Tony Mallon examines human presence by exploring spaces and experiences of life in homeless hostels in Merseyside, 2014-15.
Building on my collaborative project, Home (part of LOOK/13, Liverpool International Photography Festival, 2013), which focused on individual’s through photographic portraits occupying spaces in homeless hostels, Homeless moves beyond the human presence to explore, examine and document, through photography and text, the spaces and experiences of living in homeless hostels in Merseyside between 2014-15.
This Arts Council England funded project is part of LOOK/15 (Liverpool International Photography Festival, 15-31 May, 2015). I have documented eleven homeless hostels and the resulting photographs capture the clinical nature of these spaces and the occasional traces left behind by their inhabitants or former inhabitants.
Tony Mallon is a Liverpool-based photographic artist who has experience of working on public art commissions, including large scale photographic artworks. He also has a proven track record of working with marginalised groups who have had difficulty accessing the arts, including homeless people.
His work identifies absence; he shows you what is left out or what is left behind in institutions of care. In this series of work, he explores homeless shelters and there artificial ‘homeliness’. Guided by his work with the homeless, his work brings in to sharp focus the ‘institutional lives’ some homeless people are ‘lucky’ to have. The work asks us to question, “how does our society treat the issue of homelessness?”
Many thanks to Edmund Clark who assisted in curating the work.
