Leighton works internationally, his photographs offering a scrutiny of the form and functionality of an urban world. It is the infrastructure of the city which informs his work: Here the shape and colour of the architecture, of the streets and public spaces, how the city is lit by day and by night, are of as much of interest to him as the people that populate them.

Leighton is concerned with the increasingly conditioned viewing of the world as typically portrayed in two-dimensional imagery. The emphasis of commercial photography in film, advertising and television, is arguably on the aesthetic, and a process of ‘glossing over’, becomes increasingly perfectible through digital manipulation. The easy assumption is that the photographic image portrays documental fact, rather than photography as an authored representation of a subject.

Leighton uses the viewers’ eagerness to accept the familiar and dismiss the unfamiliar to his advantage. His digitally altered images are apparently factual records of cityscape, but are revealed on closer inspection as fictitious and imaginary.

Using his repertoire of optical devices Leighton produces large scale glossy images, which use an equivalent level of superficiality, as found in mainstream commercial photography. In their extreme form these images become caricatures of the city, as Leighton uses symmetry and repartition to create illogical yet often believable space.

The images become depictions of a super-modern Utopian society that also imply that the shiny spectacle of the city is used to conceal its inherent anxiety and alienation. Simultaneous sensations of claustrophobia and agoraphobia emerge from the ever-expanding scale of the urban environment. Leighton in his world has the power to alter a place or create an entirely new one, he is able to populate an environment that has never existed and ignore the usual rules of photography as capturing a real moment in time. Images become more akin to a memory of a place - a distorted reality - which have the power to conjure up genuine feelings of nostalgia.




Tom Leighton was born in London in 1981. Following his BA in printmaking from the University of Brighton in 2004, he gained an MA from the Royal College of Art in 2006. Throughout his practice, Leighton has worked with urban landscapes. In 2006 he won the John Purcell Paper Prize and the Thames & Hudson Book Prize. He has exhibited in London, Tokyo and the United States. Collections include The Sandor Family Collection, Chicago, The UBS Art Collection, Slade & Newman, New York and The Mayor of Kensington and Chelsea, Mr Andrew Dalton, London.





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