Guest Lecture – Murray Ballard

                       

British photographer Murray Ballard spent 9 years doing his project ‘Cryonics’, documenting people and the technical process. We are happy to invite he to come and share his experience of photographic practice, and how he develops the idea through his camera.

                                      

The motivation of starting ‘Cryonics’ project was that Ballard read an article from newspaper and it mentioned a president of the cryonics, so he googled that and it also reminded he how world’s change. Since 2006, Ballard started to look at cryonics in UK as well as researched how they became cryonics. Not only people but also animal such as cats can require for pet reserve. Ballard photographing portrait as well as the process of deep-freezing the bodies. I think he has connected to the subject deeply and hard to draw to the end of the project. Because this is a long-term project, I am appreciated that he could persevere with this works, if I requested doing a project for 10 years, I might be crazy and couldn’t stand it. Another project I quite like which is called Modify tomato, it is about took photos in a place and observing the ways of growing, which is more like communicating with science. The name of this project is interesting, the reason of calling it modify, because it means step by step and the whole process is hugely complicated, I think there are lots of conditions of planting things so this project is named modify tomato.

Images from:

Murray Ballard, (2016), Portable perfusion kit. Home of Alan and Silvia Sinclair. [ONLINE]. Available at: http://www.bjp-online.com/2017/03/murray-ballard-shoots-cryonics-in-the-prospect-of-immortality/[Accessed 3 November 2016].

Murray Ballard, (2011), GM tomato plant [ONLINE]. Available at: http://murrayballard.com/work/how-to-genetically-modify-a-tomato-and-other-things-we-eat/#PHOTO_16 [Accessed 3 November 2016].