E. Horsfield, Well Street, East London, March 1986

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Horsfield often prints his negatives for the first time many years after the moment in time they portray, the time when the photograph was taken. This lends his subjects a duality of meaning: they are both the focus of memory, and objects existing in the present. The artist believes in the capacity of the photographic image to enable us to appreciate 'slow' history, as opposed to the swiftly changing surface of culture and politics. His approach to portraits and the nude is rooted in the traditions of painting. Here the pose of the figure is a quotation from Masaccio's 'The Expulsion from Paradise'. Such references extend the historical dimensions of the work.

Gallery label, September 2004

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