Atom Rooms: The Young Satellites Photography Exhibition

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AtomRooms Gallery presents the The Young Satellites

Atom Rooms: Six Million Tales in the Teenage City

AtomRooms Gallery, 328 Portobello Road, presents the The Young Satellites: Six Million Tales in the Teenage City exhibition curated by Brett Walker showcasing the works of young photographers Jack Davison, Lydia Roberts and Conor Williams. The exhibition is open to the public from 8th to 24th December.

From Atom Rooms Point of View

Atom Rooms is passionate about supporting new and emerging cultural movements and validating the voice of young people in Britain. This exhibition will showcase works from three young creatives who have each found the means to express themselves through the medium of photography. Beautiful, yet challenging, the images will allow a wider audience to understand young people’s perceptions of the world around them and the six million unheard tales in the teenage city.

Meet the Curator and Photographer Brett Walker

Originally from the north of England, Brett moved to London at 15 years of age alone and penniless. After working as Peter Linburgh’s assistant in London and Paris, Brett continued to climb in the fashion and advertising industries throughout the 80s working for The Face, ID and Tatler among others.

Brett then spent a year in the merchant navy and travelling to Angola and Brazil to work with street kids. 16 years later Brett picked up a digital camera having never worked with one before and hasn’t put it down since. Nowadays, Brett is one of the ten most popular and viewed photographers on Flickr.

A word from Brett Walker:

What is the purpose of photography today? Far from the days of traditional film, young people of the 21st Century are armed with digital cameras, laptops and scant technical knowledge. No wet cold darkrooms or rolls of film for them, rather they are tucked up in bed with a card full of perfectly exposed shots and a 15” Macbook to keep them warm. Is it too easy for the young photographer today? Is it valid? And more importantly does it have a purpose?

The images showcased in this exhibition are all produced by young people aged 16 to 19 years old, and they say as much about the photographers as the people within them. The digital camera has become the new guitar and young people are picking them up, learning a few chords and shaking the house down. The tunes may be simple and the playing less than refined, But the lyrics… oh the lyrics

There are 6 million tales in the teenage city. Choose one.

Meet the Young Satellites - Jack Davison

Jack has always been a country boy, having been stuck in remote bumpkin villages in deepest darkest Essex since he was a dot. As a dot he didn’t get up to much, apart from draw everything that poured forth from his head. Then he picked up a paintbrush and made a lot of inky mess on canvas. Yet it was not until 2006 that he started taking photos and realized he could never better the camera’s ability to capture a moment.

He (apparently) took shit photos of flowers, dogs, old people, street signs for a couple of years, but it was not until he started studying other photographers’ works that he felt he was starting to get somewhere.

Now Jack can’t help but be continuously alert for something worth capturing. He drinks ginger beer and takes photos with big shiny cameras, and London is not so daunting through the lens.

Meet the Young Satellites - Lydia Roberts

Swindon based student Lydia Roberts grew up loving art and creativity, aswell as dance, which has given her a better knowledge of shape and positioning in photos. She first picked up a camera in 2008 on a holiday and has not looked back. She’s constantly inspired by the work of others and is motivated by what she sees. She specializes in striking self-portraiture that she feels reflects the many facets to her personality and creativity.

Meet the Young Satellites - Conor Williams

The licence to create from scratch has always been a driving force in Conor’s life, from sketching bizarre characters to evoking his own designs of a world ever so slightly removed from reality. It is the only way Conor knows to subdue the persistent ideas of his mind.

Photography became an integral part of his life in 2006 when Conor met his biological father for the very first time – himself a photographer with a taste for the unusual. The moment they met, Conor’s father shoved a camera in his hand and told him to shoot anything and everything and Conor learnt the art of capturing strangers in the streets without them knowing. Since then, Conor’s art has developed and his focus is on taking the peculiar scenes and characters of his mind and re-creating them in a photograph.