Patrick Shanahan is someone I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. An English photographer-turned-academic whose work strikes a chord with its unique Englishness. We are swamped with various US-centric aesthetics, the German School etc etc so it is nice to see something so essential English.

His last published project, Esperantis also contains images shot in Spanish locations, some, like his Sitges pics, I’ve shot the same location, so you also get the same sense of ‘Brit in Spain’ I feel with some of my images. He seems to have a close link to Spain and has produced a number of bodies of work here.

My deliberate nod to this pic was this one, taken of the same location but from a different viewpoint

But enough of my pics and back to Patricks…

Terra Vision was a foreruner to the Esperantis project

However, my personal favourite was cornwall: a post-landscape project that looked at how the lack of local industry and the turn to tourism has changed the Cornwall landscape…

I love the kind of irony dealing with nationalist symbols that is almost completely lacking when dealing with American flags etc

Looking back from current work to the early work it is interesting to see how Patrick moved from producing icons to showing more context within his images

Although I’d love to have this hanging on the wall