People. Not Pages: Liam Ashley Clark
With the “People. Not Pages” mini-interview series The Phooks invites you to learn more about people who stand behind the medium of self- & indie-published photo books, and zines.
Today in the People Not Pages interview series, we welcome Liam Ashley Clark. Born In Ipswich, Suffolk, 1990 Liam currently lives and works in Norwich, Norfolk. He was selected as a 2019 Bloomberg New Contemporary and included in the Saatchi Art Rising Stars report of the same year. Liam works largely with painting, drawing and photography, as well as in collage, and 3D. He also produces large scale murals, works as an illustrator and is a prolific zine maker.
His work has its roots in skateboarding, street art and folk art, but is also influenced by other contemporary and historical practices, it commonly contains a combination of image and text, large use of color and pattern, and often has an injection of humor.
How do you live and make your living?
I work in a kitchen and sell artworks, do illustrations and occasional murals.
How did you get into photography?
I got into photography through skateboarding. I was never a good skater, but I’ve always loved it. When I was younger, I started making skate videos, filming my friends, and eventually got a camera and started shooting them. Skateboarding introduced me to a lot of photographers I love. I started studying how they shoot, and that’s how my practice evolved outside my teenage skate environment to study the world around me.
What do you value the most in the art of photography?
I think the thing I like most about photography is just seeing little snapshots of people's existence. I think you can make better statements about society from a single good shot than you can get from a lot of politically charged artworks.
Is there something you hate about it?
I hate how expensive film and developing is getting. I’ve always shot on film, usually using simple point and shoot cameras, and until recently I could just get them developed in an hour, reasonably cheaply at Boots (a big chain store/pharmacy in the UK), but even that’s stopped so I’ll have to look into other places which still develop in-house. I don’t really like sending film away, as I’ve had bad experiences with rolls getting lost and I don’t have time or money to develop stuff myself.
How many books you have, and what does your collection means to you?
I have a lot of books and a lot of zines. It is a mixture of stuff from artists, photographers, exhibitions, skate companies and more. I’ve always loved books and, for me, it is a great, pretty affordable, way to collect imagery, especially the zines.
Is there a photo book you admire? And why?
I love everything Ed Templeton has put out, but I especially admire one of his smaller books ‘Nobody Living Can Ever Make Me Turn Back’.
The book is a series of photographs from a single trip, on motorcycles, by skateboarders across a few US states. I love the idea of a single journey being documented and presented in a way that’s different from filming it. It was also one of the first photo books I got, so there’s an element of nostalgia for it too.
What does it mean to turn your work into a sensible form of a zine?
For me, zines have always been a great way to compile and distribute my work physically. I think it’s easy for images to get lost online, but when you put a physical object together, people can take time to look at it.
My last zine ‘Bad Graffiti’ consists of photos from an ongoing theme of mine, which is simply shooting the type graffiti I see all over the world, just quick text sprayed or written in the streets. I think that having all these photos together in one place gives them more weight than a single image. It makes a statement about this graffiti, or what it’s saying.
The Zine was published by TYRO. And it was great to work with someone else, especially a photographer, to put it out.
What do you expect people should feel when opening your book?
I hope people find humor in the images. In most of my work, not just photos, but drawings and paintings, I use humor. I think it’s a great way to talk about social and political subjects. I hope that as well as humor people consider the graffiti in the images. It seems like such an outdated form of communication, but I can’t imagine a city without it.
— Read all “People. Not Pages” mini-interviews
— Visit Liam’s Website
— Go to The Phooks library
