Ben Luke
speaker
1,919 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 1 Sep
Ben Luke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
You know you were wanted to respond to this historical event in nineteen sixty three, but it took you a long time to figure out exactly how you were gonna do that and you needed both to go there but also to enact all kinds of research in order to reach your conclusion, right?
No, absolutely.
And talking about that weight of history that you just mentioned, I'm intrigued by this idea that it felt important to you in the Birmingham project, but also in this sequence of works that you've made about enslaved people in recent years, that you wanted to work in black and white because that was also a kind of historical reference point.
That was one of the ways that you could lend a certain gravity to the language that you were using photographically.
Can you explain a bit more about that?
Absolutely.
But also it seems to me it's really crucial in terms of the kind of tone of the work and also presented you with an extraordinary challenge, right?
Because you didn't use night photography, you know, contemporary technical means to photograph by night.
You photograph by day and then evoke a journey into Ohio, say, by night, or capture the plantations by night.
In such
such a way that actually must have presented you with a tremendous challenge photographically.
So in a way you set yourself a really difficult task to try and evoke what that must have felt like through the eyes of those enslaved people that you wanted somehow to represent.
Let's move on to the questions that we ask all our guests.
Who was the first artist whose work you loved?
Do you feel there's any Rembrandt I would say looking at your portrait photography?
Rembrandt's there, you know, you can feel him
I mean, literally, do you mean that?
That you know, you were thinking directly about Rembrandt when you were making them?
Which historical artist do you turn to the most today?
Well it's interesting you say that because I think a point that you made when you did Harlem Redux was that place has actually always been the subject of your work as well as portraiture.
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