Circus Work 1968 - 2018

 

 

​hard cover 190 pages

b/w & colour photographs

 

'You literally breath in the circus.It was the same circus I had sniffed in Circuswork (1997).

I soon learned something that Lavery had seen,that circus isn't only an art form . You don't work in a circus, You live in one.'

Dea Birkett - I ran away with Peter Lavery. Circus Work1968-2018

 

Dea Birkett is an award-winning author, journalist and broadcaster. She is Creative Directorof BAFTA winning film production company ManyRiversFilms. After running away to the circus, she is now Ringmaster of Circus 250,

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"Bruce Bernard called Peter a master photographer and he did not say so lightly. Bruce never said anything lightly. With his customary inscrutability, he observed, ‘it would have taken a really great photographer, perhaps an André Kertész to equal or surpass what Lavery has done.’ How pleased but how unsurprised he would have been to discover that, some twenty years later, Peter has done it again."

Robin Muir Circus Work 1968 - 2018

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I find it helps to think of all the ways in which a circus and its performers might be photographed to appreciate this exhibition. You might want to show daring or drama, the contrast of drabness and glamour, or some strange and slightly surreal aspect (think Mary Ellen Mark’s circus series, for example). But Peter Lavery has extracted something ineffable which in its ordinariness is remarkable.

Peter Barker  guest editor Redeye.

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"I have never seen such beautiful photographs of circus people or ones which give such an honest and straightforward idea of how they feel about themselves and their work."

Sally Chipperfield - Chipperfields circus

 

Lavery 'is a visual anthropologist ..... His pictures are a salute to the performers, a tribe which moves always on the edge of the social forest.'

said the The Guardian