As a photographer I have worked on campaigns and projects across the world since the mid nineteen eighties. My professional website http://www.hallmarkimaging.com has a small selection of work I have done over the years.
I began teaching on the first of September 2000 after completing my Master's degree at The London College of Printing. The intention then was to try it out for a couple of years to see if I liked it. Now twenty years later I think I can accurately answer that question. I do.
I have since taught at a number of Universities and have developed courses and modules which maintain the currency of academic knowledge on photography in a changing world.
I became interested in the tension between light and dark when I began studying for my Master's degree. Then, as now I saw photographic practice as exploring this domain. Neither one extreme or the other it was able to comment on the visible world, though the closer one gets to either extreme the more radical the images become.
Over the last ten years I have been involved in a number of publicly funded multi-agency projects. From an initial approach or question I have developed a series of projects which have been funded (£100K+) and have improved people's lives as a result.
I have been working on a number of projects over the years one of which is is my response to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities; it is a work in progress as all of my projects are. Each reflects a different time in my life and the places I find inspiration. Though these are not fixed and I find myself crossing paths I have already travelled from different directions. Such is the complex weave of life.
Light and photography play a central role, marking the hours and the passing of time. The visual boundaries that are inherent in the medium of photography lead elsewhere, into imagination and memory, as do words on a page; meaning slides into the penumbra around edges where changing relationships between light and dark can be explored but not defined.
Every city, every town and village can become invisible. The spirit music that plays gently through the streets and passages of any dwelling can be silenced by the tinnitus of everyday life. Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities uses the poetic to explore the labyrinth of the city; sightlines permeate in ways only available to the imagination. The gridded, hard shiny surfaces of the modern city or the textures and patina of age are equally hard and unforgiving and divide just as easily.
This project or journey through an invisible city is a personal one, as all journeys are, even those shared with friends or loved ones, the experiences that one shares leave traces in different ways. The city is not singular, as it was for Marco Polo in the original, nor is there any one person to communicate with, as Polo had with Kublai Kahn. The walls of my cities echo my own experience and impressions from my journeys real and imagined.
I have used images where Calvino used words, images maintain sightlines and can perpetuate division. Each image is an envelope, inside which is written something intimate and personal that I may someday hope to read.
Mark Hall ©2025
Prague
Grids and lines direct and limit my gaze, though cannot contain an imagination that is carried far beyond its confines, on wings of light.
Light reached me where I hid and ordered my darkness
Used Space
The corrosive city
Tension and movement
Echos from a lost drum
I sense a threshold: Light to silence, silence to light…
Louis Kahn
I will love you forever...
National Memorial on Vítkov Hill, Prague, Czechia
Porosity #1
Preston, Lancashire
Porosity #2
Preston, Lancashire
A White Christmas
"...Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;"
WH Auden, September 1939
"If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water."
Loren Eiseley, American anthropologist, 1907-1977
Fred: I like to remember things my own way.
Detective: What do you mean by that?
Fred: How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened.
Lost Highway. David Lynch, 1997
Night border
Beach, Night and Photographic Flash
River's edge, Night and Photographic Flash
Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.
Hannah Arendt
You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.
Louise Bourgeois
A Fortress, Warwickshire
"Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within."
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Shoe Memorial
Derby
Somewhere in the folds of darkness the light reached you.
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!
Johnson repeated the lines by Rudyard Kipling taught at school in Eaton under his breath."
Newspaper Article describing Boris Johnson visiting the Shwedagon
Adult footprints in a child's sandpit.
Matlock, Derbyshire
Room Divider, spectator.
Royal Academy Gallery, London
Christmas Lights
Ornamental Hedges, Elvaston Castle, Derby
Window
Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire.
Sleepless.
Hotel room, Berlin, Germany
Windows
Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire.
Shelter.
Blackpool, Lancashire.
Altonaer Straße 4–14, Hansaviertel, Berlin
by Oscar Niemeyer,
"Stop staring at me like I'm some piece of meat."
Mcdonalds Advert text.
"Trailers for sale or rent,
rooms to let fifty cents.
No phone, no pool, no pets.
I ain't got no cigarettes.
Ah but, two hours of pushin' broom buys an eight by twelve four-bit room.
I'm a man of means by no means,
king of the road..."
Roger Miller King of the Road 1964
Welcome
Prague, Czechia
Save me...
Returnable bottle. Hamburg, Germany
Booze + News, Tree, No Parking.
Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire
Edge Light
Florence, Italy
Window and Shadow
Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany
Morning Light, Chalk Family.
Derby
Stray Light and Shadow
Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany
Beer bottle, Security Fence and Church
Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire
Progress, Dusk, Car Park
Derby
Horizon, Field.
Wales
Disorder
Order
River Severn, Bridge.
Severn Beach, South Gloucestershire
An Imagined Seascape.
Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany
An Imagined Landscape.
Rear of Traffic Sign, Wales.
Sculptural Space.
Berlin, Germany
Mirrored Light
Paranoiac Space.
Wales
Reflection.
Plymouth, Devon
Monday - Friday: 9:30am - 4:30pm
Saturday - Sunday: Closed