History from Below: An exhibition of radical photographic tableaux from Red Saunders.
Red Saunders is an artist/photographer who combines his photographic practice with cultural, musical, and political activism. “My tableaux only work because of the enthusiasm of my supporters both crew and cast and production teams. We struggle with institutional funding so rarely have a proper budget, so we need people who share my dreams to join with us in manifesting these ideas. We use techniques of the tableaux much the same as they did 150 yrs ago, save today we have the digital tools of the Mac and photoshop, which also enable us to shoot ambitious ideas on a tight budget. We do not use CGI [computer generated Imagery] or AI , everything you see we photograph .The Hidden Project ends where photography began .”
The exhibition shines photographic light on great moments in the long struggle of working people for democracy and social justice. The aim of the project, through re-imagining those events, is to reproduce important historical scenes involving the dissenters, radicals, revolutionaries, and non-conformists who have so often been hidden from the very history they made. It covers such subjects as the Peasants’ Revolt (1381), the Women Levellers’ Movement (1647), the Swing Riots (1830), the London Chartists (1842), the Peterloo Massacre (1819), the Great Derby Lockout (1833-4), and Sikh RAF volunteers in World War Two.
Each scene is carefully planned and lit, using local community enactors. To create these amazing images, Saunders has brought together the talents of a wide range of professionals and craftspeople, alongside an enthusiastic cast of volunteers who share his vision. Despite their complexity and epic scale, no ‘artificial intelligence’ or CGI (computer-generated imagery) has been used in creating the works in The Hidden Project.
Generally speaking, The Hidden Project’s subject matter ends with the invention of photography in the 1840s.