Rhubarb: Louis Quail

I enjoyed talking with Louis Quail at Rhubarb Rhubarb, and looking at project he is developing on office work, ‘Desk Job’. Perhaps surprisingly the office is an area that has attracted some fine work from photographers in the past, and some of Louis’s work colour images reminded me of the black and white portraits taken by Brian Griffin for ‘Management Today’, as well as the colour documentary work by Anna Fox from the 1980s, published in 1988 by Camerawork as ‘Workstations‘.

I first saw her work when Anna came to a few meetings of ‘Framework‘, a small group of photographers who met in West London in the 1980s, and was immediately a fan (and it made me switch to printing on Fuji paper.) Unfortunately her work is hard to find now, although I was pleased (but certainly not surprised) to see it included in the Tate show “How We Are”. Presumably she is too busy running the photography programme at the Surrey Institute to think about a web site.

Another photographer I’ve met who has produced interesting work on the office is Lars Tunbjork, who I met in Poland in 2005. His show was one of the highlights of the festival there for me, but I’ve never published the piece I wrote about his work because the pictures it needs are not on the web. You can see a few images from his work at the Moscow House of Photography, and also in the ‘Booktease’ at photo-eye, but you really need to see either the finely printed book or his originals to fully appreciate the work.

I enjoyed seeing the work and thinking about it, and I hope the discussion was of some interest to Louis.  I look forward to seeing the finished project listed on his web site. He did also show me some of his pictures from a project on UK Swingers:

(C) Louis Quail
Image (C) Louis Quail: UK Swingers. First published Arena Magazine, Jan 2003.

and you can see more of this project on his web site, along with some other great features including a personal project on the world of Club 18-30 holidays.

Quail’s work has been published in a wide range of magazines including The Saturday Telegraph Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, Telegraph Newspaper, The Sunday Times Magazine, Observer Life, Marie Claire, Arena, Stern, Dagbladet, Nieuwe Revu, kronenzeitung, The Mirror Weekend Supplements and FHM, and he also does advertising work for some well-known clients.

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