John Kippin was selected to participate in the first Dhaka Photography festival organised by Shahidul Alam, the director of DRIK, a proactive photo-agency based in Dhaka, which represents work by a number of leading Asian photojournalists. DRIK also runs a teaching workshop for professional photographers as well as maintaining a well appointed photography gallery.

Born in 1950, John Kippin studied Fine Art at Brighton Polytechnic and the University of Northumbria, Newcastle before emerging in the late I980s as a prominent figure within the debate around the radical reappraisal of documentary photography then dominating British photography. Integrating text into many of his images was one of the strategies Kippin introduced to challenge the realist paradigm which had traditionally underlined all documentary practice. Choosing to focus his attention on landscape afforded Kippin an opportunity to explore the encoded meanings, ideologies and ideas concealed or overlooked within this specific photographic genre. In his work from the late I980s to the present, Kippin references pictorial landscape traditions and notions of aesthetic beauty, juxtaposing them with acute reflections on cultural and political change in contemporary Britain.

John Kippin originally selected all works in the exhibition for display at the Chobi Mela photography festival in Dhaka in December 2000. A small retrospective of Kippin’s work comprising 15-20 large scale images then toured to other venues in South East Asia including Sri Lanka and Calcutta.

John Kippin works form part of the British Council Collection.

For further information please contact Sean Williams