We are fortunate to be able to access a space at 1000 Trades for our monthly Photography socials, starting from Monday 23rd of September at 6:30pm. 

This Monday we have Dan Burwood sharing work with us. ‘New Family Home’ is the provisional title for a new autobiographical work by Dan Burwood, drawn from his photography since 2008, when he first visited Beirut, Lebanon. Early image series witness a city through the photographic gaze of an ingenuous outsider, albeit filtered through ‘Pity the Nation’ and the barest sense of Sykes-Picot.

(After moving to Syria in 2010, and leaving in 2011 during the early Syrian Uprising,) he returned there in 2015 with Dima; they married in 2016, have 2 children and live on the nearest edge of Birmingham to Beirut. To have hearts and minds in 2 places is far from an uncommon experience in Balsall Heath; this work speaks from the particularly Lebanese-British experience of having 2 homes washing into each other.

Since 2015 Dan’s archive of Lebanon opens into the life of their extended family, and friendship group, becomes less formal, more vernacular, and comprises thousands of images and videos from the perspective of someone no longer just a visitor.

This is the first attempt to bring the everyday shooting of the last decade, collected without an endpoint or output in mind, into some kind of edit or order.