Andrew Brown featured in new book on photography’s environmental history
Artist and educator Andrew Brown, who is based at SPACE Studios Ilford, is featured in the final chapter of a new book by Michelle Henning titled A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog, and Empire, recently published by University of Chicago Press.
The book offers an environmental history of chemical photography, exploring its deep entanglements with industrial production, empire, and atmospheric pollution. Drawing on research from the archive of Ilford Limited, Henning traces how photographic technologies were shaped by—and helped shape—industrial and ecological environments.
Andrew’s work appears in the book’s final chapter, which reflects on contemporary artists who are revisiting photography’s material and environmental histories. His projects explore the legacy of photographic manufacturing in Ilford and its relationship to local ecologies, particularly the River Roding and the communities that live alongside it.
In the exhibition Changing Currents, Brown worked with local secondary school students through community workshops connected to the River Roding Trust. Participants experimented with hydrophones, full-spectrum photography and light refraction techniques to explore the river’s ecosystems and imagine the perspectives of species living beneath the water’s surface. Brown’s practice combines historical and experimental processes from sensitised glass plates using nineteenth-century emulsion formulas to infrared and composite imaging, video and soundscape, to reflect on place, industrial heritage and environmental change.
A Dirty History of Photography will be launched at The Photographers’ Gallery on 26 March 2026, where Henning will present her research and discuss how photography’s materials and infrastructures connect environmental impact, war and empire.
Andrew Brown is an artist and educator based at SPACE Studios, Ilford, and is Arts Associate for the River Roding Trust. He uses analogue, digital, alternative and historic photographic processes alongside soundscapes, documents and objects to explore the impact on communities of rapid changes in the built and natural environment in east London. Recent commissions include SPACE/Aetreum, UP projects and the Arts Council, and collaborative work with East London Textile Arts, Humorisk CIC and Thames Ward Community Project. Following a career in education, he studied photography at Falmouth University and is now working towards a Doctorate in Fine Art at the University of East London.