Alan Raw

“Me and my show ‘POP’ are very happy to be here at the HIP Festival. Great location and wonderful galleries, curated by Alan Raw.” Brian Griffin.

Curation has always been the practice, it’s the medium that changes.

In the early 1990s, the walls of Hull’s youth clubs were the gallery. The young people who painted them were the artists, I was the assistant arts officer for the council. The playlist I built for a Friday night DJ set was a statement about whose music needed to be heard. The stage lineups I selected at music festivals were collections with an argument behind them. My BBC radio show was a curated presentation of under-the-radar artists who weren’t being played anywhere else. I didn’t start staging full gallery exhibitions until I opened POP (Pride of Place Art Space) in 2013. But I’ve been making the case for underrepresented creative work since 1993.

The exhibition record: 

Through HIPfest (Hull International Photography Festival), The Creative & Cultural Organisation’s many galleries, PhotoCity, and European Capitals of Culture. I’ve staged over 120 exhibitions across 34 spaces, almost all of them disused city centre space. Empty offices, abandoned department stores, vacant industrial buildings, docksides, and public squares. The choice of venue is part of the curatorial argument: work that the mainstream art world wasn’t engaging the public with, shown in spaces that needed new life breathed into them. This is a deliberate practice of activation, of artists, of buildings, of communities. 

The photographers: 

HIPfest was the UK’s largest annual photography festival of its time, which I directed from 2014 to 2023. I worked with some of the finest photographers in the world, curating their work for exhibition: Brian Griffin, Peter Dench, Tom Stoddart, Laura Pannack, Dougie Wallace, John Bulmer, Matthew Finn, Rhiannon Adam, Frieke Janssens, Isabelle Pateer, Ilvy Njiokiktjien, François Brunelle, Mike Harvey, Richard Lees, Matt Hart and many more, whose work I had printed, framed, hung, and promoted at my own expense with my team of fellow volunteers.

In 2018, I curated the retrospective of Marilyn Stafford, one of the twentieth century’s most significant documentary photographers. I staged it in a disused city-centre fashion store, as Marilyn had been the first fashion photographer for Chanel in 1940s Paris. We called it: A Fashion Retrospective, From Haute Couture to the Birth of Pret-a-Porter. Marilyn and I worked together on it for months, and the end result was a stunning success. It was my hundredth exhibition. The show resulted in Marilyn being featured on BBC television and receiving a lifetime achievement award. She was in her nineties, but full of life and enthusiasm. I am so glad I could print and show that work in a place that allowed thousands of people to engage with it personally, and many young photographers were able to meet Marilyn in the space. Marilyn asked me to have my team print two more sets, which she wanted to pay for, she then gave one set to me. I will treasure it along with her personal copy of a portrait she took of her friend Edith Piaf, which Marilyn presented me with at the opening.

Having already shown Smith’s Dock by Ian Macdonald (one of Britain’s foremost documentary photographers). I personally commissioned Ian to create an original body of work about Hull: black and white, shot on film, an outsider’s perspective on the city and its people as a Europort, connected to Rotterdam by ferry. That work belongs to Hull’s visual record.

Beyond HIPfest and HIP Gallery, I curated PhotoCity London in Paternoster Square for Fuji, Camera World, and Genesis. I have curated exhibitions for three European Capitals of Culture, Aarhus, Paphos, and San Sebastián, and outdoor city centre photo exhibitions during Hull City of Culture.

The collection:

Many years of working closely with artists, in spaces I coordinated, means I hold a personal collection of significant work. Signed pieces I purchased from the exhibitions, or received as gifts from the artists as a thank you for supporting them. Along with signed photo-books and memorabilia from the shows. That collection is undocumented and currently not on public display. It is part of what comes next.

The work right now: 

The physical spaces are gone. The corporate landlords who bought the buildings we worked in evicted us and left them closed and commercially dead. The curatorial practice is in reconstruction alongside the rest of the work, feeling its way toward new forms, new spaces, new arguments about what needs to be seen and where.

The MA in Creative Practice I have engaged in is partly the formal context for that reckoning. Expect more opportunities to engage with wonderful work.

Testimonials:

“Alan has exceptional vision and innovation as a curator. Having been involved in the Hull International Festival of Photography and experienced his skills, I trust his expertise and ability to create a festival that is visually stunning and engages an audience. Alan is committed, confident and galvanises the team around him to bring out the best in his creative collaborators, leading each project with an approach that allows for creative dialogue, without losing sight of the end objective and priorities.”  (Peter Dench, Getty Images, World Press Photography Award Winner, Co-Founder of the White Cloth Gallery Leeds).

“Entering into the HIP gallery we were presented with an exhibition by renowned photographer Ian Macdonald showcasing work from Smiths Dock. With nearly fifty years of material, it was incredible to see such established work beautifully curated by Alan Raw. His understanding and insight into the work allowed the audience to really engage with the prints on the wall. Isabelle Pateer’s beautifully crafted large scale prints were hung high around the gallery wall, echoing works of great art. The photography on show proved to be a hit with locals and the wider photography community and the ambitious curation took viewers around Europe and lived up to its International title.” (Matt Finn, recipient of the Jerwood/ Photoworks Award).