Stuart Cashmore United Kingdom
I'm a self-taught semi-professional photographer who lives and works in London. I have been taking photographs since the age of nine when my father gave me my first camera and introduced me to the magic of developing and printing photos in the darkroom. Photography has been my lifelong passion alongside a 40 plus year career in IT and, now retired, I spend almost all of my time making pictures.
My work is based primarily on the built environment and the beauty that is hidden in plain sight. There is so much that we no longer notice because we see it constantly – street furniture, the reflections in glass-fronted buildings, the patterns of lines and colours in architecture. In my work I challenge the viewer to look again at everyday objects and see them in a new way, to realise that there is beauty in a reflection, a bench, a flight of stairs, the shape a streetlamp makes against the sky.
My images reduce objects to line, pattern, and colour with little reference to the original, and I rejoice in the patterns generated by repetition and not-quite-perfect symmetry. My pictures have been described as “basically … geometry liberally splashed with colour".
There are two main recurring themes in my work: reflections, and steps and stairs. I love the distorted, surreal shapes thrown up by reflections in windows and glass-fronted buildings, and I have a particular fascination for steps and stairs. To me they are an architectural koan: they are simultaneously static but moving, they go up and they go down, but they stay where they are.
My work has been exhibited regularly at the London Photo Festival and the associated pop-up London Photo Gallery since 2012; at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London, in 2014; the East Finchley Arts Festival, London, in 2015 and 2018; at the Lauderdale House, London, summer photographic exhibition in 2013 and 2017; at the London Art Biennale in 2023; at Flux Exhibition, London, in 2024; Flux Review's online Creative Souls exhibition 2024; and the Little Treasures exhibition in Bologna, Italy in 2024 . I have also had solo exhibitions at the Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal, in 2017; the Lexi Cinema, London, in 2019; and Beerblefish Brewery, London, in 2023. I'm deeply honoured to have been invited to show my work at the Florence Biennale in Florence, Italy, in 2025.
