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Dayshift, from The Exiles: back garden of a terraced street, the sky dark and burning, a group of young men present but distant from each other. A man stirs a pot on a gas fire, an outhouse holds a singer and a drunk, a black and white cartoon flickers on a TV through a window.
Dayshift · 2019 · Composite photograph from over 800 source files · Arts Council Collection

The Exiles

The Exiles is a series of five large-format photographic tableaux made between 2019 and 2023. Each image draws on local folklore, archival research, and family testimony, recreating scenes from the 1960s and 70s when male economic migrants arrived in Sandwell, in the Black Country, in the last throes of its industrial might.

The work uses the principles of cinema: large-scale lighting, set builds, casting, costume, and cinematic reference, applied to make a single still image. Each tableau is composed in post from hundreds of source files. The first, Dayshift, was made in 2019 as what was, in principle, a single-shot film. The remainder of the series was made in 2022 after the lockdown pause.

Dayshift is held in the Arts Council Collection. Seamstress and Furnacemen were acquired by the Contemporary Art Society and placed at The New Art Gallery Walsall. Seamstress won the GMC Trust First Prize at the RBSA Photography Exhibition in 2023. The title is borrowed from Kent Mackenzie's 1961 docu-drama of the same name, which followed a group of young Native Americans who had left reservation life to live in Bunker Hill, Los Angeles.

Seamstress, from The Exiles: a woman alone in a darkened sewing factory under a single fluorescent strip, an image of Guru Nanak in the foreground.
Furnacemen, from The Exiles: a furnace shed at night, a foreman gesturing from a platform to exhausted workers below.
Payday, from The Exiles: a red-lit pub interior, a Sikh man at the centre table, men passing money between them in the Cooth ritual.
The Bridge, from The Exiles: a canal near Galton Bridge in Smethwick at night, a barge in the distance, three young men on the far bank.

It's personal, it's political but it's also planetary. It goes back to the 1960s, but also thinks about deep time and thinks geologically. There's an ambition to that.

Ekow Eshun, UAL 20/20, 2025
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