Andrew Catlin (born 1960)[1] is an English photographer, artist, director, cinematographer and filmmaker. His work has been widely published, and is included in numerous collections, books, exhibitions and archives.
Catlin attended University College London and continued his studies with a psychology degree at Durham University before returning to London to do a research degree in learning and development at University College London.[citation needed]
Early work for NME, Melody Maker, Smash Hits, POP and Spin led to other publications, and commissions from record companies, musicians, designers and artists internationally. His work appeared on record sleeves, books and magazine covers. He was one of the photographers chosen to document the Live Aid concert in 1985 and was the largest single contributor to the subsequent exhibition and book.[3]
During the 1980s he began directing music videos.[4] During a visit to Japan while working with Bryan Adams, he was experimenting with a Super-8 movie camera, when Adams asked if he would film one of his live songs. The black and white clip that followed was reviewed by Chrissy Iley in Direction Magazine as a great debut.[citation needed] His second video, for the Cowboy Junkies track, Blue Moon was given a feature in Direction:
"Blue Moon surprised me, impressed me, and I'm hard to impress, especially with performance videos. Its approach is not clinical or technical or corporate. But its flickered lights and sepia faces strike a mood that few directors of the three-minute clip even bother to think necessary. The facial expressions are important to him, and are carefully monitored with his portraiture eye. Fortunately, MTV shared my view and put it on heavy rotation."(Chrissy Iley).[citation needed]
Catlin was director of photography for Elements of Mine, a film by Egyptian director Khaled El Hagar which was awarded First Prize in the Toronto Moving Pictures Festival (MoPix Award 2004). [5]
In 2008, he began a project called "The Matrix Series", exploring graphic compositions with complex multi-frame narratives.[citation needed] Each piece was shot as a set of images designed to interact in multiple dimensions, combining elements of time, movement, rhythm, narrative and graphic structure, while remaining within an essentially documentary framework. In his essay "Nine Hastings Photographers" Vasileios Kantas proposes that
"Andrew Catlin's imagery formations could be considered as a study on perception. His matrix suggests a unique syntax, of which the visual elements have been formed partly coincidentally - the subject's actions - and partly in a controllable way - the photographer's decisions. The way the sub-frames are selected and positioned in the matrix is preconceived, though it does not serve the linearity of time which seems to be loosened, if not abolished. The display of the sub-frames allows different reading strategies, seemingly serving many goals simultaneously."
"In his Matrix series, he has somehow merged the rigorously formal with the luminously observational. Whereas the likes of Blossfeldt and the Bechers created visual typologies, arranging plants and industrial water towers respectively in grids that echo the natural and man-made sameness of their subjects, Catlin has used the grid format to render a series of what he calls "critical" moments. The resulting images are both formally detached and acutely observational, ordered yet intimate. ... Andrew Catlin is a photographer with a scientific eye. He is obsessive, meticulous and rigorous, but also a quiet, unobtrusive observer of the everyday sublime. It shines brightly though his big pictures."[6]
In 2021 he produced an exhibition and book of portraits, Rebel Song, exploring the connections of history and faces of Irish music. Excerpts from the book were presented by the Irish Cultural Centre in London, with commentary.[7]
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