Alan Lodge, Black & White Surveillance
Salon de Normandy by The Community
Room 412, Normandy Hôtel, 7 Rue de l’Échelle, 75001 Paris, France
October 22nd – 25th, 2020.
Black & White Surveillance is a presentation of photography and archive materials surveying Alan Lodge’s extensive counter-documentation of police surveillance and his past involvement in legislative action and activism.
Alan ‘Tash’ Lodge (born 1953 in Luton, Bedfordshire) is a photographer based in Nottingham who has focused on alternative movements since the mid 1970s. After a short career as an emergency paramedic in the London Ambulance Service, Lodge took up photography and documented the early ‘free festivals’ in 1978. In 1985 Lodge joined the Peace Convoy on its way to Stonehenge where a festival was planned to take place and he photographed The Battle of the Beanfield. In 1987 Lodge published the booklet Stonehenge: Solstice Ritual, a photographic account of the rituals taking place at Stonehenge. Since the events at Stonehenge, Lodge has covered a range of issues including the Travellers movement, Reclaim the Streets, the road protests in the mid 1990s and the campaign against the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. Lodge is also well known for his documentation of police surveillance, in which he received a ‘Winston Award’ for in 1998. Since the late 1990s Lodge has been a major contributor to the media network Indymedia.
In recent years Lodge has continued to extensively document his involvement and attendance of public demonstrations and festivals, and has actively involved himself in various welfare and advice agencies. He has worked as a field worker for the Release organisation and has sat on the management committees of several charities, including Festival Welfare Services, the Travellers Aid Trust and the Standing Conference on Drug Abuse (Scoda).
Lodge’s website One Eye on the Road operates as an extensive archive of his prolific photographic career, as well as an essential resource providing legal information and advice. Lodge has successfully taken the police to court and won damages for false claims made against him. He has also pursued a number of complaints against the police.
Lodge’s work has appeared in publications & journals including Guardian, Independent, i-D, Select, Sounds, DJ, Radio Times, New Statesmen & Society and Squall. His photographs have also been used in TV documentaries across the BBC and Channel 4, including most recently for Jeremy Deller’s BBC documentary piece Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992.
Photographs by Aurélien Mole.
Press:
i-D (interview)
Huck Magazine
Flash Art
i-D France (overview)
Purple
Artsy
LesInRocks
