SPARKS


CREDITS

GUP Author

GUP TEAM


Artist

Stephen Leslie

Artist Website

stephenleslie.co.uk

Humour is a rare trait in modern photography, especially with the level of wit shown by London-based Street photographer Stephen Leslie (b. 1970). Capturing everything from the unspeakably bizarre to the screamingly funny, Stephen Leslie possesses timing one might expect of a comedian.

A scriptwriter by profession and storyteller by nature, Stephen Leslie has been making stories his whole professional career. Using street photography as a means to break up his working life and “keep his eye in”, Leslie has been building up a colossal archive of photographs cataloguing moments of humour, irony and chance in his surrounding area without any real plan, until he recently went through his backlog and discovered a collection of images that hinted at a wider, hidden narrative.

Using his background as a scriptwriter to his advantage, Leslie has been writing short stories to accompany these photographs in order to answer the questions the images raise. He explains that this is a treat for him since, for most, street photography is the spontaneous art of subconsciously being aware of fleeting moments, “so it’s a real luxury to be able to revisit the photographs and then take the time to write stories about them”.

A visual representation of serendipity, Leslie has been stumbling across the world capturing amusing anecdotes of inner city life for the last twenty years. Having finally curated the thousands of oddities he has encountered, he is currently raising money to produce a book of sixty photographs, each with its own imagined story.