stuart paton

‘Born and bred in the central belt of Scotland. Currently quarantined in Milan. I peddle lo-fi social comment laced with hi-fi personal neurosis. With a minimum of mischief, I label my work ‘eschatological eyecandy’ but the current pandemic infuses the term with a jarring element of prophecy. More often than not, my photography is fueled by social concerns transcribed in the most personal way I can muster. Passive-aggressive double helix. My aim is to transcribe ideas in a way which isn’t simply descriptive - like a pale facsimile recorded by a machine - but rather as if the image was conjured up by the mind’s eye. Closer to the cognitive and emotional multiplicity of lived experience and incarnating all the incandescent fireworks of my shoegazing phantasmagoria. An imperfect storm. And just so it’s crystal, I decipher life and my photographic themes through the prism of an anti-capitalist perspective. In times like these I don’t afford myself the luxury of being a neutral observer or windswept artist. I’m no cuddly humanist riffing on melancholia and I champion a scorched earth policy as regards inane street photography which seems to flow directly from the arse of Lucifer himself. Spurred on by stuff I read on the erosion of singularity, social dissonance and de-humanisation, I knock out cracked mirror poetry of an ideological spell unraveling. All tinged with the attempt to recreate the euphoria of my favourite music, literature, art and cinema. But a photograph is similar to a Rorschach Test. I do my thing and the rest is in the eye of the beholder. And although it’s also the cathartic soothing of my own stigmata, the focus is on other people. Vox pop simpatico. Capitalism’s collateral roadkill in the age of post-truth and big data. Sometimes - adrift in a gloomy, nocturnal moment - I wonder if I’m documenting the early tremors of the civilisational earthquake to come. A sneaky peek behind the curtain of the endgame proper. Or just the fiction I spin myself ? Either way, I’d be chuffed if you liked these photographs’