Ken Grant was born in Liverpool in 1967. Since the 1980's he has photographed in the city and engaged in sustained projects both in the region, in Wales, and in wider Europe.
Date: Friday 12th September
Time: 7pm (doors 6.30pm)
Location: Upstairs in the Gallery at Oriel Colwyn
Ken works on long term engagements with his contemporaries which eventually become books and exhibitions. His photographs are held in major collections, including those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Folkwang Museum, Essen, the James Hyman collection of British Photography and other international public and private collections.
Tyrelads, Birkenhead (c) Ken Grant
He continues to exhibit internationally, including at Counter Space (MoMA, New York, 2011), Home Sweet Home (Arles, 2019), and Fotografia Europea (Reggio Emilia, 2022). A first monograph of the Liverpool photographs, The Close Season, was published in 2002 with No pain whatsoever following in 2014. Other monographs include A Topical Times for These Times (2016) and Benny Profane (2019).
Football (c) Ken Grant
His work made in Wales over three decades was published as Cwm: The Fair Country in 2025. Ken was editor for the recent book on the life and work of Chris Killip (Thames & Hudson, 2022), along with his wife, Tracy Marshall-Grant and together they curated the recent career retrospective of Killip’s work which toured internationally.
Blaenavon Horses (c) Ken Grant
His career as a teacher has included a decade leading the Documentary Photography programme in Newport, South Wales and he has supported the development of photography education through galleries in the UK and Ireland, notably as a board member at Open Eye Gallery Liverpool, at Belfast Exposed, Belfast and the Gallery of Photography (now Photo Museum Ireland), Dublin. He is currently co-course director of the MFA Photography programme at Belfast School of Art / Ulster University in Belfast.
John Wood 2011 (from Flock) (c) Ken Grant
Some statements about Ken Grant’s pictures:
"(Ken Grant’s photographs in The Close Season) achieve an intimacy in many of the photographs that is painful. This quality is exactly complemented by the Kelman text- not withstanding that it’s so lightly printed that it almost disappears…"
David Goldblatt, Photographer, South Africa, 2003
"My favourite photograph in all of photography is the Diane Arbus photograph of a young couple in a nudist colony. It is an unadorned photograph of a contemporary Adam and Eve. A perfect, imperfect couple, radiantly and nakedly beautiful. As a depiction, they are so firmly and completely unideal; so ordinary, yet, so undeniably and defiantly a breathtaking celebration of what they share with you and me.
What’s important, money, sex, kids, football, wife, family work? It’s a variable order. It could be that if you are playing really well, then football would have to be first. Ken Grant’s photographs of friendship, family, the mundane values of family life are an intimate sort of photography, not so much recording as remembering, a savouring of all those past, shared moments. His photographs have the allusive qualities of the Arbus photograph, but are taken from the inside, quietly affirming the lives that they depict."
Chris Killip, Professor of photography, Harvard University, USA 2002
"No hidden agendas, no exploitation, just a short cut to knowing what it’s like to be there."
Martin Parr, Photographer, UK, 2002
“They are like close friends…those horses, those heroes, allied and alienated, across our shared landscape and history. These images will stay with me.”
Donovan Wylie, Photographer, Northern Ireland, 2025
New Brighton Central Park Backswish (c) Ken Grant