Workbooks

Shafran’s endlessly creative hand scribbles a life of photographic notes and observations, with his signature blend of simplicity, profundity, and wit.

Loose Joints is proud to present Workbooks: an extensive book that gathers together a creative lifetime of collecting, imagining, sketching and recording by British artist Nigel Shafran from 1984-2024. Below, writer David Chandler reflects on Shafran’s Workbooks:

Books have been the principal means through which Nigel Shafran’s photographic work has become known. He understands the gift of their materiality and he has invested heavily in how his books look and in how they are made. But Shafran’s investment in book making is also integral to the way he builds his ideas and projects. It is ingrained in a process that sees his photographs, soon after they are made, printed, edited and stuck into the pages of bound volumes that are part workbook, part diary, part aide-memoire.

These working documents are informal books, but, partly in preparation for decisions that will later define the actual publications, they are carefully assembled and richly embellished. Each is filled with drawings, notes and bits of everyday ephemera as well as photographs, and each has a particular aesthetic, with an easy feeling for material craft as well as visual simplicity and clarity that is characteristic of Shafran’s intuitive organising principles and his entire working process.