I am a UK based artist, photographer and printmaker.
Fascinated by the urban environment, Tom Leighton has photographed and worked with iconic and hidden architecture world-wide. He layers and manipulates images to build increasingly elaborate megastructures, asking how our cities will cope and change with expanding populations, and how these populations will live and move within these urban centres. He has photographed both ancient cities and the newest cities built on land reclaimed from the sea.
Trained at the Royal College of Art, London, Leighton expertly manipulates images to allow us to imagine alternative cities of the present and the future. He seeks beauty in everything, from functional buildings to the most ornate architecture. He repeats motifs in unexpected places, repositions existing structures and contrasts the natural and the artificial: bright city lights set against natural night skies, concrete against greenery, business against eerie nighttime stillness.
Leighton asks us to reconsider our cities, what they are and what they might become. He pushes us to notice the beauty inherent in these populated places, the architecture and our place within it. At once futuristic and reflective, Leighton’s work demands multiple takes.
Projects
- AviaryThis series is about the possibilities offered through an abstraction of nature. Here the intricate architecture of a bird is stripped of its context and scale and presented with silent beauty and vulnerability. The original images were taken at a wildlife sanctuary. Now they become monumental, static and lifeless, reminders of both an astonishing evolution and a growing exposure to the threat of climate change and extinction.
- KynanceKynance is an ongoing series which focusses on the extraordinary force of volcanic geology. In this landscape we are confronted with rare evidence of the colossal pressures which once created the surface of the earth. I am finding that lockdown has, for me, forced a shift of focus. While environmental and political change accelerates at an unprecedented rate, I am now looking at transformations which happened over a very different timescale. These images feature a terrain which would seem to be
Work history
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ArtistTom Leighton Artist
United KingdomFull Time
Skills
- Art
- Photography
- Printmaking
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Lightroom
Education
Master of ArtsRoyal College of Art
- London, United Kingdom
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Bachelor of Arts (BA) The University of Brighton
- Brighton, United Kingdom
Awards
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Tokyo International Foto AwardsTokyo International Foto Awards
Bronze (Zenith series) & Honorary Mention (Kynance series)I
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International Photography AwardsInternational Photography Awards
Honorary Mention (Hong Kong series)+ Show more