Antony Cairns British, b. 1980

Antony Cairns works across photography, installation, and sculpture. His practice explores the material and technological conditions of image-making, combining analogue processes with digital and experimental photographic techniques.

Working exclusively with the ambient glow of the city at night, Cairns photographs urban environments including London, New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Seoul, and Busan. Half-built towers and anonymous commercial architecture appear simultaneously futuristic and decaying, transformed into fractured, luminous abstractions that push photography beyond documentation into something sculptural and cinematic.

Photography is treated as both image and object, with Cairns continually testing the medium through analogue darkroom processes, experimental printing, and digital interventions. Since 2016, his computer punch card series has extended this inquiry through the use of recycled 1950s–80s IBM punch cards as photographic supports. Inkjet-printing his photographs across these once-essential computing tools, Cairns repurposes obsolete data carriers as contemporary image surfaces, bringing analogue and digital histories into dialogue. Individual images often unfold across multiple punch cards, creating layered, fragmented works that blur the boundaries between archive, object, and image.

Cairns has exhibited internationally at The Photographers’ Gallery, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Tate Modern, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. His work is held in major public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the George Eastman Museum, and the Archive of Modern Conflict. He is the recipient of the Hariban Award and lives and works in London.