Author(s): Mark Neville

PHOTOGRAPHY MONOGRAPHS | STEIDL

Fancy Pictures brings together seven of Mark Neville's socially engaged and intensely immersive projects from the last decade. Neville often pictures working communities in a collaborative process intended to be of direct, practical benefit to his subjects. The Port Glasgow Book Project (2004) is a book of his social documentary images of the Scottish town. Never commercially available, copies were given directly to all 8,000 residents. Deeds Not Words (2011) focuses on Corby, an English town that suffered serious industrial pollution. Neville produced a book to be given free to the environmental health services department of each of the 433 local councils in the UK. Battle Against Stigma and Helmand are both projects resulting from Neville's time in Afghanistan. Two projects for the USA are also included. Invited by the Andy Warhol Museum in 2012, Neville examined social divisions in Pittsburgh, and the photo-essay. Here is London, commissioned by The New York Times Magazine, echoes the style of the celebrated photographers who documented the boom and bust of the 1970s and '80s.