Matt Henry (b. 1978) grew up in North Wales and is now based in Brighton, England. His photography is inspired by the politics and culture of 1960s America and its relationship to the contemporary world; a subject researched in BA Politics (Univ. of Nottingham) and MA Photography (Univ. of Brighton). The works take the form of fictional scenes staged as set-builds and dressed locations in the UK and USA. Each project is storyboarded and typically features a cast of actors styled and directed by the artist. Henry claims his work ‘plays with fragments of American photography, cinema and literature to explore ideological concerns.’
About ‘The curse of nanny goat island’:
I’ve spent the last two years in the Deep South of America making three fictional southern gothic stories in three different U.S states: Louisiana, Texas, and Georgia. These will make up my second book: ‘Night of the Hunted.’ All three draw on American history in the mid-1960s as well as the literary genre of southern gothic itself. Southern Gothic literature came out of the collapse of the American South after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. It twinned a dark romanticism with a social critique that explored grotesque characters, often in warped rural communities beset by poverty, alienation, racial tension, and violence.
It was made popular by twentieth century writers like Flannery O’ Connor, Carson McCullers, and William Faulkner. Contemporary visual examples include True Detective and True Blood. In many Southern states, the Ku Klux Klan had terrorised black communities during the 1950s and 60s, targeting Civil Rights activists in particular with violence, intimidation and assassination, which included two decades of fire bombings. All three of my stories are set in the South in a period of relative calm; 1967. Segregation had come to an end in 1964 after the Civil Rights Act and voting rights had been enshrined in 1965 after the Selma to Montgomery marches.
