Edmund Clark


Edmund Clark HonFRPS is a British artist and photographer whose work explores politics, representation, incarceration and control. His research based work combines a range of references and forms including bookmaking, installations, photography, video, documents, text and found images and material. Several of his projects explore the war on terror.
His notable projects include Guantanamo: If The Light Goes Out, Control Order House, The Mountains of Majeed, and Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition. Edmund Clark's awards include the 2009 International Photography Award from The British Journal of Photography, 2016 Rencontres d'Arles Photo-Text Book Award and 2017 Infinity Award in Documentary and Photojournalism category from International Center of Photography. In 2018 Clark was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society. Edmund Clark was the Ikon Gallery's artist-in-residence at Europe's only wholly therapeutic community prison, HM Prison Grendon from 2014 until 2018. Supported by the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, the residency culminated in the publication of My Shadow's Reflection and a solo exhibition In Place of Hate at Ikon Gallery.

Life and career

Clark worked as a researcher in London and Brussels before gaining a postgraduate diploma in photojournalism at London College of Communication.
He gained access to Guantanamo Bay detention camp and to a house under a control order. His book Control Order House is his response to a period he spent staying in a house with a man known as 'CE' who had been placed under a Control Order due to his suspected involvement with terrorist-related activity. Clark spent three days working in the house taking a large number of quick, uncomposed photographs surveying the site. These images, along with architectural plans of the house, redacted documents relating to the case and a diary kept by 'CE' form a portrait of sorts: of the site and its inhabitant and of the structure of legal restriction imposed and represented by the house.

Publications