Island Life: Photographs from the Martin Parr Foundation
Ken Grant
Born 1967, Liverpool.
Ken Grant was born in Liverpool in 1967. Since the 1980’s he has photographed in the city and engaged in sustained projects with the communities based there. Grant worked as a carpenter from a young age helping out in his father’s cabinet making workshop in Merseyside where he began taking photographs of the labourers working with and around him.
Grant tends to work slowly, returning again and again to the same places and becoming a familiar sight to the people who gather there. He continues to work in this way on long term projects across the UK and in wider Europe.
As influences and inspirations, Grant has cited Raymond Carver, Gil Scott Heron and John Berger.
Grant’s photographs are held in collections of photography at Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Folkwang Museum, Essen, the Martin Parr Foundation and other international public and private collections. He was the course leader of the BA (Hons) Documentary Photography course at the University of Wales Newport between 1998 and 2013, when he became a lecturer in the MFA Photography course at Ulster University, Belfast.
