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Luke Joyce: Breaking and entering

04/04/2018
This talk, from professional photographer Luke Joyce from Exmouth, was a talk like no other in that Luke's photography was almost a kind of burglary - 'breaking and entering' derelict or abandoned building so as to record these 'time capsules' before they were demolished. 'Get in, don't get caught and get out with pictures'.

His enthusiasm for this kind of work very few of us would ever dream of attempting was backed up by some excellent prints of what he and his group of fellow photographic vigilantes found when they finally scaled the barbed wire fences and evaded (sometimes) the security guards or the police. A self-taught photographer, Luke revealed how he had made progress by taking lots of poor images, learning from them and moving into new photographic fields such as light painting.

Delivered in a very off the cuff way, Luke answered many questions including 'Do you apply for permission to take these images' - to which the answer inevitably was in the negative. Luke was a real character and this side of his photography contrasted strongly with his day job as a full-time school photographer. We were much entertained by his casual asides and stories of his adventures as he and his mates tried to evade detection - it's not often we have a speaker who tells us that after breaking into one building he found he was in a gynaecologist's old room or that the dastardly French police had let his car's tyres down, so they could not escape.

More of Luke's work was recently exhibited at the Beehive in Honiton.