STEVE HUNT PHOTOGRAPHY / THE CHAPMAN GALLERY, UNIVERSITY OF SALFORD, 2009

‘Keys to John’s Remains: a respectful voyage into the hungover heart of Steve Hunt-land.’ Austin Collings

I know this place well; you could even say I know this place all-too-well, but then that’d be charging it with a false sense of my own forged sense of world-weariness. There’ll be enough eyes that look amongst these photographs with an inward feeling of cosseted delight because this isn’t their world; because what they see here gives them a chance to be certain other people for an hour or so, or less if they’re less generous with their time.

It could easily be a clichéd place, this place I know so well spread out across these walls: this that we’ll call Steve Hunt-land for the time-being. But thankfully it isn’t. Respect and consideration have pulled off their important roles and, in turn, all clichés have been eradicated.

Harsh with sentiment and unexpected beauty, one is, at once, reminded of a hangover. With eyes like smashed glass, he’s looking at things with the heightened awareness of a thunderous hangover. Overriding that moment when each small movement of the head is accompanied by a different axe setting about the senses, when that chalk-like cloud line marked out across that blue blue sky could easily be a cheap line of cocaine up above the rooftops, up above the damp porn mags scattered liberally across fields without fences, fields with few blades of grass…

‘I have a poets mind/but a poor exterior/what goes on inside is superior…’ Stevie Smith

Tired, as in life, we roam; and I’m looking for faces in these pictures, but I can’t see them. Geography is destiny. It’s only right. I know this place so well, you see; like vivid dreams of school when one or more bodies are missing.

I’ll keep looking...

I always keep looking...

It’s all in the looking….

Maybe they’re off to the other side; no, they’re definitely off to the other side; they exist on the other side. And for some it stinks, all of this; all of them on the other side; they’d rather not, you see; rather see it all as a living grave, of sorts…And for this reason alone, I’m glad Steve rather would; otherwise all this would be regretfully lost to botched memories and it’d be like trying to hear snowflakes fall if any of us ever did stop to recall those dear dead days. I’m glad he was there with his camera when that piss-coloured sun didn’t know its place, when some inconsiderate person had placed a fruit machine in front of a Lowry in order to attract the moth boys. I’m glad he was there with his invariable hangover and his likeably cheap camera warring with dappled sunlight and raindrops the size of kid’s fists; whilst others were out playing at doing things. He obviously understands its there for the taking, this that’s in front of our eyes and, fair play to the man, he’s taking it.

And, in the end, it’s this that matters; as this was life…