Esperantis
Millennium Images is pleased to announce the arrival of the pictures from “Esperantis”, a photographic project by Patrick Shanahan.

“Patrick Shanahan's reimagining of Europe, like JG Ballard's novel, Super-Cannes, invokes both nostalgia and fear of the future.”
David Brittain, Critic and Editor

Esperantis by Patrick Shanahan is a seductive and unsettling insight into the nocturnal face of the modern urban environment. Taken in Spain and Portugal between 1998 and 2001 as part of his doctoral thesis on 'theorising the post-landscape', these exquisite photographs explore the notion of spatial estrangement.

For urban designers and engineers, modern lighting technologies offer ways to invest the urban landscape with new cultural meanings through the editing and highlighting of physical spaces. They can transform an already spectacular scene into a yet more powerful nocturnal one. Shanahan's photographs utilise a combination of the effects of ambient artificial lighting with the 'reciprocity failure' of colour photographic film - the colour shifts that occur in exposures exceeding one second - to produce even more unusual settings.

In what Shanahan refers to as the 'Luminous Uncanny', the selective lighting of particular areas against an abstracted void causes the landscape to dematerialise into a mirage of light and shadow, infusing it with a mystery that both attracts and disturbs us.

Patrick Shanahan is well known as an artist and photographer whose photographs of Britain and Europe investigate the contemporary “cultural landscape”. He has a BA (Hons) in Fine Art and a MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in London. On graduating from the RCA he worked for 12 years as a London-based freelance advertising and editorial photographer. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Photography at Falmouth College of Arts. In 2001, he was awarded a Doctorate from the Royal College of Art, and his project Esperantis was shortlisted for the European Publishers Award for Photography 2002.

The exhibition of the Esperantis project is at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool

Saturday 26th October - Saturday 30th November 2002
Open Eye Gallery
28-32 Wood Street,
Liverpool. L1 4AQ.
United Kingdom
tel: +44 (0)151 709 9460
fax: +44 (0)151 709 3059
web: www.openeye.org.uk
email: info@openeye.org.uk

There will be an 'In Conversation' between Patrick Shanahan and the critic David Brittain on Saturday 26th October at 2-00pm in the gallery.

The exhibition will tour over the next eighteen months to Barcelona and Salamanca in Spain, the MAC Gallery in Birmingham, and The Centre for Portuguese Photography in Porto, Portugal.