School of Art
Photographer Matthew Finn got a job at the School of Art in London back in 1997 and he started to photograph both the students and the school itself. His images are an outstanding historic documentation of the height of ‘Cool Britannia’ and the hope which was felt throughout the country at the time.
Photography Matthew Finn
In 1997 “Cool Britannia” was at its height. Brit pop was flooding the airwaves, a new Labour government took power and a sense of hope that had not been felt for a generation was palpable.
British photographer Matthew Finn was 24, had recently graduated and took a job at the School of Art in the outskirts of London. Over the coming year he photographed the students and the school itself.
“It was last decade before cell phones and social media, we discussed, argued and tried things out, not because we were told to but because we wanted to. Everything seemed possible.”
Matthew Finn
“We were able to expand our creativity in any direction we wanted. Hot boxing the car in the car park at lunch then going into class to swirl paint around a canvas. Chain smoking, listening to Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam on loop on the communal tape to tape deck, skateboarding in the corridors, mushrooms in the street, papier mache boobs, tampon sculptures, I can’t imagine any other form of education being that life changing.”
School of Art Student
About Matthew
Matthew Finn (b. 1971 UK) explores personal relationships both within the corpus of the family as well as the wider stage of personal relationships through long-term photographic projects. With no commercial constraints or deadlines, Finn cultivates a working practice of an auteur, in charge of all the elements of the work where the craft of the print and the process are equally important. Finn continues to make significant long-term bodies of work including his series of portraits of students, which commenced in the early 1990s (Finn is a Senior Photography Lecturer), and durational bodies of work that focus on the province of family life and close relationships.
Finn’s most notable works include the thirty-one-year process of making intimate, domestic portraits of his mother and the twenty-eight years he documented his relationship with his uncle. Today Finn collaborates with family members as he pursues the universal themes of love, loss, bereavement and intimacy. Through these current and completed projects Matthew Finn has expanded the frontiers of documentary photography, bringing a new and deeply psychological reality to the genre.
He is the recipient of the Jerwood/Photoworks Award 2015 and has published 2 monographs; Mother (Dewi Lewis, 2017) and School of Art (Stanley/Barker, 2019)
To see more of his work, visit his website or follow him on Instagram
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