Dr Mark Hall

Dr Mark HallDr Mark HallDr Mark Hall

Dr Mark Hall

Dr Mark HallDr Mark HallDr Mark Hall

About

Photographer

Photographer

Photographer

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.

Educator

Photographer

Photographer

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.

Researcher

Project Developer

Project Developer

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.

Project Developer

Project Developer

Project Developer

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.

Projects

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.

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Invisible Cities

  

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

Cities and Desire

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


Everything fades from view but the view itself

The corrosive city

Tension and movement

Echos from a lost drum


Cities and Eyes

  

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

Cities and Movement

  

"...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

Britain, a ferry and waves, dusk.

A Border (2020)

River's edge, Night and Photographic Flash

Cities and Memory

  

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

Folded Cities

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 


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Adult footprints in a child's sandpit.

Matlock, Derbyshire

  

Room Divider, spectator.

Royal Academy Gallery, London

Christmas Lights

Ornamental Hedges, Elvaston Castle, Derby


Framed Cities

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, 

Trading Cities

  

"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

Thin Cities

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

Continuous Cities

Progress, Dusk, Car Park

Derby

Horizon, Field.

Wales

Disorder

Order

River Severn, Bridge.

Severn Beach, South Gloucestershire

Hidden Cities

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

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Dr Mark Hall

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Saturday - Sunday: Closed

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