| FuturKrome04 | The Northern Quarter Gallery, 61 Thomas Street until Sunday 14th November 2004 |
Ed's no one trick pony, working in a variety of visual styles and the exhibition is divided into three sections: figurative work in black and white, urban abstracts and states of mind. As with all good photography the work makes you look at the familiar with a fresh sense of seeing.
 | | Cute Chick with Red Lipstick - Ed Swinden |
The urban abstracts take the likes of flats in Manchester and frame them in such a way that it is as if strips of film have been laid out before you. Only a few silhouettey figures at the windows and the tops of trees give the game away.
Yet this section isn't all angsty urban isolation stuff. A composition involving a brick wall, two openings, a pole and a discarded red box entitled "The Cute Chick with Red Lipstick" seems to tip a knowing wink at Dali while Birmingham's new Selfridge's building is shot in such a way as to leave you thinking of Bilbao or San Francisco. States of Mind offers a darker palette where faces are muddied with a drizzle of colour nicked from the Photoshop rainbow. With titles like "Stress", "Supplication" and "The Hidden Knife" the overall effect is of a hemmed-in claustrophobia and brings to mind the work of Francis Bacon. For me the most successful of these shows a woman stood, head bowed, in a thin strip of rectangular light overwhelmed by the surrounding darkness. The scene reminded me of the set of Yukio Ninagawa's recent production of Hamlet at the Lowry where Denmark was a dark, inky prison full of huge, black, closed doors. The black and white figurative work is perhaps the most conventional and for me the most instantly appealing. Shots of builders high above the city on a tea break, solitary figures crossing a street or walking the dog or the homoerotic "Free" showing three young lads jumping into the sea from a cliff have an intimacy and directness that is beguiling.
 | | Crossing Sun Street - Ed Swinden |
These pictures also have a timeless quality. With its watery shimmer and visible tram markings, the woman "Crossing Sun Street" could have been taken somewhere in Central Europe in the 1920s or 1930s. One of my companions, a Parisian, had reservations about these pictures of lovers by the Seine and the like as the style has become so familiar via coffee table titles like Paris Mon Amour. While "Under the Same Sky", a sequence of archetypal destinations from the desert to the city set under the same moon and scudding clouds shows that Ed can compose big impact pieces as well, it was the intimate, figurative material I was most impressed with. If you want to see a rich and varied body of work by a thoughtful new talent, you'd do well to head down to the Northern Quarter Gallery. | 
