Miles Aldridge Studio is looking for a full-time Studio Manager to work in the London studio. Applicants should be highly organised and capable of managing multiple projects. Responsibilities include –

• Liaising with galleries, museums and publishers
• Management of digital and analogue archive
• Overseeing print production and delivery of prints to galleries and museums
• Preparing the studio space for studio visits / talks
• Social media management

Please send your CV and cover letter to studio@milesaldridge.com. A job specification can be provided upon request.

The position is also listed on both LinkedIn and The Dots

Aptly named ‘Process’, this exhibition of small format photographic works by Miles Aldridge illustrates the artistic journey from initial idea to final image. Through this progression, the image is captured first on Polaroid before being shot on colour negative film. Once processed in his lab, the frames are printed up as contact sheets for the artist to review. After careful edits and annotations, the final image is chosen. Each of these stages is essential to Aldridge’s practice as, unlike most photographers working today, he continues to work with traditional film rather than digitally. A close look at these precursors to his fully realised photographs reveals their own unique character and give us a keen insight into the artist’s working method.

The Polaroids and contact sheets included in this exhibition have come directly from the artist’s archive and span over 20 years of his career. Each has been carefully chosen for the insights they offer into some of his most iconic images and because of their own particular beauty, which is often spontaneous and unexpected.

This is the first time Aldridge’s contact sheets have been publically shown and we are delighted to be able to include several examples in this exhibition. They are rich with markings, notation, and edits – evidence of the artist’s hand and witness to his creative decision-making. Each sheet tells a story as an image unfolds from one shot to the next – a model’s eyes slowly open and close, a glass is raised and lowered, a diamond ring is fractionally moved to capture the different reflections of light. Moment to moment, we see the gentle shifts and subtle nuances that Aldridge relentlessly refines in pursuit of the perfect image. Once all the film is shot and the negatives are laid out on the contact sheets, he is able to carefully examine each frame, looking for the particular still that will become the final photograph.

Alongside the contact sheets, we have included a selection of Polaroids. These have all been newly released from the studio archive and are inc-luded in the forthcoming book – ‘Please, Please Return Polaroid’. This is the second book dedicated solely to Aldridge’s’ Polaroids and contains both recent work and earlier projects. Described by Aldridge as ‘sketches’, the Polaroids offer an intimate glimpse into the early stages of an image’s development, where his experiments with light and composition are laid bare.

Seen together in this exhibition, the Polaroids and contact sheets show the balance between consideration and spontaneity embedded in Aldridge’s artistic process. Where an idea is discovered, repeated, refined, and examined until eventually, the final image emerges.

Miles Aldridge’s 20 year retrospective Virgin Mary. Supermarkets. Popcorn. Photographs 1999 to 2020. opens this week at Fotografiska museum NYC as part of Frieze week.

Open to Frieze VIP’s Wednesday May 5

Fotografiska members Thursday May 6

General public Friday May 7

To celebrate the opening of Virgin Mary. Supermarkets. Popcorn. Photographs 1999 to 2020. The Philip Glass Ensemble will be performing a special concert at NeueHouse, Madison Square with performances at 7:30pm and 9pm.

Link to Fotografiska and to purchase tickets for Virgin Mary. Supermarkets. Popcorn. Photographs 1999 to 2020.
https://www.fotografiska.com/nyc/exhibition/virgin-mary-supermarkets-popcorn-photographs-1999-to-2020/

Link to NeueHouse
https://www.neuehouse.com/frieze-week-2021/

Press Release

Fotografiska New York is proud to present Virgin Mary. Supermarkets. Popcorn. Photographs 1999 to 2020, a photographic exhibition by British artist and photographer Miles Aldridge.

Opening on Friday, May 7th at Fotografiska New York, the exhibition will be Aldridge’s first museum retrospective in the US, comprising 66 works spanning the artist’s career. The show draws on Aldridge’s highly composed and cinematically inspired tableaus, including his 2015 project (after Cattelan) in which the artist Maurizio Cattelan invited Aldridge to respond to his sculptures over the course of one night together in a Paris museum. Aldridge’s unique style is also applied to portraiture and his subjects include Marina Abramović, Gilbert and George, Sophie Turner, Viola Davis, Michael Fassbender, Donatella Versace and David Lynch.

