CJ Clarke is an award winning director, producer and photographer.
His book, Magic Party Place, was the culmination of ten years work documenting contemporary England and the the rise of the right in the years over the last decade. The book was shortlisted for the Aperture Paris Photo First Book Award 2016, Arles Authors Book Award 2017, Photo Espana Book of the Year 2017 and Photo London Krasna-Kraus Photo Book Award 2017. A short film experimental film with C4 followed, which saw him return reconnect with characters from the book in the wake of the Brexit.
His film Cody’s Story won the inaugural BJP/Canon Open Shutter award and he also wrote and directed 'It Shouldn’t Happen Here' an advert Save the Children’s UK poverty campaign. Recently he directed a campaign ad for RSPCA. He has directed numbers films for Google, HP, Save the Children and Action Aid. Widely published his work has appeared in The Guardian, VICE, HUCK, Dazed and Confused, The New York Times, Vanity Fair and TIME.
He is co-founder and director of Just Another Photo Festival, a guerrilla festival that democratizes visual media by taking photography to the people and forging new audiences in India. Now in it’s third editon, the curator Carine Dolek called the festival, “adventurous, daring and militant” and JM Colberg said it “brings photography back to what the medium does best. It brings it back to the photographs themselves, and these photographs are shown to people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to them.”
As a producer his has worked across numerous projects, notably Blood Speaks a trans media project investigating the causes and consequences of normalised violence against women devised by artist and activist Poulomi Basu. This project was premiered at selected for the Sheffield Doc Fest Meet Market 2018, shortlisted for the Sheffield Doc Fest Interactive Commission 2018 and premiered at the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In March 2019, alongside Poulomi Basu he presented the project at SXSW.
His work has been commended in the once in the Ian Parry Award, twice in the Observer Hodge Award, three times in the Magenta Flash Forward Award.
Projects
- MAGIC PARTY PLACE (film)MAGIC PARTY PLACE by CJ Clarke maps the psychopathology of the suburb, investigating a community which occupies the mainstream of society yet perceive themselves to have been pushed to the margins. The work does this by journeying deep into the new town of Basildon a constructed community, located 25 miles east of London. The town is statistically average and socially conservative. Initially published as a photo book in 2016, the work traces the internal landscapes of it’s inhabitants, the ins
Work history
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Film DirectorJAPC
London, United KingdomFreelance
Education
MALondon College of Communication, UAL
- London, United Kingdom
MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography
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BA Hons English Literature - Writing for PerformanceThe University of York
- York, United Kingdom
BA Hons English Literature - Writing for Peformance (Theatre/Film/TV)