John Riddy

John Riddy's photographs are distinguished by a combination of poetic delicacy and formal precision which has been evident since his earliest pictures made in London in the late 1980s. Working consistently in series, Riddy has created collective studies of urban architecture and rural landscapes in countries as disparate as Japan, Italy, South Africa and the United States, in every case exploiting the capacity for still images to render the everyday both factual and transcendent.

The starting point for much of his work has been the relationship between photography and the history of art and architecture, such as John Ruskin's autobiography, Hokusai's woodblock prints and Gustave Le Gray's photographs. This book presents all of Riddy's major series and, like a volume of collected poems, each image is distinct and of itself yet linked to its counterparts by technical skill and a finely tuned sensibility.

The sequence of images builds progressively towards a final series of magisterial works that reveals Riddy's subtle use of color, light and darkness to express his complex comprehension of the world. I know of no recent body of photographic work that exhibits a more deeply considered set of reflections on the nature of the enterprise. Michael Fried Exhibition: De Pont Museum, Tilburg, April 2019

About the Author

John Riddy was born in 1959 in Northampton and studied painting at Chelsea School of Art between 1980 and 1984. He joined London's Frith Street Gallery in 1993 and in 1998 was awarded the Rome scholarship as well as a Sargent fellowship to study at the British School at Rome. Riddy's work has been exhibited widely and is held in major private and public collections including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Tate Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the De Pont Museum, Tilburg; and the Art Institute of Chicago.