An exhilarating ride through Aldridge’s universe, the show reflects on three strands of his colorful cosmos. Virgin Mary references the religious paintings by artists such as Caravaggio, who like Aldridge represent experiences in an artificial, almost cinematic manner through their use of dramatic lighting, costuming and staging. Supermarkets are a metaphor the consumer society; the hope of self-improvement through retail therapy. Lastly, Popcorn is a nod to the influence of cinema in Aldridge’s work and the many auteur directors such as Hitchcock, Lynch and Fellini, who serve as a source of inspiration for his style and approach. With so many diverse influences coming from the history of Cinema, when everything was still shot on analogue film, Aldridge likewise prefers to shoot on film rather than digital. Every print in the exhibition was captured on Kodak Colour Negative.

A recurring theme throughout Aldridge’s oeuvre is the false promise of luxury. Psychedelic interiors are furnished with the trappings of mid-century suburban comfort: gleaming kitchen appliances, candy colored telephones, and well-groomed pets denote success. The images of domesticity are often undercut with a bittersweet edge; a personal reflection of Aldridge’s childhood memories of his mother after a shattering divorce.

Aldridge’s work conflates historic and modern motifs and makes subtle reference to the art historical canon. Only rarely does he allow the real world to encroach upon the imagined realm. Through his lens, even reality appears artificial.

Virgin Mary. Supermarkets. Popcorn. Photographs 1999 to 2020 is curated by Nadine Barth, barthouse Berlin, in collaboration with Johan Vikner, Director of Global Exhibitions at Fotografiska International. This installment marks the second iteration of the show which debuted at Fotografiska Stockholm in September 2020 and ran till March 2021. The exhibition has been made in close collaboration with the artist and his galleries; Fahey Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, Lyndsey Ingram Gallery, London, Christophe Guye Gallerie, Zurich, Reflex Gallery, Amsterdam, and Casterline Goodman Gallery, Aspen.

Hello and I Will Love You Tomorrow are the first screenprints from a new series entitled Subtitles. Printed on 410 gsm Somerset paper in three passes – a matt halftone dot, a high gloss black border and the subtitles in a satin acid yellow. Both screenprints are available either unframed or in a polished aluminium frame designed by the artist.

‘This series of screenprints extends and enhances the influence of cinema on the photographic practice of Miles Aldridge, further exploring the mood and allure of theatrically constructed images. Artifice is everywhere in these screenprints, proposing figure, setting and event as both immediate and static – reprising the aesthetic of the tableau vivant as it might be conceived by Luis Buñuel or Eric Rohmer. Aldridge has long been fascinated by the transposition of suspense – as it might occur in film noir – to the mise-en-scene of sexually loaded pictorial narratives. These narratives, here broken down into the film-still idiom of individual sub-titled scenes, become at once  visually amplified and ambiguous. Pictorially, each screenprint depicts an open-ended dramatic image that calls on both the coldness and glamour of Pop art. While proposing a scene with dialogue – the urbane high passion of European cinema is implied – they resemble frozen fragments of mass media. Insoluble mysteries, as present yet remote as a billboard, acting in silence.’

– Michael Bracewell

Hello

2020

Screenprint in colours

Printed on 410 gsm Somerset paper

Signed and numbered in pencil verso

28 ¾ × 37 ½ inches (73.5 × 95 cm)
Edition of 15 plus 3 artist’s proofs

I Will Love You Tomorrow

2020

Screenprint in colours

Printed on 410 gsm Somerset paper

Signed and numbered in pencil verso

28 ¾ × 37 ½ inches (73.5 × 95 cm)
Edition of 15 plus 3 artist’s proofs

View Hello and I Will Love You Tomorrow in Works

View a list of the galleries in Contact

Please Please return Polaroid is Miles Aldridge’s ongoing love letter to Polaroid, a process once integral to the craft of many photographers but now more or less extinct, apart from the rare and out-of-date material traded on eBay for exorbitant prices. The sequel to Aldridge’s Please Return Polaroid of 2016, this book presents new and vintage Polaroids from his more than 20-year archive in a seemingly random sequence shaped by a dreamlike logic and surprising juxtapositions. Please Please Return Polaroid explores Aldridge’s to analogue processes where cut-and-paste is still a manual process, made with scissors, gaffer tape, intuition and not a little patience. Aldridge continues to use Polaroids as part of his work-in-progress “sketches,” often scratching, tearing and taping them together, even drawing over them: each mark part of the creative act. Known for creating immaculate photos of a less than perfect world, Aldridge revels in these unpolished images, transforming some into extreme enlargements filling double pages with their re-worked and damaged surfaces. Long live Polaroid!

Please Please return Polaroid

208 pages, 117 images

11 ¾ x 11 ¾ inches (29.5 x 29.5 cm)

Clothbound hardcover

ISBN 978-3-95829-748-7

€ 45.00

www.steidl.de/Books/Please-Please-Return-Polaroid