Witness Marks

Stairlift – Canon R5 – RF 50mm f/1.2

Witness Marks was the culmination of my final major project for my Master Degree in Photography, which I completed in the Winter of 2023. Since completing the course the ideas I explored here have continued to inform my personal work. The text that follows is taken from my exhibition of the work at The Artery Gallery in Worcester in the UK.

Cast in the simplest light these are photographs of a house, but they are also photographs of a life, one that ticks with energy and movement. They are photographs of relationships, of time, and of space. They are photographs of the past, the present, and of the future.

Life is reflected in the patchwork spaces we create for ourselves, the collections we build, and the marks that we make. These are witness marks of success and failure, of inevitable trauma, and evidence of our occasional victory over it.

Our spaces wear the scars of our lives.

A project that began as a personal exploration now stands exhibited as a snapshot of where that exploration has led. While this exhibition marks the culmination of an MA in photography, this is likely not the end of Witness Marks as a body of work.

The Photographs – (In Series)

Motion Stills

These were experiments thrown up by the process.  While they weren’t exhibited, they were successful and had their place on the original Witness Marks website.

The Exhibition

The exhibition was open to the public from the 9th to the 12th of December 2023 at the Artery Gallery in Worcester.

We had a private viewing on Friday the 8th at 8pm. The render above shows the layout of the gallery, and the video below shows both the hang and opening night.

Books

I had booked the space long before I knew what the show was going to be, and had always wanted to collate the work in a way that would live beyond the exhibition. Here is the text from the original website.

Books feature heavily in the photographs, as they feature heavily in the life the photographs depict.

It was also important to me that these photographs were given the chance to live on in curated form, beyond the life of the exhibition.

For these reasons there needed to be a book to accompany the exhibition.

I’ve made two versions, there is a hardback portfolio edition at £125, and a paperback edition at £25. Both are available via a print on demand service at Blurb books and are available now.

It’s intriguing to think that one of these books now sits on the shelves that are depicted in the photographs. The images have come full-circle and become a witness mark in its own right.

The Website

My plan to produce a show, book, and website meant that I had plenty to do in the Autumn of 2023. As of early 2026, the original version of www.witnessmarks.photo (seen above) has been retired and that url now brings the interested to this page.

My process documentary blog remains available at www.jamesgreenoff.photography