Paul Seawright (b. 1965)

Seawright is a photographer who has drawn heavily on his Northern Irish background to produce searching photographic investigations of aspects of its fraught political terrain, as in his ‘Orange Order’ and ‘Police Force’ series from the early 1990s. In his recent work, Seawright has moved away from an overtly Irish context, focusing on what he has termed a ‘generic malevolent landscape’ represented by the uninhabited spaces at the edge of cities and forests throughout Europe. These images take the viewer from bright, bleached vacant lots to corners of almost complete darkness, lit only by the dim, ambient light of street lamps, where the city merges with the forest.