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Stuart Griffiths

East Sussex
Dr. Stuart Griffiths is an award winning photographer, who comp

I began taking photographs as a young British paratrooper during the Northern Ireland "Troubles" in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I then worked as an official unit photographer where I decided to leave the services and become a professional photographer.

In 1997 I graduated from the school of art & design at Brighton University before moving to London and working as a freelance photographer. That same year I was Highly Commended by the Observer Hodge Award and in 1998 I was an intern at Magnum Photos London before working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where I was tortured and imprisoned before returning to the UK.  

In 2000, I was living at a veteran hostel in East London where I worked as a night-time paparazzo before working for the national press. In 2003, I returned to the hostel to work on a project on homeless ex-service personnel, which was published in The Guardian in 2005. The years that followed consisted of editorial work and my personal project on injured British troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Luke Seomore & Joseph Bull documented this journey in their film Isolation that was premiered at the 2009 Edinburgh Film Festival which was endorsed by the filmmaker Ken Loach.

The following year, I was the winner of the Brighton Photo Fringe OPEN for my exhibition proposal CLOSER which was judged by Charlotte Cotton, Val Williams & Martin Parr. Then in 2011 Photoworks published my first book The Myth of the Airborne Warrior. In 2013, my second book Pigs’ Disco was published and in 2015, I undertook a Ph.D. scholarship at Ulster University, where I graduated in 2021.

Presently, I work for a veteran charity on the South Coast of England, as part of the innovation project for veterans suffering from alcohol and substance misuse problems, where I use my photography to document the group’s activities.

 

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