PHOTOGRAPHY Edward Griffiths
CO-COLLABORATORS Kent Baker & Vytautas Niedvaras
WORDS Elizabeth Hammond
Edward Griffiths is a man you remember meeting – even if this is the only way you’ll ever meet him.
From the raves and underground clubs of 1980s London to the ateliers of Ungaro, Fendi, and Lagerfeld; from leather scraps sold at Kokon To Zai to crystal sculptures that lit up Lady Gaga’s Chromatica Ball world tour – Edward Griffiths has built one of the most genuinely singular creative careers of his generation, and he’s done it entirely on his own terms.
In Issue 2: STELLAR, writer Elizabeth Hammond charts the full arc of that life, arriving at its most recent and perhaps most personal chapter: a body of work born from loss, physical transformation, and the radical reclamation of self.
When damaged eyesight and a period of profound personal upheaval left Griffiths searching for a way to regain ownership of his own body, he turned to the tools closest to hand – literally. Working with creative technologist Vytautas Niedvaras and photographer Kent Baker, Griffiths began scanning and remapping images of himself, shooting composited layers on iPhones and iPads, then re-shooting the results mercilessly, until something new emerged from the accumulated image-making: the chimera.
Part human, part machine, part animal – these new beings collapse the boundary between self and other, flesh and technology, the recognisable and the surreal. They ask, quietly and insistently, what it means to be a body in the world.
The chimera, as Hammond notes, has long been reviled as a symbol of unnatural disorder. Griffiths reclaims it as something else entirely: a philosophy of living, a way of riding chaos toward creation. In his hands, Humpty Dumpty gets put back together.
It’s a remarkable piece of writing about a remarkable man. Follow the link below and read it in full.
Featured in It’s Interval STELLAR – view full story and more from this issue!