Echoes

About

Olivia Thompson and Jago Boase are London-based photographers whose work deals with the urban environment and our place in it.

Olivia Thompson’s work straddles various genres including street life, portraiture and still life, focusing on human stories within the urban landscape. Taken over a three year period, predominantly in London and South America, these images reflect her instinctual approach to the medium. Using reflections, shadows and natural filters, she has created a distinct photographic language that hovers on the edge of abstraction.

Boase’s work focuses on the abstract qualities of informal and/or decrepit spaces. Though people rarely feature in his photography they are never far away, manifest in the order and disorder of what they build and in the traces they leave. His work uses a reduced palette of visual themes - voids, planes and grids - overlaid and undermined by mess and decay.

The work in this show was taken between 2014 and 2016 while Boase was working in the Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan. His photographs capture a city facing wholesale redevelopment but still bearing the scars of both an acute disaster and long-term poverty. Alongside these, the photographs from Manila, Hong Kong and London show similar pressures being manifest even in these much bigger, richer cities. For “Echoes” they have each curated the other’s work, so that each piece reflects their shared preoccupations even as their work differs in form, theme or content.