Luca Bailey is a multidisciplinary artist working across visual art, photography, moving image and sound. His practice drifts between mediums, exploring the boundaries between documentation and introspection.
Bailey’s photographic work often focuses on narratives of journeying, both physical and emotional, reflecting on themes of memory, time and the instability of place. Many of his prints are produced through Xerox and other reprographic processes, embracing imperfection and repetition as integral to meaning.
He views the photograph not as a sacred or untouchable object, but as a mutable file, something to be reworked, copied, degraded and reimagined. This attitude speaks to a broader concern in his practice: how images survive, erode and transform as they move through time and technology.
Bailey’s aesthetic and conceptual sensibilities are heavily informed by the Provoke movement of post-war Japan, whose artists sought to challenge the notion of photographic truth through raw, grainy and gestural imagery. Like them, Bailey treats the photograph as an act of perception rather than documentation, a fragment of experience charged with ambiguity and emotion.
He also draws inspiration from Duane Michals, particularly his reflection: “It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph reality and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.” This sense of futility runs throughout Bailey’s work.
Originally from Birmingham, UK, he now lives and works in London. His debut monograph, Wanderer, will be released in 2025, marking the culmination of several years of photographic experimentation.
Project statement For Wanderer
Wanderer is a photographic series born from a period of emotional dislocation, a time when walking became less about joy and more about searching for something lost. Created during two separate periods in Japan, the work began unintentionally. The images emerged from long, aimless walks that became quiet acts of escape and reflection in the midst of growing personal tribulations.
What began as purposeless movement gradually revealed itself as a deeper search: for belonging, for stillness, for a sense of home - for all the things that felt missing.
During these solitary walks, one recurring figure kept reappearing: a lone raven. It crossed my path again and again, like a shadow or a witness,. At the time, I often found myself daydreaming about seeing the world from another perspective. Much of my view was from above, through the window five floors up, from the balcony overlooking the trees in the park.
In Japanese postwar photographic culture, the raven holds layered symbolism: a messenger, a mystery. The Japanese term for “wanderer” (旅烏) can also be interpreted as “bird of passage,” a phrase that seemed to describe both the raven and myself, two separate beings drifting through the same landscapes, unseen and searching.
This book is about that search, a quiet journey shaped by absence, longing, and the effort to see through another’s eyes.
Social Media Handles
@luca_c_bailey @tiedoverpress @emi.taka.hasi