Ken Grant
Pete James Memorial Lecture
Thursday 16th October 2025
6.30 PM – 8.00 PM
Birmingham School of Art, B3 3BX
Free, Book your ticket here
About Ken Grant:
Ken Grant was born in Liverpool in 1967. Since the 1980’s he has photographed in the city and engaged in sustained projects both in the region, in Wales, and in wider Europe. He works on long term engagements with his contemporaries which eventually become books and exhibitions. His photographs are held in major collections, including those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Folkwang Museum, Essen, the James Hyman collection of British Photography and other international public and private collections.
He continues to exhibit internationally, including at Counter Space (MoMA, New York, 2011), Home Sweet Home (Arles, 2019), and Fotografia Europea (Reggio Emilia, 2022). A first monograph of the Liverpool photographs, The Close Season, was published in 2002 with No pain whatsoever following in 2014. Other monographs include A Topical Times for These Times (2016) and Benny Profane (2019). His work made in Wales over three decades was published as Cwm: The Fair Country in 2025. Ken was editor for the recent book on the life and work of Chris Killip (Thames & Hudson, 2022), along with his wife, Tracy Marshall-Grant and together they curated the recent career retrospective of Killip’s work which toured internationally.
His career as a teacher has included a decade leading the Documentary Photography programme in Newport, South Wales and he has supported the development of photography education through galleries in the UK and Ireland, notably as a board member at Open Eye Gallery Liverpool, at Belfast Exposed, Belfast and the Gallery of Photography (now Photo Museum Ireland), Dublin. He is currently co-course director of the MFA Photography programme at Belfast School of Art / Ulster University in Belfast.
About Pete James:
Pete James (1958-2018) was a significant figure in British photography. Between 1989 and 2015, he was the Curator of Photography Collections at the Library of Birmingham, establishing one of the most significant public collections of British photography, ranging from historical photographs by Sir Benjamin Stone to archives of work by renowned photographers such as Anna Fox, Brian Griffin, John Blakemore, John Myers, Martin Parr, Vanley Burke, and Val Williams.
Pete worked on many other initiatives over the years, including chairing the Committee of National Photography Collections; co-founding the Photography Collections Network; co-founding GRAIN Projects, supporting projects such as FORMAT International Photography Festival; lecturing and working with many academic institutions; writing books and curating exhibitions at galleries such as the V&A, the National Portrait Gallery, Somerset House, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Ikon Gallery, and the Library of Birmingham. He worked with Mat Collishaw on his exhibition that used virtual reality technology to re-stage one of the earliest exhibitions of photography – William Henry Fox Talbot’s presentation of photographic prints at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, which toured Somerset House, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, the Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, and the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, in 2017-2018.
