All images taken from No Love Lost © Michael Grieve
1000 Words contributing editor Michael Grieve recently revamped his personal website with a whole new look and feel, and has put up some fresh portfolios as well as stuff from his frequent forays into editorial photography. He is also selling prints from his wonderful series Blue of Night and No Love Lost. Check it out.
It´s no secret that Michael and I are good friends (shock horror!) but, needless to say, I am an avid admirer both of his work and his spirit for life. The images shown above are taken from his trademark project No Love Lost which speaks volumes about intimacy and dislocation in a theatre of sexual commodity. Talking about the body of work, he says "(No Love Lost) is a visual project that inhabits heightened sexual environments in contemporary England. People featured are active in the increasingly entwined and performative worlds of pornography, prostitution and stripping. What they share is a measured psychological engagement with strangers in close proximity that is a purely physical and sexual union lacking in affection. Fantasy is played out within the frame of constraints and closeness is kept at a distance. Menace is always present, control is often threatened. These are emotionally charged settings, both plastic and primitive, where the ‘stuff’ of life is all too present."
"These are real fictional encounters that convey a sense of the difficulties of meaningful human connection in spiritually vacant environments," he adds.
Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1966, Michael Grieve is based in London and is represented by the prestigious Agence Vu in Paris. He studied an MA in Photographic Studies at the University of Westminster in 1997 and works for a variety of publications internationally including the Sunday Times Magazine, Weekend Guardian Magazine, Liberation, Le Monde and Le Monde 2. He writes for Hotshoe and the British Journal of Photography and, as I mentioned before, is a contributing editor for 1000 Words. His first book, No Love Lost, will be published in the new year. He describes his work generally as ‘searching for the light of possibility in an existential world’. Here´s to you, Michael.
