Helton Levy (They/he) is a lens-based artist, researcher, and lecturer in visual media, based in London.
Having worked for years as a freelance journalist, levy began experimenting with cameras during their journalism degree, when they started feeling misled to produce "reality" that satisfied the canon of photojournalism and coverage.
After working and living in different parts of the world and learning about the intermediariness of migrant photographers such as Vincenzo Pastore or Pierre Verger, their work turned towards capturing ordinariness, while, at the same time, framing it according to their own will and aesthetic.
Twenty years later, this portfolio comprises part of their production repurposed into lines of inquiry, decoded here as sharp, witty expressions. The photographs do not prioritise the aesthetic power of cameras or even aim for maximum image quality. These pictures, instead, try to capture subjects that reside far from their material realities, while canvassing some of the feelings yielded in the field.
Here, levy prioritises urban scenes and the portrait of life as de-institutionalised but not entirely devoid of meaning. There are, overall, relationships between people, their immediate location, and emotions depicted in the cultural memory of spaces
Check out the website heltonlevy.net for their academic production.
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