Alvin Booth

Born

Hull, England, 1959

Based

New York City, since 1989

Medium

Photography; hand-worked prints; photographic light objects

Alvin Booth came to photography sideways. Born in Hull in 1959, he left school at seventeen and trained as a hairdresser; the interest in the camera took hold later, in Oxford, and hardened into a practice after he moved to New York in 1989. He is self-taught, and the studio habits show it: Booth built his reputation on nude studies in which the body is transformed at the surface — figures gilded, sheathed in latex, patterned by stencilled light — and then transformed again in the darkroom, where each print is toned and distressed by hand and often sealed under glass with copper and solder, so that a photograph made in the 1990s carries the finish of an object from the 1890s.

That body of work was gathered in Corpus, his first monograph, published by Edition Stemmle in 1999 with a foreword by a curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum; the book took a Kodak photo-book award the same year.

The work Wild Project Gallery showed belongs to a later turn. The Nocturnes, begun after an invitation to shoot in Kiev in the spring of 2015, are less pictures than instruments: giclée prints combined with graphite, steel, and LEDs into wall-mounted black boxes that read by day as dark mirrors and reveal their imagery as ambient light falls. The gallery presented them in early 2017 as Nocturnes – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (9 Feb – 18 Mar 2017), the eleventh entry in its documented program and one of six shows recorded in the photography-now directory listing that survives the gallery itself.

Record at Wild Project Gallery

WPG.11 Nocturnes – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (9 Feb – 18 Mar 2017). Solo exhibition. See the exhibition chronology and the institutional record.