About Me
I am an independent documentary and fine art photographer who photographs cities, islands, and borders. I hold degrees from the University of London (BA hons) and the University of Cambridge (PhD). In 2006 I became the Board Chairman of the Look 07 International Photography Festival, Manchester (2006 – 08). Since that time, I have worked on a range of commissions, projects, and exhibitions in Europe and North Africa, often dealing with questions of migration, refugee experience, diaspora, and memory. In my capacity as an artist I am a member of the international Euroborderwalks team of researchers and artists based in the universities of UCC Cork (Ireland), Lodz (Poland), and Zagreb (Croatia), conducting a two-year project on the making and re-making of the European borders between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, Poland and Ukraine, Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina.
I am drawn to the silent stillness of photography. This quality invites us to linger on the surfaces of people, places, and objects, on their ever-changing transformation by light. Silence and stillness also lead photographer and viewer to turn their gaze inwards to their memories and dreams, so that photography becomes a form of attentive reflection.
In this way photography refracts the world documented by the blink of the camera eye through the prism of the photographer’s and viewer’s evolving dialogue. Dialogue is at the core of my working practice and motivates the collaborative processes that define much of my work. In this way, photography allows me to be open to new ways of viewing, inhabiting, and thinking about the world in ways other than my own.
The recipient of a Creative Scotland Open Fund Award in 2025, I am the author of nineteen self-published photobooks and zines, copies of which have been acquired, among others, by the National Library of Scotland as part of its Photography Collection. All are available from this website. My photographic work is also studied as part of the undergraduate humanities programme at Royal Holloway University of London.
I am drawn to the silent stillness of photography. This quality invites us to linger on the surfaces of people, places, and objects, on their ever-changing transformation by light. Silence and stillness also lead photographer and viewer to turn their gaze inwards to their memories and dreams, so that photography becomes a form of attentive reflection.
In this way photography refracts the world documented by the blink of the camera eye through the prism of the photographer’s and viewer’s evolving dialogue. Dialogue is at the core of my working practice and motivates the collaborative processes that define much of my work. In this way, photography allows me to be open to new ways of viewing, inhabiting, and thinking about the world in ways other than my own.
The recipient of a Creative Scotland Open Fund Award in 2025, I am the author of nineteen self-published photobooks and zines, copies of which have been acquired, among others, by the National Library of Scotland as part of its Photography Collection. All are available from this website. My photographic work is also studied as part of the undergraduate humanities programme at Royal Holloway University of London.
|
My WorkOften collaborative, my projects use photography, text, and related media to reflect on diasporic states of being. Revealing how places are layered by time, my work is concerned with how the past is regenerated, the existential use of knowledge and memory, and how meaning is formed through migration, travel and our attachment to, or displacement through specific locations.
|
|
Download CV Here
| dr_john_perivolaris_cv2025.docx |