About
Robert Ashby
What's happening
Why Visit?
This exhibition invites visitors to pause, reflect, and connect with the social realities that surround us. Ashby’s photographs create empathy, spark dialogue, and illuminate inequalities with a clarity that is both urgent and human. By engaging with these images, visitors are prompted to consider their role in addressing societal inequities, and, potentially, supporting initiatives that create real change.
What to expect: Ashby’s exhibition will feature images from three of his bodies of work, each asking questions about how we live, aspire, and respond to social inequality, without ever passing judgment, as set out in his adopted motto by the 16th century philosopher, Francis Bacon:
“The contemplation of things as they are, without substitution or imposture, without error or confusion, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.”
Opening Saturday 11th October
Private view Thursday 16
Guided tour Saturday 18
Closing Saturday 25
Open Tuesday to Saturday, 12-5pm
1. Shut In, Shut Out
The main series in the exhibition confronts viewers with the stark inequalities of modern life. Through his lens, Robert captures the boundaries between privilege and the underclass, exploring our contemporary aspirations with precision and subtlety. These images of the security gates on expensive property do not lecture; they pose questions. How do our spaces, our possessions, and our opportunities shape the lives of some while excluding others? The photographs are strongly complemented by the stanzas of the poem "How to make an underclass", by local poet and broadcaster Henry Normal, in Robert's artists book "Shut In, Shut Out", described by Fergus Heron, Senior Lecturer in Photography at Brighton University as "...a beautifully made and thought provoking piece of work".
2. Status Urban Vanity
The second series sampled in the exhibition turns the lens to the polished fronts of luxury cars, each one gleaming and often marked with personalised number plates that hint at names, jokes, or status symbols. Here, Ashby explores an apparent obsession with differentiation, admiration, and perhaps envy. The images highlight the humorous, sometimes ridiculous lengths some go to assert individuality and social status, while revealing the deep human desire to be seen and valued. These works invite reflection on what we prize and why—and in that tension, they are both funny and profoundly telling.
3. Grenfell Tower – A Disturbing Counterpoint
The final image serves as a poignant counterpoint: a photograph of Grenfell Tower, tragically blackened to ashes five years ago, with huge loss of life, as a result of defects in the building's cladding and fire prevention system, arising from very serious attitude and methodology defects in the local council's procedures for ensuring building safety. Ashby visited Notting Dale a few days after the fire, as he had lived and photographed in nearby Notting Hill through the 1980s, as the area gentrified. Talking to people and with the consent of and consideration to the feelings of residents, he made this image as part of a body of work capturing the atmosphere on the local streets. It directly captures the human cost of systemic, socially derived, irresponsibility and neglect by the Conservative Kensington & Chelsea Council. Presented during Black History Month, this work commemorates the fifth anniversary of the tragedy and the beginning of the building’s demolition in September 2025. The question it poses is stark: How will we respond, will we remain silent or act?
