Downtown, Los Angeles
Leigh Johnson
Queen's Crescent
FaragoFarago is pleased to announce Queen's Crescent, its second solo exhibition by Leigh Johnson. These photographs span the last thirteen years in the United Kingdom, with some moments in continental Europe and the United States. They represent grand openings, holes to fall into, and all the mixed emotions that follow: hope, anger, frustration, loneliness, and desire. Ritual and resilience, ferocity and passivity, encounter and surrender play out in public performances that feel private. Queen’s Crescent is a short curved street in London where Johnson has her studio. It was laid out in the neighborhood of Kentish Town, Camden, during the middle of the Nineteenth Century, to accommodate what would become one of the city’s oldest market streets—selling food and clothing and everything in between. The market still opens every Thursday and Saturday but the number of stalls has, in recent years, declined by half, and the tradition’s future is in doubt, possibly condemned to a lingering death. A hundred years ago, by one account, you could buy, “hot baked sheep’s heads, sets of brains, cowheel, hot faggots [and] pigs' trotters three shillings a feast.” Today, meat is sold by Abdallah and Al-Kheyrat, halal butchers that serve the community of the Baitul Aman Mosque which is adjacent to a yoga studio called Fierce Grace. A diverse mix of lives are lived in public: street life, with emotions often riding high, with lots of criss-crossing back and forth, with lingering and loitering—through which Leigh likes to weave her way through. “The human chain,” says Johnson, “taking by the hand and holding tight, to remain joined, is often the impulse to take a photograph.” “Stolen emotions,” she adds, “feeling a little of what everybody else feels, is also a catalyst to pick up the camera—and to make an attempt to cast memories into something unbreakable, into a place to solidly return to.”