This body of work is called "The Mayfair Squatters series" www.themayfairsquatters.com
A group of squatters in London called The DA! Collective squatted a mansion house on Charles Street in Mayfair, London. Built in the 1740's and now worth over £25 Million, the group set up an art base called The Temporary School of Thought. With exclusive access to this group, Colin Hampden-White spent several months taking portraits of them.
Colin is intrigued by the question: nature or nurture? He is adopted and, in his late teens, learned that his birth parents were an artist and a concert pianist. This discovery led to a desire to explore the relationship that people have with the place they inhabit: at home, at work, or in the local area. His photographs open up the fault-lines between subject and environment to reveal the space in which identity is created.
Colin’s style is strongly narrative, with minimal interaction between subject and viewer. His pictures are intensely personal, yet freighted with strangeness, playing on the tension between familiarity and absurdity, convention and innovation. His work is imaginative, intuitive and has an honesty which is rarely found elsewhere.
