023 - Murray Ballard

Murray Ballard embarked on a degree in furniture and product design before realising that learning about the chemical properties of plastic held little interest for him. At this point he jumped ship and switched to an art foundation course where he duly discovered something much more exciting. He graduated from the University of Brighton in 2007 with a degree in Photography. The following year he was selected for Fresh Faced and Wild Eyed 08 – the annual showcase of work by the ‘most promising recent graduates’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, London. In 2011 the British Journal of Photography recognised him as an ‘emerging photographer of note’, following his debut solo show at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, The Prospect of Immortality, which took as its subject the strange, marginal world of cryonics: the process of storing a dead body by freezing it until science has advanced to such a degree that it is able to bring that person back to life. Immediately after leaving college, Murray got the job of assisting Magnum photographer Mark Power, a role which he stayed in until quite recently. During those past ten years he has taken on his own commissions, worked on his own personal projects and continued his cryonics story - which he had first began while he still studying after coming across a curious news story in The Guardian. Exactly a decade later the book of that project has just been published by GOST books. Murray's photographs have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers including: Esquire, FT Weekend, GEO, GQ, The Guardian, The Independent and Wired. In episode 23, Murray Discusses: Early times doing "bad Jeff Walls"; a turning point - Alec Soth, Sleeping By The Mississippi; early influence: sci-fi movies; learing about "picture making" with Mark Power; the unlikely origins of his cryonics project; the Prospect of Immortality; working with GOST on the book