RYAN BLACKWELL
LOST & FOUND
London is a city of constant change. Things are bought-used-abandoned-replaced. Mattresses appear on pavements, objects gather among parks and rivers, and the traces of everyday life become part of the landscape. Most of the time we walk past them without looking.
Lost & Found is an ongoing exploration of London through its waste, and questions what the things we leave behind tell us about how we live. Across four interconnected works, it looks at the objects, images and ideas that sit at the edges of our attention, asking what happens when we stop to look at them.
Beginning with photographs of discarded objects found on London’s streets, Lost & Found considers the city’s endless cycle of collecting and throwing away. In Portraits (2026), objects recovered from the Thames are photographed with the care usually reserved for things of beauty or value. Disposable products, fragments of packaging and intimate belongings become records of lives once lived around them. A series of video interviews with researchers brings new perspectives to the ways we experience and understand the city, while [third project name TBC] turns to beauty and makeup, exploring the uneasy relationship between what we consume, what we desire and what we discard.
Together, these works ask when an object becomes waste, and what happens when its meaning changes. A mattress, a vape, a lipstick. These objects pass through our hands, belong to a moment, and remain part of the world we share long after their use has passed.
There is a contradiction at the heart of the city. We want London to feel clean, ordered and desirable, yet the waste we produce is an unavoidable part of the same environment. We remove it from sight, but it does not simply disappear. It accumulates in the streets, settles into the river, and leaves a record of our habits.
Lost & Found is not an attempt to resolve this contradiction, but to spend time with it. What do we choose to see, and what do we learn to ignore? What might the things we leave behind reveal about the lives we lead, and the traces we leave behind?
ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice explores how images negotiate between time, culture and place. Working across fashion, portraiture and beauty, I use photography to examine the ways we construct meaning, value and identity through the images we make and consume. I am interested in the tension between what feels instinctively beautiful and the cultural ideas that teach us why something should be considered beautiful. My camera is both a medium and a means of questioning how, and why, we look at the world in the ways that we do.
My work develops through sustained periods of looking, often drawing my attention towards people, objects and environments that sit at the edges of everyday attention. I am interested in what happens when something familiar is looked at more closely, and how photography can shift our relationship with it.
Originally from Liverpool and now living and working in London, I approach the city from the position of someone who has lived within it for many years without originally belonging to it. This perspective informs my interest in how cities shape the people who inhabit them, and how our relationship to place changes through familiarity, distance and time. Alongside my photographic practice, I work as an Associate Lecturer, remaining engaged with emerging approaches to photography and the evolving ways in which images are made, understood and experienced.
My projects are evolving investigations, developed through sustained observation and an ongoing curiosity about people, objects, culture and place. Lost & Found grows from this approach: a five-year investigation into London's discarded materials and the ways that what we choose to ignore remains an intrinsic part of the city we inhabit.
