Turner Prize 1996 poster
He lived from 1972 to 1979 in Poland, spending two of those years studying graphics at the Academy of Science. His subsequent work articulated his socialist beliefs, often through black-and-white photographs of his friends in Krakow, Poland, or the East End of London; his large photographs were always unique rather than editional prints, stressing their physical identity as handmade objects. These portraits and figure studies have a claustrophobic, sparse atmosphere, suggestive of a mentality bound and defined by the weight of its own history. His work often deals with the problems of a mythologising interpretation of history and highlights the contingency and specificity of the present. In the mid 1990s he worked on a photographic project in Barcelona to describe the experiences and identities of individuals living in communities.