Founded in 2024 by photographers Fergus Riley and Finnegan Travers, Pig Iron Works is a collaborative publishing venture that aims to use photography as a tool for connection and community, creating space for human-driven work to exist outside digital channels of distribution. Essentially, their goal is to offer an escape from the online world. As Travers shared with us:
“It’s heart breaking to work in print and be apart of darkroom culture, then to see the work sat only on instagram. Days go into making images. I often think the darkroom becomes a church and its followers who like making faces in the dark join in silence and converse over colour casts. I’m sure everyone knows this feeling when they see something in the real world vs on their phone curled up in a ball with eyes burning—its just more meaningful and we really wanted to push the group publication aspect of this in hopes we can at the very least talk more about making things collectively and bringing work back into the physical world.”
Their first publication with designers SM Studio, “Handover” is a visual conversation between photography communities in London and Manchester. The book brings together 27 photographers to showcase the kind of work that might otherwise not be seen. Split into three chapters—‘Even Seeing a Rainbow in the City is Rare’, ‘Lust and Laundry’, and ‘The Fable’—which contributors were asked to respond to, the result is a passing of personal perspective and interpretation between people and place.
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