Exhibition
Generations

Venue
QUAD hoardings,
The Market Place

Dates
22 September
to 5 November

Times
24 hrs a day

Flash
Julian Germain, artists
talk, 23 September.

Julian Germain

Julian Germain’s work has evolved from a conventional documentary practise to a more fluid and layered approach where the photograph is document. As a means of exploring personal and institutional histories, Germain’s projects examine the relationships between his own pictures and those produced for commercial and everyday uses. His role as a photographer is that of social historian and archaeologist.

Recently, Germain has concentrated on the social and emotional ties that various forms of portraiture engender. Germain takes a genre strongly attached to values associated with sentiment and nostalgia. This echo is evident in projects such as the Generations portraits commissioned for FORMAT06.

In these, Germain has created a series of group portraits of the people of Derby, Derbyshire and the surrounding area. The large-scale photographs depict families with 4 or even 5 living generations.

Generations portrays direct biological lines of descent; for
example a great-great-grandfather or mother with his/her child, grandchild, great-grandchild and great-great-grandchild.