Stuart Griffiths (b. Manchester, 1972) first began taking photographs in violent council estates whilst serving in the Parachute Regiment during the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.
After his second tour of duty in 1992 as a military photographer in 3 Para, Griffiths left the Airborne Brotherhood and moved to Brighton and become the ‘un-official’ photographer of the Church of the Sub-Genius photographing the burgeoning illegal rave scene of 1994. In 1997 Griffiths graduated from the University of Brighton with a second-class honors degree in Editorial photography.
Griffiths has free-lanced for many titles, travelling far and wide. He has been imprisoned in the Congo, resided in the mountains of Portugal and lived in a homeless hostel for veterans in the east end of London and photographed gang culture in Liverpool in the wake of the Reece Jones murder in 2007. Many of these ‘dispatches’ have appeared on Vice. In 2009, a documentary film called Isolation (about Griffiths journey from soldier to civilian) was premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival and then toured the UK at Picture House Cinemas.
In 2010 Griffiths won the Brighton Photo Fringe Open and had his first major solo show at the Phoenix Gallery in Brighton, which later toured the UK. The following year Griffiths won a bursary from the National Media Museum to make first monograph The Myth of the Airborne Warrior (Photoworks, 2011) and in 2013, Griffiths second book Pigs’ Disco(Ditto) was published. Presently, Griffiths has optioned the film rights to Pigs’ Disco and is currently a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Ulster.
About ‘GANGS & GUNS’:
“This series of photographs began as a magazine assignment for a Sunday supplement magazine on Liverpool gang culture in the wake of the Reece Jones murder in 2007. I began with working with the crime writer Graham Johnson and I travelled from London to Liverpool making contact with gangs over time.
This was not an easy place to work within, gangs by nature distrust journalist and getting access to the various gangs I photographed took many visits. Some of these visits were very traumatic. I had a Mac-10 sub machine pulled on me and for a moment I thought I was going to be murdered, for getting to close.
After time a mutual trust formed and I travelled back to Liverpool for other visits with other journalist from international titles. These journalists would never return to the UK, there experiences in Liverpool too traumatic. In the end, Vice Magazine published my photographs and although I wanted to continue with documenting gang culture, it was proving to be too dangerous.
These photographs are the representations of that journey, when I was willing to take many risks for the sake of documenting the reality of a subject that was in some ways impossible to photograph”.
