Eastern Soul: A Photographic Odyssey

About

Hookers, mafia and oligarchs? This photographic exhibition by emerging British photographer Kit Fordham shatters the common Western stereotypes of a fractured and fractious Eastern Europe. Rather it seeks to show that the Orthodox Christian faith is, in fact, a key anchor in the lives of young and old alike while life around them changes inordinately. The accents of these changes feature too in the exhibition including as it does nightlife, work life, school life and home life.

Eastern Soul represents the first major effort by a Western visual artist to examine the relationship between the revived Orthodox Christian Church and post-communist identity, made possible through rare access to Orthodox holy places and a camera blessed by the Patriarch of Moscow and All The Russias.

This provocative, hauntingly beautiful photographic odyssey is the result of years of work throughout Russia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Romania forming the first installment of an ongoing project across the Orthodox Christian world. At a time when East-West tensions are on the rise Eastern Soul provides a prism through which life in the Slavic East can be viewed; lurching toward the future yet strongly anchored by the traditions of the past: two thousand of years of Orthodox Christian tradition and less than 20 years of capitalism forming an inseparable whole.

"Kit's work is fresh and contemporary yet in the tradition of Cartier-Bresson."

- Jason Bell (Winner Terence Donovan award and Best British Black & White Photographer)

About Kit Fordham

British photographer Kit Fordham www.kitfordham.com has in recent years taken upon himself a mission to capture images both sacred and profane on black and white film. Using his cherished Leica and inspired by the great street photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Gary Winogrand, Kit applies 20th century analogue techniques to the 21st century digital age.

A long-time traveler and photographer with more than 40 countries on 6 continents under his belt, Kit finally decided to abandon his decade-long career as a London-based advertising strategist after the arrival of his wife and two daughters in his life prompted a deep and profound career re-think.

Happily freed from the shackles of corporate life and determined to make a success of his new calling, Kit trained intensively with renowned photographer Nick Berkeley (Paradise Row) and at the London College of Printing. He has been exhibited in locales as exotic as Targu Mures, Romania as well as London, with work published in the national and international press as well as being purchased for numerous private collections.

He and his family now live in a San Francisco-style painted house in Brighton, where he is attached to the Fiveways Artist Group.