Please join us in the Bookshop and meet photographer Chris Brooks who is launching his first and self published monograph The Brooks Press of Wirksworth.
In The Brooks Press of Wirksworth Chris Brooks revives and re-imagines his own family’s publishing house, The Brooks Press, some forty years after its closure. For almost ten years Brooks has been returning to his childhood home in Derbyshire to photograph the land and research the story of his family’s printing press, a business which he knew very little about due to the death of his father when he was a teenager.
An imprint founded in 1898 by his great grandfather, F.W. Brooks, The Brooks Press published a wide range of material from travel guides and poetry to books on self-improvement. It finally closed its doors in the early 1970s, having passed from father to son for three generations, winding up just before Chris Brooks was born.
By employing a mixture of exquisitely composed, atmospheric, large format colour portraits and landscapes combined with archival fragments and pages of letterpress, Chris Brooks examines the pull of history and the complicated nature of belonging and family. By doing so, he draws our attention to the constantly changing meaning of what it is to be ‘in’ and ‘of ’ England. The Brooks Press of Wirksworth is thus a timely meditation on changing notions of nationhood, identity and the power of place.
Chris Brooks studied photography between the Midlands and the north of England specialising in the photograph as art (paid for by jobs as wide ranging as oil refinery worker and club DJ). After graduation, he began working in London, and later in New York, on both personal and commisioned projects, gaining much technical experience and the skill he needed to be able to craft the images he does for his own work, as well as for international magazines such as WSJ, W, Amica and Wallpaper.
Thu 28 March, 18.00 - 20.00, Bookshop.
Free event, no Booking.
