phoenix Place in The Buildings of England: Sussex East with Brighton and Hove. In connection a dialogue occurs between different observations of a place; Heron’s photography proposes a sense of place made of composite views, some imagined from the past, layered with others seen in the present. The exhibition, held during Photo Fringe 2024, addresses the festival theme Common Ground by inviting consideration of how the histories of a community can be seen in pictures of urban environments in which people live and work. Referencing histories of photography, art and architecture, the exhibition combines different ways of seeing place to reimagine collective and individual needs essential to ideas of the common past and present.