Trained as a silkscreen printer and print finisher after leaving school, Chris Dorley-Brown joined Red Saunders studio as a camera assistant and then set up his photographic practice in 1984, concentrating on documenting east London. In 1988, he was appointed artist-in-residence at London’s Homerton Hospital, which remains the UK’s only residency of this nature. In 1991, he expanded his interest outside photography to film-making and other activities associated with burgeoning new technologies. In 1992, he received a Photographers Gallery Bursary to photograph the administrative buildings of the EC in Brussels, Strasbourg, and Luxembourg.

Since 1993, Chris has been collaborating with artists, filmmakers, curators, publishers, performers, and writers as well groups and individuals in the public sphere in a variety of cultural contexts, and institutions primarily outside the art gallery (radio, print, cinema, television, the internet, and architecture).

In 2006, he was one of three artists the BBC commissioned to research and create new perspectives for developing the iPlayer application using the corporation’s vast TV and radio archive. The resulting publication BBC in the East End 1958-73 was launched in 2007.

Exhibiting internationally, Chris has increasingly become concerned with the development of London’s social and civic environment and has used photography and writing to accompany his text pieces in the form of a journal. Extracts were published in The Art of Dissent in 2013. In the period before, during, and after the London 2012 Olympics, Chris created The Cut, a major document of the event.

In 2015, two widely acclaimed photo books, The Longest Way Round (Overlapse) and Drivers in the 1980s (Hoxton Mini-Press) were published.

Chris lives and works in London, and his work can be found in many significant public collections, including the BBC, British Library, Wellcome Trust, National Sound Archive, Museum of London, and Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris).

These images are from a still emerging series begun over five years ago. The idea started out from some research I did into my family history for a different reason and I just did some snapshots to illustrate this research, something to show my brothers some day.

I found myself going to street corners and just looking, sometimes I wasn’t carrying a camera, I was just fascinated by watching how people moved and negotiated the space around them and particularly how they acknowledged each others presence. I didn’t think how it could be photographed at first so I began making pictures of just the architecture or the spaces between things and waiting for people to exit the frame before I made the picture. I then had this backdrop to start playing with and add figures selectively to each part of the frame. I was intrigued how these composites seem to create alternate narratives and constructions that had a degree of artificiality, a bit like a still from a movie or maybe a painting. I still think of them as documentary photographs, kind of multiple decisive moments if you like.