Antony Cairns was awarded one of three Jury’s Special Awards for his remarkable urban landscape photographs. Cairns works in the streets of the city of London, often at night. He produces images of the urban environment that rely for their unusual, almost abstract aesthetic on the play of artificial light. In Cairns’s work the city ceases to be a space of solid architectural forms and becomes instead a series of planes of silver, black and white. Reminiscent of the finest urban photographs of the post-war generation of Japanese photographs, like Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira, Cairns offers his own unique take on the transformation of the real into the abstract through a combination of highly original picture taking and complex darkroom processes. Cairns was selected both for the originality of his approach but also for the exciting potential that his work would bring through collaboration with the Benrido Collotype Atelier.

– Simon Baker On behalf of the Jury, Hariban Award 2014

Bio

Born in 1980. Antony Cairns started taking images of London at the age of fifteen and since then has continued to document the city of his birth. His practice is deeply routed in exploring the fragility and boundaries of chemical based photography and he is likely to be found somewhere in a darkroom coating aluminium plates with silver gelatin.