Cat Garcia releases Our Time, a 252 page book documenting the lives of 60 of Britain’s most creative talents including Sir Peter Blake, Bella Freud, Giles Deacon, Gavin Turk, Fergus Henderson and Sir Paul Smith. See www.thisisourtimebook.com for full details on the series. Supported by artisanal paper manufacturers G.F Smith, curated by Olivia Triggs, and words below by Editor Anthony Leyton.
Photographer Cat Garcia has documented the working lives of Britain’s most creative talents to produce this series of quietly revelatory images. Featuring some of the most pioneering minds in the fields of art, photography, design, fashion, film and more, Our Time combines candid black-and-white and colour portraits with telling incidental details from the ordinary lives of extraordinary people.
The photographs in this book don’t try to dissect creativity or explain the process of inspiration; they make no thunderbolt claims about genius. They are simply the result of time spent with 60 of Britain’s most creative people – an assortment of artists, designers, photographers, film-makers and other talents – all linked not by the arena in which they operate, but by the fact that ideas are their currency. Whether artist or curator, fashion designer or florist, their aim is to cross a few boundaries, shake things up a touch, make something new.
Each of the people featured in Our Time allowed Cat Garcia to share their lives for one day, inviting her and her camera into their homes and workspaces, taking her along on their daily journeys and giving her the chance to see them at work. The resultant images are a compelling assortment of candid portraits, captured moments of stillness and telling incidental details. These fascinating still lifes from their environment (a model unicorn, a rainbow of paint pots, an antiquarian book…) offer the viewer, for one stolen second, a flash of insight into the style and surroundings of Britain’s creative generation.
Don’t open the book expecting to find sample art, finished pieces, or examples of what each contributor is ‘most famous for’. There are other books for that. Cat’s book is about the life, not the work. Above all else, it is a series of photo stories about people, a compendium of quiet revelations, the collected fragments of lives lived creatively, one day at a time.
